Stories about: Symbol

Katmai, the code name for Microsoft's imminent SQL Server 2008 release, comes from an Alaskan territory know for volcanoes, which may not be the best symbol for a database. So far, however, Katmai hasn't blown up on me. And the lower-profile Katmai seems like a good follow-on to Yukon, the code name for the gigantic SQL Server 2005 release.

Web-based office suites are coming into their own at last. For quite a while, Web-based suites -- which offered word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and other tools associated with desktop office suites -- were extolled not because they did these things well, but because they could do them at all. But the three major competitors, Google Docs, ThinkFree, and Zoho, have all made major improvements in recent months. They're becoming both broader, with more applications, and deeper, with more features and functionality in existing apps.

This interview is dedicated to the investigation of YACC, and to chatting with AT&T alumni Stephen C. Johnson. Johnson is currently employed at The MathWorks, where he works daily with MATLAB. Computerworld snatched the opportunity recently to get his thoughts on working with Al Aho and Dennis Ritchie, as well as the development of Bison.

Mozilla has touted Firefox 3 as faster and more secure than earlier versions of the open-source web browser. But there's another reason to look at the browser upgrade: it is highly customizable for individual users by utilizing the massive library of Add-ons - additional features that users can choose to install on top of the browser.

Some videos offered by advertising software maker Zango are likely being distributed without permission from the copyright holders, according to a spyware researcher.

Hospitals have been one of the main users of Wi-Fi networks, so far. Driven by a mobile workforce and an environment where cellular devices are usually forbidden, they have accepted centralised Wi-Fi switches before many other markets. Now a London hospital has installed a wireless network which claims to do away with the need for those centralised switches.

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

Assuming that Saturday's public walkaway by Microsoft doesn't prove just to be a high-risk negotiation tactic against Yahoo -- after all, the companies are rumored to have been talking about some sort of merger or acquisition for almost three years -- then what we have is a software vendor suddenly awash in tens of billions of unspent dollars that it can now lavish on other Internet firms.

Research examining the love/hate relationship Australian executives have developed with their BlackBerrys describes ownership of the popular e-mail device as akin to signing a Faustian pact.

London's Heathrow Airport Terminal 5 is in many ways a controversial building. However, there's no denying the grandiose scale of the £4.3 billion project. Britain's largest free-standing building, it contains a mega-shopping complex, an advanced baggage handling system... and a nifty wireless LAN.

You'd have thought that, by now, we would have settled the WLAN architecture wars. You'd think one architecture or another would have been declared the winner and that we'd all be buying basically the same product from a small number of vendors -- just as is the case with Ethernet switches.