Brian Livingston

Recordable videodiscs are more often associated with Hollywood studios than they are with corporate suites. But the latest technology in burn-your-own DVDs is quickly changing that. With a DVD’s capacity to hold gigabytes of data, not megabytes like CDs, the more capacious of the two formats is ready to break out of its rent-a-flick ghetto. […]

At this very moment, one of your employees may be walking out of your building with a complete set of word-processing documents, e-mail messages, even Windows desktop settings. This could actually be good. It probably means that your employees have the benefit of new, little devices you’ve given them, called keychain drives, that allow them […]

Corporations that have strong firewall defenses didn’t take long to figure out that their greatest threat was from employees who log on to their networks from outside the building. With laptops, Palms, Pocket PCs, and even cell phones accessing your enterprise databases from God knows where, you’re in for a nasty surprise one day if […]

Headlines are flying with stories of incriminating e-mail messages — and the many court cases that have been launched by “discovered” e-mails. That makes this a very good time for you to be securing your corporate communications with new tools. Perhaps your idea of protecting your e-mail is to exhort your employees not to say […]

Enterprise professionals are being faced with a difficult question: 802.11b or 802.11g. You probably know that 802.11b (known simply as “b” to its friends) is the most commonly used standard for wireless mobile computing, or Wi-Fi. But it’s now threatened with displacement by faster standards such as 802.11g and 802.11a. The “b” standard is cheaper […]

Information technology executives such as yourself are likely to say, “I know all about USB — there’s a new version that’s faster, right?” If that’s all you think there is to it, you have a big surprise coming. The USB Implementation Forum (USB-IF) — a standard-defining consortium that includes such marquee names as Hewlett-Packard, Intel, […]

I knew I’d stumbled on to a great story when my research led me to my first “Google whack.” A Google whack consists of any two words that produce one and only one result when entered into the Google.com search engine (without quote marks). A recent example from the hilarious Googlewhack.com site is ambidextrous scallywags. […]

Hiding within all Microsoft software, it seems, are secret features that never get into the official manuals. Whether the product is Windows or some other Microsoft offering, capabilities that offer you power and convenience somehow go undocumented for months or years. No one knows this better than Dan Appleman, the president of Desaware Inc., a […]

The Web site of the Intel Corporation is wasting more Internet bandwidth than any other major company, according to a new study of all Fortune 1000 corporations. The report found that the Intel site could reduce by 82% the number of bytes it sends out to visitors. The change would merely require adding a simple […]

How much money could a single traveling salesperson be costing your company in wireless Internet access charges? The answer could surprise you. Multiply that by 1,000 or more workers wandering around the planet and we’re talkin’ real money here. Let’s take the example of a single wireless laptop user we’ll call John: • LGA. John […]