IT Week Insider, Volume 10, Number 9

This week the Insider is considering emailing some Nigerian widows and asking them if they want to get married. Once we are living in wonderful, solicitous happiness together we can discuss her lottery winnings, the many millions of dollars that her late gold-mine-owning husband accrued, and why she can’t ever initiate a conversation without SHOUTING.

We are sure that once we work through the usual difficulties (the last two that we approached turned out to be men) we could have a long, and presumably prosperous relationship. Or something.

In the meantime we stay single, and offer you this.
Salutations.

News:

Will Trading Standards strike down on IT chiefs with furious anger?
Yes, cower in the corner if you listen to Fast – the very non-sensationalist Federation Against Software Theft - but no, if you listen to the Trading Standards Institute. Fast is warning managers that use pirated software to expect a knock – or more likely a hard kick - at the door, as the TSI hunts down flagrant infringers. The TSI says, actually, it’ll probably only ever go after the distributors. So who do you believe? And do you realise that CDs won’t flush down toilets?

More news:

Oracle to buy Hyperion
The headline may sound like the sort of thing you would find written on a balled up piece of paper found to the side of Sophocles’ waste bin, but it isn’t – so if his estate could please resist from suing us we’ll all sleep a lot happier. Instead, this item concerns Oracle, spawn of that hairy-chinned hegemonistic heavyweight Larry Hellison! (OK, actually we mean Larry Ellison, but we liked the alliteration), which has agreed to buy Hyperion for $3.3bn. Experts say this will let Oracle provide an end-to-end performance management suite. We say it’s one less bejewelled tortoise to wander around Ellison’s yacht.

More, more news:

Turn off datacentre servers to save power
Yeah, after you turn out the lights and check that no-one left any change in the vending machine you probably ought to go along turning off all the ‘on’ switches in your datacentre. That’s the advice from Fujitsu Siemens, which says that turning off your non-critical apps will save on space and power in the server room.

Comment:

Denial of service threatens everybody
According to Phil Muncaster, denial of service attacks are not going anywhere – despite a lack of media interest in them. Phil says that firms really need to be continually on their guard against such an attack or face the consequences. Those consequences range between being bragged about by a spotty faced oik to being blackmailed by cyber-criminals. In these instances the lesser of three evils might be some tidy investment in your infrastructure.

Time for a memory upgrade
Our editor, Lem Bingley, thinks that soon he could be replaced by a mobile phone. Good news, since we doubt a mobile phone will ever make the monkeys make us go and get it a cappuccino. Actually, his column is more about the fallibility of memory, and what it means for... er... who said what now?

IT Week Podcast
Audio analysis of the week’s events. This week Madeline Bennett discusses the new BlackBerry 8800 as well as a fancy new chipset from AMD. No one plays any requests, and listeners are discouraged from phoning in with traffic reports.

Lem Bingley blog
This week Bingley will boggle you with stats about web site usage while this writer tries to think of another word that sounds like Bingley and Boggle. Nope. Can’t think of one. Bugger.

IT Week Labs blog
Would you like a Mac or a PC? No, this isn’t a competition question, it’s the latest word retch from the IT Week white-coat wearers. The debate will usually start a flame war as Mac users stop gelling their hair and editing “a rad skateboard video man” to complain that nobody ever says anything good about them. Ah. Shut up and polish your trendy spectacles.

Green Business News
Green business news - yes, there are green businesses. And we don’t just mean that huge bloke who somehow manages to farm all those tiny yellow corn things. Ho ho ho.

IT Sneak blog
This week Sneak celebrates 2000AD’s 30th birthday with talk of fat men and implausible situations. Yep – it is that old stag night story again.

Phil Muncaster blog
Phil – again – on the dangers of blogging. Be careful where you click! Apart from this link here, of course.