Editor's note: On Feb. 20, IT manager and Network World columnist Ron Nutter was called into his boss's office and told he was being let go -- that day. Once the initial shock wore off, Nutter launched an aggressive search for employment in the Kansas City area. Over the next 76 days, Nutter applied for 85 jobs, and had 16 interviews before landing a new position. He chronicled the job search in a daily blog. Now that he has had some time to reflect on the experience, Nutter offers these 20 tips for surviving a layoff.

1. As you're being laid off, take notes

[ Need to clean house where you work? Read InfoWorld's report on How to fire an IT person. ]

This can be difficult to do, because losing a job can be a very emotional experience. Nevertheless, while everything is still fresh in your mind, write down all the details you can remember. For example, I was told I would be paid for the full two-week pay period plus my remaining vacation and sick time. When my last check arrived, there were discrepancies. Having written notes helped me when I went back and reminded my former boss and the Human Resources folks of their commitment.

2. Take some time for yourself

Take a few days for yourself. A traumatic event has just happened to you, and you need to get over the initial shock before you jump into the fray to search for a new job.

3. Review the paperwork from the company that laid you off

You need to attend to several important things rather quickly. One is finding out how to file for unemployment. Another is determining how long your company-paid health insurance will be in force before you have to consider paying for COBRA insurance.

4. Update your résumé

This is something we should all do, but it doesn't always get the attention it should. I was told a long time ago that a résumé should be more than two pages with a maximum of three bullet points per employer. That may work in some cases, but not in all.

I have found that some recruiters and employers use software that counts how many times a particular word, such as Cisco, or a word describing a certain type of experience appears in a résumé. I can attest this is happening to a degree. During a previous job search, a recruiter had me rewrite my résumé just about completely to list specifically all the different types of Cisco hardware I had worked with. It was interesting to note how the callbacks increased after I did that.

You may find it necessary to keep more than one type of résumé, each tailored to the type of job you are pursuing.

5. Get a handle on monthly bills

Although I had a little money put by for a rainy day, I went through my recurring bills to see if there was any room for saving more. I found that by shopping around for automobile and homeowners insurance, I could keep the same coverage and reduce both bills. I had been thinking about doing this for a variety of reasons, but being unemployed helped push it to the top of the list.

6. Cut food costs

If you live by yourself, this will be easier to do. If you have a family, everyone will need to sit down and understand they will all have to help out until you can get another job. Not that I ate out a lot while I had a job, but I did eat out sometimes. When I was laid off, that stopped. The one treat I allowed myself each week was to stop by a local pizza place that made the pizza but you took it home to cook in your own oven. I made sure to take a coupon with me each week to take a couple dollars off the cost of the pizza.

I also shopped at my local Costco and bought the food I needed in bulk so I had to shop only once a month. Having a freezer make this easier to do. For example, I would buy a 3 to 5 pound tray of fish, which I would portion out into individual meals using a vacuum-sealing machine. Another suggestion: Buy several gallons of milk at one time and put them in the freezer. Pull one gallon out at a time, and it will still be good. I have been doing this for more than a year and have yet to notice a difference in the taste.

7. Look at health insurance options

Your company-supplied health insurance will come to an end. My former employer's health insurance ended a few days after I was separated from the company. Worse yet, I wasn't due to receive COBRA information until after my company health insurance had lapsed. Because my previous employer also had been processing my claims, I wasn't comfortable with it having any further access to my medical records. Doing a little research on the Internet, I found a single health-insurance policy from Blue Cross Blue Shield for half the price of the COBRA policy my former employer was going to offer me and with better coverage.

8. Check with your financial adviser

I have worked with an excellent person at Smith Barney for several years. Because I knew I might need to access my credit line to help pay bills, I wanted to give him a heads-up on my situation so he could be looking at other options to keep the use of the credit line as a last resort.

9. File for your income-tax return refund

Another thing to consider, depending on the time of year you are laid off, is to use your income-tax return as a one source of money for paying bills. I haven't been a fan of paying for electronic filing, but this year I did spend the money so I would get the tax refund a little sooner.

10. File for unemployment compensation

This is something I delayed doing a little bit -- partially because of pride and partially because I didn't anticipate job-hunting to take more than three months. As someone pointed out to me, you have earned this money and you should take advantage of it. In my case, filing was complicated because I had moved from another state in the previous 18 months. The unemployment folks go back that far in figuring out where someone should file for unemployment. That potentially had me talking with three states' unemployment departments. I spent several days on the phone with the two states that would be involved in my situation. As painful as it may be to deal with this part of your unemployment, the sooner you start, the sooner the money will come in in to help pay the bills until you get another job.

11. Check the job boards

During my job search, I looked at CareerBuilder, Craigslist, Dice and Monster. I found no job leads from Monster in my career area. Several of the HR folks I talked to during the process told me they used Monster very little, in part because of the higher fees the site charged for posting a job compared with other job boards, and in part because of the generally poorer quality of applications they received from Monster. I found some new job-postings on Dice, but with a significant number of jobs cross-posted on other boards, I didn't find Dice to be a significant source of potential job leads. One source I wouldn't have thought to check was Craigslist. More than one recruiter told me he had good results from posting jobs on Craigslist. Set aside time each day to do this.

