eWEEK EDITORS

Projecting optimism despite an 82 percent drop in the companys first-quarter profits, Intel Corp. executives last week predicted that chip sales will rebound later this year, due mainly to dramatic price cuts the company is planning for the Pentium 4. However, IT managers offer a starkly different outlook of the PCs future. Several system managers […]

Thieves can go to jail for switching price tags and attempting to buy merchandise at the lower price in a brick-and-mortar store. Yet online merchants get hit with price switching scams by e-shoplifters all the time, and rarely are thieves detected or caught. An estimated one-third of all shopping cart applications at Internet retailing sites […]

With every passing week, the tea leaves surrounding the privacy debate on Capitol Hill become easier to read, and now theyve got the word “gridlock” written all over them. With about 50 bills that have something to do with privacy already introduced in the 107th Congress, at least one rhetorical campaign has started to gain […]

Users have a strong tendency to place unwarranted trust in the privacy and integrity of online communications. Users regularly e-mail sensitive information that they would never commit to paper—a problem businesses often first come to grips with when their e-mails are subpoenaed in court. Instant messaging (IM) takes that phenomenon to an even greater extreme. […]

Streaming Medias once-sunny future — like the outlook for much of the digital world — is looking mighty gray these days. Whopping predictions for its usage have withered in the light of reality, shrinking like the investment capital that fattened the industry just months ago. Today, the fastest-growing streaming statistics seem to be the tallies […]

To listen to Rocky Taylor describe his experience in outsourcing is to imagine a magical world of fairies and elves dancing happily around a retail point-of-sale (POS) terminal. A midsummer nights retail dream. OK, thats overstating it. But given the sorry state of many vendor-customer outsourcing partnerships, the four-year relationship between Beach Street, a 27-store […]

Its no secret that data centers are power gluttons. With power densities of 100 watts per square foot or more, electricity usage of a single data center can far exceed that of a comparably sized office building. But InfiniBand may provide data centers with dramatic reductions in energy needs. The new standard does away with […]

Storage appliances are busting out all over, and experts say they are part of a trend to detach storage from specific servers and make it a pooled resource on corporate networks. Most server vendors produce their own version of a storage appliance that is mounted on a rack and loaded with disk drives. In addition, […]

As bandwidth-hogging multimedia traffic swarms over the Internet, multicast — a technology designed to reduce Internet congestion — is undergoing a transformation that will make Webcasting far more efficient. A new traffic management protocol, called Source-Specific Multicast, solves a key network configuration problem that has limited the adoption of traditional Internet Protocol multicast technology. While […]

Until now, the only way to make Web data “live” was to constantly refresh the users browser or use streaming technology, which sacrifices bandwidth. Bang Networks Inc., which was launched earlier this month, is taking a new tack that will enable organizations to keep data for Web pages and in Web applications up-to-date without gobbling […]

Taking the Storage Route Cisco Systems later this month will roll out a storage router based on the proposed Small Computer Systems Interface over Internet Protocol (iSCSI) standard. IBM and Cisco co-formulated the standard. Ciscos offering allows such applications as storage consolidation, data backup and data archival to tape devices. The $27,000 router is part […]

In its push to reach profitability, Amazon.com could end up vanishing. The e-tailing giant wants to become the back-end fulfillment center for brick-and-mortar retailers that are having a hard time making their dot-com businesses work. That means Amazon, once poised to become the worlds largest e-tailer of everything, could fade into the background as it […]