Imagine a data storage device the size of an atom, working at the speed of light. Imagine a microprocessor whose circuits could be changed on the fly. One minute, it would be optimized for database access, the next for transaction processing and the next for scientific number-crunching.
The deputy CIO at a major aerospace company had worked hard to get her company into software reuse. She hired reuse librarians, trained developers in reuse and object-oriented methods, and overhauled the company's software development methodology. Her goal was to have 60 percent of the code in new systems come from a library of reusable components within 12 months. But at the end of that time, the figure stood at just 6 percent.
In just four months, students at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) have built an "interactive physical and digital workspace," a prototype meeting room that could herald the future of interactive collaboration by design teams.
It was September 2001, and Jeff Immelt had just become General Electric's new chairman. His predecessor, Jack Welch, had come up through the engineering ranks, but Immelt was a marketing guy, and one of his first actions was to survey the company's sales force. He was dismayed to find that members of the sales team were spending far more time on deskbound administrative chores than in face-to-face meetings with customers and prospects.
The potential for mining cost-saving and revenue-boosting ideas from data is increasing as companies build bigger data warehouses, applications become more integrated, computers grow more powerful and vendors of analytic software introduce products that are easier to use.
Veteran IT leader David R. Guzman wants his management to say, "Ah, got it!" And executives at Office Depot definitely did get it when Guzman and a team of his colleagues, in the first application of a new data warehouse, boosted annual sales by US$117 million.
By their very nature, Web services require strong standards for interoperability, security and reliability. Yet so far the standards are immature, and they aren't yet adequate for the most sophisticated business processes.
"The mood here is grim," said W. Brian Arthur, Citibank professor at the Santa Fe Institute, a think tank that specializes in emerging science. "Broadband is dead in the water, some say, and Peter Drucker thinks the information technology revolution is over."
They are mostly gone now, those early online retailers. They believed profits didn't matter. They saw advanced technology as the silver bullet. And their business plans ran to just six words: "Build it, and they will come."
Chip fabrication is the process by which multibillion-dollar plants turn common sand into microprocessors, memory chips and integrated circuits of all kinds. Producing a microchip is one of the most complicated, exacting and expensive of all industrial activities, yet makers continue to double the capabilities of chips every 18 to 24 months.
Last month, IBM Corp. made the stunning announcement that it had written data to a storage medium at a density of 1T bit per square inch, enough to pack 25 million printed pages on a postage-stamp-size chip.
Cryptography expert Martin Hellman, co-inventor of Diffie-Hellman public-key encryption, says he never encrypts his e-mail. It's just too much trouble.
Richard P. Gabriel is Sun Microsystems's open-source expert. He has written four books and more than 100 articles, mostly about programming languages and practices. He's leader of the Feyerabend Project, whose goal is "to repair the arena of software development and practice." It was inspired by the philosopher Paul Feyerabend, who wrote in 1975, "Given any rule, however 'fundamental' or 'necessary' for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite." Gabriel recently told Computerworld's Gary H. Anthes what's wrong with software today and how it might be improved.
Until recently, storage-area networks (SAN) have gotten a mixed reception. Users have praised their performance and flexibility but criticized their cost, complexity and lack of interoperability. But new products based on current standards have finally begun to address those problems. And practitioners who have been down this road say that lower maintenance and support costs can quickly make up for the relatively high deployment costs for SANs.
An elderly man squints at an automated teller machine (ATM) screen and the font size doubles almost instantly. A woman at a shopping center kiosk smiles at a travel ad, prompting the device to print out a travel discount coupon. Several users at another kiosk frown at a racy ad, leading a store to pull it.