12. Make the job boards work for you

Dice has a feature where you can make your résumé searchable by companies and recruiters with a position to fill. I got some calls from that. CareerBuilder recently followed suit. Dice lets companies and recruiters repost a job every day so that it looks new, but in some cases this makes identifying the jobs a little harder. Turn the tables in your favor by making changes to your résumé periodically so that when it is searched it will show up as new or changed; this could get you looked at by a company or recruiter that might have passed you by the day before.

13. Prepare for the interview

One thing I have done when preparing for an interview is to research the company, as well as the companies, sectors and industries it serves. If it is a publicly listed company, read some of its press releases from the the past quarter or two to see any changes that have occurred and new directions it is heading in. The responses I received from several companies indicate it makes a good impression that you are interested in finding out about the company before an interview. It may seem like a small thing or something that you should do anyway, but there seem to be quite a few people looking for a job who don't do this.

In addition, have several copies of your résumé with you at an interview. This becomes even more important once you see your résumé as the client or recruiter does after they have downloaded it or printed it out from the job-board application: The formatting is pretty much gone. To make matters worse, the résumé's paragraphs or bullet points will look like a series of poorly written, run-on sentences that may cause distinctive or unique information about you to be overlooked.

14. Deal with recruiters

I encountered a couple of recruiters who would give used-car salesmen a bad name, but as a general rule, I found them pretty decent to work with. Several positions I was approached about were not on the job boards and sometimes were from only a single recruiter. The trick I learned was to identify the same end-job when it came from different recruiters. One situation you want to avoid is having more than one recruiter pitching you to the same client for the same job. Most recruiters usually will tell you early on who the actual end-client is.

15. Accept help from family

Your pride may make it hard for you to accept help, but keep in mind that your unemployment affects them to a degree as well. Depending on their ages, your unemployment may be a new thing to them. There was a time -- unfortunately long-gone now -- when the company you first worked for was the only company you worked for in your entire career. How much help you accept from family is something you will have to decide. Look at it this way: Whatever help they do give you is that much less you will have to spend for food.

16. Keep good records

This suggestion came from a letter from the unemployment department telling me I would need to provide some basic information. I set up a spreadsheet in OpenOffice with three tabs. At the first tab I kept track of the jobs I had applied for by date, source of the job, how the job was applied for, company name if known, job name, contact name and job number if provided. At the second tab I kept track of the recruiters I talked to; HR folks I had contacted for the jobs to which I had applied directly; and anything else, such as job fairs I attended. This information was helpful when I was audited by the unemployment folks to make sure I was looking for another job. At the third tab I recorded when I filed my unemployment claim each week, when I received the check, and the check number and when it was deposited.

17. Get your personal records in order

When you accept a job offer, one of the things you will have to deal with is the I-9 form that proves you are allowed to work in this country. If you haven't seen the I-9 form lately, get a copy so you can see what documents you will need. If you can't find your Social Security card, now would be an excellent time to order a replacement. This will take several weeks to process. The sooner you receive it, the sooner you will have it ready to produce when you start your new job. Another document you want make sure you have, even if you don't need it for the I-9, is a copy of your birth certificate. This might take a little while to get. I didn't know until recently that, depending on when and/or where you were born, there are two types of birth certificates -- one the hospital does and one that's done when the birth is registered with the local authorities. You will want to get a copy of the certificate on file with the local authorities.

18. Don't wait for the phone to ring

This may be one of the harder things to do. Keep in mind that recruiters and HR types move at their own pace, which can be very slow. When you first apply for a job, it could be several days or more before you get the first contact. Waiting for the phone to ring will have you climbing the walls in short order. Sometimes you will get a call within hours of applying for a job, but expect that to be the exception. There are always things you can do while you wait for movement on the job front, and some of them may be done at little to no cost -- that little bit of touch-up painting you have never gotten around to, or the trimming around the yard that always needs to be done. You need to stay active -- don't just sit around and watch the clock move forward.

19. Get out of the house at least once a dayAt some point you will run out of things to do around the house or will simply need to get out. There will be the occasional job fair, but that won't take a large amount of your time. You can knock on the doors of companies that you would like to work at, but with the price of gas hovering around $4 a gallon depending on where you live, that can be an expensive trip to make for an unknown return. Do some things you enjoy, such as going to a museum or sports game. The main thing is to get out to keep from getting cabin fever.

20. Never give up Don't leave any stone unturned. You just may find that a company that today passed you over in favor of another applicant may come back to you when that person leaves to move onto greener pastures. I never would have thought that could happen, but I have seen it happen twice in the past year.

Nutter is an IT executive in Kansas City. He is also one of the editors of Network World's IT Asked & Answered . He can be reached at nww@networkref.com .

When Apple launched its new App Store earlier this summer, the assumption was that scads of businesses would develop applications for their iPhone -toting customers. Although there are more than 60 apps in the App Store's Business category, virtually no big-name companies have bothered to cough up one of their own. Since Apple plans to make at least 40 million iPhones in the next year, many of which will no doubt end up being used in the workplace, what's the holdup?

Nick Halsey, vice president of marketing at business intelligence (BI) vendor Jaspersoft , says it's simply not worth the bother. "Our business users are using Safari to deliver JasperReports to them on their iPhone. While the effort to write the 100 lines of Java code to build an iPhone app is minimal, it's just not needed."

[ InfoWorld slideshow: Enterprise apps for the iPhone. ]

Halsey says Jaspersoft would be willing to create an iPhone app in response to customer demand, but there hasn't actually been any yet. However, he says it's likely that someone from within the user community will choose to make and submit an app on his own "as a fun project."

