On one of my favorite lists, we just had an amusing discussion about naming computers. It seems that unless someone is running a server farm or hosting facility, where logical organization is de rigeur and computers are numbered according to some strict plan, then anyone with any poetry in their soul feels they must find "good" names with some kind of consistency for their hardware.
First up this week, a white paper or report or ... I have no idea what these things should be called any more ... maybe a "glorified press release"? Whatever. Let's call it "a study" from Checkmarx, a company that specializes in automated security code review, titled "The Security State of WordPress' top 50 Plugins."
Is the NSA defending their intellectual property with more success than they protect our country?
Gibbs reviews two products from Satechi and is impressed by a paper that explains the power of social network analysis
A top secret NSA program to collect ALL Verizon customers' call data isn't at all surprising
This week, a collection of goodies. First up for all of you iPad aficionados, a neat wireless Bluetooth speaker called Zooka from Carbon Audio that fits onto the edge of your tablet and boosts your audio volume by about five times (turned up full, that's a sound pressure of 80dB at 1 meter). There's also a built-in microphone so you can take calls if you've paired the Zooka with your iPhone.
Yep, I've been writing for Network World for 20 years and a lot has happened in that time ... here are 10 of the most surprising
As I note in Backspin, as of the 24th of this month, I've been writing for Network World for 20 years and 6 days. And my first Gearhead column published a mere 17 years, 4 months and 5 days ago (see page 52). I'm going to leave the peering into the rearview mirror to see how we got here to Backspin and, instead, do as I always do: Talk about cool, geeky stuff you need. Today, I have your summer reading assignments.
Kim DotCom holds what may be a key software patent that could rake in huge amounts of cash but he's got bigger plans
UPDATE: When I wrote last week's Gearhead, "No more Adobe Dreamweaver, so how about Xara Web Designer?" I had looked at Adobe's online shop) to make sure that CS6 wasn't available. Clicking on the dropdown showed:
There are jobs that robots might be able to do in the near future. Gibbs has ten that they're unlikely to steal from meat machines.
If you're doing serious Web content engineering you might well choose an all-singing, all-dancing product such as Adobe's Dreamweaver. The latest version of Dreamweaver in Adobe's Creative Suite 6 (released just over a year ago) was really impressive with new features such as an improved user interface, support for jQuery UI widgets, better cascading style sheet Version 3 support and support for PhoneGap. All in all, a very cool and comprehensive Web development platform.
On the ISS, Linux is in and XP is out and open source is the way of the future
Have you had a IT project go astray? Maybe you were lucky and it was a brief hiccup with minimal financial consequences. Or maybe you had a disaster of biblical proportions, such as the one that befell Levi Strauss in 2008.
Some enterprise vendors try to keep what they are offering away from what they think might be the wrong eyes. This is never a good idea.
