1) Redmond Report
By Doug Barney
Editor in Chief, Redmond magazine
Jobs Bails on Macworld
Let's say there's a big independent convention that does nothing except gather your customers and promote your products. Oh, and they offer you the keynote so you can shock the world with amazing new products. "Where do I sign up?" you might ask. But if you're Steve Jobs, you'd ask, "How can I bail?" That's what Apple and Jobs are doing with Macworld. Job cancelled his keynote and next month's Macworld will be the last Apple will support. Instead, Apple will push its own events. Can you say proprietary? My beef is that Apple isn't reaching out to new markets. It's not reaching out to the enterprise (we've offered Apple opportunities to talk to you Redmond readers, but it had little interest). It's not reaching out to middle- and low-income consumers (or the Third World) with aggressively priced products. And now it's not even reaching out to its own customers! What would you do to expand the Mac market? Suggestions welcome at dbarney@redmondmag.com.
Cisco Says Hackers Getting Smarter: Who Would've Thought?
Cisco -- or, for the purpose of this story, Captain Obvious -- released a study showing that hacker attacks are getting more sophisticated. Doesn't this happen each and every year? Diving into the details, Cisco says spam makes up about 90 percent of all e-mail traffic. (Since my e-mail is published everywhere, including in this newsletter, spam is about 99 percent of all my mail.) There's also a new form of personalized spam; this way, phishers trick you into thinking the mail is truly legit. Botnets are also getting trickier, the network giant says.
SQL Server in the News
SQL Server is in the news this week nearly as much as Gov. Blagojevich. No, SQL Server didn't try to sell a Senate seat, refuse to leave office and go for a jog. Instead, SQL Server gained a new beta of what will probably be SQL Server 2010 and got a bunch of new security tools for the current version, plus a new service pack. Starting with what's shipping today (or near-abouts), we have beta versions of two SQL Server security tools. Both the Anti-Cross Site Scripting Library and the Code Analysis Tool are built to deflect SQL Injection attacks. Next is SQL Server 2005 SP3, which came out Monday. This service pack is largely a roll-up of bug fixes (if you want new features, Microsoft would be happy to point you to SQL Server 2008), but also includes database engine and replication tweaks. Furthest out is Kilimanjaro, which isn't due for a couple of years. For those that just have to have what will become SQL Server 2010 now, a preview is scheduled next month.
Share your thoughts on the topics in today's issue! Go here or contact Doug Barney directly at dbarney@redmondmag.com. |