InfoWorld articles from October 2002

InfoWorld archives from October 2002

Packaging services - Services-oriented architectures ease the transition from xSP to ISV.(Opsware, Akamai )
October 28, 2002... WHAT IRONY: Just as the world started getting serious about software as a service -- and services-oriented architectures -- the wave of service providers that had been funded during the dot-com boom years started to fall on hard times. Some...

Office 11 beta unfurled.(Microsoft's Office 11.0 business applications suite)(Brief Article)
October 28, 2002... Microsoft this week released to selected beta testers an early version of its long-awaited Office 11 desktop suite. Company officials heavily emphasized the suite's collaboration capabilities, enabling users to connect to each other and to...

PeopleSoft, IBM team up.(Brief Article)
October 28, 2002... PeopleSoft announced this week a partnership with IBM to provide the PeopleSoft Human Capital Management Solution for IBM's Dynamic Workplaces initiative. With the announcement, PeopleSoft becomes the first human resources application vendor...

Crystal Decisions offers reporting on AIX.(IBM's AIX 5L Unix platform)(Brief Article)
October 28, 2002... Crystal Decisions will begin marketing its enterprise reporting solution on IBM's Unix solution under a new agreement announced this week targeting small and midsize businesses. The two companies will work together to deliver Crystal...

Opsware branches out - MSP turned software company scores partners, customers with expertise.(management services provider)
October 28, 2002... IT COST-CUTTING mandates are forcing customers and software vendors to take a hard look at squeezing greater efficiency and control out of mission-critical hardware and software investments. In an IT climate desperate for configuration...

Integrating an upturn - It's the new reality. Rather than spend millions for new technologies, CTOs spin their legacy systems into new business models.(Princeton Review Chief Technology Officer Curtis Brown)
October 28, 2002... CURTIS BROWN, CTO of New York-based Princeton Review, says the down economy has forced him to approach the future in a more creative way. "In the heyday of the boom, it was easy to say, 'Let's drop $750,000 on a new system and add on some new...

CTO with backbone - Strong fiscal management and technology innovation are key for Level 3 Communications.(Chief Technology Officer Jack Waters)
October 28, 2002... IF YOU HAVE A DIAL-UP Internet connection at home, you're likely to be connecting via Broomfield, Colo.-based Level 3 Communications, says the company's group vice president and CTO Jack Waters. Overseeing some 500 direct and indirect...

Better days (way) ahead (First in a four-part series).(Brief Article)
October 28, 2002... With conflicts abroad, continued missed earnings, and accounting scandals, many chief technology officers are looking as far out as October 2003 for economic recovery. Copyright (c) 2002 InfoWorld Media Group Inc.

Diving into data - Companies aim to control the rising tide of unstructured data and gain strategic edge.
October 28, 2002... Although no one disputes the value contained in unstructured information, the work and expense required to add structure to the data or to make it consumable and searchable by workers is significant, Ramos says. And because the ROI is not...

XML everywhere - As platform vendors incorporate XML, will content management problems go away?(document management software )
October 28, 2002... THE REVOLUTION WROUGHT by Web-based standards and distributed computing environments is having tremendous impact, including the democratization of many specialized enterprise software functions. Business intelligence applications, for...

EAI players seek higher ground - Vitria turns to BPI as pressure from app-server low end mounts.(enterprise application integration)
October 28, 2002... AS OPEN STANDARDS and XML start to strip specialization from the lower end of the integration market, pressure-squeezed EAI companies are hunting the higher ground of BPI (business process integration). At the Gartner Application...

WS-I welcomes Sun to ranks - Standards consolidation on Sun agenda as it plans to lobby for board position.(Web Services Interoperabilty Organization )(Brief Article)
October 28, 2002... SUN MICROSYSTEMS' absence from the Web Services Interoperabilty Organization (WS-I) effort, spearheaded by IBM and Microsoft, has ended after the company last week joined WS-I as a contributing member. Sun announced at the same time that...

