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Enterprise 2.0 worth watching
The Enterprise 2.0 show in Boston June 9 to 12 served as both a launching pad for new products and a showcase for technologies that haven't gotten a lot of attention yet. eWEEK surveyed the demonstration pavilion and found a number of cool technologies that could help businesses share and manage information among employees, partners and customers. Take the tour and enjoy the screenshots as you plot your course through the world of blogs, wikis and RSS feeds.
Why people don't trust the IT department
Every so often, an article or study comes out that strives to make IT look bad, either ineffective or a misguided use of corporate dollars. And every so often, an article or study comes out that shows some IT people making their own selves look bad. A new survey falls into this latter category.
One-third of IT workers admitted to snooping on confidential files in their company's networks, including salary details, personal emails and meeting minutes, according to a survey released June 19.
Women in the IT industry
For years now, the IT industry has been dominated by men--women deterred by the geeky image of an anti-social, geeky teenager who hasn't seen daylight in weeks, working in the basement of his mum's house, programming away to some complicated code. On the flip side, you have the perspective of a woman in the IT industry somewhere, where they're sat behind a desk filing away, writing reports and performing general secretarial duties, whilst flirting with the other employees as she stirs their coffee, whilst imitating something sexually deviant with her tongue.
Both are wrong, because both are misconceptions and mistaken stereotypes. Although there may be elements of both some might actually like, it does pose the million dollar question. Why aren't there enough women in the IT workplace?
AP going after bloggers
The Associated Press claimed that it was ready to change to face the new Internet world--and that meant not just being a gatekeeper, but joining in the conversation. As noted at the time, AP execs said all that, only to immediately follow up with plans that looked like it was trying to become a new type of gatekeeper. It didn't help that the company had also just sued VeriSign's Moreover division for linking to AP stories along with a title and a tiny excerpt. That sort of thing is clearly fair use--but the AP doesn't seem to think so. And now, it's expanding its target list. Rather than just going after the big aggregators (surprisingly, Google settled), it appears that the Associated Press is going after bloggers for merely posting a linked headline and a tiny snippet of text from the article.
IBM number one vendor
IBM has announced that Gartner once again named IBM the world's number one vendor based on market share for application infrastructure and middleware (AIM) software. The report, which analyzed the total AIM market for 2007, showed IBM increasing its marketshare and now holding 28.9 percent share of the overall market, with more than three times the market presence of its closest competitor.
The Gartner data shows that IBM grew 15.1 percent, faster than the overall market which only grew at 12.9 percent for 2007. Additionally, according to the report, IBM holds the number one marketshare position in eight submarkets.
IBM claims greenest data center
IBM says it has flipped the switch on what it has dubbed the "greenest" datacenter in North America. The 115,000-square-foot facility is sited in Boulder and was made out of an existing office building. Approximately 65 percent of the materials from the original facility were recycled and about 25 percent of the "new" materials used in the retrofit contained recycled products. IBM snagged training incentives from the state, some investment credits from the city and some rebates from Xcel Energy for the work it did on the project.
Red Hat adds patch for OpenOffice
Red Hat has issued a security update covering multiple versions of the OpenOffice open-source productivity suite to address a flaw related to use of the software with its Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 operating systems.
Rated as "highly critical" by Secunia, the heap overflow flaw in the OpenOffice memory allocator could allow an attacker to remotely compromise unpatched end-user systems, Red Hat reported.
The Linux software maker ranked the issue as "important" and said that if a specially crafted file was opened by a victim using an unpatched system, an attacker could use the flaw to crash OpenOffice applications or, possibly, execute arbitrary code. Red Hat specifically credited researcher Sean Larsson for initially discovering the problem.
Sun scales down HPC
Sun Microsystems is offering a scaled-down version of its Constellation high-performance computer system, with a new, smaller switch and a blade based on quad-core Intel Xeon processors.
This scaled-down version of the Constellation system, which can offer a performance of about 7 teraflops or 7 trillion calculations per second, will be on display at the International Supercomputer Conference in Germany.
Half a GB of stolen data found
Finjan's Malicious Code Research Center has uncovered half a gigabyte of stolen data from US Healthcare organizations and from a major airline on crimeware servers in Argentina and Malaysia.
Non-technical reasons IT projects fail
A study of IT "abandonment" reported by the British Computer Society (BCS) reinforces the notion that IT projects fail primarily for non-technical causes. Such quantitative research is important in helping managers understand the business, organizational, political, and cultural dimensions behind failed projects. Here's the BCS list of "key reasons why projects get canceled."
The triple constraints of IT failure
Every project management trainee is (or should be) taught the triple constraints of time, scope, and cost. These constraints represent trade-offs; you can't change one without affecting the other two.
HP aims Blade at mainframe users
Hewlett-Packard introduced a new industrial-strength blade server, Integrity NonStop NB50000c BladeSystem, on June 16 at its annual Technology Forum & Expo in Las Vegas, and aimed it directly at existing IBM mainframe users for consideration as an alternative system.