Chuck Dietrich, VP of Salesforce Mobile, says his company, Salesforce.com , has a different take on the usefulness of iPhone apps. Realizing that mobile professionals won't want to take the time to haul out a laptop and boot it up simply to look up a customer's order history, Salesforce Mobile provides the same information-and more-with less hassle.

Before launching its app, the company prioritized feedback and ideas from the user community to develop one that includes more than 60 percent of the features customers want most. While users can still access client information via the iPhone's native browser, Salesforce Mobile is a targeted app designed specifically for the mobile professional . "[It] allows iPhone users to access Salesforce CRM applications and more than 70,000 Force.com custom applications right from their iPhone," says Dietrich.

Dietrich sees iPhone apps as part of the natural evolution of mobile devices in the workplace. "From a historic standpoint, the mobile revolution began in the'90s with the mass adoption of mobile phones as a primary means of communication. Soon, mobile e-mail became a way of life in the enterprise. As consumers and professionals became more familiar with mobile devices, and as mobile devices became more like mobile laptops, end users increasingly desired and expected to be able to do everything from the mobile devices that they could do from their desks."

BI firm Oracle also couldn't pass up an opportunity to design an app specifically for the iPhone. Oracle Business Indicators lets users access their company's business performance information and manipulate the data based on what's most convenient for them.

Lenley Hensarling, general vice president of application development at Oracle, says, "It's not meant to replace a dashboard and analytical apps that have a whole bunch of drilldowns, but rather to give you handy access to core sets of metrics. We wanted to make usage and availability ubiquitous, and let users tailor the information to exactly what they want to see."

Indicators also makes use of the iPhone's native tools. "Since we support [the iPhone's] alerting mechanisms, you don't have to go hunting for information. You'll get alerted when data crosses a threshold that you or someone else has set."

Although Apple is famously picky about who gets access to the iPhone Software Developer Kit (SDK), Hensarling says developing an iPhone app was easy as pie. "The cool thing is that you're actually developing in Cocoa and the Mac OS environment, so in terms of the development environment, it's very mature and complete." He says they also never felt constrained during the development process because rather than try to shoehorn an app made for the desktop onto the iPhone, the team instead built Oracle Business Indicators from the ground up.

Salesforce's Dietrich agrees that building an iPhone app is a smooth process . "Thanks to the iPhone's robust development environment, we were able to develop, test and deliver Salesforce Mobile for the iPhone, all in less than three months," he notes. In fact, the process was so painless, the company plans to develop additional apps in the coming months. " Salesforce.com and Apple will continue to work closely to iterate and expand the breadth of functionality of Salesforce Mobile for the iPhone to expand the ways that enterprises can use Salesforce CRM and Force.com applications to improve the way they work."

Still, Jaspersoft's Halsey remains unconvinced. He says there is a greater demand for Web apps that can be accessed anywhere, regardless of device or browser. He points to the growing trend toward cloud computing as evidence. "What's more interesting to us in the enterprise, and where we see customer demand, is for Web 2.0 tools for reporting and analysis as well as for collaborating on making BI tools better," says Halsey.

Twenty-one months after its initial release, what do we know about Windows Vista? That home users hate it, businesses are uninstalling it and -- according to Gartner Inc. -- it's proof that the 23-year-old Windows line is "collapsing" under its own weight.

Meanwhile, predecessor Windows XP has belatedly become so beloved that it's garnering more calls for "unretirement" than NFL icon Brett Favre did in his wildest dreams this summer.

[ Get the analysis and insights that only Randall C. Kennedy can provide on PC tech in InfoWorld's Enterprise Desktop blog. And download our free Windows performance-monitoring tool. ]

But all of the griping about Vista and instant nostalgia for XP covers up a dry, statistical reality: XP itself was slow to catch on with users -- maybe even slower than Vista has been thus far. For instance, in September 2003, 23 months after its release, XP was running on only 6.6 percent of corporate PCs in the United States and Canada, according to data compiled by AssetMetrix Inc., an asset-tracking vendor that was later bought by Microsoft Corp. (That information was helpfully pointed out by a Computerworld reader.)

In comparison, Forrester Research reported that as of the end of June -- 19 months after Vista's November 2006 debut for business users -- the new operating system was running on 8.8 percent of enterprise PCs worldwide. Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel, who authored the report, wasn't impressed: He compared Vista to the ill-fated New Coke.

However, even Gartner, that prophet of Windows' doom, forecasts that Vista will be more popular at the end of this year than XP was at a similar juncture -- with 28 percent of the PC operating system installed base worldwide, vs. 22 percent for XP at the end of 2003.

"The uptake of XP was slower than people remember today," said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft in Kirkland, Wash. He noted that many IT managers "labeled XP a consumer-only upgrade" at first.

Vista's challenges echo those of Windows XPEarly opinions of Windows XP were remarkably similar to those that many users offer about Windows Vista today.

For instance, a Computerworld survey of 200 IT managers conducted in the fall of 2001, just before XP was released, found that 53 percent of the respondents didn't plan to upgrade their PCs, while another 25 percent were undecided. And in an informal poll of 25 users a year later, only four said they had started deploying XP.

"We have not moved to XP, and we have no plans to," one CIO said in 2002. "This is an upgrade that offers nothing to a business customer."

Another IT manager said that the cost of upgrading to XP was "very high" and that there wasn't "a lot of perceived value" in moving up.

