If running your car on corn oil were possible, the car got 100 miles per gallon on corn oil, and corn oil was 25 cents per gallon, plentiful, and the use of corn oil meant you never had to take the engine in for a tune-up, what sort of rationale would you use to fool yourself that you still needed a fossil fuel-powered car? It's the same rationale that many businesses are using today to justify....

I turn to open source software for a lot of things -- not just the fact that it's almost inevitably free for personal or internal business use, but that it's often written by and for people who have very specific problems that need solving. They're little irritations, problems that typically don't get attention from commercial software makers, and which can be recycled into other solutions by dint of being open source. Here's a local example.

It's time to upgrade my crummy old refurbished Moto cell phone to a snappy smartphone. (Yes, I will recycle the relic.) I've narrowed down my choices, and I'm either going to hold out for a next-gen iPhone, or go for the BlackBerry Curve.

No, your vision isn't failing you. Google is testing new software that blurs the faces of people captured by its Street View cameras. The goal is to appease privacy advocates. Manhattanites will have their privacy restored first.

Three-year-old Aster Data Systems is about to launch its flagship product, an analytics database that scales to hundreds of microprocessors. The Silicon Valley startup has an impressive customer, MySpace, that's apparently already using its new system.

The current poll on InformationWeek's sister site Byte and Switch, "Sun Down," paints a very bleak outlook for Sun storage. The final question, "Do you think they should exit the storage hardware business?" has a surprising 57% say that it should. Can Sun save itself? Probably not, but I can ...

Someone out there has a lot more patience than I do. A Computerworld editor took his laptop out and about in Connecticut, New Jersey, and New York and collected 500 data points with a ThinkPad X300 and wireless data cards from AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon. AT&T's HSDPA network proved the fastest.

Whoa. Microsoft is getting a little bit ahead of itself here. It has yet to contend with the entrance of Android in the mobile market, but it has declared that it will attain some 40% of the global smartphone market in just four years. Microsoft, dare I ask what you've been smoking?

Earlier this decade, many universities started adding cybersecurity as part of a well-rounded programming curriculum. Apparently, universities in the U.K. didn't get the memo.

In the last few weeks several big Web and social networking players have released versions of "open" platforms that allow users to port their data and their connections between sites and between devices. Does this mark a major turning point for the advent of Web 2.0?

How many CIOs make it to CEO? Frankly, you can count them on one hand. But if that's what you want from your career, there's hope: Here's one who made it.

Citing a failure to find a buyer for the troubled city-wide Wi-Fi network, EarthLink unlinks Philly.

There's been a good amount of buzz in recent months about whether Salesforce.com is prepping itself for a marriage of some sort. What about Salesforce.com and Workday? The two could make one heck of a SaaS powerhouse.

Having a hard time finding professionals to staff your SAP software rollouts? That's apparently the case for many organizations implementing NetWeaver, ERP 6.0, and other SAP technologies, as well as the third-party companies assisting in the deployments.

Hewlett-Packard CEO Mark Hurd says the company will "run the same playbook" with EDS that it's using to make HP more profitable. OK, time to torture the sports metaphor: look for Hurd to call Data Center Consolidation left and right, with CIO Randy Mott as the lineman knocking over anyone who gets in the way.

News of a massive security hole in the Debian distribution of Linux has dropped jaws everywhere, mine included.  It's the sort of thing that speaks very badly indeed for the way Debian does code review -- exactly what's required urgently for open source to work well.

A poll of 2,367 people indicates that more than one-third would choose to bring their mobile phone with them rather than their wallet, laptop, or other items if they had to choose. Which would you bring?

I understand why Microsoft wants the world to move to en masse to Vista with all deliberate speed, and they are all good business reasons. The problem is that the world isn't cooperating. The latest speed bump to Vista's world coronation is the rise of the ultra-low-cost PCs.

Powerset launched a tool to search Wikipedia and open source database Freebase Monday, but the technology that powers the search startup could wind up at home in a corporate setting.

What is to be done about companies who use open source software to create something derived from open source, but provide it as a Web service and don't contribute their changes back to the community?  Aren't they violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the open source agreement?  I don't think so, for a variety of reasons.

