ShadowRAM: IT industry rallies for sick kids; The Shadow not on poor Paris’ list

COMMENTARY: Rumours, Truth and Innuendo in the IT channel.

IT industry rallies for sick kids

IT companies are once again being asked to contribute to this year’s IT Fund for Kids ‘Putting IT back’ campaign to raise funds to help seriously ill and autistic children. The campaign will be held in March and has two key components.

First, people who work in the IT industry are asked to donate a day’s pay (or nominated amount) through their payroll and each organisation is asked to match their employee’s contributions.

And a new ‘Know IT All’ Challenge will ‘pit IT industry minds together’ in an online IQ test that is followed up by an industry dinner on 1 April where company teams and individuals can put themselves to the test.

The IT Funds for Kids wants to raise at least $350,000 in 2005 and reverse the trend of falling contributions over the past four years.

The money raised would be a drop in the ocean given that the total income in the Australian IT industry in 2002-03 was a fat $90 billion, according to Australian Information Industry Association (AIIA) figures. C’mon guys, help out!

Amanda Wood at the Starlight Children’s Foundation has the details and can be contacted on
(02) 9437 4311 or at awood@starlight.org.au.

The Shadow not on poor Paris’ list

The Shadow was very distraught at being left off Paris Hilton’s hacked-and-put-on-the-internet T-Mobile telephone address book to care much about anything recently.

The star of television and bootleg internet videos -- who had the phone numbers for Vin Diesel, Twiggy and San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom -- had all her data thrown open for public consumption.

The US Secret Service was all over the case and had its agents contacting one offshore web host after another to have the personal information of the rich and semi-famous taken offline.

What the agents didn’t take into account, though, was that even though web hosts were quick to take down the hacked phone numbers from various websites, Ms Hilton’s hacked data remained in plain view on the web for most of the week through the magic of Google cache. Oops.

Word’s out that Lenovo is already looking to hire employees for the ‘new’ company once the IBM deal closes. But Taiwan-based publication DigiTimes reports that Lenovo has tapped contract manufacturer Foxconn to build a series of Lenovo-branded, Sonoma-based notebooks.

More Sun pink slips

Sun pink-slipped a number of employees in its software group last month, an extension of the 3500 layoffs the vendor announced last March. The current tally of layoffs at Sun in the past year is now 3600.

Insider sources told CRN that those who lost their jobs were the entire UK Solaris team, as well as the US Solaris testing team and other people in the software organisation, which is run by
Sun Executive vice-president of Software John Loiacono.

Insiders said the UK team was working on the Linux compatibility project that makes Solaris 10 binary compatible with Linux, a much-touted feature of Solaris 10.

Winners and losers for 2005

Gartner analyst Bob Hayward set the cat among the pigeons at ITJourno’s KickStart 2005 conference. His keynote address sounded like an obituary for technologies we thought were faring well.

Hayward was clearly not a fan of biometric technology, claiming that the number of false positives were too much of a security compromise. Tablet PCs were next in Hayward’s sights. With just 1.1 percent of the portable market, tablets remain firmly in ‘flying car’ territory for usefulness versus real world practicality.

Hayward was upbeat about VoIP. But who isn’t these days? Large corporations – that’s who, according to Hayward. The difficulty of converting from PSTN to VoIP scales into the very hard basket.

In consumer-land, wireless home networks will grow and grow, fuelled by the success of the MP3 format. Blu-Ray DVD and Sony’s PSP will be riding the same wave of success. Hayward referred to the blinding success of the iPod. Oh really?

Last, we can all stop adding an ‘e’ to the start of buzzwords. Thank e-God.

The ubiquitous e-word will be replaced by none other than u for ubiquitous --
‘U-Japan’ being where it will all begin, said Hayward. U-heard-it-here-first.