John Taschek

The Javaone Show, held last week, began life as a technical gathering and quickly evolved into a forum for chest thumping, top 10 lists and chants that Sun was the king of the world. It finally settled into a nice balance between technology demonstrations and marketing, which still puts it way ahead of most computer […]

This is a multiple-choice question: if people are so concerned about 802.11 wireless security, why have they deployed $1.5 billion worth of the stuff? (A) Theyre idiots; (B) theyre ignorant; (C) they believe its secure enough; (D) they dont care. The answer most likely is C, and, chances are, theyd be right, especially on limited-use […]

Suns billion-dollar lawsuit against Microsoft is a hugely risky move. If the company loses, it will still be a company respected for its technology but reviled for its management. Winning, however, could take a decade, and by then the industry will certainly look quite a bit different. On the surface, we all should be extremely […]

IP security VPNs are a good way for individual users to connect into a corporate network. Theyre extremely ill-equipped, however, for connecting corporate applications, especially when two companies are involved. The reasons are simple: Its very difficult to manage two or more networks using a single virtual private network infrastructure because doing so means coordinating […]

“Citius, altius, fortius.” sponsorships took gold at the recent Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, where they shut out open-source technology in the massive infrastructure that supported the event. Interestingly, there were far fewer sponsors than at past Olympics (those run by IBM), but they contributed far more in the way of cash, goods and […]

Utahns sometimes say that the state is the birthplace of word processing (not quite true) via the WordPerfect empire (now a small department of a Canadian concern) and the birthplace of networking (also not quite true) with Novell (now merged with Cambridge Technology Partners). In truth, Utah was the birthplace of the sophistication of the […]

Awards programs seem like theyre a dime a dozen. The sheer quantity of awards—and Im not just talking about computing technology awards—often dilutes the importance of legitimate awards programs and leaves readers and viewers feeling that nothing was accomplished. Fortunately, in my unbiased opinion, we have the eWeek eXcellence Awards. This is perhaps the only […]

Mere hours after Microsoft officially launched visual Studio .Net, reports of a potential security flaw in the .Net compiler rolled in (see www.eweek.com/links). In this case, the timing of the release is highly suspect, and the company that reported the flaw sounds like its either out to get a little fast fame or has something […]

Instant messaging is among the most popular applications in the enterprise. Yet because IM cant be managed and because it tunnels traffic directly over Port 80, IMs sometimes treated as an insidious disease. With new applications, control over IM is possible, satisfying the desires of control freaks who, in the late 1980s, frowned on e-mail; […]

It annoys the heck out of me, but Ive finally realized that gadgets are the future. It took 20 years of messing around with them and seeing how others gloat about the latest addition to their arsenal to realize how important they are, but clearly everyones going to be packing PC power in their pockets […]

Death, taxes and the fact that your computer systems are vulnerable are the only things that are certain—at least in our lifetimes. Unfortunately, many companies will find this out at least once. The problem is that they rely on vendors to disclose problems, and by then its way too late. Large companies, such as IBM, […]

Broadwing, formed in 1999 by a merger of IXC Communications and Cincinnati Bell, has the first all-optical network with paying customers. The network consists of about 18,500 miles of long-haul IP fiber, which lowers the number of times a signal must be regenerated to every 2,500 miles or so. This also means the network will […]