EMC adopts SMI standard - Industry steps up standards push to address interoperability concerns.(Storage Management Initiative)
October 28, 2002... HOPING TO KEEP momentum alive around its WideSky initiative, EMC has announced it will incorporate open-standards specifications into its developer suite by early next year. The announcement this week follows the development of an...

Deep-data security - FortiGate melds invaluable security functions into one affordable box.(Fortinet's FortiGate line of security appliances)(Hardware Review)(Product/Service Evaluation)
October 28, 2002... MANAGING NETWORK SECURITY is a time-consuming affair. Appliances make the work somewhat easier, but each firmware-based appliance typically addresses a narrow range of security needs. The alternative is a robust, configurable integrated...

ABOVE THE NOISE: Innovation is not over -- it's evolving - The market pushes innovators to create products for complex environments.
October 28, 2002... CONSIDER THE MESSAGES we've been digesting during the past few months. Layoffs continue to ease the Silicon Valley freeway commute, enterprise IT spending remains lackluster, and in the stock market, the IT industry's pulse is just short of...

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: I, clairvoyant -- not.(Column)
October 28, 2002... SOME DAYS, AMBER agrees with my clairvoyance; others she thinks I am just plain blind. But one of my predictions, which came way back in January of this year, appears to be gaining steam. I refer to a recent poll by Leger Marketing in...

WINDOW MANAGER: VOIP and SBS feedback - There's more than meets the eye in voice over IP services and Microsoft's Small Business Server.(Column)
October 28, 2002... THIS WEEK, I'm updating some earlier columns with new information provided by readers. Keep those tips coming, and I'll keep printing 'em. VOIP. I wrote recently that I managed to thrive in Germany for a few months only because my U.S....

THE OPEN SOURCE: DMCA horror show - Scarier than ghosts and ghouls, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a nightmare for Red Hat.
October 28, 2002... WELL, IT'S THAT time of year again when horrifying things terrorize people in their dreams. Ghoulish tales fill the air. And grown people peek over their shoulders in fear. No, I'm not talking about Halloween. It's time again to consider...

SECURITY ADVISER: Tastes better than Tang - NASA's vulnerability reduction program turns up some encouraging numbers.
October 28, 2002... THERE ARE TIMES when it's possible to look at the sorry state of computer security and wonder if this really is as good as it gets. But this isn't one of those weeks; instead, I'm pondering a piece that ran earlier this month in Federal...

STORAGE INSIDER: McData's SAN serve - Switch's flexibility may mark turning point: Giving customers what they want.(McData's Sphereon 4500 fabric switch)
October 28, 2002... FOLLOWING THE evolution of storage technology is like watching a tennis match. Action shifts suddenly from one side of the court to the other, forcing you to continually twist your neck to track the ball. The latest serve in the storage...

WIRELESS WORLD: Thin-client redux - Research in Motion is putting its BES foot forward to secure a spot atop the wireless-server heap.(Blackberry Enterprise Server)
October 28, 2002... JIM BALSILLIE, chairman and CEO of Research in Motion (RIM), is a man in motion, even when sitting still. He's intense and driven. He talks fast and is not shy about giving you his opinions. The trick is somehow applying those traits to...

ENTERPRISE STRATEGIES: Carry your state - Standard techniques for contingency planning don't map well to service-oriented communications.
October 28, 2002... CONCEPTS SUCH AS BPM (business process management), federated computing, and Web services would not exist were it not for reliable, low-latency networks. Such service-oriented architectures entail calling out to multiple systems. But what...

CTO CONNECTION: The 'new normal' is here - Big budgets for large IT projects are over -- CTOs must deliver ROI with incremental change.
October 28, 2002... WE RECENTLY started a new budget year at InfoWorld, and I couldn't be happier to put the past year behind us and start with a clean slate. I'm optimistic, perhaps foolishly, that the tech economy will improve at least somewhat during the next...

SURVIVAL GUIDE: The glory that is Greece - Like the Parthenon that speaks to us from the past, IT infrastructure should stand the test of time.
October 28, 2002... ATHENS, GREECE -- The Parthenon stands on the fields of the Acropolis overlooking this ancient, modern city. Built some 2,500 years ago during the country's height of power and influence, its age and commanding architectural grace and...

