Drew Robb

Far from representing yet another wave of hype, industry watchers say VoIP appears to be successfully transitioning into the mainstream. According to a survey by Harris Interactive, 12 percent of businesses have already deployed it, and another 29 percent are planning to do so before the end of the year. Harris also found that 87 […]

In the 1982 Cold War action flick “Firefox,” Clint Eastwood prevails over the might of the Soviet Union in stealing the supersonic Firefox airplane. Will the Firefox browser do the same thing and steal the browser market from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE)? Or will the open source browser find itself shot down in a far […]

Many IT departments think disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) are the same thing. As a result, they tend to take a largely technology focus on the subjects. And that’s a problem, according to Michael Croy, director of business continuity at Forsythe Technology Inc., a Chicago-based IT consultancy and infrastructure firm specializing in BC […]

Computers are getting better at replicating human activities, but they still haven’t mastered the body’s ability to heal itself. The body continually evaluates its own health and replenishes its components using raw materials. It locates and eliminates new viruses, repairs damage done, and adjusts its systems to prevent new infections. Life would be far more […]

What do James Bond, the Roman Empire and Netscape have in common? When you defeat someone, you better do it completely, or you’ll surely regret it later. James Bond’s opponents all make the same fatal mistake. They assume Bond is dead and are free to carry out their nefarious plot to take over the world. […]

One of the major advantages Linux has to offer is cross-platform functionality. Far from being a PC operating system that has been extended for other uses, it runs on cell phones, mainframes and everything in between. This offers IT departments the possibility of using Linux to consolidate resources into a single skill set, or at […]

As more workers discover the joys of becoming connected and, simultaneously, untethered, IT execs are expanding WiFi projects to better serve this growing constituency. To accommodate a growing mobile workforce, more companies are installing wireless LANs (WLANs). While organizations initially deployed wireless on a trial basis or to meet the needs of just a few […]

Outsourcing is a hot button topic these days. Unions and displaced workers are up in arms about it, saying their jobs have been sent overseas. Corporations are putting up a stiff rearguard action to defend it, saying they can’t compete without saving money by using lower-paid programmers and help desk technicians in countries like India […]

According to the U.S. Congress’ 9/11 Commission, one of the key elements that allowed the attacks to occur was the FBI’s inability to easily share information gathered by different offices — to coordinate and analyze that data. But remedying this has not proven easy. After spending as much as $170 million on custom software to […]

In this year’s enterprise server category, Datamation readers by a wide margin selected StorageTek Technology Corp.’s StreamLine SL500 Modular Library System as Product of the Year. Making a strong showing as runner-up was IBM’s eServer p5 Systems. Other finalists were JBoss Inc.’s JBoss Application Server; Open VMS OS for Alpha, VAX and Integrity Servers from […]