Erin Joyce

NEW YORK — Ever since HAL, the self-aware computer, doomed the Discovery space mission in Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 sci-fi classic “2001: A Space Odyssey,” one of the movie’s key themes — man vs. machine — continues to drive debate over how much control we should cede to computers. As autonomic computing systems that can diagnose […]

NEW YORK — UK-based telecommunications giant BT and systems provider HP have hired each other for outsourcing services valued at about $1.5 billion over seven years. The companies will also join forces to offer a soup-to-nuts IT outsourcing menu to enterprises in the UK, Middle East and Africa. The alliance is the latest aimed at […]

HAWTHORNE, N.Y.– The head of IBM’s $13 billion software division has added his voice to the call for Java to become completely open-sourced instead of managed by its creator, Sun Microsystems. “There’s no reason for Java to become inconsistent,” said Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM’s Software Group. “And certainly there’s […]

IBM rolled another round of middleware packages targeted for vertical industries Monday, the latest in its strategy of providing software tools and middleware packages for specific sectors. This time, the packages are geared for government, consumer products and energy and utilities sectors, with unique connectors and codifiers that help independent software vendors (ISVs) roll out […]

Strong hardware sales and favorable currency exchanges helped boost tech bellwether IBM’s profits by about 16 percent during the first quarter of 2004, to $1.6 billion (93 cents per share). During the same time last year, IBM’s profit was $1.4 billion (79 cents per share). EPS rose by 18 percent. The results, which met expectations, […]

Worried that your IT job is going offshore? Trends suggest you might be. Gartner predicts that by 2010, 25 percent of traditional U.S. IT jobs will be done in emerging countries, up from roughly 5 percent today. If your job is at risk, you need to determine what to do about it. Veteran programmers have […]

NEW YORK — Online customer relationship management (CRM) software provider salesforce.com today launched a new suite of tools to help customers roll out highly customized in-house applications, part of its bid to replace specialized programming with drag-and-drop toolkits that create applications on the fly. The suite, part of its Spring 04 release, includes salesforce.com Studio […]

ATLANTA — Top executives of six major wireless service providers said the industry is a lot healthier than people think, but suggested they could do more if federal lawmakers eased some of the regulations in the 1996 Telecommunications Act regarding competition. But beyond agreeing that U.S. carriers are catching up to other global markets with […]

ATLANTA — Now that Verizon Wireless has pledged another $1 billion to expand its 3G data services based on its CDMA 1xEV-DO (evolution data only) technology, will other carriers be goosed into spending big bucks for “true” 3G upgrades? Not Sprint. Company officials told internetnews.com it is sticking with its plan to upgrade its 3G […]

The European Commission has fined Microsoft a record US $613 million (497.2 million euro) after it found the company abused its “virtual monopoly” with its Windows operating system and broke European antitrust law governing competition. EU Competition Commissioner Mario Monti said the EU found that Microsoft “has abused its virtual monopoly power over the PC […]

ATLANTA — The next big opportunity for the mobile computing industry involves the work of bridging gaps between a growing universe of networked devices, the CEO of chip and cellular giant Motorola said Tuesday. Without those connections, the concept of seamless mobility won’t be fully realized, Ed Zander told a keynote audience at the CTIA […]

Europe had its 3GSM World Congress in February to showcase cutting edge wireless networking advances with its dominant TDMA standard. Now, it’s CTIA Wireless 2004 conference’s turn in Atlanta to showcase how the United States and other global players are pushing 3G networking with the competing CDMA standard — and tackling the interoperability with different […]