P. J. Connolly

One might be forgiven for thinking that after 25 releases, Autodesk had run out of things to put into its flagship product, AutoCAD. As with many simple assumptions, that simply isn’t the case. The 2012 version of the gold standard in CAD software boasts new features designed to make users more productive, without compromising performance […]

Today, I’m going back to the subject of personal identity, thanks to an author-described “self-indulgent comment” in today’s Register, which, except for a few details, could have be written by me. Here’s my story: Back in the day, there was a service called CompuServe, whose octal-based user addresses were rooted in the Digital PDP systems […]

So, it appears that Windows XP users won’t be able to take advantage of Apple’s iCloud service. This is good news for Microsoft, in a perverse sort of way. That’s because the XP users who want to experience iCloud have two choices: switch to Mac, or upgrade to Windows 7. [WP_IMAGE] There are two reasons […]

With just an hour or so left to go on World IPv6 Day, I have to say, that I’m surprised – and a bit happy – that more fuss hasn’t been made over it. After all, “hassle” has been a big reason why transitioning to IPv6 – which has been “imminent” for the last five […]

I’m deeply unhappy that Apple is only offering Lion as a download. There’s something atavistically comforting about having tangible install media. It’s also rather efficient when one has multiple machines to upgrade; I can’t imagine why the company’s leaders think that downloading the same 4GB blob of data over and over again across a home […]

Not much that applies to enterprise IT came out of the keynote at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco on Monday. The summary version: Lion will be released in July, available only as a download; iOS 5 will be available in the fall, along with iCloud. The tl;dr, along with a heaping pile of […]

Earlier today, users reported widespread problems while trying to access Apple’s cloud-based services, such as the iTunes Store and the Mac App Store. Although I didn’t run into any difficulties outside my normal experience – so far today, I’ve downloaded Xcode for one of the MacBook Pros in the lab, so that my boss-dude-person could […]

So, MacDefender. To hear some people go on about it, you’d think it was the end of the world. Not hardly; but it does raise some interesting questions. The first has to do with the way it seems to spread. Search poisoning isn’t exactly a new tactic, but it’s shaping up to be an effective […]

Today, I saw this headline at CNN: “Cell phone use can increase possible cancer risk” and once again, I’m struck by how quickly people can make something out of what might as well be nothing. After all, you can replace the first three words with just about any other three words and it will still […]

Dashboard Slickness The vice president of sales in our sandbox needs to see at-a-glance what his team can be expected to deliver in the next few months, and this dashboard gives him the information he wants. Task-Oriented, but Watching the World Our sandboxs sales manager Will can keep one eye on his to-do list, another […]

Customer-relationship management software-thankfully referred to as CRM in casual conversation-is the sort of tool that you don’t know you need until you’ve tried to work without it. It barely existed a decade ago, although the category can trace its roots to the contact-management tools that proliferated throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, and before […]

The enterprise mobility gurus at iPass released a survey this week that indicates a significant number of people wake up in the middle of the night to check their e-mail. Although many of the respondents are likely to fall into the “always on call” category, the behavior patterns described in the survey are familiar enough, […]