Spotlight Features

In an effort to trim costs, U.S. companies increasingly have been shipping work overseas, especially to India, China, Eastern Europe and South America. While this practice boosts the bottom line in the accounting office, it also raises the anxiety level of U.S.-based employees. However, not all IT j...

Buzz about WiFi has swelled to a dull roar this year. Ads for laptops highlight Intel's Centrino technology, which gives users wireless networking capabilities without requiring them to buy a separate PCI card. Across the United States, Starbucks enables customers to check e-mail wirelessly, and McD...

Gorging on enterprise infrastructure was de rigueur in the go-go 1990s, but a drop in capital spending has heralded the arrival of new methods of building out networks in small increments. In the storage networking arena, budget-conscious CIOs are focusing on such cost-cutting measures as utility co...

Flash animation -- once widely derided as a bells-and-whistles annoyance -- is quickly becoming ubiquitous, thanks to the prevalence of broadband connections and a freely distributed plug-in for nearly every major computing platform on the market. In fact, Flash technology, developed by Macromedia, ...

Part 1 of this article discussed the relative advantages and disadvantages of IBM's DB2 and Oracle's 9i software. However, IBM and Oracle are not the only vendors in the database race. Microsoft has seen tremendous growth in the last few years for its Windows-only SQL Server. "Microsoft leads all ve...

Although databases have been a fundamental component of the enterprise IT stable for decades, they now seem to be multiplying faster than ever before, both in number and in importance. Many enterprises now rely on hundreds or thousands of databases, and administering them has become a major challeng...

Under an interdisciplinary project collectively known as the Semantic Web, computer scientists around the world are working on ways to revolutionize the Internet. The researchers -- from Europe, Asia and the United States -- are developing standards, protocols and technologies that will advance the ...

Recently, a new value-added tax (VAT) law was enacted to level the playing field between Europe-based and U.S.-based companies in the European e-commerce market. Previously, U.S. e-commerce companies doing business in Europe had not been required to charge value-added tax, putting their European cou...

On paper, the allure of no-name PCs, or "white boxes," may seem almost irresistible. Today's typical white boxes are equipped with industry-standard Intel motherboards and processors and are usually cheaper than their branded counterparts. But if no-name hardware is such a bargain, why are so many b...

Macromedia Flash technology garnered a shaky reputation at the height of dot-com mania in the 1990s, when it was often associated with Web site splash pages that effectively barred users from accessing a site's useful content. But things have changed: Flash is now a nearly ubiquitous environment for...