Opinion

Getting ready for next year’s revolution

2004 will bring dramatic changes and complexity to storage

‘Tis the season to be geeky

Here's a group of goodies for the geeks on your gift list

Vendors to watch in 2004

The vendors I’m eyeing will fuel the coming year’s thrilling, yet very productive, joyride

Reviews, reviews, reviews 

Two new tools to help buyers evaluate major IT purchases

Security

Sixty-eight solutions for protecting networks, and apps for thwarting intruders

Dumb, dumber, and dumberest events of 2003

The first annual awards for Greed, Underhandedness, and Ineptitude

XML for the rest of us

Once eclipsed by machine-to-machine communications, the human factor of XML is starting to emerge

Hardware

Countless pizza boxes, blade systems, and rack-mount monsters built for speed

Wireless

Eighteen products for building, managing, and securing WLANs

Warning: Exploding batteries

Safer alternatives on the way promise extended energy

App Dev and Integration

Wares for working wonders with .Net, Java, and Web services

Networking

Faster speeds, bigger feeds, and more control over IP networks

Platforms

Two Windows, a lot of Linuxes, and five J2EE app servers

Storage

Triumphs in big storage, innovative IP SANs, and the value of virtualization

Applications

Lots of good collaboration solutions, innovative analytics tools, and a few CRM gems

2003 Year in Review

What’s fair?

Dear Bob … In regard to the writer who wanted to know what is fair in business, I would ask several questions of my own. Fair to whom? To the employees? To the suppliers? To the customers? To the stockholders? To the competition? I would also like

Please place your laptops in the upright position

Thanks to a pending Nor'easter, Jon Udell and I were all but guaranteed a miserable trip back to the east coast this weekend. In an attempt to mitigate our impending bad fortune, we badgered a ticket agent for almost an hour at SFO and finally g

Bad deal

Dear Bob … Your article, Explaining the inexplicable,  gave me some insight into a situation I faced not too long ago. I had to deal with a sting of "expert consultants" brought in by the IT A

Meet and potatoes

Dear Bob … When I worked in the computer operations group of a mid-sized software product firm, I pointed out to our boss that the technical staff was spending a minimum of 16% of our time in meetings: daily stand-up, weekly group, quarterly divis

The invisible workforce: IT in the future

As IT becomes invisible, so do the workers who keep it that way

1979 – 1985: The Dawn of the PC 

Personal computers meet the enterprise

Basic security is the best foundation

Companies sometimes forget the basics in their effort to cover all the bases – or save time and money

Fixing up the new Office

Office 2003 is better than Office XP, but oh, those bugs. Reports from the front lines of Office 2003 tech support

Storage gizmos from Santa?

Personal storage parallels enterprise storage, including the price

1986 – 1995: The Networked Enterprise

LAN, Ethernet, Lotus Notes, Windows 95, and a connected workforce

Government enterprise: Peering into your network

Working with the government? Better make sure your network security plans are firmly in place

The visionaries

IT leaders make predictions about the future

Great moments in geekdom

Through the past, dorkly

1996 – 1999: The Internet Era

What a lovely bubble it was

The bold road ahead

25 years of technology proves the journey is its own reward

Wi-Fi buyer beware

Wi-Fi-product interoperability has a high failure rate, and emerging standards could mean more complications

Setting up the conditions for a quiet mind

You can’t think about thinking outside the box

Mining the intranet

Using Web services, with or without SOAP, to cull valuable data from other Web apps

After silicon: Biocomputing at work

Organic processes become the model for future technology

Computers that mimic intelligence

Do computers need 'brains' to function intelligently?

The path to pervasive computing

Consumer electronics show us the way

Get security right the first time

Successfully securing government organizations depends on knowing the systems, identifying the risks, and keeping people and procedures in mind 

System security’s hit parade

The external hacker is just one of many chart-topping threats to information systems

The birth of enterprise computing

InfoWorld began as information technology took off

The next 25 years of IT

What the future holds

Intrusion detection or protection?

Know the network and its core functionality

Dealing with a yutz

Dear Bob … I've recently been promoted to CIO of my company, a mid-size manufacturer. I report directly to the CEO, which means his other direct reports, which until now had been my "internal customers" (yes, I know – you don't

Chasing Microsoft’s silver foxes

Preparation and online resources make sticking with old versions of Windows a little easier

Microsoft’s patchwork security blanket

Microsoft has had a lot of Windows patches, but is that really a bad thing?

Storage vulnerabilities

Lack of storage security spells identity theft

Giving back to open source

Readers explain why contributing to the community isn't as simple as it seems

Looking in the right direction

How much we miss that happens right under our noses

A sorry excuse for a column

Nextel's hard sell, L.A. goes PC

Data warehousing gets a shot in the arm

Melding data warehousing with business analytics offers companies a new view of their data