P. J. Connolly

Once upon a time in San Francisco, there was a network administrator, one Terry Childs, who had pretty much architected the city’s IT network by himself. Childs is now headed to state prison with a four-year sentence for holding the network hostage, but since he’s spent the last two years in jail, he’s probably going […]

Microsoft announced today that the next version of Office for Mac would be available in a little over two months. That’s good. Unlike the Windows version of Office, Office for Mac 2011 will only be offered as a 32-bit application suite. That’s bad. It will include a full-blown version of Outlook (for the first time […]

Apple’s iPad and its forthcoming competitors could lead to a complete rethinking of operating systems and application platforms; today we use desktops and notebooks that amount to scaled-down workstations, but the future may be one of scaled-up tablets. Read my full review at eweek.com.

Although directory services have been used in IT for years, bridging the gap between the corporate directory and the cloud is a chore that many prefer to avoid altogether. Symplified’s SinglePoint SSO allows organizations to operate a hybrid of local and cloud identities, or even to migrate identity functions to the cloud. Read my full […]

The latest round of exemptions to the DMCA, announced in July by the U.S. Copyright Office, gave limited approval to the jailbreaking and unlocking of mobile devices. But could these practices lead to mobile phones becoming commodities? Read my full review at eweek.com.

No matter what one’s political orientation might be, it’s really hard to complain about the Library of Congress, and today its Copyright Office demonstrated that Americans still have some rights to their digital devices and media. You see, the Copyright Office is charged with authorizing and reviewing exceptions to the much-maligned Digital Millennium Copyright Act […]

This week, I’m spending some quality time with Symplified’s SinglePoint Universal SSO (quick, say that five fimes, fast!); it’s a relatively simple-to-grasp single sign-on package that doesn’t use server-side agents or desktop clients. SinglePoint works with SAML 1.1 or 2.0 applications, and through HTTP federation, also handles applications that lack any SAML support whatsoever. In […]

Mac OS X Backup Tools That Every Apple User Needs by P. J. Connolly Time Machine Baked into Apple’s Mac OS X, Time Machine offers a unique interface and the ability to roll back the system state by days or weeks at the click of a mouse.http://labs.eweek.com/product/time-machine/ Carbon Copy Cloner 3.3.3 It’s simple and free, […]

Apple held a rare snap press conference at its Cupertino headquarters today to denounce the rumors of reception problems with the iPhone 4. But instead of announcing a mass recall, or a change in device design, the only meaningful thing that came out of the presentation by Apple chairman and CEO Steve Jobs was the […]

The promised update for iOS 4 that was expected to deliver more accurate displays of signal strength arrived today, and after some good old-fashioned TBWA*, I think it’s safe to say the bars that represent the signal finally bear some relationship to reality. But all this release does is apply a cosmetic fix to a […]