We all live with Windows, and I don’t mean the ones in our walls that let us see outside. By capitalizing the word, and not the Word (which should mean Logos, not a word processor, but that is a different story. . . . ), you all knew I meant Microsoft Windows, a desktop and server operating system, and not the glass panes. Windows is a fact of life in data centers of the 2010s when it was but a dream of Microsoft’s in the 1990s. But running Windows applications does not necessarily mean having to put up with

Are the handcuffs on your IT budget cutting off your circulation? When the bulk of your expenditures are tied up in maintenance-related costs and day-to-day operations, and one more “do more with less” speech from the boss makes you punch a hole in the wall, you need a fresh idea with a workable, realistic opportunity for success. Renegotiating your hardware maintenance and software subscription contracts could be your new money tree. How this works can take several paths.

Let’s begin with the money tree. The way this most often works is that savings from maintenance costs are moved into new

In tough economic times, like those we have lived through for nearly two years now, companies look to outsourcing and other managed services as a way of maintaining and improving their IT operations while cutting costs at the same time. While this is great for IT shops and their companies’ chief financial officer, monitoring and managing complex i setups takes the right tools, and it can be expensive to acquire them under perpetual licenses. Not any longer, at least for the service providers who choose Power Systems i monitoring tools from CCSS.

After The Four Hundred went on holiday

Cities that once had several newspapers now have just one, if any. Even the strongest of those remaining seem to be in grave danger. Their plight was a key theme of The Press a 1961 collection of A. J. Liebling’s essays from the New Yorker. Liebling’s love of newspapers was recalled by his widow, Jean Stafford, in 1975 as she introduced a third edition of the classic. Stafford is long gone, too, but Liebling’s “wayward concubine” is still with us amid its lingering death. For the press, the future, if any, depends on American Internet policy.

Liebling’s The Press

I have nothing against a chief financial officer. Being CFO is a tough position with a lot of pressures that can easily be misunderstood. That being said, it is the money people who generally stand in the way of engineers and technologists and the spending required to accomplish great things with IT. It is a common problem we all have–dealing with accounting, the CFO, or other non-IT management. Of course, our running joke is the CFO thinks of technology as a $499 PC they can pick up at Staples or OfficeMax.

CFOs don’t understand why $29 billion is collectively used

Four Hundred Stories

As the year was ending, we had a few stories in The Four Hundred that caused readers to crack their fingers and hit that Contact button at the top of the page. Here’s what they had to say about what we had to say.

Reader Feedback on Power Systems i: Thinking Inside the Box and Abacus Offers i 6.1 Upgrade Virtual Test Drive Service

Hey, TPM:

From your article: “I was grousing in last week’s issue of The Four Hundred that the program conversion process that IBM is forcing customers to go through to move to the

As The Four Hundred reported a month ago, the U.S. economy stopped hemorrhaging jobs in November and the unemployment rate actually went down a smidgen and could do it again when the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out its jobs report for December. And it looks like business in general and their IT departments in particular are getting ready to add some jobs.

Let’s start generally and work our way into the IT part of the jobs market. If you take a gander at the latest quarterly economic survey from the Business Roundtable, which is comprised of

In the prior issue of The Four Hundred, we gave you the rundown on Gartner‘s casing of sales of external, controller-based disk array sales in the third quarter of 2009, and in this issue, we present IDC‘s take on disk arrays for the quarter.

The way IDC dices and slices the data, you can get a feel for how external arrays (which attach to servers through Fibre Channel, iSCSI, converged storage-server Ethernet or InfiniBand, or other means) are doing as well as internal arrays, which are generally based on PCI-Express RAID disk adapters tucked into the servers.

Not everything is at it appears. While this should be a no-brainer for anybody venturing onto the Web, this little piece of advice will pay higher dividends in the new year, according to security experts, who say cybercriminals are increasingly preying on people’s misplaced trust in each other and popular Web sites. This advice applies especially to hot technologies, such as social networking and smart phone users, but also anybody who uses search engines, clicks on Internet ads, or sits in front a Mac they thought was safe.

Social networking Web sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Google Wave,

Since last fall, COMMON, the midrange user group that is trying to expand beyond its AS/400 base to encompass AIX and Linux users on Power Systems boxes, has been looking for some new board members to replace three members that are due to vacate their positions later this spring.

Over the holiday break, COMMON announced that the nominating committee has approved a slate of five candidates for the three open positions on the board of directors. The five candidates are: Jeff Carey, Pete Helgren, Kevin Mort, Jim Oberholtzer, and Ron Pilcher. In the coming months, COMMON will give each