On technology for the elderly
Toshiba has two teams working on "home life support robots" designed to aid Japan's aging population. (Japan's population growth is near zero and its citizens' average age is climbing rapidly.
Between the Lines
Larry Dignan and other IT industry experts, blogging at the intersection of business and technology, deliver daily news and analysis on vital enterprise trends.
Larry Dignan
Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic.
Andrew Nusca
Andrew Nusca is a writer-editor for ZDNet, contributor to CNET and the editor of SmartPlanet, ZDNet's sister site about innovation. In 2013, his coverage will focus on enterprise startups. He is based in New York.
Rachel King
Rachel King is a staff writer for ZDNet based in San Francisco.
Latest Posts
One man's corporate standard--another man's monoculture?
If you caught one of my recent blogs about zero-day exploits, a day in the life of a real IT manager, and how he's very worried about what he's seeing (in terms of what's getting through the cracks), then you also saw that Doc Searls is recommending that companies consider the idea of polycultures. There's no question that monoculture-based IT deployments increase the odds that a simple exploit can devastate an entire company, let alone the Internet.
Uh oh. Has the zero-day exploit tipping point finally arrived?
By way of linkage from Doc Searls comes this tale of woe from Mike, an IT guy in the trenches who, up until now, felt as though he was doing a pretty good job beating back the bad guys from the networks and users that he supports. Says Mike of the Windows installation he oversees: So, here it is in Mid-2005, we've got a continous stream of system patches, and a continous stream of virus definitions, most of our spam is gone, and we're behind a continously updated firewall.
More standardization work on enterprise information flow
Worth noting: The Open Group (you remember them) this week spurred on work to add additional (and needed) standardization to the interoperability of different but semantically equivalent data. The San Francisco-based vendor-neutral organization is working to create a registry that holds descriptions and identifiers of the venerable Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF).
Listen to Dan and David spar on tech
In the first of what we hope to be many episodes of The Dan and David Show, Dan and David kill 11 1/2 minutes arguing about everything that's on the tech front burner as the sultry summer winds down.
Akamai produces a zeitgeist meter
Near instantaneous feedback loops are one of the things we expected to see more of when the World Wide Web was a newbie. The Web offers true data capture on where people focus their attention and gives insight into how people behave online -- unlike other mediums where it's largely guesswork, after the fact.
The road to municipal Wi-Fi is paved with good intentions
The goal: To provide all the citizens of Philadelphia with Wi-Fi access to the Internet for around $20 per month. A worthy cause indeed, but to what end? And at what cost?
IBM, HP and BEA results point to software infrastructure resurgence
A world where all software is open source and free, right up and across the stack, including the data and the business apps ... not in any of our lifetimes.
Ex-AOLer gets one day in jail per 189K IDs stolen
Sending a clear message to anybody who comes to the aid of a spammer by illicitly securing electronic IDs, New York U.S.
Smashforce, mirrorforce and smashmouth at salesforce.com
Salesforce.com announced impressive results today and announced two new facets of the business--mirrorforce and smashforce.