ShadowRAM: May 23, 2005
Forget those folks standing in line, Darth Vader's biggest victory lies in snuffing out corporate productivity. Outplacement firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas estimated that the loss of productivity due to workers playing hooky or calling in sick could end up costing businesses up to $627 million in the first two days of the picture.
What's with Philadelphia? The city is gaining a rep for being very tech-savvy and wired (well, wireless-ed) to the max. Probably doesn't hurt that Comcast CEO Brian Roberts is a homeboy. It scored last week by luring the AIIM show away from New York. The only place Wi-Fi was on the fritz, ironically, was in the press room.
Maybe Boston can pick up tips from Philly on how to fill Southie's cavernous new convention center. Although attendees of the Sapphire confab here last week raved about the facility, it is still rather, ahem, underutilized. Still, everything from the windows to the food got a thumbs-up.
Linux looky-loos want to know how Novell's efforts will go now that ex-SUSE Linux CEO Richard Seibt has split and Markus Rex is moving to Waltham from Nuremberg. (Or is he?) It'll be interesting to see how the German engineers take to what many call Novell's micromanagement style. Novell top dog Jack Messman has his hands full.
EMC and Hewlett-Packard both held storage user confabs last week. The EMC Summit was in New Orleans, while HP StorageWorks set up house in Vegas. HP also decided to go on a road offensive, however, and set up a competing storage conference in an 18-wheeler parked near the New Orleans Convention Center, HP advertised with flyers and a billboard truck emblazoned with a most unusual message: "Save yourself from another storage failure." Why unusual? HP, coming off a couple of bad quarters in storage, is telling customers of EMC, which is showing strong growth, to save themselves from storage failures? Get real.
Folks who buy a lot of iTunes from the online iTunes store may get burned if they use Roxio's Toast 6 Titanium recording software. The latest version of the staple Mac product, 6.1, which works with Apple's new Tiger OS, won't let users burn purchased iTunes audio content to CDs and DVDs or export it to their hard drives. They'd have to use Apple's iTunes or iDVD software. Roxio's Web site said the move came "following discussions with Apple."