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The InformationWeek May 2005 Archive « April 2005 | Main | June 2005 » |
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HP's Itanium Gamble May Be Hard To Win
Hewlett-Packard continues a multibillion-dollar gamble that many of its core high-performance server customers can be convinced to make the switch from their traditional RISC-based systems to those using the often-maligned Itanium processor from Intel. Despite numerous users, and even some equipment vendors, having vividly demonstrated a distaste for Itanium, HP sees a strong future.
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More IT Jobs May Leave Europe In Wake of France's 'Non' Vote
For a country where unemployment is north of 10%, France seems unduly anxious to ensure that well paying, white collar jobs forsake its shores for foreign soil.
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Careful What You Wish For?
From a security perspective, the Internet is plenty screwed up. It's just the kind of screwed up that may very well obscure attacks. There may be plenty of clever crimes committed that we're never even aware of (in addition to all the ones we are very well aware of).
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Security Is the New Cold War
Electronics, technology and ubiquitous computing have made the world a far more convenient and efficient place to live. The speed with which the things we can now do, get done, is as mind boggling as is the rate at which they quickly become obsolete, or melded with yet another cool, useful technology. Just look at the speed with which cell phones have been turned into the Swiss Army Knife of personal technology. Nevermind calling, it's fundamental use. How 80s.You can use cell phones today to take pictures, send email, run movies and even signal your fave rock band for an encore. Pretty soon we'll be using them to pay bills on the go, relegating ATMs, hard cash and physical credit cards to the recycling bin of the 90s.
There is, of course, a dark side to all of this, and if the past few weeks are anything to go by, the speed with which the technology that has so improved our lives is being turned against us seems to be ratcheting up at a frightening pace.
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Unlocking The Secrets Of Open-Source Success
The story of open-source software has largely been one of success to date. Open source has grown exponentially in popularity among Web users, and it's making headway in corporate application-development environments, even influencing the ways in which proprietary app vendors create and distribute their own products.
Still, open source won't be a tale of unmitigated growth. The answer to open source's challenges is, in a word, services.
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Are Kids Today New And Improved Communicators, Or Just A New Breed Of Stenographers?
After spending a couple of days this week surrounded by dozens of teens and tweens at a WiredKids summit in D.C., it became pretty clear to me that many of our young devote an awful lot of time to writing.
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A Tale Of Cingular Ineffectiveness
As a longtime AT&T Wireless customer, I have a message to Cingular executives: You're really screwing up this acquisition. And I don't just say this because of my recent customer-service and network-coverage woes. The problem is much more widespread than one little reporter having problems with his cell phone. Even AT&T call-center reps are openly admitting during calls that the volume of complaints from subscribers unhappy with the way the acquisition is playing out for them has gone through the roof. If my experience is indicative of what other customers are going through, it's no wonder complaints are on the rise.
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Don't Sweat The Small Stuff
Besides the obvious technical intrigue ignited by the potential for creating a whole new generation of 'Intel Inside' Macintosh hardware, recent reports of chip talks between Intel and Apple are a sign that maybe Apple hasn't taken its eye off the ball after all.
I was beginning to wonder. The paranoid bunker mentality that sometimes envelopes Apple's leadership seemed to have intensified since January, evidenced in part by a string of petulant tantrums.
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Filtering Flaws
There are few aspects of corporate work environments more frustrating than the use of technology to enforce policy, specifically Internet filters. While there are clearly good reasons for organizations to have Internet use policies, relying on technology alone to block potentially objectionable sites does more damage than it prevents.
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U2 Uses IT To Change The Live Concert Experience--And Support the One Campaign
Anyone who's been to a rock concert lately knows that the old days of holding up lighters during ballads has been replaced by the more modern, high-tech glow of the cell phone. But the Irish band U2 has taken mobile communications to a whole other level--and for a great cause.
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The Dream Of x86-Capable Macs Remains Elusive
Thirteen years ago the electronics industry was buzzing about the potential uniting of two disparate computer architectures when IBM, Motorola, and Apple announced plans for the PowerPC architecture. Earlier this week, the buzz surrounded another potential agreement that would put Intel microprocessors inside Apple computers. Obviously, uniting the two most durable PC platforms in history is a lot easier said than done.