THE GRIPE LINE: Sneakwrap abounds - Readers say restrictive license agreements have been showing up in some odd places for a long time.(Column)
October 28, 2002... OK, SO I'M a little slow. While I already realized that sneakwrap tactics have spread well beyond the software industry, reader responses to recent columns on shrinkwrapped books and deactivated PDAs make it clear that I had no idea just...

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: Not fade away - Before you buy the line that peer- to-peer and Web services are passing fads, look again at how they're converging.
October 28, 2002... ON WALL STREET, the canary in the mine shaft for a turnaround is capitulation. It's the tipping point between despair and salvation, when enough people believe the worst is yet to come to fuel the upturn they've given up on. Fundamental...

Captured in XML - Next-generation forms tools and office apps wrap data at the client.
October 28, 2002... XML DOCUMENTS, encapsulated in SOAP messages, are the packets of the business Web. Standards efforts under way focus on how to create, transform, interpret, sign, and encrypt these packets as they flow among communicating applications and...

AOL sends corporate IM.(instant messaging services)
October 28, 2002... AS CORPORATE INTEREST in instant messaging and presence-awareness technology escalates, widely-used consumer IM services are making a run at the enterprise with new security, management, and integration capabilities. AOL next week plans...

SIs retool Web services - Frameworks enable service customization to tackle BPM concerns.
October 28, 2002... LOOKING TO LAY down a solid foundation for Web services initiatives, top-tier services providers are developing a set of packaged technology solutions designed to address an array of enterprise IT development concerns. Large SIs (systems...

e-Speak creators launch Confluent.(Hewlett-Packard's e-Speak development team this week launched a new company, Confluent)(Brief Article)
October 28, 2002... The former leaders of Hewlett-Packard's e-Speak development team this week launched a new company, Confluent. The company's Core platform is designed to lash disparate Web services together, and then manage and monitor them in the context of...

AT&T revenue slides in Q3.(Brief Article)
October 28, 2002... AT&T reported third-quarter 2002 earnings of $207 million this week, compared with a loss of $2.2 billion in Q3 2001. Revenue for the quarter was $12 billion, down 8.3 percent from Q3 2001. Copyright (c) 2002 InfoWorld Media Group Inc.

More than musical? Apple's iPod may be the best MP3 player on the market, but as a PIM it leaves a lot to be desired.(Hardware Review)(Product/Service Evaluation)
October 21, 2002... THE WORLD OF high-tech gadgetry is awash with multifunction handheld devices. As we await the single unit that will do it all (don't hold your breath), device manufacturers, including Apple Computer, are determined to add functionality to...

Apple gets Bluetooth bug - iSync could transform cell phones into powerful data-access devices.
October 21, 2002... HIDDEN BEHIND Apple Computer's summer rollout of protocols and software -- dubbed iSync, iChat, and Rendezvous -- is a set of strongly held beliefs about the future of pervasive devices. Senior management at the Cupertino, Calif.-based...

CTOs en masse - Far-flung enterprises and complex technical needs have inspired some large enterprises to design org charts with multiple CTO tiers.(Air Force Research Lab virtual private network deployment)
October 21, 2002... DESIGNING A VPN can be a daunting task for any enterprise, especially for a military laboratory with 22 locations nationwide supporting 5,900 employees whose missions range from designing new conventional weapons to researching the next...

That unifying voice - Webley CTO designs the platform for a voice-based integrated communications system.(Alex Kurganov )(Interview)
October 21, 2002... WEBLEY SYSTEMS IS a communications company, headquartered in Deerfield, Ill., that integrates office phone, home phone, cell, fax, e-mail, and other services from one interface. As CTO, Alex Kurganov is principal architect of Webley's...

Benefits of sharing (Part four of a four-part series).(Brief Article)
October 21, 2002... Caution and benefits are CTO watchwords for any public or private program designed to share information about corporate network and systems security. Copyright (c) 2002 InfoWorld Media Group Inc.

