YouTube and advertising: Accepting the inevitable

By Dan Blacharski, ITworld.com

You wanna play, you gotta pay. YouTube has ads on videos now, a common-sense move that long-term is the only way for sites like these to survive. Fortunately for YouTube users, the "pay" end of the deal is that you have to give YouTube advertisers your eyeballs for a few seconds.

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Trusting systems

By James Gaskin, ITworld.com

Who do you trust? Your spouse? Your boss? Your dog? Your software?

Standard answers: Dog absolutely, spouse probably, boss maybe, but who thinks about trusting software? Smart, high performing companies. A leading vendor in this new space, SignaCert (.com), aims to automate software trust, audit trails, and best practices to enable more companies to reap the benefits of management automation reliability. Continue...

Network outages should spur integrators to stay in contact with customers

By Joel Shore, ITworld.com

You've to feel for the 20,000 people stranded recently at Los Angeles International Airport's Tom Bradley International Terminal and the 200 million more around the globe who lost access to Skype. Television and general-interest news organizations ascribed the woes to the ubiquitous "computer glitch." We, of course, know better. And usually the truth is a lot scarier.

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Satellite phones and solar iPod chargers

By Steven Schwankert

You don't really learn about technology until you're removed from it to the point where you're at both extremes of the technological spectrum. Say, using plentiful Mongolian sunshine to charge your iPod.

During the course of a two-week scuba diving expedition to the landlocked Asian country's Lake Khosvgol, we learned about both ends of that spectrum. For the members of our team who work in Mongolia, satellite telephones and generators are part and parcel of their work. In all, we moved over a ton of equipment from places such as Hong Kong and Beijing to the lake shore and back, along with personal equipment from our participants' home countries, including Austria, the United States, and the U.K.

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DIGITAL GEAR: Satellite messenger reaches earth

By Agam Shah

If a cell network goes down in an emergency, satellites could be used to send a distress call. Spot Inc.'s Spot messaging device uses satellites to send rescue alerts to emergency responders or to family members via SMS (Short Message Service) or e-mail. A more earthly gadget is Iogear Inc.'s Digital Scribe, a digital pen and receiver package that records, recognizes and digitizes handwritten notes immediately from a normal pad. Staying on earth, Logitech Inc.'s Pure-Fi Dream speaker system plays songs from both iPods and iPhones.

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The annotation age

By Shane Schick, ITBusiness.ca

A new feature on Google's news aggregator will allow those who are involved in a story to add their own comments to the articles. So, if you were quoted in a story and felt the media got it wrong (as we often do), you'd have a chance to set the record straight. But this is not a media story. It's an IT story, because it is a sign of what will soon become the preoccupation of technology professionals everywhere.

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Blog Insights: Old Media Assimilating New Media, or Other Way Around?

By Dan Blacharski, ITworld.com

I used to work at a small weekly where we had manual typewriters and a typesetting machine that still created type with metal slugs. I learned how to run the brand-spankin' new phototypesetting machine when it came in, and marveled about how the media business was changing. A few years later, even the phototypesetting machines became obsolete, and all the layout was done digitally on PCs. I didn't know it at the time, but that was only the beginning. Of course, the old-timers decried the computerized machines and sang the praises of the "hot type" equipment, but I could tell right away that its days were numbered, and that the news business would be all the better for it.

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PDF and HTML: Splitting the difference

By Sean McGrath, ITworld.com

I never thought I would hear myself saying this, but I think the world needs another file format for storing images.

Like many people in this industry, I have often had to fight the file format fight converting images endlessly from format A to format B and back again to achieve some result or work around some application limitation. More than once I have said to myself "It's only pixels darn it! How many sensible ways can there possibly be to store these things?". And now I find myself advocating the creation of another one? What gives?

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Interview: Wikia CEO on lunacy, air miles and being profitless

By Dan Nystedt, IDG News Service

Gil Penchina, CEO of Wikia Inc., showed up for a recent interview in a brown T-shirt that said "Wikia" in yellow letters on the front, and "Lunatic" on the back.