Remember the Android Developer Challenge? Google offered up some prize money to those who submit the best applications for the Android platform. Today, Google said it has whittled the 1,788 entries it received down to the top 50. Each of them earned a $25,000 initial prize, but just what makes a good Android application?

You gotta give Google props for its openness, in terms of its executives speaking in plain English and not treating a launch as an excuse to engage in robotic sloganeering. (Remember "We'll release it when our customers tell us it's ready"?) On the other hand, the problem with Google's new Friend Connect is that it's nowhere near as open as competitive offerings from Facebook and MySpace. Hey, Google, open means open. What part don't you understand?

The Long Tail, the now-famous reference to targeting customers that buy the hard-to-find or nonhit items, got a little shorter with the release of Baynote's Merchandizing and Editorial Console.

Yesterday, reports were surfacing that the iPhone had been completely sold out at the U.S. and U.K. online Apple stores. Apple confirmed the reports. No more iPhone for you.

Interested in adding social network applications such as user registration, friend invitation, and message posting to your site, but aren't the code guru you should be? Google's Friend Connect lets you set it all up, programming skills not required.

There's no question that mashups are hot right now. In fact, it's a market that Forrester Research's Oliver Young says could be worth nearly $700 million by 2013. Vendors in every sector are rushing to deliver these so-called "situational applications" to sophisticated business users everywhere in the hopes of improving collaboration and spiking productivity.

Research In Motion officially made the BlackBerry 9000 -- aka the "Bold" -- public today after months of it appearing on Internet rumor sites. As expected, 3G is on board, and in three flavors, making it the first BlackBerry that can roam from the U.S. to Japan and South Korea. It's a smartphone first, but its media capabilities aren't lacking, either.

The first public-consumption beta of OpenOffice.org 3.0 has arrived, and while I'm not trusting any production work to it yet I'm still giving it a whirl.  There's a whole catalog of new and improved features, but from the outside it still looks and works like the same program.  That may be the best feature right there.

The hacker took the data from several government-run Web sites, then displayed the data for all to see.

First the iPhone sold out in the U.K. online Apple stores. Now it has sold out in the U.S. Customers attempting to order one are met with a "Currently Unavailable" message. This includes both the 8-GB and 16-GB models. 3G iPhone around the corner?

Train travel, glamorized by film noir, is in vogue once again, thanks to soaring oil prices and the dismal state of air travel. But attractive prices alone won't fill those railcars with business passengers.

As the economy slows down and budgets tighten up, once again IT professionals are being asked to do more with less (does anyone remember when you were allowed to do less with more?). How can you tighten up your storage processes one more time? The first technology that I would count on to help is virtualization. For virtualization to truly pay off it must be more than just server virtualization.

I've spent this weekend -- yes, the life of a tech journalist is that exciting -- not Twittering but rather mulling the significance of the incident involving the White Plains, N.Y., girl who led the police to recover her stolen Mac after she took a picture of the thieves using the laptop's "Back to My Mac" feature.

The resilience of the U.S. economy in the face of recent recession worries is a wonderful thing to behold. If you're like me, you've resigned yourself to a kind of schizoid view of the current business cycle. Greatly simplified, it boils down to: average people, very worried; businesses, not so much. Or, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt put it in a recent interview: "What recession?"

It should be clear to most of us by now that server virtualization changes the disaster recovery game dramatically. Rather than having to maintain a server at your DR site for each server in your production environment, you can replicate physical, and/or virtual, servers from your production site to virtual servers at your DR site, reducing the cost of protecting production systems or increasing the number of servers you can protect.

Astute readers may have noticed many of my recent blog posts have touched on VM management. I've been doing research for InformationWeek Reports, investigating the state of vendor offerings, real-world experiences, and new solutions to handle VM sprawl.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin recently said, "We have been talking to Yahoo and we are very excited to be working with them." The goal? Tie the two companies into an advertising powerhouse, which I have decided to call GooHoo.

Who says the profit motive and Third World development can't work together? Wireless infrastructure giant Ericsson is trying to prove otherwise in remote areas of Sub-Saharan Africa.

