CenterBeam
Infoworld, 9/24/04: The whining class
Is it time to crack down on willfully clueless users who soak up support bandwidth?
By Chad Dickerson
Nearly a generation ago, in 1981, the debut of the IBM (Profile, Products, Articles) PC ushered in the personal computing era of business, a wondrous event in the history of computing that led to the immediate birth of one of the most thankless tasks in IT: desktop support.
…Like all resources, IT resources are ultimately finite and as end-user support services evolve to measurable and metered, per-employee, pay-as-you-go models (CenterBeam and Everdream are examples),…
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Outsourcing
Business Week, 10/4/04: Is Outsourcing On The Outs?
Not really, but companies are taking a closer look at whether it's worth it
The announcement sent ripples of anxiety through the tech world. On Sept. 15, J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. (JPM ) said that it was terminating a seven-year, $5 billion technology-outsourcing deal with IBM. For many, it's an article of faith that corporations will gradually hand off ever more of their technology operations to big service providers such as IBM, Accenture (ACN ), and Electronic Data Systems (EDS ). Yet here was the nation's second-largest bank taking its tech back because it was strategically too important to be left to an outsider. Is outsourcing losing its steam?
The short answer is no.
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IT Management
Infoworld, 9/24/04: Fixing what's wrong with backup
CentricStor and Data Domain take different routes to preserve corporate data
By Mario Apicella
It's no secret that the old-fashioned approach to data protection – backing up copies to tape -- often can't keep pace with the disproportionate information growth faced by many companies.
Not surprisingly, tape-based backup solutions are losing popularity due to many shortcomings, including lack of flexibility and scalability that numerous emerging data protection solutions are trying to address.
Recently, customers started to examine a number of different approaches to data protection, some of which extend the tape-based backup model, such as VTLs (virtual tape libraries), while others propose a completely different approach.
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Otherwise
eWeek, 9/26/04: MIT Works to Power Computers With Spinach
By Mark Pratt
BOSTON (AP)—"Eat your spinach," Mom used to say. "It will make your muscles grow, power your laptop and recharge your cell phone... " OK. So nobody's Mom said those last two things. But researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology say they have used spinach to harness a plant's ability to convert sunlight into energy for the first time, creating a device that may one day power laptops, mobile phones and more.
{Editor’s note: Then, for everyone who missed Fifth Grade Science…}
Photosynthesis, the process by which plants use light beams for energy rather than eating food like animals, has been known to scientists for decades.
{Another editor’s note: Well, actually, photosynthesis was rather well documented by 1796. While the word “decades” is certainly correct, the writer could have used the word, “centuries” to communicate more accurately.}
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