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.… Read the rest

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.… Read the rest

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 ready to put an EJB application into production.… Read the rest

Intrusion detection systems can work, but they require time and money

BY 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 Williamson, associate director of information and technology services at the Jonesboro, Ark.,… Read the rest

Strong Java

Despite 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.… Read the rest

Back to the Future

By D. Tweney
Sun 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.… Read the rest