Robert L. Mitchell

Don't get me wrong. At heart, I'm a technology enthusiast. But there are a few things about the IT industry that just make me crazy.

In a wide-ranging keynote at Gartner Inc.'s recent IT Expo, Intel Corp. chief executive officer Craig Barrett slammed the state of California's political system as

Videoconferencing used to require users to adjourn to specially designed rooms filled with complex technology that worked over satellite, Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) or other private network services.

When it comes to IT security, good technology can't protect an organization against bad policy.

Network Appliance Inc.'s NearStore ushered in the era of using inexpensive, Advanced Technology Attached (ATA) disk arrays for disk-to-disk backup or secondary, near-line storage.

Economic times may be uncertain, but that hasn't held back Tony Scott. As chief technology officer at General Motors Corp. and head of the company's Information Systems & Services group, he is pursuing IT infrastructure initiatives ranging from wireless LANs to content caching.

A new generation of relatively low-cost disk-to-disk backup systems is reducing the restoration task to a 30-second point-and-click affair. It

Just as wireless LANs based on 11Mbps 802.11b (Wi-Fi) technology have started to catch on in the enterprise, vendors have begun shipping products based on the new 802.11a specification (Wi-Fi5), which is two to five times faster, depending on transmission distance.