In this all-new book review, we put The TCP/IP Guide: A Comprehensive Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference by Charles Kozierok to the test. In this article, we review a book you should have in your library, but which you probably won’t read until that one day when you really, really need it.

Read this DominoPower article.

Our own Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz has a new article out, Are political journalists falling prey to technological misdirection?. This time, though, it’s not in a ZATZ magazine. Instead, it’s running in the Nieman Watchdog of the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.

Here’s more interesting news on David and his analysis of the White House email mess. He was just interviewed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. The interview will be broadcast to 60 terrestrial stations, XM satellite radio, and on the Web sometime during the weekend of April 26th. We’ll have more details as we get closer to the broadcast day.

Google Apps is like a "fog rolling into the harbor," permeating businesses quite possibly at the expense of Microsoft and IBM, Gartner analyst Tom Austin said. Google just isn’t doing it by coddling the enterprise market the way its rivals do.

Austin, in a presentation at the Gartner Symposium ITxpo April 9, said that 20 to 30 percent of businesses Gartner surveyed claim they are using free Google Apps in addition to Microsoft Office, SharePoint or IBM Lotus software.

While this wouldn’t seem to threaten Microsoft or IBM, Austin wondered what might happen if 80 percent of the users in 80 percent of large enterprises start using Google Apps. He argued that the more people use Google Apps, the harder it will be for Microsoft or IBM to benefit from renewing contracts.

Yahoo wants to appeal to lazy developers. Jeremy Zawodny, a developer with Yahoo and a leader of the Yahoo Developer Network, spoke April 8 at the Evans Data Corp. Developer Relations Conference on the issue of laziness and impatience in developers.

Zawodny said that in the business of creating developer programs, the Web services and APIs Yahoo offers are part of the company’s effort to boost its ecosystem and indicate that "there is a lot we can offer without money associated with it."

Gartner analysts say IT executives are frittering away as much as 25 percent of their budgets on unnecessary and redundant customization, and IT departments need to act now to take advantage of cheaper products and services.

According to the analysts, wasteful IT spending is on the decline, but IT will still overspend by at least at 10 percent through 2010. Much of the waste stems from the inability of traditional IT departments to realize savings as they shift from buying and building technology to accessing IT as a service.

A startup called MokaFive has launched the MokaFive Desktop Virtualization service.

The new service, supported by 15 pending patents, is intended to deliver "virtual desktops as a service" to help customers manage thousands of virtual desktops running a variety of operating systems and resolve key security issues remotely.

Just how important are wireless skills to IT departments? A survey of more than 3,500 IT managers released by CompTIA, a trade association, identified wireless skills as those that will be the most important for businesses to have in-house in the next five years. The need for these skills was especially strong in health care and education, cited by 63 percent of respondents in each.

IBM announced new services and advanced tools to help customers better focus on the crucial architectural decisions when implementing a service oriented architecture (SOA).

A recent study of SOA engagements by the IBM Academy of Technology found that the chief cause for difficulty among clients in implementing SOA is the lack of emphasis on getting the right architecture blueprint in place with an eye to future growth.

IBM unveiled the industry’s first complete mashup portfolio for business, empowering individuals to create situational applications, or mashups, and to help them do their jobs more effectively and meet the needs of the emerging real time enterprise. Innovative companies of every size are beginning to realize the possibilities of Web 2.0, and IBM’s deep history in open standards, information integration and emerging Internet technologies, make the company an undeniably strong partner in a new technology era.

IBM Mashup Center allows non-technical users to literally drag and drop mashup components from personal, enterprise and Web sources to easily create, deploy and share customized Web applications in minutes. In addition to the ease-of-use, the product also includes the management, security and governance capabilities that IT departments require. The IBM Mashup Center is planned to begin Beta on April 15, 2008.

Lee Nackman, a technology star in the IBM Software Group, has retired. Nackman, who had been with the company more than 20 years and was most recently vice president of product development and customer support of IBM’s Rational unit, retired March 28.

IBM named Jamie Thomas to replace Nackman. Most recently, Thomas was vice president of Rational software development.