Stories about: Pinnacle

Your PC already plays music, and your hard drive holds every digital photo you've ever taken. And you probably watch hours of video on Hulu, Veoh, or YouTube.

Canada may have been the first industrialized country to reject funding a drug that treats the severest form of the most common type of vision loss in the developed world, were it not for a quickly-assembled Web campaign from the Canadian Institute for the Blind (CNIB).

There was a time when workstations occupied a highly competitive niche in the hardware market. In those days, some 10 years ago, companies such as Sun Microsystems, SGI, IBM, HP, and Dell competed fiercely to deliver the top desktop systems characterized by powerful graphics and processing engines. An added element to this competition was the vendors' reliance on vastly different processor architectures to deliver the knockout performance. A decade later, the market segment is significantly different.

The bad news just doesn't seem to end for Yahoo. As the Internet portal prepares to fend off a proxy fight by billionaire investor Carl Icahn, new research from comScore concludes that for the first time, Google has overtaken Yahoo as the most-visited Web site in the US.

You've heard of a Microsoft Certified Professional. Perhaps at one time you've even dreamed of being a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (MCSE). You took one exam after another at a Microsoft testing center to reach this honored and prestigious pinnacle, then battled your way to prove to your employers (or future employers) that you had what it takes to administrate their Microsoft-oriented network.

If you believe the documentation, the white papers, and the news releases, iTKO's recently released LISA 4 is an SOA testing tool. That descriptor, however, is modesty riding on the back of the still trendy acronym "SOA" because LISA goes well beyond testing what are typically understood to be SOA components: Under one roof, it houses the abilities to test Web and Java applications, the ESB (enterprise service bus), JMS (Java Message Service) systems, EJBs, databases, combinations of the above, and -- oh yes -- Web services.

Sun announced Tuesday that its US$1 billion deal to buy open-source database vendor MySQL has closed, and with the news came a bold proclamation from Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

International Data Group (IDG) Monday relaunched an online-only version of The Industry Standard, once known as The Bible of the Internet economy, with a new publishing model that includes editorial content, a community-driven prediction market and social networking components.

A quick scan of almost any IT department -- from the trenches to the corner office -- confirms it: Women who embrace technology as a lifelong career remain a rare breed. To be sure, opportunity for women in technology has advanced in the past few decades, as have education initiatives aimed at leveling the playing field, but for every woman rising to prominence or embarking on a profession in IT, there seems to be another opting out of her career in technology.

Not many products truly deliver what they promise. Scalent V/OE (Virtual Operating Environment) 2.0, however, comes as close to keeping its pledge as anything I've seen. Scalent is attempting -- and succeeding -- at reaching the pinnacle of datacenter management: a truly adaptive infrastructure.

Think of the great rivalries that you know: good vs evil: Hertz vs Avis; Duke vs UNC; Microsoft vs (in order) IBM, Novell, Netscape, AOL, Linux, Google, the Department of Justice, Sun, Sony, the European Commission and now, Cisco.