Colonizing Endicott
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

'All politics is local.' That was the lesson that Tip O'Neill, the legendary Speaker of the House of Representatives, learned when he lost his first political battle, which was to try to get onto the Cambridge, Massachusetts city council. It was the only election O'Neill ever lost, and he had pretty good job security in his district and in Washington until he retired in 1987. Like many of you in the IT sector, I am beginning to wish that all employment was local. And it just isn't. READ MORE >

PHP Forges Ahead; Consultant Propels Multiple Projects
by Dan Burger

PHP has had a place at the IBM System i table for the past three years and somewhere close to 12,000 System i application developers have sat down to taste the popular Web-enablement language. Some are eating it up. Last week, I spoke with Larry Nies, president of NSC, a company with a System i focus and a flair for PHP application development that depends on the Zend Framework. READ MORE >

i Shops Get Some Power Rewards Action, Finally
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Here's a special deal for Power Systems i shops that you can only know about if you are talking to high-level IBMers from time to time, as I get to do in the course of my job. I haven't seen an announcement letter on any of this out of IBM, but the deal I am about to tell you about went into effect on February 10 in conjunction with the Dynamic Infrastructure extravaganza that I told you about last week. READ MORE >

As I See It: A Novel Idea
by Victor Rozek

As the Feds apply money like defibrillation paddles to the chest of the seizing economy, some still-healthy bystanders (think IT vendors) are openly wondering why they don't just let the patients die. Of course, the onlookers wouldn't phrase it so fatalistically, but they question the strategy of rewarding failed companies for their greed and stupidity. READ MORE >