Many companies had just finished or were still rolling out Windows 2000 when XP came along just 20 months after its predecessor. Few could get excited at the prospect of another upgrade, especially when the economy turned sour after the dot-com bust.

And although XP may seem svelte compared with Vista, at the time, it was considered by many to be a bulky resource hog that likely would bog down applications on older PCs.

As of March 2005, Windows 2000 was still running on almost half of business PCs in the U.S. and Canada, according to usage data compiled by asset-tracking vendor AssetMetrix prior to its acquisition by Microsoft.

"Vista really does parallel the situation with XP in a lot of ways," said Michael Cherry, an analyst at Directions on Microsoft.

Users loved Windows 2000, which was less than two years old when XP was released. And for many, XP didn't add enough to make them want to move up. "XP was really viewed as a glorified upgrade, not a new operating system in its own right," recalled Donnie Steward, CIO at ACH Foods, a Memphis-based maker of processed foods.

Then there were all the security issues. XP now is considered to be highly secure, but that wasn't the case in 2002. That's when LifeTime Products upgraded to the operating system after Microsoft released Service Pack 1, its first bug-fix update. "We used to say XP was like Swiss cheese -- full of holes everywhere," said John Bowden, CIO at the Clearfield, Utah-based maker of recreational equipment.

To try to fix the security problems, Microsoft developed a second service pack, which it pushed customers to adopt. But SP2 was such a major change that it broke applications -- lots of them, especially enterprise ones. That caused many companies to block updates to SP2 on their PCs for months until they could prepare for the mammoth upgrade.

To try to fix the security problems, Microsoft developed a second service pack, which it pushed customers to adopt. But there were two problems. First, not everyone was convinced that SP2 would be a security cure-all -- a view that was partly vindicated by later developments.

And second, SP2 was such a major change that it broke applications -- lots of them, especially enterprise ones.

"We consider XP SP2 to be a major release because of the nature of the enhancements," one IT manager told Computerworld in 2004. Such opinions prompted many companies to block updates to SP2 on their PCs for months until they could prepare for the mammoth upgrade.

Another Forrester report, by a different analyst, cites a "new trend" of upgrades from XP to Vista -- and says that skipping Vista to wait for Windows 7 would be a mistake.

Some of the reasons cited for Vista's supposed doom are unique to the new operating system. There's the widespread exercising of downgrade rights by users who purchase PCs with Vista but then revert to running XP. Mac OS X has taken some market share away from Windows over the past year. Cloud computing technologies offer new competition. And the scheduled 2010 arrival of Vista's successor, which Microsoft is calling Windows 7, looms on the horizon. Both Steward and Bowden said they will likely skip Vista entirely and wait for Windows 7.

But other strikes against Vista are ones that XP has also faced and overcome, such as a tottering economy (the dot-com bust, in XP's case), the belief that it was a piece of "bloatware," accusations of price gouging by Microsoft, and apathy or revolt by end-users.

For most users, "change is always bad," said Merrie Wales, information systems manager in the human resources department in Glenn County, Calif. Wales, who oversees 250 desktop PCs, said that only a tiny portion of her users welcomed a move to Vista this spring. But, she noted, a similar sliver of users was happy when the agency finally upgraded to XP in 2006.

And the Vista rollout "has turned out much better than we anticipated," Wales said. "It's not a bad OS. There are big improvements under the hood."

There also are other factors that brighten the long-term outlook for Vista.

1) Virtualization is easing compatibility problemsLike Vista, Windows XP has an application compatibility mode that simulates older versions of Windows. But it's not perfect. And Vista gives more options to IT managers who are stymied by drivers or applications still breaking.

For instance, Glenn County runs Vista in standard mode, instead of administrator mode, on all of its PCs for security reasons. But the human resources department had a key application that could run only in administrator mode. To solve that problem, Wales said she used Microsoft's application virtualization technology to create a self-contained app package that runs as an administrator inside a virtual machine but doesn't require end users to possess admin credentials.

2) Deploying and managing Vista is easierMore advanced deployment tools and systems management software, from Microsoft and third-party vendors, combined with broader bandwidth, are making it easier for admins to press a button and remotely roll out Vista to new or existing PCs than it was in XP's hey day.

3) Things are finally lining up for 64-bit computingPCs running 32-bit Vista don't sport a big performance advantage over XP systems. But 64-bit Vista PCs tricked out with dual- or quad-core processors, multiple terabytes of storage, up to 128GB of RAM and multiple video cards serving multiple widescreen LCDs -- they, in short, do.

Such gear was out of reach of the typical user five years ago. More importantly, little software, especially games, had been ported to be compatible with 64-bit technoloy, much less take advantage of its power. It was the typical chicken-and-egg problem. As a result, 64-bit never really caught on with XP, despite Microsoft's exhortations.

With Vista, 64-bit appears to be finally catching on among more than just technology enthusiasts. Microsoft claimed last month that 20 percent of new Vista PCs in the U.S. appear to be 64-bit, compared to just 3 percent in March. That kind of uptake may finally drive software vendors to port their Vista apps, especially high-performance ones, to the 64-bit versions of the operating system.

In addition, history tends to repeat itself. XP deployments eventually accelerated, reaching near-ubiquity by the time Vista finally debuted. Similarly, some industry observers expect rollouts of Vista to pick up -- even in the shadow of Windows 7 -- as a Vista SP2 arrives, companies refresh aging hardware and the end of mainstream support for XP next April draws closer.

