David F. Carr

Googles founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page made Ziff Davis Medias Top 100 Most Influential People in IT list for inventing technologies that rewrote expectations for Internet search engines and then building outward to establish a growing suite of complementary applications that reinvented other categories, including e-mail and mapping. In the process, theyve built Google […]

Booming traffic demands put a constant stress on the social networks computing infrastructure. Yet, MySpace developers have repeatedly redesigned the Web site software, database and storage systems in an attempt to keep pace with exploding growth—the site now handles almost 40 billion page views a month. /zimages/6/28571.gifClick here to read more about how MySpace handles […]

What is it? E-discovery refers to finding and producing documents stored in electronic form in response to litigation or regulatory requirements. Civil litigants, regulators and criminal prosecutors now commonly ask for copies of selected e-mail communications or make broad requests for all electronic records. That trend will only intensify after Dec. 1, when changes set […]

The City of New Orleans this week announced the departure of chief technology officer Greg Meffert, who helped rebuild many of the citys networks after Hurricane Katrina swept through the region last year. According to a news release from the office of Mayor Ray Nagin, Meffert, 38, handed in a letter of resignation on July […]

With his unruly hair dipping across his forehead, Douglas Merrill walks up to the lectern set up in a ballroom of the Arizona Biltmore Resort and Spa, looking like a slightly rumpled university professor about to start a lecture. In fact, he is here on this April morning to talk about his work as director […]

Fearful that computerized balloting systems will eat their votes in November, many citizens are seeking the safeguard of a traditional technology that is thousands of years old: Paper. The catch? Paper may not be any more foolproof. “If you were a crook who wanted to cook an election, youd probably attack it through the absentee […]

When Frank Finch arrived at the Alstom-Chantiers de lAtlantique shipyard in Sainte-Nazaire, France, last September, the Queen Mary 2 was almost ready to head out to sea for her first operational test. Freshly painted, the QM2 looked nearly finished on the outside. The inside was another story. Thousands of workers swarmed through its interior every […]

For Merck, scientific computing isn’t some ivory-tower exercise. Genetics, biology and medicine (an applied science) are all fundamental to Merck’s business. But scientific computing poses a different set of challenges than those that arise in everyday business applications. The biological and medical domains feature complicated taxonomies, millions of technical terms and an ever-changing terminology. Problem: […]

To Marine Corps Sgt. Marco Garcia, the Navy Marine Corps Intranet sounds like a great project, in theory. “They sold me on it,” he says, when he attended training in December on the new network. “The transition itself, though, seems to be a problem.” Turns out, that assessment is an understatement. The project being deployed […]

/zimages/5/17485.gifPNC Banks information-systems team wasnt thinking about compliance with the Patriot Act when it started a cleanup of customer files in 2000. The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and the federal legislation that quickly followed hadnt happened yet. The new regulatory climate would ultimately demand that PNC be able to prove it knew its clientele […]

Eighteen days after landing on Mars, the robotic explorer named Spirit squawked in distress and went silent for nearly 24 hours. Listening anxiously for any sign of life were navigators at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. They had to fix a broken interplanetary communications link that reached more than 100 million miles […]

On Feb. 17, 2000, the America West Airlines flight-planning computer system collapsed. The airline was forced to cancel 128 flights that day and following morning, leaving thousands of passengers stranded. Bob Ewers was headed to his Chicago home from a consulting assignment in Pomona, Calif., and had a ticket for an afternoon flight out of […]