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Teen Blogs: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly
In the seventh grade, my friends and I produced a weekly "mini-magazine" featuring articles on cosmetics and hairstyles, our lists of likes and dislikes, horoscopes, all of the typical teen stuff. It was nothing fancy -- handwritten text, ditto paper, our crude illustrations of Dorothy Hamill and Farrah Fawcett hairstyles.
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That's The Way The Cookies Crumble
Sunday night I deleted 508 (!) cookies from my home computer. The exercise brought to mind a recent report about an industry group formed this spring in a bid to stem cookie deletion. They were to begin work on a plan to help improve the image of the technology used to track Web activity.
I remember thinking at the time, if that's the plan, their campaign is going to miss the point--at least for a lot of InformationWeek's readers--by a mile.
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Outsourcing Deals Need Prenups
Regardless of who is right or wrong in Sears' courtroom battle with Computer Sciences Corp., the case shows why a solid prenuptial agreement is necessary when crafting an outsourcing deal.
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Battle Against Terrorists Found In U.S., European IT Collaboration, Chertoff Says
IT will be at the top of his agenda as Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff travels this week to Europe.
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The Complex World of Standards
Vendors speaking at two separate venues last week drew a bead - some more directly than others – on the need to maintain system control. A big part of the solution to the downside of system complexity, according to both panels, lies in that old saw – standardization.
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The Dark Side Of IT
Movie theaters up until now have been pretty low-tech operations. Hire a half-dozen high school kids, plug in a bunch of video games in the lobby, and make sure you’ve got plenty of popcorn to go around. Last night, when I went to see the new Star Wars movie, I saw something at Brooklyn’s Pavilion Theatre that seemed out of place given the theater’s old-school decor: a state-of-the-art IT infrastructure that could revolutionize the movie distribution business.
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A Call From The North: Be Brutal Against Spammers
A group of 10 business executives, consumers, academics, and government officials has spent the past year trying to figure out how best to stop unsolicited E-mail known as spam. The solution: brutalize violators with stiff financial penalties.
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Hype Aside, AMD Lays Claim To Enterprise
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
- From The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
The hype surrounding the microprocessor innovations brought to market by Advanced Micro Devices over the past year has seemingly grown exponentially. From AMD’s virtual creation of the 64-bit x86 market to, more recently, its leading the way with dual-core processors for the x86 server market, AMD’s accomplishments--while still too fresh to be considered legendary--are certainly more than hype.
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Web Site Maps Murders, Mayhem
The murder of Duane Polk, a 26-year-old gunned down May 5 about a block from his Southside Chicago home, warranted only 148 words in the next day’s Chicago Tribune. But a new Web site that combines crime statistics from the Chicago Police Department and Google maps lets anyone with Web access pinpoint the block where an assailant shot Polk or where any other crime occurred in the Windy City.
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IBMers To Protest Cuts With 'Moment Of Silence'
If you need to reach tech support at IBM this coming Monday, you might not get through if you call between 1 and 1:10 p.m. Eastern. That's when an employee group, upset over IBM's plan to lay off up to 13,000 workers, is asking colleagues to observe a companywide "moment of silence."
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Lifestyle Vs. The Bottom Line: IT Pros Asked To Choose
It’s a given: Most IT pros expect to work long hours. But as our salary survey shows, a plurality of business-technologists believe they’re fairly compensated for their efforts. Given the choice of more job flexibility or a healthy boost in income, what would you choose?
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The State Of Blogging
A recent conference on blogging brought together a large number of bloggers who are striving for legitimacy alongside traditional media outlets and traditional forms of covering the news.
The conference hits home because we have dramatically increased our emphasis on blogs, our stable of contributors is increasing almost every day, and it's clear that interest among all of you, our readers, is going straight up.
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Offshoring's Ebb Tide
The authors of a new book argue that IT outsourcing will come full circle and that U.S. workers will ultimately benefit from the practice. Douglas Brown and Scott Wilson, in The Black Book of Outsourcing, note that rising costs in countries like India and China, combined with the management headaches presented by offshoring, will combine to limit the number of U.S. jobs that ultimately end up offshore.
