Stories by: Oliver Rist

Paul Venezia bamboozled me into buying a MacBook Pro back in January, and I've been on it semi-daily ever since. And yeah, overall, I've been pretty happy. Of course, the only reason I was willing to buy one at all was because Parallels made it so easy to run Windows. But while my initial usage ratio was 85 percent Parallels, 15 percent OS X, over the last six months, that's changed dramatically to 45 percent Parallels, 55 percent OS X. Yup, the Orchard does slowly assimilate you.

I'll never get it. Of any industry, save perhaps the stock market, you'd think the tech market would have become inured to hype. Yet every souped-up calculator that comes along seems to create ripples far in excess of its true weight in the universe. This week, it's the iPhone. Hey, I bought a MacBook Pro, so I'm certainly not immune to Apple's marketing (though I do blame the lucidity lapse on Parallels and Paul "Sasquatch" Venezia's overbearing Orchard fetish), but from an IT manager's perspective, you can sum up the iPhone in two words: Who cares?

The world doesn't revolve around IT. Consultants like yours truly sometimes have a hard time grasping that concept, because our lives really do revolve around IT. So when I walk into a site where we helped build the network three years ago to find that the total amount of network monitoring that's been going on since we finished UAT (user acceptance testing) is ... nada, you can imagine the initial reaction.

If there's one thing I learned from my recent sojourn into the depths of Microsoft's future vision, it's that the concept and popularity of open source software has shaken Redmond to its core. Much of this new vision is the direct result of how Linux and open source have galvanized Redmond's management team. This is why Microsoft has upped the feature ante on so many platforms at once: to overwhelm customers with new technologies you simply can't get from open source.

The goal of ERP isn't simply to provide a unified application interface for every aspect of a company's business process -- it also tries to include the inherent data-mining capabilities that go along with it. But while JD Edwards, Oracle, SAP, and others have invested significant resources in building ERP software that's customizable enough for any business, these companies have also forced the price of the software to heights many businesses just can't afford.

One of the first open source VoIP projects -- and one of the earliest VoIP PBXes, period -- is Digium-sponsored Asterisk. A highly mature platform licensed under the GPL, Asterisk supports almost everything that even larger enterprises would desire of a VoIP gateway solution, including voice mail, call forwarding, conferencing, and even IVR (Interactive Voice Response). It also has call-detail records -- the golden goose of VoIP -- as well as advanced features suitable for use in virtual classroom or virtual conference room applications. Its large developer community contributes still more add-ons for the platform, both commercial and open source.

Baby back ribs. A nasty name when you think about it, but with meat falling off the bone, a pile of roasted potatoes, a friendly merlot, and the Patriots on TV setting a new record for undefeated ... ness, who's thinking about nastiness? I can't even remember the Seattle poopypants fiasco -- and on the slim chance she's reading: Please never say that word again. With a BBQ-sauce-and-wine cocktail slowly congealing in my goatee and the Pats crushing the opposition off to my left, I've established a sanctuary of safety, a cloud of calm, a haven of ... never mind. Point is, anxiety has taken a backseat to personal comfort.

It's strange. For years, geeks, sys admins, and nerds in general have been praying for someone to come along and knock Microsoft off its near-monopoly perch. I've been one of them: The healthiest thing that could happen to Windows is competition. But now that it may actually be happening, I find myself strangely concerned about Microsoft Corp.'s reactions. Redmond is just going about the Linux war all wrong.