eWEEK EDITORS

Living in Denial Now, admittedly, most of the 900 attendees had drifted off to golf course dreamland by the time Kurt Rosenthal, Cisco Systems product marketing manager, reached the full-on sales portion of his 7 a.m. presentation — “IP Services: The Path to Profitability” — at the U.S. Telecom Association Convention & Exhibition in Scottsdale, […]

Windows XP is set for an extravagant New York City launch on Oct. 25, but the debate over the security of an element called “raw sockets” in Microsofts latest operating system release will rage for quite a bit longer. Steve Gibson, an independent software developer who has written several security programs, has been waging a […]

It should have been an easy contract for IBM to win. And in years past, it probably would have won the deal. But in late August, Firemans Fund Insurance Co. awarded a 10-year, $350 million outsourcing contract to Canadian integrator CGI Group, not IBM Global Services. CGI won even though Firemans Funds data center in […]

Government Gets Secure U.S. government agencies will begin deploying more secure authentication technologies as a result of a partnership between RSA Security and Maximus, a large government services firm. Using digital certificates and smart cards, agencies will begin implementing “two-factor” identification requiring both a password and an additional authentication method such as a smart card […]

In recent years, as IBM has turned its marketing attention away from the retail PC in favor of its mainframe servers and services, the companys PC market share has dwindled. Last week, the Armonk, N.Y., company used the unveiling of several PCs and services to help restore its old luster and tout itself as the […]

With the recent surge in charitable donations around the country, I wonder if this penchant for giving will spill over into PC philanthropy, i.e., sharing unused computing power and hard disk space for the benefit of medical and other research. There are already several projects out there that allow you to do this, often simply […]

Can IBM make computers smart enough take care of themselves? Big Blue this week will launch an initiative to promote “autonomic computing,” an approach to building self-managing systems that require little or no human interaction. On Monday, Oct. 15, Paul Horn, director of IBM Research, is scheduled to deliver a keynote address at the Agenda […]

Like relatives trying to steer a couple away from what they fear will be a doomed marriage, investors and analysts have strongly urged Hewlett-Packard Co. and Compaq Computer Corp. to back out of their proposed merger. Yet the corporate couple remains undeterred and is now seeking the blessing from whats normally a skeptical authority but […]

Over the past year, security-savvy administrators enjoyed the largest pay raises of any specialists in the IT sector, according to an Interactive Week/Advantage Business Research study, with salaries jumping 12.6 percent over 2000 figures. But heightened awareness stemming from the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 may make the increases of the past year look minuscule. […]

Microsoft is fleshing out its web-services lineup to include not only consumer offerings, but a set of developer services, code-named Iris, that will be licensed — and, in some cases, hosted — by Microsoft. The company already has announced its consumer web services — .Net My Services (formerly code-named Hailstorm). Microsoft has begun delivering to […]

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The judge overseeing the Microsoft antitrust trial has ordered a mediator to try and bring the case to an out-of-court settlement. As expected, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly named the mediator, Boston University Professor Eric Green, after neither Microsoft nor the government had reached a settlement by Oct. 12. The order was filed Friday […]

Read this weeks Spencer column.