Facing the future - Carriers zero in on the services side of telecom as wireless picks up speed.(Industry Overview)
October 21, 2002... Delivering the opening keynote address at last month's NetWorld+Interop conference in Atlanta, Sprint President and COO Ronald LeMay deftly proclaimed, "Confusion, it seems, prevails everywhere today." LeMay's remarks described the...

Messages and media - Could device-savvy SIP finally bring computers and telephony together?(Session Initiation Protocol)
October 21, 2002... ONE NICE THING about communications protocols is that there are so many. No matter what you want to do, you can find a protocol that will allow it. Of course, as new communications technologies are introduced, they are accompanied by even...

IBM stokes autonomic fire - Group formed to integrate autonomic technology into diverse product offerings.(Autonomic Computing Organization)
October 21, 2002... ATTEMPTING TO accelerate delivery of autonomic computing-based products, IBM next week will announce a multipronged initiative to embed the technology into its entire software and hardware stack. The Somers, N.Y.-based company has formed...

WS-I to expand its board.(Web Services Interoperability Organization )(Brief Article)
October 21, 2002... The Web Services Interoperability Organization (WS-I) has announced it plans to elect two seats to its board of directors next March, a move that may help heal a rift between the group and Sun Microsystems. The member companies elected by the...

Tibco details BAM vision.(business activity monitoring)(Brief Article)
October 21, 2002... Following its September acquisition of BAM (business activity monitoring) player Praja, Tibco has outlined a strategy for serving up real-time enterprise information. In the next six weeks, Tibco will roll out a stand-alone version of Praja's...

Apple reports net loss.(fiscal year 2002)(Brief Article)
October 21, 2002... Apple Computer has reported a $45 million net loss for the completion of its fiscal year and a 14 percent drop in shipments of its flagship Macintosh computers, as compared to the fourth quarter a year ago, when Apple reported a profit of $66...

ERP targets midmarket - Microsoft, Oracle, Baan to improve front- office, back-office ERP integration.
October 21, 2002... RISING TO MEET midmarket demand for integrated front-and back-office systems, Microsoft, Oracle, and Baan are separately revving new enterprise software applications designed to reduce integration costs. Microsoft next week will unveil...

No worms here - Xserve, Jaguar a well-matched team.(from Apple Computer)(Hardware Review)(Product/Service Evaluation)
October 21, 2002... WHEN WE REVIEWED Mac OS X Server last fall, we noted that Apple had a credibility problem (see "A low-end alternative" ). The company lacked a decent hardware platform on which to run a promising operating system. At the time, the best an IT...

ABOVE THE NOISE: Polishing the Apple for the enterprise - The darling of the alpha geeks may also be sparking corporate interest.
October 21, 2002... APPLE COMPUTER -- longtime darling of the education, graphics, and desktop publishing markets -- is pushing the enterprise envelope. A powerful server, a commitment to open standards, and killer innovations such as FireWire are slowly nudging...

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: It's the same old story.
October 21, 2002... "YOU KNOW, BOBBY, all you ever want to do these days is ride that Harley," Amber complained. "It's fun to do other things sometimes, too." It's OK with me if she thinks that way, so long as she comes along for the ride. Service pack...

To the editor.
October 21, 2002... Who owns your words? ALTHOUGH I AGREE with some of what was written in Steve Gillmor's Ahead of the Curve column, I find some of the guest author's statements deplorable(see "We the people"). For example, consider, "Intellectual...

THE OPEN SOURCE: Expand your infobase - Support staff struggling to answer questions about open-source products should try a Net search.(Column)
October 21, 2002... EVERY ONCE in a while, I get a message from someone who says "We had such-and-such problem under Linux. We called our vendor support line. They suggested a couple things that did not help. They said they would look at it, but they could not...

WINDOW MANAGER: Services with a smile - Windows 2000 and XP have processes galore, but most can be turned off if you know the secret.(Column)
October 21, 2002... WINDOWS 2000 and XP do a lot of things. Fortunately, if you don't like the things they do, you can turn some of them off. I wrote last week that one Windows user -- a devoted PC games player -- has done a remarkable job of picking apart...

