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One of the most pervasive security technologies that doesn't work very well is the intrusion detection/prevention system. To get value out of an intrusion detection system, you need to be able to at least separate out some of the good alerts from the many irrelevant ones. Read more.

Since we began tracking Facebook demographics in late May, weekly growth has held steady, usually in the low single-digits on a percentage basis. More importantly, it's fair to say that the company has successfully expanded overseas. With close to 128M users, the share of U.S. users is down to around 30% from 35% in late May: Over the last three... Read more.

The Adobe/Microsoft/Sun strategy for producing rich Internet applications can solve most of the problems in developing web applications -- at the cost of a huge step backward away from ubiquitous computing. Read more.

I've been doing some reviews of desktop applications recently, so I have been thinking about what criteria I would use to judge them. Read more.

Imagine if your web browser knew who you were on the web. Just as you login to your computer, what if when you fired up your browser, it said "Hello Dave" and asked you to "unlock it" as well. In doing so you become securely logged into your OpenID provider and as you move around the web your browser takes care of automatically logging you into the sites that you want to be, asking you about others, and helping you register with new ones using your OpenID. Argue as much as you want about the details in making this happen, but I think it's hard to disagree that making it easier for people to manage and use their identity (or identities) online is a bad thing. Read more.

Good programmers tend to be polyglot programmers. I'm not sure that good applications tend to be polyglot applications; perhaps the way we build Internet applications is hazardous in the long term. Read more.

After months of being gagged and leashed, iPhone developers are now free to talk about the iPhone SDK. Apple has dropped their NDA and opened the flood gates to those new developers who thirst for iPhone programming knowledge. I feel that Actionscript developers will have an easier transition to Cocoa-Touch than developers coming from other languages. Being a long time Actionscript developer myself I found it easy to port from Flash to iPhone. Further down in this article I show how I built my app in Flash and the steps I took to port it over to Cocoa. But first, here’s why I believe the learning curve is very low for Actionscript developers.

Learning Rails targets web developers whose programming experience is tied directly to the Web. Rather than begin with the inner layers of a Rails web application -- the models and controllers -- this unique book approaches Rails development from the outer layer: the application interface. You can start from the foundations of web design you already know, and then move more deeply into Ruby, objects, and database structures. Browse the book now.

Do we really understand the deepest causes of the economic crisis? If not, then we run the risk that our remedies will not produce sustainable results. Read more.

Taking a cue from Raven's recent post announcing the 10,000 iPhone app milestone, I decided to update some charts from earlier posts on the U.S. iTunes app store. First, the weekly growth in the number of apps was slower in November: the number of apps grew less than 10% on a weekly basis for all of November. During the last... Read more.

I've been operating almost exclusively on a Mac since OS X came out. I grew up in Unix, and never liked the lack of usability in Windows, so it was a good fit. However, I don't have any particular interest in making Apple look better than it really is, particularly when it comes to security. Read more.

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James Hamilton is one of the smartest and most accomplished engineers I know. He now leads Microsoft's Data Center Futures Team, and has been pushing the opportunities in data center efficiency and internet scale services both inside & outside Microsoft. His most recent post explores misconceptions about the Cost of Power in Large-Scale Data Centers: I’m not sure how many... Read more.

Last week, the final judgment was issued in the SCO v. Novell lawsuit. Later in the week SCO filed notice of intent to appeal. We thought it might be a good time to check in with the chronicler of all things SCO, Pamela Jones of Groklaw, and see just where things stand. Read more.