SOUTHWEST AIRLINES WANTED to give e-mail accounts to each of its pilots, flight attendants and ground-crew workers—critical employees who needed to be in the corporate loop but didn’t even have computers. The problem: It would have been prohibitively expensive to give all 30,000 of them accounts on the corporate mail system, Novell GroupWise. It wasn’t [...]

THE SQL SLAMMER WORM began its rampage shortly after midnight on Jan. 25, 2003. Within days, the insidious piece of code had infected more than 120,000 computers, slowed Internet traffic, crashed sites and even disabled ATMs, costing companies an estimated $1 billion in lost productivity worldwide, according to analyst firm Mi2g. The irony? Slammer exploited [...]

Open-source development tools offer low-cost, high-quality options. BY DYLAN TWENEY ANDRIG MILLER first got excited about Java’s possibilities in March 1998, when Sun Microsystems released the initial version of the Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) specification. But it was more than four years before Miller, vice president of technical architecture for office product supplier Corporate Express, was [...]

Intrusion detection systems can work, but they require time and moneyBY D.F. TWENEY ARKANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY is asking for trouble. The school is in the midst of a major network upgrade that will eventually bring gigabit-speed network capacity to every dorm room and office on campus—making the network a tempting playground for hackers, says Greg [...]

Strong JavaDespite Microsoft’s best efforts, Java is well-established in the enterprise. Can it hold its ground?BY D.F. TWENEY THIS YEAR, the programming language-cum-development platform called Java turned 5. It now stands as one of the world’s most popular computer languages—and it continues to grow. The number of Java programmers is increasing by 10 percent per [...]

Back to the Future By D. TweneySun first touted Java as a universal client-side platform—and even went so far as to develop brain-dead network computers (NC) that relied on Java for their operating system and on servers for their storage and smarts. But NCs flopped, Java applets on webpages are a dying breed, and client-side [...]