eWEEK Editorial Board

As each year draws to a close, we summarize in this space where we stand on the most important issues facing the IT community. As 2004 dawned, the role of IT in corporate governance emerged as a significant obligation, challenge and opportunity. The seemingly thankless chore of engineering compliance with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act was the […]

The Federal Communications Commission made the correct decision recently when it labeled the services of VOIP providers such as Vonage Holdings fundamentally interstate in nature and therefore exempt from regulation by state public utilities commissions. The decision came in response to the actions of states such as Minnesota and New York, which had begun moving […]

The browser market lives. the Mozilla Foundations stand-alone browser, Firefox, now comprises 3 percent of the market. That number compares with Internet Explorers 92.9 percent, the remainder being consumed by several smaller players. Those figures, reported by Web analytics provider WebSideStory, represent significant inroads into Microsofts browser market dominance and indicate, however tentatively, the presence […]

When Hewlett-Packard announced its decision to discontinue its Itanium workstation, company leaders were quick to reassure customers by stating that “HP continues its commitment to deliver on the road map for Integrity servers.” Yet you could hardly blame customers if they were a little skeptical. The Itanium workstation debacle is just the latest in a […]

Its a lamentable state of affairs, but it will probably take years more of identity theft on a massive scale and security breaches of increasing severity to spur common-sense actions that should be taken today. What other explanation seems plausible, in the face of the apparent indifference to a growing list of well-considered recommendations on […]

With the recent release of Linux Standard Base 2.0 by the Free Standards Group, attention has once again turned to preventing the fragmentation of Linux distributions. LSB 2.0 is intended to enable software vendors to write an application once and have it install and run identically on many Linux distributions. Customers, in turn, would be […]

Its been more than a decade since we saw significant advances in file systems. In that time, data storage has grown exponentially, making the simple act of data searching torturous. The solution, we and many others believe, is a metadata-aware file system that lets users sort through their huge stacks of data. Microsoft saw this […]

As VOIP services continue multiplying nationwide, offering businesses and consumers ever-greater value, questions about regulating IP telephony are growing louder and more insistent. In general, as previously stated in this space, we favor the hands-off approach taken by the Federal Communications Commission chairman, Michael Powell, who recognizes that voice over IPs growth could be stunted […]

Windows is by far the most prevalent desktop operating system, and security—often due to flaws within that environment—is the most prevalent IT headache. Consequently, the rollout of Windows XP Service Pack 2, which has remedies to many of Windows security ills, has been eagerly and impatiently awaited for many months. The enhanced security features of […]

Many commercial software vendors—IBM, Microsoft and Sun among them—have faced software patent claims. So it should come as no surprise that Linux is also susceptible to claims of patent infringement. Given the sorry state of the U.S. patent system, any technology—be it a standard commercial product or an open-source application—could face a damaging patent claim. […]

Sun Microsystems decision to extend its Java Enterprise System to Windows- and HP-UX-based servers should give IT managers a healthy dose of platform independence—the kind that many have been demanding for years. Its another step for Sun down the path of open and cross-platform software. Its a path that promises choice for users and perhaps […]

Both antitrust enforcers and enterprise technology professionals must look toward the future, not the past. The U.S. District Court in San Francisco is looking in the wrong direction in its analysis of Oracles proposed acquisition of PeopleSoft; we urge enterprise IT buyers not to make the same mistake. Regardless of whether one sees the Oracle-PeopleSoft […]