Stories by: Mark Hall

Suppose you were developing software that would run about 50 to 60 operational tasks simultaneously, including the management of multiple mechanical and digital devices. That'd be reasonably complex. Now consider that any time a task stumbled, the software would have to correct itself. That would mean thinking ahead for every possible contingency that could affect all running tasks and designing in self-healing capabilities. That's much more complex.

There are moments in history that place one-to-many communications media in pivotal roles. These events ("Where were you when you heard...?") become elemental markers in history not just because of the enormity of what happened, but also because of how they were conveyed to the world.

CIOs are loath to give up direct control of the systems that chief financial officers watch like a hawk. Billing and general ledger software come to mind as programs you'd think would never be candidates for software as a service (SaaS). But that will change. In fact, says Ed Sullivan (no, not that Ed Sullivan), it already has.

Librarians will go a long way to defend the privacy of their patrons' reading habits. How far will you go to defend the privacy of your customers' information and your employees' personal data?

When disaster strikes a community, first responders race to the scene. But where does everyone else affected by the event go?

In late October, a buddy from my MacWeek days e-mailed me with this half-joking dig: "Apple's worth more than IBM. The Mac wins!!"

Social networks, blogs and other online forums can make or break a reputation these days, be it a company's or a product's. But the sheer volume of verbiage being posted is all but impossible to track. Unless, of course, you've got a tireless computer with clever software designed to extract meaning from content.

Patrick Byrne has biked across the U.S. four times. On a recent journey, he pedaled a recumbent bicycle. It's better than a road bike, he says, because "unlike a road bike, where your head is down and you're looking eight feet in front of you, you're sitting up on a recumbent, and you can see everything."

There are two kinds of people: optimists and pessimists. Sadly, I'm one of the latter. So I wasn't surprised when the vast majority of scientists concluded that human contributions to the buildup of greenhouse gases are a key component of global warming.

As part of the IT team at the Virginia State Police department in the U.S., Lt. Pete Fagan's job is to ensure that criminal investigators, police officers in the field and other authorities get the most accurate, timely and detailed crime-related information possible. Crime never stops, so the data volumes are huge, dynamic and getting bigger every day.

As part of the IT team at the Virginia State Police department, Lt. Pete Fagan's job is to ensure that criminal investigators, police officers in the field and other authorities get the most accurate, timely and detailed crime-related information possible. Crime never stops, so the data volumes are huge, dynamic and getting bigger every day. Criminal records often stretch back decades and include source material from countless systems in myriad formats. Multimedia content is a growing necessity. Metadata, a new necessity, is gobbling up precious disk space. Storage capacity, as you might imagine, is an ongoing problem for the department.