For instance, Gartner expects Vista to be running on 49 percent of all PCs worldwide by the end of next year -- surpassing XP's market share, which the consulting firm forecasts at 44 percent.

Lundberg Family Farms in Richfield, Calif., is in the process of upgrading its 100 PCs to Vista. "We don't try to be at the cutting edge, but we don't want to be too far behind," said Todd Ramsden, Lundberg's IT manager. "Sooner or later, we knew we were going to have to move forward."

Ramsden added that his users have been "pretty good with going with the flow" on the rollout. "I've gotten some complaints about Vista," he said. "But most of the time, it turns out they're really complaining about some change in Office 2007."

Moreover, most of the talk among enterprise Vista holdouts is about sticking with XP or waiting for Windows 7 -- not switching to Mac OS X or Linux. Cherry said skipping an operating system release may merely be a long-term trend, not an indication "of Vista being a failure." And he noted that until companies jump off the Windows treadmill instead of merely slowing it down, "Microsoft still makes its money."

Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Microsoft on Friday said it has completed development on Small Business Server 2008 and that the software will hit its targeted ship date of Nov. 12.

The long-awaited server, built on Windows Server 2008, also includes Exchange Server 2007, SharePoint Services 3.0, Windows Server Update Services 3.0, Forefront Security for Exchange Server, Windows Live OneCare for Server, and integration with Office Live Small Business.

[ Discover the top-rated IT products as rated by the InfoWorld Test Center. ]

SBS 2008, which was code-named Cougar, is designed for companies with as many as 50 PCs, and comes in a Standard and Premium version.

Microsoft has eliminated Internet Security and Acceleration Server (ISA) from the bundle and replaced it with a one-year trial subscription to Forefront Security for Exchange Server Small Business Edition and Windows Live OneCare for Server.

The inclusion of Office Live Small Business provides tools to create basic Web sites, online document sharing via SharePoint, and an introduction to Microsoft's online advertising platform.

The Premium version of SBS lets users for the first time run the software on two servers. The second server runs Windows Server 2008 and SQL Server 2005 or 2008 to support business applications.

In May, Microsoft announced pricing for SBS 2008 along with Windows Essential Business Server (EBS), two bundles that make up its Windows Essential Server Solutions family.

SBS 2008 Standard is priced at $1,089, which includes five Client Access Licenses (CAL). Additional CALs are $77 each. The Premium version is priced at $1,899 and additional CALs are $189.

The company also said it is introducing the option to purchase single CALs. Previously, users had to purchase them in blocks of five. In addition, the CALs will apply to copies of Windows Server, SQL Server, and Exchange Server running outside the Essential Server environment.

In SBS 2008, Microsoft has added tools to manage domain names and data folders, monitoring that stretches across servers and clients, customized and remotely available reports, and block-based server protection to speed backups.

Network World is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Mike Kavis wrote an interesting blog entry that explains why SOA is not just a technology to leverage legacy applications, but it's also good for startups. This got me thinking about how vendors could make it easier for startups or existing small businesses to begin the journey into SOA.

Right now, most SOA products are developer tools, governance and other management tools, and back-end products such as application servers. There are few, if any, off-the-shelf services anyone can buy, install and start using with minimal customization. It's hard to tell from the marketing-speak whether such products exist, and where they may exist; they seem to target things like CRM for large organizations.

[ Get expert SOA insights from InfoWorld's Real World SOA blog. ]

There could be a good market for off-the-shelf SOA components. Maybe not today, since SOA is only just beginning to see significant success and adoption, but soon. One of the nice things about SOA (or about any good component-based architecture) is that you can create a service that is a superset of what most people need. Design it right, and it automatically adapts to the subset of data and functions any given customer may need.

Here's an example. Imagine a small chain of DVD rental stores. The business decides to run a central server to track the rentals from all the stores. Normally, the chain would adopt a complete system and adapt their business practices to it, or they could create a custom set of applications written to deal with the chain's process for handling rentals.

But suppose there's an SOA product that covers almost every imaginable aspect of tracking DVD rentals. It's overkill for this small chain, but if the product is built right, the chain could buy that product and use the appropriate subset of the services the product provides. There's no reason to stop there. Given the right set of off-the-shelf components, they should be able to string together SOA services to create a complete end-to-end solution. Ideally, this should be much easier than choosing a database server and client GUI technology, and then building a system around it. Better still, if their suppliers migrate to an SOA approach, the chain could integrate that into their purchasing system. And so on. Granted, this specific example is less than ideal, since there probably isn't a huge market for DVD rental service software, but hopefully you get the idea.

The point is that SOA is similar enough to component-based software that it should be able to fulfill the promises of component-based software. If so, this should benefit everyone from the smallest companies to the largest, because it enhances the development of scalable applications.

As I mentioned above, this isn't likely to happen today, because SOA standards are not fully in place, yet. It's hard to sell an off-the-shelf SOA service if customers aren't equipped to connect it. Most potential customers probably wouldn't even know what to look for in terms of compatibility with their development efforts. Vendors can mitigate this problem to some extent by providing compatibility layers, so that the same service can connect via Web services, CORBA, or what have you. Maybe that sort of thing will always be necessary, but it would be preferable to have enough standards in place that you can buy an off-the-shelf service with confidence that it will work in your project with minimal effort.

Regardless, I believe the market for pre-packaged services has potential. I'll be watching carefully to see if anyone attempts to jump-start this kind of business.

CIO.com is an InfoWorld affiliate.

