Last month’s cluster of “Mac Defender” malware flareups felt like a flashback to 2001, with the role of Microsoft being played by Apple. The malware, which took advantage of poisoned Google images search results to trick users into installing fake anti-virus software, first appeared in variants that required an administrator password for installation. Soon, though, […]

rPath X6 expands on the company’s software appliance assembly and deployment ambitions with powerful configuration management capabilities and a spruced-up user interface that’s much improved compared with the Version 5.2 release that eWEEK Labs tested in 2009. Also much improved is the product’s support for deploying software images to VMware, EC2 and other virtualization hosts. […]

This week, Microsoft announced that it would support CentOS as a guest operating system on Hyper-V, citing CentOS support as the number one interoperability requirement among Web hosting providers weighting whether to consolidate their system virtualization on Microsoft’s hypervisor. When I read the news, my thoughts turned immediately to Red Hat and its Red Hat […]

I’ve just returned from Atlanta, where Cameron and I attended a Microsoft Server and Tools reviewer workshop packed with cool product presentations, such as those for Microsoft’s Windows Azure cloud computing services, and for the LightSwitch non-developer development platform. However, I found my my enthusiasm for Azure and for LightSwitch somewhat stunted upon finding that […]

This week at its Google I/O conference, the Web giant announced that Chrome OS, its long-awaited, “nothing but the Web” operating system, will soon be available for purchase, powering a pair of Samsung and Acer “Chromebooks.” My overall take on ChromeOS hasn’t much changed since early developer builds of the platform first turned up nearly […]

Late last month, The Attachmate Group completed its acquisition of Novell. Moving forward, Novell and SUSE Linux will operate, alongside NetIQ and Attachmate, as four separate business units—a reorganization that unravels the 2003 SUSE acquisition that had established Novell as a Linux and open source player. In the years following its SUSE pickup, Novell trumpeted […]

This week we re-launched labs.eweek.com to serve as a home base eWEEK Labs team, and as a place to test out some of the products and services we cover in more “real world” setting than what we get within the confines of our San Francisco lab. To that end, we’ve set up shop in the […]

It’s been a week of copycat allegations, with Google accusing Microsoft of cribbing Google search engine results by monitoring and acting on the browsing habits of Bing toolbar users. To my mind, it’s a fairly boring flareup, but one which, when combined with the Salesforce.com Chatter tests that my fellow labsman Cameron Sturdevant has been […]

Back around the turn of the millennium, I had the great fortune of watching the Windows XP, aka Whistler, development cycle unfold. I had so much fun tracking the procession of development releases topped by the shiny gold master copy of Windows XP, that I sought after, and found, an operating system to track that […]