Jason Brooks

ETrade Financial saved $13 million annually, realized a boost in performance and changed the way it thinks about development by moving from a Sun Solaris infrastructure built up during the stock market boom to an open-source stack running on x86-based IBM hardware. Building on work it began in late 2001, the financial services company has […]

IT managers whose users depend on Research In Motions BlackBerry devices and service need to be thinking of ways to get out of Dodge. As the injunction barring RIM from doing business nears—and, with it, the darkening of RIMs much-relied-upon network of BlackBerry devices—the top concern of IT managers whose users rely on RIMs service […]

Palm Inc.s Treo 700w marks the marriage of Microsoft Corp.s Windows Mobile 5.0 operating system and the slick and functional smart-phone design thats made previous Palm OS-powered Treos a fixture in the fists of so many always-connected mobile workers. Click here to read the full review of the Treo 700w. 2 Palm Inc.s Treo 700w […]

Boasting management and performance improvements for its core file and identity-service duties—along with broadened support for Unix—Microsoft Corp.s Windows Server 2003 Release 2 is a worthwhile upgrade, particularly for organizations running the operating system in remote-office scenarios or in heterogeneous environments. Click here to read the full review of Windows Server 2003 Release 2. 2 […]

It was an exciting year on the operating system beat, with prominent new releases for every season. While the proliferation of platform options weve seen this year has made the OS landscape more complicated, this diversity is spurring competition and much-needed innovation. Fortunately, most of the vendors and projects that made this year so interesting […]

I was pretty impressed when, just before Thanksgiving, I came across a Financial Times article reporting that Microsoft was pledging to open up the specifications for its Office file formats, although those specs wouldn’t be available for 18 months or so. That story wasn’t quite right, but, in the Financial Times reporter’s defense, neither was […]

Among the challenges that enterprise administrators face when attempting to properly lock down the Windows machines in their care, managing the laundry list of operating system functions that require elevated privileges is a chore that looms large. Making matters even worse are Windows anemic facilities for allowing rights-limited users who are out of reach of […]

Research In Motion Ltd.s BlackBerry 8700c Wireless Handheld device improves upon the previous model with a higher-resolution display—240 by 320 pixels versus 240 by 160 pixels—and a speedier EDGE (Enhanced Data for Global Evolution) radio, replacing the GPRS (General Packet Radio Service)radio in the BlackBerry 7100 we reviewed last year. /zimages/4/28571.gifClick here to read eWEEK […]

Microsoft Corp.s Group Policy provides enterprises using Windows with base-line functionality for running managed, locked-down client machines—as long as the target systems live within an Active Directory environment. GPAnywhere 2.0 is an ingenious product from FullArmor Corp. that bridges the Group Policy coverage gap. Click here to read the full review of GPAnywhere 2.0. 2 […]

I read a blog entry today by Shai Agassi, president of the product and technology group at SAP, in which he sought to set the record straight concerning his opinions toward open source. Last week, Agassi made some comments about open source software and development that some interpreted as negative. So, let us duly note, […]

As part of our issuewide reflection on the Windows that Microsoft has produced during the past 20 years, we thought itd be interesting to consider the Windows we wish we had as well. If we had a magic, Windows-morphing wand, heres how wed wave it to remake Windows. Software packaging Along with managing hardware, which […]

While operating system virtualization isnt a new concept—big-iron vendors such as IBM have offered hardware partitioning for some time now—interest in this sort of virtualization has heated up in recent months. Driving this interest is a proliferation of new virtualization products and technologies that promise to bring security, consolidation and testing benefits to a wider […]