The new blade server, a cousin of the company's BladeSystem C-class series--which it debuted two years ago--is designed specifically for high-transaction industries such as financial, telecommunications, public sector and high-volume Web 2.0 companies.
What happens when user support fails?
As a support person, your first priority is to protect your end users and help them do their job with the tools they're given. The story of what happened to Michael Fiola is a cautionary tale that all support personnel should take to heart.
Bank of America data compromised
Bank of America says that some of the information from its check cards have been compromised. In a letter to customers Bank of America said:
We have learned that information from certain Bank of America Check Cards may have been compromised. Your Check Card number may have been part of this compromise. To ensure that your privacy is protected to the best of our ability we have taken the following steps:
As a measure of added security we have issued you a replacement Bank of America check Card. It is included with this letter.
Your old card will be closed within 30-days of this letter.
We will monitor activity on your Bank of America account; if we detect any suspicious transactions we will notify you immediately.
MotioCI 1.3
Motio (formerly Focus Technologies) announced that it has released MotioCI 1.3, the latest version of their BI monitoring software.
The MotioCI 1.3 release is the most comprehensive upgrade Motio has delivered since the initial product release in 2006, including new functionality to further enhance the Cognos BI developers' ability to monitor and improve the operational performance of their IBM Cognos BI environments.
Army an untapped recruiting ground
EMC announced a partnership with the U.S. Army's job placement arm, PAYS (Partnership for Youth Success). The PAYS program provides opportunities for secure, quality civilian jobs for members of the military who have finished their commitment.
In a time when nearly all of the largest tech employers are fretting over a shortage of qualified IT workers, whose ranks stand to be diminished soon by retiring Baby Boomers and an insufficient number of younger adults pursuing IT education and careers, these programs stand out.
According to EMC, few are aware of the untapped pool of talent the Army discharges yearly, even though thousands of people work with state-of-the-art technology on a daily basis while enlisted.
Take that data center to go
Is it really a whole year since IBM unleashed its Project Big Green brainchild on the IT industry, triggering a barrage of like-minded efforts across the high-tech industry?
Well, apparently it is, and the company is using the anniversary to make a push for some of its modular data center technology, like the one squeezed into this container. According to IBM, the new designs can reduce energy consumption by up to 50 percent.
DB2 at 25
IBM DB2 made a market for the relational database in 1983, but its future is in stream processing and unstructured data management.
In the 1970s, Don Haderle and a team of researchers at IBM began a project that would change the face of the company's database business forever.
The fruits of their labor would come to be known as DB2, and would hit the market in 1983 to become a force for IBM among relational databases.
Why online backup is important
Here's one more good example of why everybody and every business should have their data backed up somewhere safe online.
The Associated Press reported June 10 that billing records of about 2.2 million people at the University of Utah Hospitals & Clinics were stolen from a courier's vehicle.
Bug bites OpenOffice
OpenOffice.org has shipped a fix for a "highly critical" vulnerability affecting versions 2.0 to 2.4 of its open-source desktop productivity suite.
According to an advisory from Secunia, the flaw could be exploited to launch code execution attacks with manipulated document files.
Data breaches discovered too late
Most companies only learn about network data breaches in the months after their data has already been compromised, according to a new study.
The study, conducted by Verizon Business, looks at data breaches in a wide variety of industries, such as retail, food and beverage, technology services, and financial services, and examines more than 500 forensics investigations comprising roughly 230 million records over a period of four years.
Internships map out priorities
If its internship programs are any indication, IBM already knows what it wants to see in an IT department in the next five years: pros savvy in green IT, Web 2.0 and virtual-world technologies. These are IBM's three focal areas for the summer 2008 season of its most competitive internship program, Extreme Blue.
OpenOffice.org extends free support
The OpenOffice.org Community is pleased to announce the addition of Japanese language support to its Users' Community Forum. This Web-based Community Forum brings experts and users together to provide support to users of OpenOffice.org, the free alternative to Microsoft Office. The Forum is free to users and is free of advertisements.
Since its launch six months ago, the Forum has greatly exceeded expectations, attracting a registered membership of nearly 13,000, Together, these members have generated a growing knowledge base of 90,000 postings. These include both answers to specific user questions, and user generated tutorials. Originally launched in English, the Forum added support for Hungarian in February, French in March, and now Japanese in June. Further languages are expected during the rest of 2008.
Data breaches probably avoidable
Although it has been a widely held belief among companies that insiders are responsible for most data breaches, a new study released June 11 claims 73 percent of breaches result from external sources versus 18 percent from insider threats.
Skewering some basic corporate security tenets, the study by Verizon Business also contends nearly 9 in 10 data breaches could have been prevented with reasonable security measures in place. The study covered four years and more than 500 investigations involving 230 million records.
Moreover, the study claims, most breaches resulted from a combination of events rather than a single action with 62 percent attributed to "significant internal errors" that either directly or indirectly cont |
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