The i5 515 and 525 Versus the Windows Competition
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Now that the user-priced System i5 515 and 525 servers have been in the market for a while, the time has come to see how they stack up to the competition and to prior generations of System i5 machines. While the user-priced machines are capable of supporting legacy RPG and COBOL applications using the 5250 green-screen protocol, IBM is trying to position these machines for new workloads, like Java and PHP, as well as old ones, and is therefore trying to gauge their performance on the basis of those new workloads. READ MORE >

CIOs Get Ready to Hire in the Summer
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The IT business took it on the chin seven years ago after spending like a drunken sailor on dot-com businesses and application modernization efforts, and in the wake of the global recession after the September 11 terrorist attacks, companies not only stopped hiring IT staff, they put projects on hold and, in some cases, they let go of employees they could no longer afford to keep. What a difference six years makes. According to Robert Half Technology, which has been monitoring IT hiring practices since 1995, the increase in expected hiring in the third quarter is the highest since the fourth quarter of 2001. READ MORE >

One More Time: There Is No Gender Pay Gap
by Nate Viall

During April 2007, several national news organizations once again highlighted the much ballyhooed gender pay gap. Women appear to make only 81 cents on the dollar compared to their male counterparts. In addition, the April Behind the Pay Gap report from the American Association of University Women highlighted a purported disparity between salaries earned by men and women. One year after graduation, women appear to be paid only 80 percent of what men are paid, the report found. After 10 years, their pay dropped to 69 percent. READ MORE >

As I See It: The Ne'er-Do-Well's Guide to Enlightenment
by Victor Rozek

The Catholic Church counts it as a grievous sin. Kierkegaard thought it was the only true good. Agatha Christie believed it was the mother of invention. Gandhi found it to be a delightful but distressing state. Granni Nazzano called it the hobby that naturally rules out all others. And Mortimer Caplan thought it was the habit of resting before you get tired. The "it" that inspired so many unique and contradictory assessments has almost as many names as it has descriptions. In more formal times it was known as sloth, idleness, or indolence. But as the world lightened up, so did language and now it's mainly referred to as just plain laziness. READ MORE >