Robert L Mitchell

Contactless payment cards, which use embedded radio frequency identification technology to complete credit and debit transactions wirelessly, may offer more security than the traditional magnetic stripe card, but they're not impervious to attack.

Arby's restaurants roll out support for contactless payment cards nationwide, both inside and at the drive-through

Bob DiAngelo, vice-president and CIO at MIB Group Inc., is facing the challenge of migrating off the mainframe. His company relies on an I/O-intensive application used to detect insurance fraud for more than 500 insurers in North America.

By some estimates, the total value of the applications residing on mainframes today exceeds US$1 trillion. Most of that code was written over the past 40 years in Cobol, with some assembler, PL/1 and 4GL thrown into the mix. Unfortunately, those programs don