It wasn't supposed to be this way: Last week, IBM gave the AS/400 a new lease on life. At the Common 2008 user group meeting in the US, IBM announced that its venerable minicomputer hardware is being merged with its Unix product line, once called the RS/6000. Result: The system formerly known as the AS/400 just got cheaper, more modern -- and harder to kill.
Sabotage. That's the right word for what Pakistan Telecom did to YouTube on the last Sunday in February. It was intended to be censorship -- blocking Pakistanis from seeing a video that their government found offensive. But it resulted in all of YouTube vanishing from the Internet for up to two hours.
Well, that was quick. Last week, consumer electronics giant Toshiba announced it was pulling the plug on its high-definition video disc format, HD DVD. Within days, Toshiba's partners announced that they were now Blu-ray shops, and HD DVD players and movies were reduced to fire-sale prices.
Sam Zell just told the 20,000 employees at his company that he trusts them on the Internet during work time. "I have instructed that all content filters be removed," he told Tribune Co. workers in a memo last week. "You are now exposed to the dangers of YouTube and Facebook. Please use your best judgment. Let's focus on what is important, and go for greatness."
Remember when Oracle was a database vendor and Sun Microsystems sold workstations? Yes, you can still buy Oracle 11g or a Sun Ultra. But last week's big deals -- Oracle's US$8.5 billion buyout of BEA Systems and Sun's US$1 billion deal for MySQL -- remind us that the days when vendors fit into tidy niches are long gone.
Merrill Lynch says we're already in a recession. Is that relevant? Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs say a US recession this year is now unavoidable. Is that relevant?
Ready for 2008? Budgets may tighten up, but IT's challenges will just keep growing: security problems, virtualization technology, legal issues, users who can't be stopped and that worrisome baby-boomer brain drain. Here are eight hot-button issues to watch out for in the coming year:
Security is a people problem. OK, you already knew that. But recently the SANS Institute finally recognized it too, in its list of the top 20 Internet security risks of 2007. Topping the chart of new, hard-to-defend-against risks were vulnerabilities in custom Web applications and (drum roll, please) "gullible, busy, accommodating computer users, including executives, IT staff and others with privileged access."
Simplify to innovate. If you walk away from this year's Premier 100 issue of Computerworld with one idea, make it this one: We can rethink everything we do in IT to make it simpler and then leverage that simplicity to make both IT and users more innovative.
Now it's crunch time. This is the most punishingly high-pressure part of the year, with immovable December deadlines marching ever closer. Nerves will be frayed, stupidity will flare up, and you need to give your people all the help and support you can.
Google is getting rid of its 2038 cookies. That's the year 2038, when Web browser cookies created by its Web sites over the past decade were set to expire. From now on, Google's cookies will only last for two years from the date of your last visit to a Google site.
We hate automated customer service systems. That's the key finding of a recent study by Accenture. Understand, the study didn't look at how well we like acquiring, installing, integrating, operating and maintaining customer service automation. It was about how well we like being on the receiving end. Short answer: We don't.
Coming soon to a TV near you: a show about corporate IT. No, really. Last week, U.S. television station NBC announced that its new show The IT Crowd would be a "midseason starter," which is network jargon for "As soon as one of our other new shows gets awful ratings, we'll put this one on the schedule."
No theory is ever as good as lots of real-world data. So here, based on lots of real-world data, is what you should do to minimize problems with hard disk drives: a) burn them in rigorously; b) replace them as soon as they start throwing errors, especially scan errors; and c) retire them before they turn three years old. Oh, and d) remember that none of those measures is a substitute for regular backups.
In Lancaster, last week, the county coroner was brought to court in handcuffs. A grand jury indicted Dr. Gary Kirchner, charging him with giving out his account name and password for a county Web site that contained confidential police 911 information. What kind of information? Names of accident victims and police informants, medical conditions, witness accounts, autopsy reports and not-yet-substantiated accusations. The site was the access point for real-time data generated and used by firefighters, ambulance crews and other emergency responders.