Stories about: OFT

If the doomsayers prove right, throngs of laid-off tech workers will soon be competing for only a handful of available jobs. Technical certifications, once thought to be the ticket to higher pay and more prestige, may be needed to simply avoid the unemployment line. The trick is to get the ones that will really help keep or land that job, since it turns out many certifications won't be all that useful.

The long, oft-baffling "teaser" ads" by Microsoft featuring Jerry Seinfeld and Bill Gates that kicked off two weeks ago are abruptly ending, the company said late Wednesday, as part two of its US$300 million Windows marketing rehab campaign begins.

While reading outsourcing horror stories may be somewhat entertaining, especially if it hasn't happened to you, it's even better to learn from the mistakes of others.

Computerworld is undertaking a series of investigations into the most widely-used programming languages. Previously we have spoken to Alfred v. Aho of AWK fame, S. Tucker Taft on the Ada 1995 and 2005 revisions, Microsoft about its server-side script engine ASP, Chet Ramey about his experience maintaining Bash, Bjarne Stroustrup of C++ fame, and to Charles H. Moore about the design and development of Forth. In this interview, Computerworld ventures down a less series path and chats to Don Woods about the development and uses of INTERCAL

Microsoft has unveiled a new program that allows its larger customers to combine separate product licensing agreements under one master contract, which could help them to get bigger volume discounts.

Some of the most oft-repeated comments attributed to Bill Gates through the years were not uttered by Bill Gates. Take for instance "640K ought to be enough for anybody," which he supposedly said in 1981 to note that the 640K bytes of memory in IBM's PC was a significant breakthrough. Or his alleged comment that if General Motors "had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving [US]$25 cars that got 1,000 miles per gallon."

Microsoft's plan to include ODF support in its Office suite next year reflects continued challenges for the OOXML file format, as the industry moves ahead with adopting ODF and sorts out OOXML's troubles.

The late science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously said that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

Unified communications offers the potential for anywhere, anytime connectivity between employees and the enterprise. But as the InteropLabs hotstage team found in piecing together more than a dozen commercial and open-source voice, data and messaging platforms, the technology is still at a relatively early stage, and today represents more promise than practice.

With stories surfacing on news channels regularly about lost or stolen data or the ability to recover data from discarded or resold computers and their hard drives, we decided to look at some cheap methods of removing that sensitive data from your hard drive permanently. And, what better place to look than YouTube?

The planned successor to the embedded version of Windows XP, due from Microsoft two years from now, may bypass Windows Vista and instead be based on the oft-maligned operating system's own successor, which is codenamed Windows 7.