A flu virus was picked up by at least a few attendees to the JavaOne Conference at the Moscone Center, the San Francisco Health Department has warned. It didn't say how many of the 15,000 attendees were affected, but as I read this in the San Francisco Chronicle, I'm feeling poorly [look at his pallor] myself.

Self-replicating programs, which spread unchecked across the Internet, are always bad. Except when they're good. At least that's the theory behind U.S Patent number 7,296,923, awarded to Symantec for "Using a benevolent worm to assess and correct computer security vulnerabilities."

Another legal challenge to the GPL has ended, at least for the time being.  This time it's courtesy of Skype, in German court, with the kind of legal maneuvers that make you wonder what they were thinking -- although they do conveniently illustrate the nature of some of the knee-jerk arguments against the GPL (and FOSS, too).

After finding a few last-minute problems with Vista Service Pack 1 and XP Service Pack 3, Microsoft delayed deployment on both of them. Now they're both back and ready for download, either manually or through Windows Update.

This is bordering on ridiculous. Last week, iPhone users (myself included) noticed that they could get free access to Wi-Fi service from AT&T at Starbucks locations. Later in the week, AT&T yanked the service. Early this week, it put the service back up, complete with information on the AT&T Web site. Today, any references to free Wi-Fi for iPhones is once again gone. What gives, AT&T?

The Jet Propulsion Lab will begin pilot testing startup Socialcast's social networking software for potential use by NASA. The space agency is interested in using Socialcast for knowledge transfer as Apollo-era employees retire.

I pay $60 per month for my wireless broadband card with Verizon Wireless. Sprint and AT&T charge similar rates. Are the carriers keeping prices high to deter people from signing up, or is $60 for 5 GB of wireless data the fair market price?

In a previous entry I wrote about the importance of moving data from primary storage to another platform. The roadblock is how to move that data from expensive storage to secondary storage. The traditional approach of deploying an agent on every server that monitors all the files and then moves files that haven't been accessed to a lower class of storage hasn't worked well in the enterprise. There are a variety of reasons, but most of the issues are the deployment and management of that many agents, plus the challenge of leaving stub files (files that point to where the actual file was moved) and managing those files.

Recently I've been pretty hard on content management vendors by pointing out some of the mistakes that can drive them out of business. While vendor elitism with customers can be a big problem, I can't let content management clients completely off the hook. There are a few mistakes that I've seen over and over in every vertical.

I am not a fan of hockey. I make no apologies for that, but I do love seeing hockey live. No other sport beats it. So when I sat down with Josh Schachter, the founder of startup HockeyBarn.com, I expected to have to make myself concentrate really hard to appear interested as he rattled off things like shots on goal and the mystical notion of icing. Instead, this passionate young entrepreneur wowed me with a very cool social media idea.

The web site CrackBerry, which bought the BlackBerry 9000 for over $800 on eBay, has filmed its own video review of the next-generation hardware from RIM. In this video, CrackBerry performs a walk through of the revamped user interface. Looks fantastic.

It's been reported that the Firefox Web browser has been distributing a Trojan horse application with the Vietnamese language pack. No one is sure how many users may have unwittingly downloaded the malware.

A few years ago it was easy to divide IT organizations into haves and have nots. The haves used Fibre Channel SANs and array replication to dedicated disaster recovery sites over high bandwidth dedicated links or dark fiber. The have-nots used SCSI DAS (Direct Attached Storage) on their servers and, if they did real time replication at all, used server-based replication solutions like Double-Take or CA's WANsync.

In case you hadn't heard, mobile employees are a threat to your business. A lost smartphone, or a laptop that connects to a rogue network rather than a legitimate one, can open your company to all sorts of risks. To help match some of the threats and one-up VPNs, Google used its Postini acquisition to create Web Security for Enterprise.

Google may be denying that there's a brain drain going on, as the BBC reports, but that doesn't mean it's not happening.

Good news: Asus is about to unveil its next generation of Eee PC mininotebooks in both Windows XP and Linux editions, and they look downright snazzy.  Bad news for folks down under: The Linux version of the new Eee is more expensive in Australia.  What!?

What do future generations think about the state of Java and its relevance to their research? The answer may surprise you, and Sun.