The last American DRAM maker Micron Technology named Mark Durcan CEO Saturday after long-time incumbent Steven Appleton, 51, was killed Friday morning when the small single-engine Lancair plane he was flying – one of those build-it-yourself kit things – crashed near company headquarter...

NAS devices offer an affordable compromise to investing in more expensive server solutions for small businesses. "Every small business with a network needs a server to share and secure data. NAS devices are an easy solution, but they don't provide the powerful features that would make ...

If you are in IT, I highly recommend reading this book. There are not too many systems being created today that I would consider more than interfaces to a data structure. Meaning most systems today rely on people to provide the intelligence behind them. The systems themselves are vie...

I have been a fan of the Martin Fowler Signature Series for a long time. This book fit into the series great and filled in a missing link in the series. One of the things I liked seeing was that the author does not think web services are a silver bullet. Right off the bat he warns tha...

IDC has joined Gartner in clipping its projections for global PC growth this year. It figures the number of widgets shipped will only be up 2.8%, down from a previous forecast of 4.2%, citing tablet cannibalization, cautious spending by SMBs and consumers and saturated mature markets...

RPost, the Registered Email outfit, has gone into the cloud business, calling its new widgetry the “new global standard for legal electronic messaging.” The RPost Cloud, for that is its name, is targeted at software applications, service providers, developers, IT departments, ye olde ...

From now through September 30, 2011, developers are invited to build a cool software application, web or mobile service around social, game and/or location-based networks, using InfiniteGraph to traverse the objects and relationships in their data. You could win up to $12,000 worth of ...

DS Data Systems UK Ltd. is pleased to announce the release of KonaKart v5.5.0.0, a Java-based eCommerce shopping cart application that provides an extensive set of features to enable retailers to successfully sell their products over the internet. KonaKart is a Java / JSP / XML based ...

Citrix has bought RingCube Technologies and its user personalization technology for virtual desktops. Price was not disclosed but the six-year-old company has raised about $26 million. RingCube is supposed to eliminate the tradeoff between user personalization and centralized IT mana...

Product Line Engineering Resource Kit is a kit of reusable assets made for use with SPARX EA on Software Product Line projects. I recently decided to update the Product Line Engineering Assets I reuse from project to project. In the past I reused a baseline project that contained a fo...

Almost every business leader will say that people are their most important asset, but few do anything about it. If you are going to take this principle seriously, then human capital planning is crucial. The Human Capital Plan is an important tool that organizations use to drive focused...

As the economic horizon continues to shift and belts tighten, small and medium-sized companies – that typically have between 10 to 500 employees and represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms according to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) – may wind up being so focused on ...

A robust benefits package can be the difference between a talented superstar choosing to work with you versus a larger, more established competitor. But with the cost of benefits rising each year, providing a benefits package that helps you attract, retain and motivate talented people ...

As an entrepreneur, you did not enter into business to become a human resources manager. You have no interest in contending with payroll twice a month, negotiating benefits for your employees, or worrying about how to comply with a litany of government regulations. You entered into bus...

Entrepreneurial execs know that they need to follow the rules, but they may not realize what decisions may lead to the two vital components that keep HR costs lower: 1. Increasing productivity 2. Minimizing human capital expenses The following white paper will focus on minimizing hu...

Picking through the white noise about outsourcing can be time-consuming and tedious. And while you’re busy doing all that research, your company’s payroll and benefits problems aren’t going anywhere. You need to outsource – but you’re not clear on the alternatives available to you. If ...

Intel is lacing up its jackboots to go Nvidia stomping. Seems we can expect the semiconductor giant to commercialize a better-than-50-core co-processor code named Knights Corner, a descendant of its sorta aborted Larrabee GPU adventure, in 2012-13 to compete against Nvidia’s Tesla GP...

A K Computer built by Fujitsu out of 68,544 eight-core CPUs at a reported cost of $1.25 billion and 9.89 megawatts of power is now the fastest machine in the world according to the Top5000 Supercomputing List. It benchmarks at eight quadrillion (8,000 trillion) calculations a second ...

As IT systems form the backbone of business operations, their performance plays a key role in business growth. Understanding this fact, organizations work toward obtaining best performance from the software systems to maximize ROI on IT. Now an application’s performance can be improved...

After an six-week trial in federal court, the former Massachusetts Speaker of the House Salvatore F. DiMasi, once one of the state’s most powerful politicians, was convicted Wednesday of trading $17.5 million worth of state contracts for kickbacks from Cognos, the Canadian BI shop that...

Acer, the world’s third-largest PC maker, says it’s going to write off $150 million in inventories in Europe and on accounts receivable in Spain after an internal audit found unidentified “abnormalities in terms of channel inventory.” It may be aging, unexciting widgetry. Acer chairma...