The flame is extinguished, and as such the games of the 2008 Olympics are closed. While the medal count is now final, a few awards have yet to be given out: those for the winners and losers when it came to technology at the games.

Beijing had three aims for the Olympics, intending to present them as "People's Olympics," "Green Olympics" and "High-tech Olympics." While the first was a clear success and the second a failure, what about the third? That and more as we look at the medal stand for IT at the Beijing Olympics:

[For more about IT at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, check out InfoWorld's special report. ]

Winner: American sports viewers. NBC presented the Olympics -- including 2,900 hours of live coverage -- in high-definition (HD). With the U.S. economic slump leading to lower prices on HDTVs, the HD Olympics, followed immediately by the NFL season, and preceded -- for the truly athletically addicted with a good satellite package -- by the Euro 2008 soccer finals, gave armchair sports fans their best reason ever to upgrade to full HD.

Loser: Wireless Beijing. In most races, competitors are disqualified for false starts. This attempt at creating wireless Internet connectivity was a complete failure. First there was no English interface. Then there was an English interface and the log-ins didn't work. Then it said something about payment but gave no option for it. And ultimately, its coverage area wasn't large enough to make a difference for laptop or Wi-Fi-toting Olympic spectators, not in a city that already had plentiful and free Wi-Fi connections, including Starbucks locations. That supply of free bandwidth makes Beijing a winner at anytime, not just during the games.

Winner: Official systems integrator Atos Origin had the goal of being " invisible " at the Olympics, for the simple reason that if they suddenly hit anyone's radar, then something was wrong. Despite being a top-level Olympic sponsor, Atos never broke the surface, maintaining its stealth status throughout, all the while processing 80 percent more data than at the 2004 Athens games.

Loser: Chinese sports viewers. Americans got high definition, Chinese viewers got high-enthusiasm, but it was standard definition all the way. Although China's major broadcasters all have HD broadcast capability, consumer uptake of HD sets in China, and available HD broadcasts are minimal. Blu-ray Disc is similarly absent in home video. There was more Olympic coverage than anyone could possibly watch, but only outside of China did it leap off the screen.

Winner: Lenovo installed 30,000 pieces of hardware throughout Beijing and the other Olympic event cities, which survived during rain and humidity of over 90 percent. Perhaps most impressive, the manufacturer continued trials of its Beacon wireless photo uploading system. Utilizing 802.11a Wi-Fi and supporting Nikon D2x, D3x, and Canon ED Mark2 cameras, photographers at games venues were able to transmit photos directly to their news bureaus, without having to stop and load those photos from memory to a laptop. Although not yet commercialized, this is definitely a gadget of the future.

Loser: China Mobile and China Netcom were top-level Olympic sponsors who really had nothing to win at the games. China Mobile is already the world's largest mobile service provider. That said, they brought nothing new or interesting to the "High-tech Olympics." Their trial of Chinese-developed 3G (third-generation) telephony standard TD-SCDMA (Time Division Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access) was little more than a glorified 2.5G service, and spells trouble for the commercial launch of that service later this year.

China Netcom provided bandwidth and networking for the games. Yep, they sure did. Internet service was no better or no worse at any other time of the year. Their pavilion on the Olympic Green was also the least interesting of any top sponsors, and was little more than a glorified photo exhibition of the development of telecom services in China. It may not matter -- as part of its merger with mobile provider China Unicom, the China Netcom name is about to disappear anyway.

Winner: Samsung won hearts and minds at the games with their pavilion, which featured green technology including introducing handsets with cases made from bio-plastics, and gave many users their first taste of 3G service through their distribution of handsets to Olympic executives and reporters. Their big screen TV and improvised lawn gave spectators one of the few shady spaces that also offered viewing for the games, along with providing athletes with Internet access in their lounge. A parade of Chinese and Korean gold medalists and Korean pop star Rain visiting the pavilion didn't hurt in attracting visitors.

Microsoft has already seeded its most popular patching tool for corporate users with a reference to Windows 7, its planned successor to Windows Vista .

Windows 7 Client is listed on the product-selection screen of Windows Server Update Services, which lets IT managers feed security updates to PCs and servers. Microsoft said the appearance of Windows7 in WSUS wasn't an accident. "This is a standard step in the Windows development process," a spokeswoman wrote via e-mail. She said that the reference was added for testing purposes.

[ Get the analysis and insights that only Randall C. Kennedy can provide on PC tech in InfoWorld's Enterprise Desktop blog. And download our free Windows performance-monitoring tool. ]

Windows 7 is expected late next year or in early 2010. Microsoft started talking about it publicly earlier this year, and the Windows development team launched a Windows 7 blog this month.

Slower consumer spending on electronics will slow semiconductor market growth this year, a Gartner analyst said Monday -- but the market researcher will likely leave its chip market forecast for 2008 little changed when it publishes an update this week.

"We do not believe that the semiconductor industry can remain completely immune to the macroeconomic environment," said Gartner analyst Richard Gordon in the market researcher's Semiconductor Monday DQ Report.

"We expect business and consumer spending on electronics to slow in coming quarters, and semiconductor market growth to remain muted," he added.

The market researcher's prior forecast for 2008 semiconductor revenue growth stood at 3.4 percent to $278.4 billion the last time it revised its estimate in March. Previously, Gartner had predicted growth of 6.2 percent.

Gordon wrote that the current forecast will likely not change despite strong revenue growth in the chip industry during the first half of this year.

