ShadowRAM: October 31, 2005

Now he&'s taking heat for “The War Within.” This flick depicts a Pakistani engineer who emerges from wrongful imprisonment as a terrorist as the real thing. The movie depicts his agonizing over whether or not to perform his duty as he starts to have feelings for his American friends and lifestyle.

Cuban, already a lightning rod for his antics as Dallas Mavericks owner, is now being blasted by bloggers for being unpatriotic or worse. One blogger reportedly called him a “jihadist propaganda producer.”

Cuban—dubbed by the Boston Herald as the Mavs&' “madman owner”—was in Beantown last week to raise money for families of wounded or killed servicemen. He helped judge a karaoke contest featuring Patriots QB Tom Brady.

Sources have it that VMware is opening an engineering office in Cambridge, Mass., closer to parent company EMC in Hopkinton, Mass. VMware has retained much independence as a West Coast subsidiary since EMC acquired it two years ago but is getting pressure to have engineers closer to the mother ship. HR put out a req for a software engineering manager to oversee more than 10 senior engineers to be based in Cambridge. No worries about a management shift akin to Novell&'s Utah-to-Waltham, move, however. Insiders say CEO Diane Greene is a committed West Coaster—even though she&'s a UVM and MIT alumnus.

There was a lot of paranoid chatter last week at the MSPAlliance managed services conference in Texas. Certified technicians worry about plunging salaries as proactive managed services cut down on break-and-fix incidents. VARs becoming MSPs are hiring the help-desk/monitoring types over new certs as more customers move to managed services. Maybe it&'s time for a cert for those who can fix probs before they happen.

A skirmish erupted last week over how, when and even if EMC was invited to an IBM-led open-source storage initiative. Finally, some consensus. IBM did call EMC, albeit at 4:30 p.m. Monday. That gave EMC a whopping couple of hours to jump on board. Or not. The news broke at midnight.

News of this week&'s Bill Gates and Ray Ozzie press event in San Francisco sparked speculation that Mr. Bill, who will have just turned 50, might turn over his chief software architect title to Ray, whom Gates has called the “best programmer on the planet.” Hmmm.

As CRN reported last week, Microsoft plans to offer hosted versions of everything it has. Needless to say, Slashdot commentary was brutal. Best quip: “I wonder which color will their hosted screen of death be?”