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What's Strategic About Outsourcing?
The answer to that question could be: maybe not enough. Many companies remain fixed on focusing on the cost question, and perhaps not enough on the opportunity's value.
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Web Addiction
More evidence is out suggesting that Americans are becoming addicted to the Web.
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Phones Fight Phonies
On Tuesday, VeriSign hosted a dinner for journalists at Le Colonial in San Francisco to help get its message out about strong authentication. Representatives from AOL, IBM, and Intuit also were in attendance.
The idea is that journalists get good food and the hosts get good press. Of course, it’s not officially quid pro quo, but it’s hard to imagine companies sponsoring such events without some hope that what goes around comes around. Coincidentally, Bite public relations managed the affair.
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IT One-Ups Friday The 13th
Beware paraskavedekatriaphobia (fear of Friday the 13th)! As noted by yourDictionary.com, “Paraskavedekatriaphobia is among the leading causes of loss of productivity since many sufferers avoid coming to work on that day."
True, IT systems may be crashing all around you, hackers may be pounding at the gateway, patches maybe leaking new vulnerabilities and Wi-Fi may have gone wacko, but really, doesn’t it seem like just another day at the office? Of course it does.
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What's A Blog? Many Web Users Don't Know
If you’re reading this blog, you’re part of a minority among Internet users. Despite the hype, most people don’t read blogs. In fact, some surveys suggest a majority of Internet users haven’t even heard of blogs. Hard to imagine, right?
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End Of An Era Or End Of The Line For Java?
Oracle is making an announcement May 16 that it will incorporate use of PHP into developing Oracle database applications. I don't know the details. But I do know that spells the end of an era for 10-year-old Java.
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European IT: What Angst?
One wonders what is going on Over There. On the one hand, Europe has long been ahead of the United States in technology areas as diverse as mobile computing, open systems, and standards in general.
One research firm is suggesting that mobile-phone usage is going to surpass 100% in Europe very soon.
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India Outsources Aircraft Manufacturing To U.S.
U.S. workers at Boeing who log some overtime over the next year helping to fulfill the company's $7 billion aircraft order from Air India might have offshore IT outsourcing to thank for their fatter paychecks—indirectly, at least.
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Degree Or Not To Degree: The Value Of Master's And Doctorates In The IT Workplace
The government this week begins accepting petitions for an additional 20,000 H-1B visas to let into the United States foreign nationals who earned graduate degrees from American institutions. Information Builders Inc. CEO Gerald Cohen and University of California at Davis computer-science professor Norm Matloff disagree on whether the government should issue H-1B visas, but both agree on one thing, which is, as visa proponent Cohen puts it, that the idea of requiring an advanced degree is “nutty.”
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Middle America And H-1Bs
With high-tech executives predicting a domestic IT labor shortage and workers' groups adamantly opposing the use of offshore workers and H-1B immigrants, middle America is emerging as, well, middle ground in the debate.
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Court Rejects FCC Privacy Rule
In what’s considered a blow to the entertainment industry and triumph for consumers, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia on Friday rejected the Federal Communications Commission’s broadcast flag rule.
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Are The IT World And The Real World That Far Removed?
AT&T’s Hossein Eslambolchi is considered to be one of the most influential CIOs in the industry. In addition to being in charge of the company’s strategy, network operations, and serving as an adviser on technology issues to the chairman and senior leaders, he does the best “Top 10” list next to David Letterman and has opened my eyes to a puzzling reality. The fact is, the real world and the IT world are more far removed from each other than most of us might think, he pointed out during his keynote address at this week’s Interop 2005 conference.
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Let?s Get Proactive About Data Security
It was odd Wednesday watching executives from companies whose data had been breached--and who, in most cases, did not rush to publicize that fact when the incidents were discovered--enthusiastically profess support for a proposed law that would require the same disclosure they sought to avoid.
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Goosing Google: Is It Worth A Slap In The Face?