The market researcher fears that the credit crunch on housing markets in the West and high energy prices will hurt consumers worldwide, leading to slower spending on electronics gear.

Even emerging markets such as China, India, Russia, and South America, which have bolstered PC and mobile phone sales this year, will slow, Gordon said in a note two weeks ago.

Apple on Friday released an update for its MacBook Air notebook . The update weighs in at just 368KB, so it's a very small download.

According to the notes provided by Apple, the update addresses issues with video playback and processor core idling. Apple also said that third-party software that modifies processor operating characteristics such as frequency and voltage is not supported and should be removed before installing this update.

The update can be downloaded from Apple's Web site .

Apple's laptops have had some interesting encounters at airport security checkpoints. The wafer-thin design of the MacBook Air befuddled one security officer earlier this year in the U.S., who asked to give some "special attention" to the "fine piece of machinery," according to Bob, who blogs for the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA). After inspection, the laptop was returned to the owner.

Users don't have to remove their MacBooks from their bags anymore, thanks to new "checkpoint-friendly" laptop bags. It's a hassle to remove laptops and place them in bins, so these bags allow X-ray machines to screen laptops from inside bags. The bags are designed using guidelines provided by the TSA, which wants a clear view of the laptop through the bag.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

The TSA does not officially certify bags, but it has set some basic rules that can be viewed on its Web site.

The TSA expects a majority of these bags to be available in mid-August, and voila, some products are here. Checkpoint-friendly bags and sleeves for Apple's MacBooks are available from Incipio, Tom Bihn and other vendors.

A MacBook Air checkpoint-friendly bagThe tiny MacBook Air has unique dimensions, so it won't be compatible with bags for average-sized laptops. Incipio's QuickCheck carrying case is designed specially for the dimensions of the MacBook Air. Made of nylon with a protective lining, and with two pouches to store accessories, it looks more like a sleeve than like a full-blown protective case. The $44.99 laptop comes with a shoulder strap and is available in black and "cool silver" colors. It is available on the company's Web site.

Checkpoint Flyer BriefcaseTom Bihn's Checkpoint Flyer Briefcase is a sturdy laptop bag designed for travel. It has more than 10 pockets, including a "quick-access" pocket where a boarding pass and maps can be stored. At $220, it may be a tad expensive, but it is made of protective material and has a compartment designed to save laptops from impact. The bag can be ordered for various MacBook models and screen sizes at Tom Bihn's Web site. It supports the MacBook Air, the 13-inch MacBook and MacBook Pros with 15-inch and 17-inch screens.

Sleeves for PowerBooks and iBooksIf you need just a sleeve and not a sturdy laptop case, look at SleeveCase from Waterfield's Web site. Sleeves provide a great cushion for the laptop to be stored in other bags, but Waterfield claims they can also act as a standalone bag. The sleeve is made of neoprene and is wrapped in a solid nylon shell. MacBooks do not need to be removed from the sleeve when being run through an X-ray machine during security check.

Depending on screen size and laptop model, the sleeves are priced between $38 and $42. There are sleeves for most MacBook models and even for old-school PowerBooks and iBooks. They are available on Waterfield's Web site.

A pilot's tale of aero bagsCalling themselves a bunch of "engineers and pilots, not fashion designers," Aerovation gave its Checkpoint Friendly Laptop Bag a no-frills design. The bag, padded with foam and nylon, has a zipper that splits the bag into two different parts. It also offers a number of pockets to store travel documents and computer accessories. The bag costs $129.95 and is currently out of stock on Aerovation's Web site, but the company hopes to resume shipping it again by the end of this month.

Mainsoft, which enables developers to leverage Microsoft Windows development skills to build applications for other platforms, on Monday is introducing updates to development products for Java, Linux, and Unix, adding support for Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008 IDE.

Mainsoft for Java EE, Version 2.5, is a Visual Studio-based software suite with a cross-compilation engine allowing C# and Visual Basic developers to write ASP.Net AJAX applications and run them on Java EE platforms. These platforms include IBM WebSphere Portal and Application Server, Lotus Expeditor and Notes, Tomcat, and any standards-compliant Java EE server.?

In addition to Visual Studio 2008 support, Version 2.5 adds capabilities for C# 3.0 and Visual Basic 9 language features.

Version 5.2 of Mainsoft for Unix and Linux enables C++ developers to build enterprise applications using Visual Studio 2008 and deploy them on 21 Unix and Linux platforms. The upgrade adds support for HP-UX 11i v2 and v3 on HP Integrity Servers with Intel Itanium 4-bit processors. Also supported are Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 for x86_64 and Suse Linux Enterprise Server 10 for x86. HP-UX 11v3 on HP 9000 servers with PA-RISC processors are supported as well. Solaris is supported on SPARC, AMD Opteron, and Intel architectures.

Mainsoft estimates there are more than 1 million users running Windows software on Java EE, Unix, or Linux because of its products.

"Mainsoft has invested more than 150 man years in the development, testing and performance optimization of our cross-platform product suite," said Yaacov Cohen, president and CEO of Mainsoft, in a statement released by the company.

The two products are available Monday. Mainsoft for Unix and Linux pricing starts at $12,500 for four development seats. Mainsoft for Java enterprise edition pricing starts at $5,000 per CPU for the Tomcat server. A free, open source version of Mainsoft for Java EE, called Grasshopper 2.5, is available but lacks the full breadth of platform support offered in Mainsoft for Java EE. It is limited to Tomcat.

Visual Studio 2008 was released last November.

