Stories about: Continuum

Jeff Ton has survived the booms and busts of the IT industry during his 28-year career as a programmer, consultant and manager. A year ago, Ton left ailing Thomson Consumer Electronics for a chance to lead the IT department at Lauth Property Group, a fast-growing U.S. commercial real estate developer that doubled its revenue last year to US$592 million. The company has 22 permanent locations, plus dozens of temporary sites, that are networked via everything from DSL to satellite technologies. Ton spoke with Carolyn Duffy Marsan about how he is building Lauth's IT staff and infrastructure while preparing for the inevitable downturn. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

At the 2004 Open Source Convention (OSCON), Jim Hugunin, the creator of Jython, made the dramatic announcement that he would be joining Microsoft to pursue his latest project, IronPython, a Python implementation for the .Net CLR (Common Language Runtime). The timing was awkward for OSCON -- nothing chills the room like news that an open source hero is emigrating to Redmond -- but it was opportune for me. I had just written the keynote talk that I would deliver a few days later, at the Vancouver Python Conference; it ended with a plea to consummate the marriage between popular dynamic languages, such as Python and Ruby, and the dominant managed runtimes, namely the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) and the CLR.

Jason Hamlett was caught by surprise last December when an oil refinery explosion destroyed his company's new office space in Hemel Hempstead, England, and caused its existing offices and data center to go offline for 48 hours. The ferocious Buncefield fire burned for several days and was the largest to hit Europe in peacetime.

Richard Green, the Sun Microsystems executive who will lead the company's effort to open-source Java, says a major issue with any such move is the longstanding fear that Java will fracture and follow a path similar to Linux. Despite that concern, Sun announced its Java open-source intentions plans this week at JavaOne, which the company said was attended by about 15,000 people. Green, Sun's vice president for software, said the company's default position will be to work through any problems raised by open-sourcing. Sun has not yet announced a timetable for the release or has how Java will be licensed as open-source.

Looking to encourage and inspire a new generation of IT professionals, IBM has joined with the Computer Science Teachers Association (CSTA) to create two computer science courses for free use in high schools around the world.

When he first joined The AES, a power company based in Arlington, US, George Coulter traveled the world for four months straight, meeting with business and IT leaders in 15 countries.

With storage playing a greater role in companies' asset and disaster recovery planning, and the rapid changes in the technology, it is critical that storage-savvy IT professionals keep their knowledge and certification ahead of the game.

Business continuity plans have to be prescriptive, actionable and specific if they are to work in the real world. It is all about having the right plan. And like all great plans you have to start at the beginning. Michael Crawford reports

Technology isn't going to protect e-commerce customers -- stronger government regulation is what will get the attention of online banks and merchants, forcing them to stop being casual about security, said Bruce Schneier, founder and chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security.

Last year both end users and vendors touted grid computing as the new paradigm in flexible, efficient computing. But will 2005 see widespread adoption of the technology? Rodney Gedda reports

This year looks to be brighter for information technology. Budgets are thawing. And numerous new products — many of them relatively inexpensive — beckon with promises to improve the performance, reliability, security, manageability, or profitability of your infrastructure. Which ones will really deliver? Here’s the roundup of 2003’s key IT trends and the picks, from the test centre of Computerworld’s sister publication InfoWorld, of the most innovative and effective products for 2004.