Stories about: Plan B

Rick Hill won't say where he launched his "wardriving" balloon on Friday, but he will tell you that it got a pretty good look at about 370 wireless networks, while scanning up and down the Las Vegas Strip.

USB flash drives are very small, very portable, very convenient -- and very easy to lose. In fact, the question to ask these days isn't how to avoid losing your flash drive, but how to make sure your data is safe when you do. As a result, Computerworld decided it was time to look at seven USB flash drives that are outfitted with security features to keep your data safe.

Perth-based financial services firm Plan B has installed link management appliances to balance incoming traffic between its two ISPs.

As any e-mail administrator will tell you, managing the content of the constant flood of incoming and outgoing messages is only half the battle. The sheer volume of e-mail, coupled with the increasing size of files that users want to send, also puts a staggering load on the network and servers. At the same time, end users are resisting attempts to limit the size of their in-boxes, demanding the right to stash gigabytes of mail and attachments on the server. IT clearly needs a strategy to manage the e-mail flood.

After falling on hard times and into the hands of receivers Comindico's customers are standing by their IP network and service provider despite attempts from competitors to prize accounts away.

There's been no one to challenge IBM's unprecedented mainframe monopoly since Big Blue ran off the last of the PCMs years ago when it got light years ahead of them on the silicon front, forcing them to close up shop and slink away.

Munich Reinsurance's regional IT executive Udo Bauermann shaers his IT experiences with Computerworld editor David Beynon.

Imagine a very, very large corn field. Think about a field the size of a large city, or perhaps a factor of ten bigger than that. Now consider how you would harvest the ripe corn in that field.

When Hewlett-Packard Co. announces its quarterly earnings later this month, analysts and customers will be looking for further evidence that the Compaq merger is bringing the benefits that Carly Fiorina promised when she aggressively stumped for the deal in the fall of 2001. So far the results look promising.

Microsoft plans to push back the next major release of its operating system, codenamed "Blackcomb," to 2005, because it fears that technology it plans to include in the release could bring it further into conflict with antitrust regulators, various industry analysts said.

No one at Webvan's San Diego operations saw it coming. In mid-January, four months after acquiring rival HomeGrocer.com, Webvan was set to unite the two most powerful online grocers under one brand and one technology platform. It was a milestone, the first step toward the efficiency the companies had promised Wall Street at the time of the US$1.2 billion merger. HomeGrocer's San Diego warehouse would switch over to Webvan's technology, and other facilities would follow.