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TREND NO. 1 Tightfisted Budgets Loosen a Bit Yet the economy continues to cast a shadow of uncertainty over the best-laid tech spending plans. WHEN Bogdan Butoi-Teodorescu, chief technology officer […]

Organizations trying to apply new object-oriented technologies for business advantage face a particularly daunting challenge: how to implement object-oriented programming approaches in environments where large investments have already been made […]

The IT people at Georgia Institute of Technology weren't exactly prepared two weeks ago when they discovered that a server in their business office had been hacked. That server contained […]

So much for the Golden Age of Consulting. On March 1, Lou Gerstner stepped aside as IBM's CEO. Gerstner, who was once a management consultant, rebuilt IBM by focusing on […]

Readers write - and, as usual, they've got things to say. After the Jan. 7 column in which I suggested that backers of UCITA were like weasels - except that […]

Let's Say you spot a house that's on fire, and you call the fire department. How long should it take the fire department to answer the phone? A few seconds? […]

It's called a proxy hunter. That sounds a little more elegant than 'security hole hunter,' which is really what this kind of software does. Among other things, proxy hunters use […]

Statistic: 18% of teenage girls online believe they could hack into their schools' computers. That's according to a survey of more than 1,000 young women ages 13 to 18 conducted […]

What Strassmann didn't say is this: If your top management wants to dump your IT shop, there's probably not much you can do about it. Strassmann is a hard-numbers guy. […]

Want to take some lessons from Kmart and the biggest retail bankruptcy filing in history last week? Try this: If you cut IT spending in the short run when business […]

Here's how a buffer overflow attack happens: A cracker acquires a popular piece of Internet-related software, such as a Web server or an instant messaging client, and analyzes the code. […]

Your company needs an IT security czar. Reporting security breaches should be mandated by federal law. And Congress should consider making software vendors liable for security holes in their software. […]

Department of Corrections: A few weeks back, I wrote about how virus problems at the U.S. District Court's offices in Miami forced court personnel back into a technological Stone Age […]

PROCESSES and threads have one goal: Getting a computer to do more than one thing at a time. To do that, the processor (or processors) must switch smoothly among several […]

Ready for 2002? You'd better be. Last Monday, the National Bureau of Economic Research officially announced what everybody already knew: The U.S. is in a recession and has been since […]

This Wednesday marks Day 30 since the Nimda.e worm showed up on the Internet. Microsoft and a few of its security cronies would have us believe that 30 days is […]

The big Comdex gadget story this year? No question, it's the Tablet PC. IBM won't be making one, and Michael Dell doesn't think there's a market for them. But Microsoft […]

The trouble with talking about the Microsoft antitrust settlement is that everything keeps changing. No sooner were industry pundits screaming about how the Justice Department's settlement deal is a politically […]

Buy a refrigerator or a dishwasher, and for a small extra charge, it will be delivered, unpacked, installed and made ready to use. Buy a new car, and the seller […]

Fair is fair. I've kicked Gartner analysts for some dumb ideas over the years, so it's only fair to recognize one of them for getting it right. And last week, […]

And now, Nimda. Will these attacks never end? The answer, unfortunately, is no. They won't ever end. The Nimda worm that surfaced last week apparently has nothing to do with […]

Last Tuesday morning, our world changed. Someone had discovered that a transcontinental commercial airliner can be a flying bomb. They used that knowledge to murder thousands of people at the […]

So who won? Who lost? Hewlett-Packard's purchase of Compaq is a gamble - and we won't see the ultimate results for years. A lot can change in the time it […]

Software engineering isn't 'software engineering.' I didn't make that clear three weeks ago in this space, when I wrote that 'software engineering' is to engineering what fantasy baseball is to […]

How many IT people does it take to change a light bulb? The correct answer: IT people shouldn't change light bulbs. Janitors should change light bulbs. Why? Not because IT […]

Has it really been 20 years since the PC arrived? Nope. The IBM Personal Computer didn't actually ship until October 1981, so we're still two months shy of its birthday. […]

Does speed matter anymore? You remember speed. It was one of the mantras of the dot-coms: Business at Internet speed meant everything had to happen fast, fast, fast. It was […]