Lisa Vaas is News Editor/Operations for eWEEK.com and also serves as editor of the Database topic center. Since 1995, she has also been a Webcast news show anchorperson and a reporter covering the IT industry. She has focused on customer relationship management technology, IT salaries and careers, effects of the H1-B visa on the technology workforce, wireless technology, security, and, most recently, databases and the technologies that touch upon them. Her articles have appeared in eWEEK's print edition, on eWEEK.com, and in the startup IT magazine PC Connection. Prior to becoming a journalist, Vaas experienced an array of eye-opening careers, including driving a cab in Boston, photographing cranky babies in shopping malls, selling cameras, typography and computer training. She stopped a hair short of finishing an M.A. in English at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. She earned a B.S. in Communications from Emerson College. She runs two open-mic reading series in Boston and currently keeps bees in her home in Mashpee, Mass.
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 […]