Apple Previews Mac OS X 10.5 'Leopard' Server
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Apple Computer is not a normal Unix vendor, to be sure, but then again, what would you expect? The company dabbled in Unix in earlier decades, and in recent years has shifted to a BSD Unix platform for its Mac OS operating system, which runs on laptops, desktops, and servers based on both Power and X64 processors. This week, at Apple's World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco, the company's top brass announced a "near final" version of Mac OS X 10.5, code-named "Leopard," which Apple is billing as the most significant upgrade to Mac OS. 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 >

Open Source Software Sales Pegged at $5.8 Billion by 2011
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

With open source operating systems, Web servers, databases, middleware, and development tools widely and freely available, it is hard to quantify the impact that these products have on the IT market at large. Most of the big open source software projects these days have commercial-grade support that is equivalent to that offered by the vendors of closed-source software, and it is here that open source projects get the money to pay at least some of the programmers who work on key pieces of the product that they sell support contracts for. 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 >