So you've got a small or medium-sized business. You're doing pretty well but you want to do even better. You've got a Web site and your logs tell you that 30% of your new orders are coming through referrals from search engines like Google and Yahoo. Not bad. But you want to do even better because you know that everyone in the world has access to the Internet, and wouldn't it be great if at anytime, anywhere someone wanted what you sell, they'd see your site first when they searched for your product? So you Google the product you're selling and see how your site ranks. Unfortunately, your site doesn't show up until page five of the listings, and every one of your competitors' sites is listed on page one.
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Outsourcing, Caps, And A Ship Of Fools
There has been much kvetching lately about the need to find more qualified IT workers, led by none other than Microsoft CEO Bill Gates and his homeboys. Also in the news, at least two efforts to address the issue: on the one hand we have Congress approving what amounts to an additional 20,000 H1B visas,
as long as the holders earned a masters degree or higher from an American university (and this matters why??); on the other, we have a very clever attempt to take advantage of both the upside and downsides of outsourcing via a can’t miss marketing ploy – the Love, er Code Boat.
After years of corporate downsizing, merger-induced layoffs and wholesale outsourcing of IT departments, it just seems incongruous to me that if a shortage of IT labor exists, it’s as big as we’re lead to believe.
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Wireless Dating Gets A Conference
In our industry, there seems to be a conference on just about every topic that one can imagine. No matter how narrow the market segment or product category, people want to get together to discuss and debate the topic. So I shouldn’t have been surprised to discover that there’s a conference on “wireless and mobile dating.”
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Intel Shows WiMax at Interop
At Interop in Las Vegas yesterday, Sean Maloney, executive VP and general manager of Intel’s mobility group, asked whether the productivity gains delivered by information technology had come to an end. It’s a question that has been raised before, specifically in a widely read 2003 article in the Harvard Business Review, “IT Doesn’t Matter,” which he cited in his keynote.
Unsurprisingly, he disagreed. “We absolutely don’t believe that,” he said. Given that he was speaking at an IT trade show, any other answer would’ve been heresy.
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New Grid Computing Tools Are Here, But When Will Interest Perk Up?
Three years ago, Bill Gates called grid computing “the Holy Grail of computer science.” But corporate America’s been reluctant to run the grid software that’s caught hold in education and research. That could change with this week’s release of the Globus Toolkit 4, open-source software that’s supposed to fuse grid computing and Web-services standards—and provide a big reliability boost for grids.
On Monday, the Globus Alliance, a team of academic and government-funded computer scientists, released version 4 of the Globus Toolkit, an app dev environment for grids published under an open-source license. Using Globus, developers can build apps that let users run their programs on remote computers more powerful than what might exist in house, with programming conventions that make it look like those machines live under their roof. It’s a great concept, one heartily embraced by researchers at universities and government labs in the United States and abroad. For-profit companies have been more skeptical.
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IT Labor Shortage Not Just A U.S. Problem
Bill Gates isn’t the only leader of a high-tech firm having problems recruiting talent. It’s a worldwide problem. Among CEOs who manage the fastest-growing high-tech companies, about one-third in North America and one-quarter in Europe-Middle East-Africa and Asia-Pacific say finding, hiring, and retaining qualified has become a major challenge.
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Travel IT Execs Prepping For Future
Anyone who's been reading InformationWeek's travel-industry coverage over the past couple of years knows that airlines, hotels, car rental agencies, and other travel services suppliers are in a time of great transition. Travel has continued to be the dominant E-commerce frontier, steadily forcing the industry to update its infrastructure and adopt a service architecture to make itself more nimble in a fast-changing distribution landscape. This week, I'll be attending an industry gathering in Dallas at which two of the most important topics to arise during this transition will take front and center.
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Outsourcing The Lunatic Fringe
Any serious debate—on religion, politics, sports, the outcome of American Idol—inevitably breeds extreme positions and behavior. It's hardly surprising, therefore, that this holds true for offshore outsourcing.
On one side, representing the "My Job Went to India" camp, is Steve Relles. A family man from Delmar, NY, Relles is now known as the Delmar Dog Butler. He told Reuters over the weekend that his programming job was offshored and that stooping for dog poop is now the best he can do. He makes ten bucks a week from each of about 100 pet owners for cleaning their yards after Fido's been for a romp. "My parents paid for me to get a (degree) in math and now I am a pooper scooper," Relles, 42, tells the news service.
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