Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

There I was, cruising along the Washington Beltway, when a radio ad for Qwest came on. Today, the company was pushing its broadband service using a “moving goods” metaphor. All went fine until a line that went something like this came on: “Compared to other bandwidth providers, Qwest can handle loads big enough for the […]

Linux 2.4 has arrived, and the technology is great. Its just too bad that technology alone doesnt make a success story. OK, Linux 2.4 can do serious enterprise computing lifting. With it, you can run up to 32 Pentium-class processors using symmetric multiprocessing (SMP). Come the day Itanium is really released, Linux will be the […]

Its time to turn back the clock at Corel. The embattled software company has a new survival plan: Surrender its forays into the Linux distribution business and return to its roots in end-user application development. Derek J. Burney, Corels new president and CEO, believes in the “power of Linux” and wants the company to move […]

It sounds so good. All your customer has to do is call, tack a $39.95 monthly charge to his credit card, and hell get instant DSL service. No fuss, no muss, no service call. Does it sound too good to be true? It is. I decided to take Verizon Online up on its offer. Verizon […]

Broadband was supposed to be a booming business, but someone forgot to tell the DSL service providers. Mounting financial losses, funding shortages, logistical problems and fierce competition from the Baby Bells is ringing a sour note for major DSL providers (a.k.a. DLECs, for data local exchange carriers). Indeed, Covad Communications, NorthPoint Communications and Rhythms NetConnections […]

Were used to thinking of gigabit Ethernet as the technology of choice for linking together Fast Ethernet switches, locking together storage area networks and binding servers into clusters. It can be more. Much more. Companies like Extreme Networks and Foundry Networks are taking Gigabit Ethernet from the back office to the wide area network (WAN). […]

TurboLinux and IBM have struck a global distribution and support agreement that enables TurboLinux to offer its customers IBMs entire Linux software line. Specifically, TurboLinux will sell and support such products as DB2, WebSphere, Lotus Domino, Tivoli Framework and IBMs Small Business Suite for Linux. This is not the first such deal, though. IBM made […]

My buddy Jack the CIO is as unhappy as I was when I watched the Oakland Raiders make mincemeat of my Miami Dolphins earlier this month. He had had a big 2001 budget ready, complete with a corporate W2K server rollout and a half dozen senior-level hires. Then, his firms board had a “come-to-Jesus” meeting […]

Quiz time. Everybody put away your books and notes. Who, in the pages of the New Yorker magazine, recently said of Bill Gates, “I think he has a Napoleonic concept of himself and his company, an arrogance that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses …” Then, went on […]

Would you want to see a virus crawl into your PC from a message? Of course not, and neither do your users. Unfortunately, many corporate customers shrug their shoulders at labor hours lost because of a viral infection. That should not continue. The International Computer Security Association says 87 percent of virus infections occur via […]