Brian Proffitt

Since much of my job involves wandering around the Internet looking for news, I often find off-the-wall things that one might not expect. I won’t share all of this stuff because I don’t think limegreengelatinbabes.xxx is really something worth sharing here, even if it ran Unix on its server. But a few recent (and non-fiction) […]

Perhaps you’ve been unsettled by the singular message of change espoused by every U.S. Presidential candidate this election season; or maybe you were disturbed when Dick York replaced Dick Sargent as Darrin on “Bewitched”; or you just don’t like chocolate in your peanut butter. If you are someone like this who just likes the status […]

Want to get a heated debate going? Just ask Linux advocates (myself included): Why is Linux not popular on the desktop? The answers vary, depending on whom you ask: More Linux desktop applications are needed; proprietary vendors have locked Linux out of the OEMs; and (my personal non-favorite) consumers just aren’t ready for Linux. The […]

It should be clarified that neither of these teams are what we in America term “major league.” Both are minor league organizations, with the Indians in a AAA minor league and the Silver Hawks in an A league. AAA is the league right below the majors, and A teams are accordingly less experienced. While my […]

Last week, I made mention that things in Unix-land were getting a bit abrasive, particularly between the big three: HP, Sun Microsystems and IBM. In late March, IBM let fly with a trade-in credit program for customers to get credit on existing hardware when migrating to IBM machines running AIX or Linux. In the announcement, […]

With Spring finally arriving in the Midwest, a young man’s fancy turns to — well, never mind, because I haven’t been called “young” in quite a while. So, instead, my fancy will turn to — what else? IBM. Big Blue has been stirring up a little smack talk lately around the enterprise neighborhood. My favorite […]

Oracle Corporation is one of those companies that simultaneously has a huge presence in the IT world yet remains stealthy. It does this by somehow always managing to insert itself into customers’ lives, (usually) without big fanfare or hoopla. Not always, however. In late 2006, when Oracle announced its Unbreakable Linux support program, much attention […]

Over in Geneva, Switzerland this week, the International Standards Organization is getting together for a Ballot Resolution Meeting to determine if Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) format is to be declared a genuine, bonafide international standard. The open source community, which prefers the Open Document Format (ODF) because it is supported in several open source […]

Over on IT Jungle, I just read an interesting story about how Microsoft is (by proxy) cleverly using the same law that was just smacked over its head for Windows market dominance against IBM’s mainframe base in Europe. The story, by Hesh Wiener, is a fascinating look into the world of litigation-as-business-strategy, and details the […]

Telling the story of Project Indiana is not an easy one. The Sun Microsystems initiative, designed to create a binary-compatible distribution of OpenSolaris, has drawn what could be considered fair comparisons between the future structure of OpenSolaris and the current state of the various Linux distributions. Thus, headlines like “Sun hopes for Linux-like Solaris” or […]