New media

Opinion

That sinking ILM feeling

Information Lifecycle Management has been a storage buzzword in recent years, but recent research from TheInfoPro, a New York-based research firm, indicates that ILM is losing cachet as a solution to real-world enterprise storage...

Opinion

The business press turns on Second Life, and boosters fight back

The honeymoon between the business press and Second Life is officially over. Last year, outlets like BusinessWeek and CNet were only too happy to report on the frenzied business charge into the virtual world. "Virtual worlds abound...

Opinion

Harvard's virtual education experiment in Second Life

Right now, Second Life is not a great place to hold business meetings. I've written about this before, but I'll sum up some of the obvious problems: A poor UI, robust technical requirements, a steep learning curve, an inability to...

Opinion

Transforming 2D photos into 3D models

Courtesy of StumbleUpon, I happened across an interesting service called Fotowoosh that purports to turn 2D photographs into 3D models. The demo is very cool -- check out the European street scene with the church and the tree, and...

Opinion

Tech Dispenser: The human algorithm vs. the machine

If you are plugged into tech news like I am, you've probably bookmarked several of the tech news aggregators on the Web and visit them regularly, to see what's bubbling to the surface in terms of product news, debates, and trends....

Opinion

SNW In Focus, and a shift in the storage buzz

I haven't been to the Storage Networking World conference since 2005, but I am fortunate enough to be at the current show in San Diego. I am working with Lucas Mearian, Computerworld's online storage editor (and co-host for the...

Opinion

Putting too much trust in TurboTax

I have been a user of the TurboTax Web-based service for about four years now. I have found it to be quite convenient and easy to use. But working at Computerworld, and regularly reading articles about retailers, government agencies,...

Opinion

Second Life: 2D bridges and fragmented worlds

Last week, Intel invited me to California to participate in a panel about Second Life. The panel included a range of people who have participated in the virtual world, and some interesting conversations resulted. Many of the issues...

Opinion

Sophos to add Second Life to blacklists

Corporate users of Sophos' antivirus tools will, as of the end of this month, have the option of blocking their employees from spending time in Second Life. Sophos is enabling IT shops to add Second Life to their Web blacklists, for...

Opinion

Second Life's population problems

David Carr has written an article about Second Life: Is Business Ready For Virtual Worlds?" David is not the first person to write about doing business in Second Life, but he has managed to dig up some interesting information...

Opinion

Achievo's approach to finding talent in China

Last week for the Computerworld Weekly I/O podcast, I interviewed James Zhang, vice president of human resources for Achievo. This Silicon Valley company has capitalized on Western and Japanese firms' interest in outsourcing software...

Opinion

IT gets dragged kicking and screaming into Second Life

What's the deal with Second Life? More than 1.3 million people have joined the virtual world, which allows users to interact and experiment in a real-time 3D universe. A virtual economy has sprung up, based on the trade or outright...

Opinion

Is your company one of the best places to work in IT?

Computerworld's annual "Best Places To Work in IT" is one of the most popular features of Computerworld.com. Well over 150,000 people visited last year's collection of Best Places To Work articles, which included a feature, a full...

Opinion

Problems finding, keeping Chinese IT workers

Many foreign companies see China as a destination for overseas expansion. However, when it comes to IT expansion, Western managers should prepare themselves for struggles on several fronts. A Computerworld article by Maria Trombly...

Opinion

Desktop storage: How many GB do you need?

Robin Harris at the StorageMojo blog has an interesting post about storage of electronic files, on desktops or small networks at home. These are the typical files you might have for personal use (raw video footage, photographs) or...

Opinion

Subjectively ranking operating systems

How much better is Mac OS X than Vista? Or BeOS, compared to OS/2? Scot Finnie's article about Vista ("Visual Tour: 20 Things You Won't Like About Windows Vista") contains an interesting chart that attempts to answer these questions,...

Opinion

Microsoft Office 2007 Beta

If you're a regular user of Computerworld.com, you've no doubt noticed our site makeover. However, there's more to the new Computerworld.com than the bright yellow banner. Among a slew of technical and editorial tweaks is a...

Opinion

Premier 100 Resources

Once again, the Premier 100 conference is upon us. I missed the Golf Exhibition with Dan Boever, but I am very much looking forward to the presentations starting on Monday morning. There are about six I have marked off on my agenda,...

Opinion

RIM cries uncle -- is anyone surprised?

There's been a lot of anxiety over the past few months among the CrackBerry-toting crowd, as the possibility of a district court judge shutting down the nation's BlackBerries loomed. But was a shutdown ever a likely scenario? I...

Opinion

Three must-have iPod accessories

If you're one of the millions of people who owns an iPod, you may be wondering what else it's good for besides listening to music or watching video on the go. The answer: quite a lot, if you combine the functionality of a standard...