SECURITY ADVISER: Time for an e-mail call - Taking a break from unpacking boxes and moving, P.J. catches up on correspondence.
October 21, 2002... THE INFOWORLD Test Center lab didn't move to San Francisco on my back, but that's how it feels after three weeks of unpacking. I'm not sure which is tougher, shaking my newfound addiction to extra-strength aspirin or reading a few months'...

STORAGE INSIDER: Need capacity? Pushing monster storage boxes may be a bad idea in the dour economic climate.(Hardware Review)(Column)
October 21, 2002... FOR SOME TIME, NAS products have been knocked for their inability to scale and for being difficult to manage. Well, that is changing: Startups Spinnaker Networks and 3Par are the latest to release next- generation NAS products that promise to...

WIRELESS WORLD: Farewell to handhelds - Innovations from Intel, coupled with Bluetooth, will make data phones even harder to resist.(Column)
October 21, 2002... CELL PHONE or handheld, which will it be? Though many vendors, afraid of ticking off potential customers, always respond with the bland assurance that "There will be room for both," I think there will be a winner and an also-ran. If I...

ENTERPRISE STRATEGIES: Presentation matters - Apple and Red Hat are redefining GUIs by taking it one small step at a time.
October 21, 2002... MATURE USERS OF Unix, Mac OS, and Windows realize that GUIs have not changed appreciably in the past 15 years. Today's GUIs jam text into rectangles in more or less the same way they always have. But we can't discuss Web services,...

CTO CONNECTION: The ubiquitous CTO - As technology, financial, and business processes intertwine, demand for the CTO's expertise will grow.(chief technology officer)
October 21, 2002... I SPOKE RECENTLY about technology leadership at the National Association of Convenience Stores annual convention in Orlando, Fla. Technology leadership is a tough issue in the convenience store industry. Despite dependence on technology...

SURVIVAL GUIDE: Leading by listening first - Before you judge history or your staff, review the facts and the process.(management of information technology)(Column)
October 21, 2002... REVISIONISM IS the art of waiting until everyone who knows better is dead, then interpreting events through your ideological filter. Consider the following response response to my recent column (see "Crisis management"). "Though [Franklin...

THE GRIPE LINE: An uphill battle - Bills before Congress seek to erode consumers' rights, but one measure deserves consumer backing.
October 21, 2002... MAYBE IT'S TIME for a little self help of our own. For years we've associated electronic self help -- the remote disabling of software -- with UCITA, the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act. And UCITA is going to remain a threat...

AHEAD OF THE CURVE: Off the record - Psst ... Here's the Cliffs Notes version of Michael Crichton's thoughts on the copyright debate, but don't quote me.(Column)
October 21, 2002... LAST WEEK WAS ONE of those weeks where I had a number of off-the-record conversations. This is not unusual, mind you. As InfoWorld Test Center director, I am often under nondisclosure agreements about products and technologies. As author of...

Apple's road less traveled - Technology strategy maps a path to the enterprise's front door.
October 21, 2002... APPLE COMPUTER IS flirting with the enterprise. The company that for 20 years has driven innovation of technologies including 802.11, peer-to- peer networking, PostScript, FireWire, portable MP3, and the clean user interface, is sharpening...

Mac marks the enterprise - Unix's power and flexibility combined with Apple's end-user savvy pose a true challenge to Windows and Linux.
October 21, 2002... IN MAY 2001, Apple began shipping OS X on new Macs. Six months later, at the O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer and Web Services conference, it was clear that a sea change was under way. The open-source geeks who flock to these events were flouting...

Too big for its niches - Apple has a Mac for your rack, desktop, and seat-back tray, but can it push out the Unix and PC hardware already there?
October 21, 2002... DESPITE REPEATED attempts to market the Mac to corporate customers, it never caught on as a general-purpose business computing platform. Some blame the esoteric Mac OS for discouraging application development, while others point to Apple's...

