Cameron Sturdevant

Apple’s 17-inch MacBook Pro Is Built for Comfort, Speed Look, Ma, No Battery Slot Because the battery is built in, there is no access port to weaken the solid aluminum base of the 17-inch MacBook Pro clamshell. It’s a good thing the battery has such long life (between 4 and 8 hours)-once it loses its […]

Apple’s 17-inch MacBook Pro is appropriate for high-value content producers and executives who desire a highly capable desktop replacement that makes a bang when it enters the room. The first thing l noticed about Apple’s 17-inch MacBook Pro notebook-which earned an eWEEK Analyst’s Choice award–is the appealing fit and finish. The solid aluminum unibody enclosure […]

The 10 Most Interesting Products at RSA 2009 Altor Networks Virtual Firewall Built solely for the virtualized data center, the Altor Virtual Firewall enforces security policy for each guest while tracking traffic that might be hidden from physical firewall products. Bit9 Parity IT managers who are installing Bit9’s Parity into an existing fleet of systems […]

The lead keynote speaker of the 2009 RSA Conference tried to sound a note of revolutionary change, but did so mostly by proxy. Most of RSA President Art Coviello’s remarks on April 21 were vague exhortations for greater cooperation among security vendors and mild instructions for practitioners to make demands for this cooperation. It wasn’t […]

VMware’s announcement April 21 of vSphere 4-the successor to VMware’s Infrastructure 3 and ESX 3.5-sets the stage for virtualization technology to fully enter the data center, enabling nearly every application to be virtualized. Positioned as a cloud computing operating system, vSphere 4 will be offered in versions for everything from modest-sized businesses to the largest […]

Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.2 Is a Tempting Alternative to VMware Fare by Cameron Sturdevant OVF Initial Setup The systems I exported in the Open Virtualization Format had no special enhancements turned on, such as graphics acceleration or CPU virtualization hardware extensions. Sun’s xVM VirtualBox can now import and export specially configured virtual machines that include […]

Sun Microsystems’ xVM VirtualBox, the no-cost virtualization tool that enables guest virtual machines to run on a desktop computer, continues to improve its position as a potential challenger to VMware Workstation. With Version 2.2, xVM VirtualBox now offers support for the emerging virtual appliance standard Open Virtualization Format, host-only networking that broadens how virtual machines […]

Once a fixture only in graphics departments and on rogue users’ desks (or laps), Macs are making their way into the enterprise. As a lifelong Microsoft/PC user, I’ve decided to “live the Mac life” so that I can put both platforms in perspective in my Labs analysis and reviews. As someone who came up through […]

Apple iWork 09 Looks Slick, Adds Useful Features by Cameron Sturdevant Keynote Magic Move Here, you see a demonstration of the Magic Move transition effect, going from one slide to the next by sliding a graphic element between the two slides. Keynote Text Transition Here, I’ve used the Anagram transition to go from one thought […]

Now that “Nehalem” is no longer under Intel’s hat, after its March 30 launch, there are a couple of housekeeping issues to take care of. First of all, what’s up with Intel’s Itanium platform? The thorny question of Itanium-based servers came up at the Nehalem launch, held at Intel headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. Intel’s […]

Intel’s Nehalem microarchitecture-now officially known as the Intel Xeon 5500 series-offers advances in addressable memory, simultaneous multithreading and I/O handling, providing IT managers with the ability to put even more virtual machines on a single physical system. But as memory capacity and compute power increase and I/O overhead diminishes, what’s the new VM limit on […]

Server virtualization is getting a boost from the newest Intel microprocessor architecture, known as Nehalem. With an integrated memory controller, an additional memory channel and a slew of performance improvements, Nehalem will enable IT managers to consolidate more virtual machines onto fewer physical systems. The new Intel platform should also be a trigger for IT […]