Lisa Vaas

Is your IT certificate worth the paper its printed on? It depends on whom you ask. James Kotwicki, for one, thinks his prove that hes got pluck. Kotwicki has an A+—a broad hardware and software certificate for entry-level computer service technicians—and a Network+—a vendor-neutral certification that measures the technical knowledge of networking professionals with 18 […]

Psst. Want to buy or sell some telecom routing capacity? For you buyers: today only, real cheap. For you sellers: Dont worry, its all anonymous. Nobodys going to tell your muck-a-muck retail customers you slid some capacity under the table at flea-market prices. Sound good? If so, have we got an online exchange for you. […]

Soured economy or no, you still have to have the skills of a sleuth to find information security professionals. How bad is the dearth? Lee Kushner, CEO and founder of L.J. Kushner & Associates LLP, an executive recruiting company specializing in information security, estimates that the number of unfilled jobs requiring skilled security professionals is […]

On one hand, theres dot-com die-off. there are H1-B visas going begging. There are job boards seeing IT job-seeker traffic as if theyre Los Angeles freeways. On the other hand, enterprises are still gnashing their teeth, hungry for networking, security, e-commerce/Internet, customer relationship management and enterprise resource planning skills that they say they just cant […]

Swim OK LLC, with a whopping four employees, is small fry. But the Web design company made a surprisingly big splash early last month when it put out an ad seeking to hire a programmer skilled in using Macromedia Inc.s Flash 5 design tools. The company was flooded with 173 résumés, many of them from […]

Revenge is sweet. A year ago, Old Economy stalwarts like $100.7 billion Enron Corp. were ridiculed for their slow pace in moving to embrace e-business. Today, those same companies are being showered with accolades and awards. Most recently, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Managements eBusiness Awards last month named Enron—the No. 1 […]

Helicopter pilots the world over fly in fear of the dreaded Jesus Nut. A part on all rotor-powered craft, the Jesus Nut is so critical that, if it were ever to pop off while in flight, the helicopter would dive faster than a ripped parachute. These days, IT officials at Bell Helicopter Textron Inc.—and all […]

Theres nothing new about peer-to-peer networking. Indeed, the Internet fundamentally is P2P. Packet switching—a P2P technology that breaks a message into smaller packets, which are then transmitted over the network via dynamic routing as circuits become available—is the technology that made the Net the Net. But if P2P is so fundamental to the Internet, why […]

Do you have P2P jitters? Is all the talk about peer-to-peer sending frigid, lack-of-control, lack-of-security, lack-of-standards shivers down your spine? Stop fretting. P2P is about a lot more than the chaos of Napster and your teenagers ripped-off Metallica hits. Although the music-sharing, recording-industry-provoking service certainly helped to shine the spotlight on this powerful networking technology, […]

Put a Web developer up against a wall and demand why his or her site isnt accessible to the disabled. Youre likely to get a response something like this recent anonymous posting to online techie news site slashdot.org: “Im sorry, the burden is on the user,” the correspondent sniffed. “Im not going to dumb down […]

As with most Web sites, the click-on-me buttons in the banner ads for America Online Inc.s online service read with simple, understandable interfaces. “Tell me more,” they say, or “No thanks.” If youre reading this story as text online or on paper, thats fine. You can easily choose the correct button to get out of […]