Eric Lundquist

An uncertain economy, new technologies and new business requirements add up to a job market that few can fathom. Are you better off taking a lower-paying, less demanding position, or should you hold out even longer for something appropriate to your skill level? And what skills will you need in the coming years to make […]

Open-source advocates championing their approach to software as inherently more secure would use each new vulnerability in Microsofts proprietary Windows software to buttress their arguments. The Code Red and Nimda worms had a feast on unpatched Microsoft Internet Information Services servers last year, while the open-source Apache servers sat untouched. Proof, said advocates, that proprietary […]

What would be the cyber-defense equivalent of having grandma take off her shoes at the airport as a security measure? Building a federal network operations center that filtered Internet traffic to find bad guys comes to mind. No sooner would the federal NOC be built than cyber-terrorists would find a way into, around or through […]

What will be the impact of Web services? On the one hand, technologists with a decade or two of experience contend Web services will just be an extension of architectures developed in the 1980s. On the other hand, venture capitalists and technology pundits hope Web services will be the spark that reignites the high-tech economic […]

Disaster planning used to focus on natural disasters, accidents and careless employees. But after the terrorist strikes on Sept. 11 last year, disaster planning expanded to become the work of planning to recover from an attack once thought of as only remotely possible in the United States. This week, we go back to companies and […]

Ready for the real-time enterprise? Where real-time operations were once the province of nuclear power plants and mission-critical manufacturing processes, the real-time concept has been sneaking into the vocabulary of the “next big thing” technology futurists. The most recent explanation Ive heard was during a presentation by Creative Strategies President Tim Bajarin at a CRM […]

Does our desire for security mean well be passing all our data through some big federal cyber network operations center? The cyber NOC is one proposal in a still-to-be-announced cyber-security project under consideration by the Bush administration. Thanks to some enterprising reporting by Caron Carlson and Dennis Fisher, were reporting on some of the details […]

While U.S. companies are continually encouraged to invest in defenses against major IT terror attacks, it is the little terrors of spam that currently take the greatest productivity toll. The spam flood, along with its promises of riches, sexual solicitation, and myriad scams and hoaxes, washes daily through corporate Americas e-mail servers and in-boxes. Accessing […]

Getting the most out of your IP network makes sense. youve spent a lot of money trying to make the network secure, robust and flexible; now is also the time to make it economical. Where should you start after you realize that your IP network can do a lot more than shuttle data about? You […]

When Suns Jon Bosak led the team that developed the first XML spec in 1996, I doubt he envisioned a day when competitors Oracle and Microsoft would become two of the standards champions. In Redmond, nearly every phrase heard in the hallways includes XML used as a noun, verb, adjective and overall magic elixir for […]

Last week, as Bill Gates was delivering an update on Microsofts .Net initiative, the moribund stock market came alive for a rapid rise. Coincidence? Certainly. But that shouldnt stop Gates and company from taking credit for getting the technology industry to stop bemoaning the past and start looking toward the future once again. In Gates […]

Two years ago, almost to the day, I went to the first briefing of .Net. At that time, which seems very long ago now, the dot-com boom was at its peak. Microsoft was increasingly being seen as an also ran, behind the Internet curve and facing a hard-charging Department of Justice intent on breaking up […]