Short straw people 2

By James Gaskin

Two years ago I wrote Short Straw People for those of us working during the holidays. Now it's time to revisit that issue, because we're still working during the holidays. We drew the short straw again.

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Remote monitoring

By James Gaskin

Do you know what's going on at all your remote offices? When someone calls and reports the network is "acting funny" do you have a way to look at their network, or are you doing that painful "tell me what lights are on" dance with the remote site secretary who started work yesterday?

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Net neutrality and what the Internet will become

By Dan Blacharski

The thing I like most, and dislike most about the Internet is that anybody can publish an opinion. But as in much of life, you must take the bad to get to the good, and so I willingly wade through the inevitable and prolific web sites created by half-literate hatemongers, and am usually able to find those pearls of wisdom that I require.

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A quick trip to Redmond

By Joel Shore

Heading up to Microsoft's Redmond, Wash. campus is always interesting. In the past, these trips were for big-time launch events, briefings for large groups of editors and analysts, product reviewers' workshops, or the occasional one-on-one interview for an executive profile piece. This time was different. Very different.

The recent gathering included just a handful of invitees. Several of them were from the world of the blogosphere. The agenda appeared to revolve around the idea of innovation. Certainly many people do not use the words "innovation" and "Microsoft" in the same sentence. I could play the cynic and note that Microsoft purchased DOS, built Windows from ideas first seen in Apple's Lisa, and more recently, launched its Zune music player five years and five million units after Apple's iPod. But I digress.

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Symantec simplifies support

By James Gaskin

You probably remember that Symantec gobbled up Veritas last year, but little changed. Symantec support couldn't help you with Veritas problems, and vice versa. Now that's fixed as Symantec rolled out three new support tiers that include both products.

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AJAX and the hidden cost of ease of use

By Sean McGrath

The IT industry - always a seething den of buzzword bingo - appears to be in complete overdrive at the moment. Based on a back-of-an-envelope calculation, I believe I have had to internalize an average of 1.5 new buzzwords every working day this week.

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Budget adjustments

By James Gaskin

Whatever your final budget number for 2007, prepare to slice that number. Continued weakness in the residential housing market (construction spending was down for the seventh month in a row in October), a slowdown in US manufacturing, and warnings about flat retail sales from WalMart and others means your budget will probably
get cut next spring.

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RFID Chips: Not in my arm!

By Dan Blacharski

RFID technology is here to stay, and in its most benign form, brings a lot of advantages. But there are two things to make clear: First, despite industry claims to the contrary, RFID is not a secure technology, and it should never be used to track anything sensitive. Second, it should never be used on people, or in personal identification of any type. But regrettably, our government is moving away from being one which values the privacy of its citizenry, and seems bound to push this technology into places where it has no business being.

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The virtual taxman

By Dan Blacharski

I don't play online games, but a lot of people enjoy them. There are virtual communities, entire virtual lives, filled with people who have virtual jobs and even make virtual money. I can't imagine what it would be like to have a virtual life -- the real thing is hard enough -- but I suppose it could have advantages. Wouldn't it be great if, in real life, when you screwed up something, you could just reboot and start over? No such luck. But one real-life government agency wants in on the virtual action, and it seems that a virtual taxman is going to be taking a cut.

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Two radically different approaches to enterprise application software

By Sean McGrath

Nothing stays still for long in this business. Every day (or so it seems) there is some new technological innovation that changes the business environment. Competitive forces move and shape-shift all the time. To keep up, you develop/deploy your own technologies that in turn may change the business environment in which you operate. Around and around the cycles of change we go...

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All good things come to those who wait, even Vista and Office 2007

By Joel Shore, ITworld

With Windows Vista and Office 2007 now released, what are your customers' expectations, and are you moving to lower them?

One thing we've learned over the years is that businesses are slow to upgrade client operating systems and applications. That happens for a variety of reasons: the software is unproven and risky, acquisition and deployment costs are prohibitive, training dazed and confused end-users is an enormous undertaking, help desk personnel lack intimate familiarity and expertise, or maybe new versions simply aren't needed.

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