Stories by David L. Margulius

Government veers onto the Web

Imagine if dealing with the government online were as easy as dealing with Amazon.com, Dell, or Southwest Airlines. Want a building permit? No problem. Have to track a benefits check? Just a few clicks.

The rush to RFID

In an airport at Frankfurt, Germany, a maintenance worker crawls through the cramped ventilation system, wearing a small device that reads data from chips positioned throughout the system to verify that he's done his job. At a U.S. theme park, a teenager on a waterslide wears a special wristband with an embedded chip that will remember how many rides he has taken, no matter how wet he gets. And at a large drug company's warehouse, a shipment of the regulated narcotic OxyContin gets tagged with chips to track its route, and discourage theft and counterfeiting.

UPS pilots an RFID rollout

How is United Parcel Service, one of the world's largest logistics companies, approaching RFID? Like many companies, it's launching pilot deployments to better understand the business case for a wider rollout.

Who runs the Internet anyway?

From its origins as an academic and military network funded by the U.S. government, the Internet has evolved into a global network owned and managed by private-sector vendors, end-users, and governments and regulated by a multitude of government-sanctioned bodies and technical committees. In other words, there is no single entity "in charge." The Internet is a big group effort, the ultimate "coalition of the willing."

Analysis: Do-it-yourself IT support

Used it equipment may seem like a bargain, but getting support cheaply for equipment that's out of warranty may prove a tough battle. For open source software, there are numerous Web-based support resources available. But for hardware, if it breaks, you may be out of luck.

Tackling security threats from within

A University of Texas student steals 55,000 Social Security numbers from the school's administrative databases. A UBS Pain Webber system administrator activates a logic bomb in the company's network, causing US$3 million in damage. A disgruntled Australian IT employee commandeers his company's sewage management software to dump hundreds of thousands of litres of raw sewage into local parks and rivers.

Managing it all

While enterprises loaded up on security-related technologies from anti-virus to IDS (intrusion detection system) solutions during the past few years, a new problem was brewing: how to aggregate the streams of information coming from the various security devices throughout a network and correlate that data to help IT prioritize and respond to threats?

Collaborative challenges

Vendors from both the integration world and the application development world are tackling the collaborative applications challenge, building new middleware layers they hope will become platforms for the development of these next-generation enterprise applications. Their efforts will ultimately move the enterprise beyond point-to-point integration using proprietary APIs and toward a standards-based, loosely coupled, business-rules-driven software layer that enables enterprises to stitch together existing systems components into collaborative applications.

Apps on the edge

Will mission-critical enterprise business logic someday reside on distributed application infrastructures rather than in corporate datacenters and thus span the globe to deliver improved performance? A recent flurry of announcements has put a spotlight on "edge computing" as the newest entrant in the race toward distributed computing, alongside grid computing, peer-to-peer architectures, and Web services.

Wireless apps delivered via Web services

Interoperability of next-generation wireless services will hinge on the synchronisation of wireless carriers' back-end architectures -- and the standardisation of interfaces they provide to third-party developers. Increasingly, it looks as though Web services could be the glue that makes it all work together.