Enriching Clientele - Epicor leverages .Net and a fat client for powerful and flexible CRM.(Clientele Customer Support 8.0 by Epicor Software; customer relationship management )
October 21, 2002... TEN YEARS FROM NOW, no doubt we'll look back at our time and find it unbelievable that enterprise applications were built with so little disposition to communicate with the outside world. But thanks to SOAP and XML, a new day is dawning, as...

Building a better browser - Smart client-side apps bolster services- oriented computing.
October 14, 2002... THE INTERNET'S SERVERCENTRIC model is demonstrating itself too slow and too static for the medium to advance beyond a document warehouse. Static forms are persistently cornering server resources. Round-trip server calls hog bandwidth and...

Integration lightens up - Enterprises turn to 'EAI lite' for less costly, smaller-scale options.(enterprise application integration)
October 14, 2002... WITH INTEGRATION and security toping IT priority lists, it's no surprise that enterprises are furiously seeking the right technology to help them link legions of disparate systems. But enterprise wariness about traditional EAI platforms'...

Security by fiat (Part three of a four-part series).(Brief Article)
October 14, 2002... The CTO community is almost equally split on whether the federal government should mandate security and business continuity best practices. Copyright (c) 2002 InfoWorld Media Group Inc.

Enterprise play - The gaming and entertainment industries have surprising technology solutions to offer enterprise CTOs.(Seth Berger, CTO, Estco Medical )
October 14, 2002... SETH BERGER draws on his experience as a game developer in his role as CTO of Estco Medical, a Bethesda, Md.-based Web site developer for the medical industry. "In both the video game and enterprise environment there's a large-scale...

Entertaining links.(Linda Beck, EarthLink's executive vice president of operations)
October 14, 2002... EarthLink's chief technologist is peering with partners to manage increasing demands for rich options SERVING NEARLY 5 million subscribers who demand game downloads and more, EarthLink executives are keenly watching developments in the...

Playing the broadband market - Gaming publisher Gigex turns to real- time broadband to manage fees for unpredicted traffic spikes.
October 14, 2002... Dateline: July 4 -- World Wide Web THE U.S. ARMY launches a special "Recon" version of America's Army, a 10-level, realistic, military role-playing and simulation game being used as a "wired" recruitment tool, after a barrage of...

Microsoft to share code.(Passport authentication technology)(Brief Article)
October 14, 2002... Microsoft has announced it will share a portion of the source code for its Passport authentication technology, hoping to spur adoption of its SSO (single sign-on) software among corporate developers. Beginning in November Microsoft will share...

J2EE, .Net in dead heat.(Brief Article)
October 14, 2002... A survey conducted by Evans Data found that the more than 600 developers surveyed virtually split on development plans for Java and .Net. The survey, completed in September, found that 40 percent of developers surveyed are currently building...

HP, Critical Path team up.(to offer hosted services)(Brief Article)
October 14, 2002... Hewlett-Packard and Critical Path have aligned to offer hosted services, including email, instant messaging, wireless access, group scheduling, and file storage. Starting in the first quarter of 2003, the companies will jointly sell and...

Web services lockdown - Vendors to tighten enterprise security via ID management, PKI history.(Netegrity introduces TransactionMinder)(Product Information)
October 14, 2002... SECURITY VENDORS deeply ROOTED IN PKI, AUTHENTICATION, ENCRYPTION, AND WEB ACCESS MANAGEMENT TECHNOLOGY ARE RAMPING UP NEW WARES TO PLUG SECURITY HOLES IN WEB SERVICES INFRASTRUCTURE. Vendors, including Entrust, RSA Security, and...

Microsoft touts Office vision - XDocs, Jupiter drive Office agenda to capture business processes with XML.(Product Information)
October 14, 2002... ATTEMPTING TO FORTIFY its Office suite as a rich interface for Web services, Microsoft has announced a set of technologies designed to embed business process functionality into the core of its software stack. The Redmond, Wash.-based...