Convicted hedge fund felon Raj Rajaratnam wants the presiding judge in his months-long trial on insider trading charges to throw out the verdict that could send him to jail for a very long time. On Wednesday his lawyers renewed a motion to have him acquitted and his slate wiped clean...

Beset by a flagging consumer business and the bottom falling out of the public sector on which it’s ever so dependent coupled with competitive pressures, market share losses and pricing challenges in its core business, industry bellwether Cisco, the overextended networking giant, said ...

Intel Wednesday disclosed that it has perfected – and will be able to mass produce – a new kind of transistor for the first time in the 50-odd years since the computer’s basic building block was invented. It said the breakthrough, which basically puts a fin-like second story on the h...

One of the jurors in the high-profile Rajaratnam case has dropped out for medical reasons and has been replaced by one of the alternates, CNBC reported Wednesday morning. It will pretty much mean starting over again. The jury is already a week into deliberations over whether hedge ...

A New York federal jury got the Raj Rajaratnam insider trading case Monday around noon and so far no decision. It did ask for a bunch of the government wiretaps to be replayed on Tuesday and Wednesday and it’s supposed to deliberate for a few hours on Friday, then resume again Monday...

Lawson Software suckered the punters who had bid its stock up over 13 bucks a share in the last six weeks in anticipation of a bidding war or a sweetener after privately held Infor – now run by former Oracle president Chuck Phillips – put $11.25 a share on the table late at night the F...

A New York federal jury got the Raj Rajaratnam insider trading case Monday around noon. The alleged ringleader of a virtual syndicate using inside information to make illegal trades in a litany of high-tech stocks, the billionaire founder of the Galleon hedge fund is the only one of ...

Whether Microsoft has to pay little i4i what must now be about $300 million on interest alone for infringing its XML patent is now in the lap of the eight Supreme Court justices who heard oral arguments in the closely watched case Monday. As the Seattle Times says, it “could potentia...

Less than three weeks after Acer’s CEO and president Gianfranco Lanci quit in a disagreement with the board over what to do about the company’s flagging PC business, it has named Jim Wong president and also made him responsible for developing the mobile devices Acer needs to ward off A...

Serial entrepreneur Ron Wiener, whose Venture Mechanics venture arm incubated Swiss Post’s digitized postal mail partner Earth Class Mail, has spent the last couple of years putting together a new parcel carrier meant to challenge FedEx, UPS and the USPS in delivering B2C packages from...

Intel emerged from the first quarter whole, intact and justifiably giddy – despite the Sandy Bridge chipset recall, the supposed drop in PC shipments, the mobile challenge and the supply chain crisis in Japan – bragging Tuesday of record sales and earnings in a historically soft quarte...

Samsung is selling its money-losing hard drive business to Seagate Technology for about $1.375 billion, half stock, half cash, with Samsung winding up with about 9.6% of Seagate and a seat on the board. The sector is said to be another victim of the flash-bearing iPad and its ilk, wh...

PC shipments unexpectedly went down rather than up in the first quarter. Both Gartner and IDC promised they would be up as the economy improved. They were both fooled. IDC promised a modest 1.5% gain. Instead its data said demand dropped 3.2% to 80.5 million units worldwide. Gart...

The go-between who carried insider information about pending industry mergers between Wilson Sonsini lawyer Matthew Kluger and trader Garrett Bauer for 17 years pleaded guilty Monday to charges of securities fraud and conspiracy. He was identified as mortgage broker Kenneth Robinson,...

Intel has trotted out its latest 32nm Westmere-EX or E7 Xeons, which support up to 10 cores connected by a ring bus and are supposed to deliver up to 40% better performance than the eight-core Nehalem-EX chips they replace. Amusingly the things are considered so powerful they’re pitt...

Albert Einstein is arguably one of the most intelligent people who have ever lived. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to chat with him about business intelligence? I have. Mr. Einstein, thank you for taking the time to talk to me today. I work for a business intelligence ...

Texas Instruments said Monday after the market closed that it’s going to buy rival National Semiconductor for about $6.5 billion cash. Chip groupie Nathan Brookwood called it simply “the passing of an era.” TI is offering 25 bucks a share for the analog chipmaker, a hefty 78% premiu...

Mentor Graphics’ board Monday unanimously rejected Carl Icahn’s month-old offer to buy the joint for $1.9 billion, which translates into $17 a share. It says it’s too little. It also said that “Icahn’s proposal that Mentor put itself up for sale to a strategic buyer entails significa...

Trying to get its arms around the possible component shortages, postponed product launches, higher parts prices and the impact of iPad 2 on laptops, Barclays Capital has cut its PC growth projection for 2011 from 8% to 5% as a result of the disasters in Japan and weaker-than-expected d...