InfoWorld's Technology of the Year Awards

The feature well: Yes, it's that time once again. From the hundreds of IT
products InfoWorld's Test center evaluated over the last 12 months, we
choose and recognize those most groundbreaking, capable, polished and
valuable -- across an overflowing fistful of categories that include
everything from application development to networking to security. 2008
Technology of the Year Awards. The winners represent the cream of the crop,
to be certain.

Best of the blogs: "What the hell is wrong with Microsoft these days?"
Randall Kennedy begins Flyback to the future. "It seems like every time
their R&D folks come up with something unique and powerful (volume
snapshots), some idiot further down the program management chain steps in
and cripples it." This time around Kennedy is referring to Microsoft's Vista
Backup utility, which Kennedy considers a technically superior solution that
is hamstrung by several factors. So much so that the FOSS folks are working
on their own alternative, dubbed Flyback and "progressing so well that the
developers have time to indulge in little side projects, like a promised
'3D' effect for restoring archived files/folders."

The news beat: Microsoft bids $1.2 million for Fast Search and Transfer,
which it says it will integrate into SharePoint as a means to build out
high-end search offerings. Symantec says that the U.S. government needs to
take new cybersecurity steps as it accounted for just more than a quarter of
data breaches that could lead to identity theft in the first half of last
year. IBM, meanwhile, digs into security management and says that building
out its portfolio in that area is both ongoing and inevitable. And Linux
creator Linus Torvalds maintains that he is sticking with the GPL 2, though
the Free Software Foundation has released GPL 3, because version 2 still
makes the most sense for the Linux kernel now.
Source: infoworld.com