Media projecting further - Rich content and digital media companies take on network congestion.(Kontiki and CenterSpan )
October 14, 2002... BOASTING INNOVATIVE delivery models and tightened security, digital media and streaming content are poised to kick down enterprise doors and take up residence behind the firewall. Vendors Kontiki and CenterSpan are among those companies...

DRM knocks at the enterprise door.
October 14, 2002... So far, enterprise IT isn't mired in the DRM swamp. For the most part, the content that DRM aims to control is produced by the entertainment industry and consumed in the home. But as licensing regimes creep into the technical infrastructure,...

ABOVE THE NOISE: CTOs learn to play a rich-media game - What the the gaming and entertainment sectors can offer for the enterprise.
October 14, 2002... ONCE MARGINALIZED IN the technology industry, games developers are becoming a sought-after commodity. Their understanding of complex technology issues and peer-to-peer networking make them the ideal developers in today's enterprise...

NOTES FROM THE FIELD: Not quite resting easy.
October 14, 2002... I SEEM TO BE stricken with a bout of insomnia of late. "What is it that is keeping you awake, Bobby?" Amber asked. I wish it were easy to answer, my dear. I think I just need to get back out on the Harley lest the whole summer fade away...

WINDOW MANAGER: Turn off auto-update - If you can't stand the idea of Windows morphing on you, here's the information you need.
October 14, 2002... FOR THE PAST two months I've written about patches, service packs, and the update process for Windows XP and 2000. Several readers have responded that they no longer feel comfortable letting Windows automatically download such changes. ...

THE OPEN SOURCE: It drive(r)s me crazy - Don't let the unfounded fear of having to hunt down elusive drivers deter you from using Linux.
October 14, 2002... EVERY TIME I buy a piece of PC hardware, I take a trip down memory lane. As I unpack the box, I generally find the device (whatever it is), an instruction booklet, and a driver diskette or CD. Ah, a driver disk. I remember those days. I...

SECURITY ADVISER: Dewie or don't he? Cybersecurity mascot mockable at first glance, but will likely score big with the small-fry.
October 14, 2002... EVEN WHEN THE anticipated war with Iraq fills the headlines, a wise bureaucrat knows that the way to get ink is to bring up the woeful state of computer security. Whether you're discussing the private sector or institutional problems -- such...

STORAGE INSIDER: Moving on up - It's high time to consider moving Oracle to clustered Linux, with Sistina's help.
October 14, 2002... ALL THE LINUX-centered "wows" for the foreseeable future will probably be sparked by the recent Red Hat 8.0 release and stretch the never- ending debate: Is Linux ready for the desktop? Just to be different, we would like to direct your...

WIRELESS WORLD: Peek at iPaqs to come - Tomorrow's iPaqs range from a model built for value to one primed for wireless computing.(HP personal digital assistant plans)
October 14, 2002... EARLIER THIS MONTH, I met with Cindy Box, Hewlett-Packard's worldwide marketing director for smart handhelds, and she was kind enough to give me a peek at the HP iPaq road map. Normal operating procedure is for vendors to ask reporters for a...

ENTERPRISE STRATEGIES: Too rich or too thin - The rich interfaces that replace browsers and text can't be controlled by vendors.(Column)
October 14, 2002... YOU HAVE TO pity anyone forced to use a text terminal. Green screens are as outrE as rotary phones: flat, static, unaesthetic, unexpressive. Yet it's easy to forget that in many applications, green screens are the norm. The huge, modern...

CTO CONNECTION: The show must grow on - As rich content streams into the enterprise, CTOs must be savvy in the ways of media delivery.(streaming media)
October 14, 2002... AS TECHNOLOGY becomes less about data processing and more about enabling communication and information delivery -- whether it's headline news or a Webcast to your shareholders -- most companies are now accidental media outlets. This is...

SURVIVAL GUIDE: PDAs are here to stay - IT managers need to end obstructionist practices and start integrating PDAs into the enterprise.
October 14, 2002... TWO YEARS AGO I predicted hard times for Palm. Hard times have arrived, in the form of plummeting market share and negative profits. It was not a difficult prediction. When I wrote the column, Palm hadn't given customers any reason to buy...