Opinions

The US Air Force's Cyber Command might have some competition on its hands, this time from a sister service, with the official activation of the US Army's Network Warfare Battalion earlier this week.

When I appeared on CBC Newsworld last week to talk about Bill Gates' departure from Microsoft, they asked me whether I thought the company can survive without him. I tried not to roll my eyes.

What do I do if I suspect someone is controlling my PC? When my IP address has been changed without my knowledge? My boot-up process is getting harder unless I unplug the Ethernet cable and the CPU is at 100 per cent every time I open any program. There is also a new connection to the Internet that is between my connection and the net I know was not there a month ago. When I try to register my e-mail address the programs say it's invalid and does not match whatever it has to compare it to.-- Teresa Hurst.

Developers working with three tiered software architectures -- divided into presentation, business logic and data tiers -- cannot efficiently handle temporary application data that must be sharable between servers to provide high application availability and seamless scalability. But technologies, many of them open source, have emerged that deliver an important piece of infrastructure to manage this work-in-progress data.

Stories detailing the theft of personal information from enterprise databases have filled our news for years and are reaching almost unbearable intensity and frequency. Even back in 2005, it was reported that more than 55 million Americans had their personal data exposed in more than 130 major security breaches. A more recent survey found that nearly 90 per cent of Fortune 500 companies and government agencies have experienced security breaches (that they know of!)

With the economic downturn on everyone's mind, assumptions about job security come under question, and everyone starts reexamining their skills. There are lots and lots of valuable jobs performed in IT, but some skills are valued even more highly than others. With all the upheaval we're experiencing in IT, many new skills are in high demand or rapidly increasing in value. Here are my Top 7 skills that could help you not only keep that job, but secure an even better new job, positioning you to work on the next generation of IT applications and software products in the era of Web-delivered online applications.

In the late 90s I worked for a midsize ISP in the midwestern United States. Like any ISP at that time, we had dialup service, which meant we had a consumer-oriented tech support number. A friend of one of my co-workers was hired for dialup tech support. We'll call him Jake. He had some computer experience but no specific qualifications to do more than what he was hired to do.

There's an old show-business joke about a play that is failing. A potential theatergoer calls the box office to find out when the show starts, and the ticket agent responds, "How soon can you get here?"

I've used iPhones and I have an iPod Touch. I love the interface, and I dig the device. Initially, I had to resist the urge to just buy an iPhone and deal with these problems, but I didn't, opting to get a Nokia N95 instead. A year has passed, and I've realized that I definitely made the right choice -- the limitations of the original iPhone (and the iPhone 2.0) are simply too numerous. Perhaps I've been spoiled by my N95 (and truth be told, I'll be getting an N96 in the next few months), but no matter how you slice it, I've decided that the iPhone just isn't my cup of tea. Here's why:

With the cold an flu season most definitely upon us, there is much that the common cold can show us about network intrusion and what can happen once a single compromise has taken place.

One of the most talked about topics right now is innovation. Hardly a day goes by without some prominent publication featuring comments from consultants, academics, and now politicians about how the key to breakaway success is to out-innovate the competition.

Broadly speaking, there are two main reasons for companies to go green. The first is to reduce energy costs, thereby saving the company money. As one IT executive put it to me recently, "Green computing is all about saving greenbacks."

How you manage the inevitable letdown after an intense, creative project determines whether you'll keep or lose your best people.

Last week, Microsoft released its virtualization product, Hyper-V, to manufacturing. Previously, the company had promised to make a production-supported version of Hyper-V available to Windows Server 2008 customers within 180 days of the official release of the operating system itself. By releasing Hyper-V in late June, Microsoft beat its self-imposed deadline by about a month, although delivering less than was originally promised.

As the old saying goes, "When you're holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail." For me, this means more than just seeing a storage angle everywhere I look. Lately, it also means seeing the environmental impact of every product I review.