Stories by John Edwards

  • A hardened approach to system security

    Glenn Phillips, president of Pelham, Ala.-based Forté, says that the dedicated Windows workstations his company sells to hospital emergency room administrators must not only be secure, but absolutely tamperproof as well. After all, lives depend on the machines' flawless operation.

  • Minimize server-consolidation mistakes

    Joe Latrell, IT manager and lead programmer for GetMyHomesValue.com, a real estate data services company in Lancaster, Pa., knows that it's all too easy for even a knowledgeable and experienced IT veteran to make mistakes while managing a complex server-consolidation project. "You have to think about everything," he says. "It can be a minefield."

  • Does GPL still matter?

    Jeff Haynie reached a crossroads last summer. Haynie, CEO of Appcelerator, a firm that develops open source cross-platform application development software, made a decision filled with implications for his company's future. That decision: to toss away his upcoming product's Gnu General Public License (GPL), the best-known and most popular free software license, in favor of what he viewed as a more business-friendly alternative. "We initially started the product with a GPLv3 license and we decided last summer to move the license to Apache," Haynie says.

  • Small notebooks pose big threat

    They're highly portable, inexpensive, very popular — and a potential security nightmare. Running against the trend of mobile computers featuring progressively larger processors, memory, storage, screens and price tags, ultraportable notebooks promise to streamline and simplify their users' lives. Easy to carry, capable of running only a handful of modest applications and affordably priced, ultraportables have emerged over the past year or so to become one of the hottest mobile computing trends.

  • Financial crisis: The tech innovations at risk

    September 2008 will certainly go down as one of the blackest months in Wall Street history. Venerable financial institutions such as Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and AIG abruptly vanished or were radically overhauled. Investors lost loads of money -- in some cases, fortunes -- and ordinary taxpayers are now finding themselves funding an industry bailout that could cost a staggering US$700 billion, perhaps even more.

  • Who provides what in the cloud

    The news that US telecommunications provider AT&T has joined the rapidly growing ranks of cloud computing providers reinforces the argument that the latest IT outsourcing model is well on its way to becoming a classic disruptive technology.

  • Google's unhappy Android developers

    For a long time, Google has led a largely blissful existence, fostering a widespread perception -- sometimes in direct contradiction to the facts -- that it can do no wrong. Yet the company's controversial Android mobile platform venture threatens to seriously dent this notion, at least with some of the people it needs most.

  • They want your body

    Once the stuff found only in James Bond movies, biometrics identification technologies based on biological features-is rapidly moving into the mainstream to help prevent unauthorized access to ATMs, computers, buildings and other important assets. Propelled by cheaper and better software and hardware, as well as enhancing security and eliminating pesky passwords, biometrics, many experts believe, will become increasingly popular during the next few years.