"We have a monopoly on lunacy," he said, when asked about the shirt.

While Google Inc. works hard to nurture its image as a whacky, non-corporate company, Wikia seems to manage it quite effortlessly. Started by Wikipedia cofounder Jimmy Wales, the company is not making much money yet, and its executives seem barely interested in doing so. But they do like to work. The company began life building Web sites using its wiki collaboration software where users can discuss their passions, vent opinions and share experiences. So far there are 3,000 sites and around 80,000 Web pages, supported by the 38 people at Wikia.

In this interview, Penchina talks about his company and what makes him tick.

Read the full interview here.

The rush of tools to the hand

By Sean McGrath, ITworld.com

I think there is a universal law that goes something like this:

The degree to which information technology can
truly help problem X is inversely proportional
to the enthusiasm with which the average young
software developer approaches the problem.

Maybe "universal law" is a bit high here? How about "rule of thumb"? Yes, that's better. Example? Personal productivity. "How hard can it be?", says the typical enthusiastic young software developer. "You have meetings, calendar appointments, notes, TODO lists, contact list, task lists, expense recording...Just a whole bunch of lists really. How hard can it be to get a computer application to manage that sort of thing?"

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More ill-conceived IT security legislation

By Dan Blacharski, ITworld.com

Germany's new anti-hacking law, approved in May and implemented last week, was designed to target dangerous attacks on computer networks in both the public and private sectors. The new law specifically highlights denial-of-service attacks and sabotage as punishable crimes, as well it should. If a hacker brings down a network, steals information, or causes a business or public agency to lose time and money, then that hacker should suffer the consequences.

But the problem with the well-intentioned law is that it defines "hacking" as simply gaining access to secure data, even if nothing is stolen.

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SpikeSource CEO: Linux all grown up

The recently concluded LinuxWorld Conference & Expo looked like any other big tech industry conference as the logos of HP, Intel, Dell, IBM and other big names filled the exhibit hall at San Francisco's Moscone Center. That's a change from LinuxWorld shows of a decade ago, when open source was a renegade, even subversive, concept. In this interview, Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource, talks about the open-source movement and new products SpikeSource introduced at LinuxWorld.

Read the full interview here.

Jimmy Wales talks on the future of Wikimedia

The role Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, plays at the organization that supports the user generated and edited encyclopedia is changing as he shifts more of his time to activities in the wiki and open source communities, and shares time with his for-profit venture, Wikia Inc. In this interview, Wales discusses his changing role at Wikimedia, plans for the future, and other topics.

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How to sneak Linux into your office

By Shane Schick, ITBusiness.ca

Now that Dell and Lenovo are running the distribution on some of its machines, and Novell is promoting a desktop version of Suse, the stage is set for a serious change in expectations. I'm actually beginning to picture a day when users start to ask their IT departments why they can't run Ubuntu Linux at work, the way they do at home.

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Video Lessons

By James Gaskin, ITworld.com

Suddenly it's a video world, or perhaps I'm paying more attention since I mentioned the Altus video products earlier this month. The good news? You can watch plenty of technical videos after you get tired of Diet Coke and Mentos on YouTube. One of the most technical set of videos comes from Cisco and their TechWise TV series of webcasts.

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The message is the message

By Sean McGrath, ITworld.com

I have been struggling for quite some time now to get to the essence of one of the biggest confusions I see in modern day enterprise application integration practice. On one hand sits the practitioners who think in terms of enterprise objects that talk to each other by means of messages sent to and fro over the wire. On the other hand sits the practitioners who think of webs of services but who also send messages to an fro over the wire to get things done.

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Intel works to boost build-to-order whitebook channels

By Joel Shore

It wasn't that many years ago when we first heard the term "whitebox," referring to built-to-order desktop PCs tailored to customers' specific needs and often branded with the systems integrator's house-brand logo. It's happening again, but with notebooks.

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