Drew Robb

It’s hard to beat high performance at a low price point. But when you factor in a tiny desktop footprint, you have a combination that once again proved unbeatable in Datamation’s Client Systems Product of the Year category. The space-saving Dell OptiPlex SX260 garnered almost half the reader votes, giving Dell top honors in the […]

The accuracy of weather reports has been a standing joke ever since the first meteorologist delivered his initial prognostication. However, comedians may soon need to update their routines. An armada of satellites and floating sensors have joined land based weather stations in streaming terabytes of daily atmospheric readings. A new generation of supercomputers are making […]

Mining for data is like mining for gold. It is a lot of work but, done right, produces a high return. At Newmont Mining Corp.’s site near Battle Mountain, Nev., for example, the company must excavate and process 30 tons of raw material to extract a single ounce of pure gold. Knowledge workers face a […]

Most IT departments have the luxury of rolling out their wireless networks on a gradual basis, putting in access points and then assigning access privileges at their discretion. Stewart Seruya, Chief Security and Network Officer at the University of Miami doesn’t have that option. “8,500 undergraduates start over one weekend,” he explains, “and they all […]

Managing storage in the old mainframe days was a simple matter. Everything was stored in one place, under the watchful eyes of the operators. But client/server and low-cost disks changed all that. PCs now come with more storage than most mainframes used to have. Add to this all the capacity strewn throughout the enterprise’s file […]

Managing storage in the old mainframe days was a simple matter. Everything was stored in one place, under the watchful eyes of the operators. But client/server and low-cost disks changed all that. PCs now come with more storage than most mainframes used to have. Add to this all the capacity strewn throughout the enterprise’s file […]

See sidebar on available handheld databases. Handheld devices, once dismissed as “geek toys,” are increasingly finding homes in all enterprises of all sizes and types. The medical and education fields, for example, are big adopters of PDA’s. “We are introducing our graduate students to the idea that handhelds are an essential tool of the medicine […]

Despite their differences, Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and former hacker Kevin Mitnick do have at least one thing in common: Both their companies have trouble keeping organizational software up to date. Some Microsoft servers were hit by the “Slammer” worm due to them running unpatched versions of SQL Server. And hackers twice hit Mitnick’s company […]

Movie stars pay a bundle for clothing that fits just right, revealing or concealing the desired areas as they parade down the red carpet on Oscar night. In a similar fashion, companies lay out billions for management software to reveal what is happening inside their networks, while concealing most of the most of the messages […]

Laying one’s hands on worthwhile content used to be slow and extremely expensive. Monks spent years painstakingly copying a single manuscript. Monarchs required a scribe standing by in case they wanted to send a note to a counterpart in a neighboring fiefdom. A small quantity of data moved slowly, mostly by word of mouth or […]