Networking

IT pilot fish at a rural hospital gets a call out of nowhere from a big medical equipment supplier, who wants to know all about the hospital's wireless equipment. And why would that be?

Thanks to the recession, Google has begun killing projects that haven't made it financially, with CEO Eric Schmidt warning the company will eliminate "dark matter" projects that "haven't really caught on" and "aren't really that exciting." Two are already on the chopping block, with more to follow. Check out my blog for details about which Google projects have already been deep-sixed --- and which should be.

The latest figures from Nielsen Online are out for the search market, and it's good news for Google, and bad for Microsoft. Google now holds 61.25 of the search market to Microsoft's 11.4%. And things are only getting worse for Microsoft --- and better for Google

Fedora 10 is here and it already looks like a great cutting-edge, not bleeding-edge, Linux distribution.

One of the great myths about Mac OS X is that it's invulnerable to malware. But two pieces of malware making the rounds show that certainly isn't the case. One reason the Mac has been safer than PCs in the past is that Windows has so much more market share. But now that the Mac is gaining in popularity, expect Mac-based malware to increase as well.

As the economy heads south, there are plenty of boneheaded CEOs and clueless government officials to blame. Looking at the overall economy in general, and the tech economy specifically, Chief Yahoo Jerry Yang and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson stand out for how destructive their actions have been. Which one of the two do you think has made more boneheaded decisions?

This pilot fish works at a telco that provides DSL hardware access to ISPs. Total number of users: in the millions. And when an upgrade goes horribly wrong, the mess is just about that big too.

In Wednesday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings watches bloggers watch spammers foiled by the McColo takedown try to get back on the net. Not to mention the JavaScript drum machine...

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We probably shouldn't get ahead of ourselves, but Microsoft has hit a home run with the pre-beta of Windows 7. The biggest surprise is that it feels unbloated and fast.

If you believe Microsoft, an independent study by ClickStream Technologies found Microsoft Office, to be far more popular than OpenOffice.org, which in turn was far more popular than Google Docs. What Microsoft doesn't mention is that ClickStream is headed by Microsoft's former head of Microsoft Office research. Very independent, eh?

The network is down on the shop floor at this plant, and the VP of manufacturing is furious -- but after 12 hours of effort, IT finally finds the root cause.

From the outside looking in, it may always seem like it's always about Linux taking on Windows, Solaris, or Mac OS but there's serious Linux on Linux competition as well.

In Thursday's IT Blogwatch, Richi Jennings would us want to keep an eye on journalists shutting down spam sites. Not to mention google suggestions...

Brian Krebs was busy at work:

For the past four months, Security Fix has been gathering data from the security industry about McColo Corp., a San Jose, Calif., based Web hosting service whose client list experts say includes some of the most disreputable cyber-criminal gangs in business today.

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Programmer pilot fish isn't officially an IT guy at this government lab, but he handles local IT problems -- and when one user after another can no longer connect to the Internet, he has his hands full.

Pilot fish working at a government installation gets a call from a user who complains that her network connection has stopped working -- and it's not hard to see why.