It’s a sign of the times that simply avoiding clicking suspicious emails and visiting only trusted, known websites is no longer adequate to avoid drive by downloads of spyware, keystroke loggers, and other malware that could seriously compromise your computer, identity, and financial security. Zone Alarm , a unit of Checkpoint, is introducing a new way to virtualize your browser so theoretically nothing bad hits your internal machine.

Genuitec, which has been known for its Eclipse development tools, is continuing to evolve its months-old Pulse offering, which is designed to bring order to managing your Eclipse desktop. The new version contains features that are of use to an audience which Genuitec initially underestimated: ISVs.

One of the biggest hurdles to modeling business processes is taking reliable snapshots of what really goes on, as opposed to what's supposed to occur. Fujitsu, whose enterprise BPM product that isn't well known outside its Japanese market (and used to be actively marketed by Software AG prior to their webMethods acquistion), is introducing a deceptively simple idea for finding process needles in proverbial haystacks. They sample log files from all systems touched by end users, whether it be databases, applications, or even standalone Excel spreadsheets or emails.

MySQL, long known as the little open source web database that could, has grown enormously popular as the back end database for modest blog and websites like ours. But when it comes to the large transaction loads common to mission-critical systems, nobody has taken MySQL seriously. Fans of Postgres and its descendants, EnterpriseDB and latter-day Ingres, point to it as the open source alternative for mission-critical transaction workloads.

A new benchmarking study being released by Hyperic this week at JavaOne shows that, when you do the right optimizations, MySQL actually can scale.