Mozilla this week is touting technology to boost performance of its JavaScript engine and Web applications.

Called TraceMonkey, the technology adds native code compilation to the engine, which itself is called SpiderMonkey, said Mike Shaver, Mozilla vice president of engineering, in a blog post on Friday. The software builds on code and ideas shared with the Tamarin Tracing project, Shaver said.

TraceMonkey was placed in the Firefox 3.1 development tree this week. It is slated to be featured in Firefox 3.1, which is due to be available the end of this year.

"I'm extremely pleased to announce the launch of TraceMonkey, an evolution of Firefox's SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine for Firefox 3.1 that uses a new kind of Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler to boost JavaScript performance by an order of magnitude or more," said Brendan Eich, Mozilla CTO and the founder of JavaScript, in a blog post.

"TraceMonkey advances us toward the Mozilla 2 future where even more Firefox code is written in JavaScript. Firefox gets faster and safer as this process unfolds," Eich said.

The project still is early in development, though.

"The goal of the TraceMonkey project ? which is still in its early stages ? is to take JavaScript performance to another level, where instead of competing against other interpreters, we start to compete against native code," said Shaver.

"We have bugs to fix, and an enormous number of optimizations still to choose from, but we?re charging full speed ahead on the work we need to do for this to be a part of Firefox 3.1," Shaver said. "Depending on the benchmarks you choose, you might see massive speed-up, minor speed-up, or maybe even some slowdown ? those latter cases are definitely bugs and reporting them through bugzilla will be a big help."

TraceMonkey supports x86, x86-54, and ARM. "This means we are ready for mobile and desktop target platforms out of the box," Eich said.

"As the performance keeps going up, people will write and transport code that was 'too slow' to run in the browser as JavaScript. This means the Web can accommodate workloads that right now require a proprietary plugin," said Eich.

He added he expects other browsers to follow Mozilla's lead and take JavaScript performance through current interpreter speed barriers, using JIT native code compilation.

Three Texas men pleaded guilty Friday to charges related to selling counterfeit computer software on the Internet, the U.S. Department of Justice said.

Thomas C. Rushing III age 24, of Wichita Falls, Texas, and Brian C. Rue, age 29, of Denton, Texas, each pleaded guilty to one count each of criminal copyright infringement in U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas in Austin. William Lance Partridge, 24, of Royse City, Texas, pleaded guilty to one count of criminal copyright infringement.

[ Keep up on the latest tech news headlines at InfoWorld News, or subscribe to the Today's Headlines newsletter. ]

Each faces a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Sentencing for all three defendants is scheduled for Dec. 19.

Between early 2006 and September 2007, Rushing, Rue and Partridge operated several Web sites that sold a large volume of counterfeit software, according to the DOJ. The software they sold had a combined retail value of $2.5 million.

The three sold the software through downloads from Web sites, including Valuesoftwaresales.com, Allsoftwaredownload.com, esoftwarevalue.com and Priceslashsoftware.com, without authorization from the copyright owners, the DOJ said. The three men purchased advertising to promote their sites from major Internet search engines.

The case is part of an ongoing DOJ initiative to combat the sale of pirated software and counterfeit goods through Web sites, including online auction sites. The DOJ effort has resulted in 32 felony convictions, including the three pleas Friday.

According to a Microsoft representative, you will be able to activate new XP installations for the foreseeable future. The fact that the company longer sells XP "has no bearing on one's ability to activate XP installations..."

Of course, the current rules about moving a Windows installation from one PC to another will still apply:

[ Get the analysis and insights that only Randall C. Kennedy can provide on PC tech in InfoWorld's Enterprise Desktop blog. And download our free Windows performance-monitoring tool. ]

You can only do this with a retail version of Windows. The copy of XP that came with your computer stays with your computer. You must remove Windows from the old computer. Automatic activation will fail on the new computer. When that happens, call the toll-free number displayed on the screen and explain your situation to a human being. They will help you manually activate XP.

Email your technology questions to me at answer@pcworld.com , or post them to a community of helpful folks on the PCW Answer Line forum .

While developers have been hard at work building Android applications that can use GPS (Global Positioning System), Wi-Fi and cameras, they just discovered they likely won't be able to offer applications that use one common mobile phone feature: Bluetooth.

The most recent Android SDK (software development kit), released on Monday, says that Android 1.0 won't include a "comprehensive" Bluetooth API (application programming interface).

[ Read about Google's unhappy Android developers. ]

Developers aren't exactly sure what that means and a Google spokeswoman said the company plans to elaborate later on Friday in a blog post.

Some developers contributing to Google's Android forum say they find it hard to believe that Android 1.0, the first version of the Linux-based mobile operating system expected to become available soon, won't support Bluetooth. "HTC would not release a smartphone in this day and age that lacked Bluetooth support," wrote a developer going by the name Jeff Craig on the forum.

HTC's Dream phone is expected to be the first on the market to run Android software.

Google may plan to build support for Bluetooth into Android so that end users can wirelessly link standard Bluetooth gear, such as ear pieces, to the phone. But a lack of APIs would mean that developers couldn't build applications that use Bluetooth.

Some developers have focused on the word "comprehensive" to surmise that a future SDK update that Google has said might come in September could include very basic Bluetooth support.

End users and developers alike have eagerly anticipated the release of Android. Google's software along with Apple's iPhone software are rare new entrants into the mobile phone market.

While recent rumors suggested that Android would be released later than expected, Google has maintained that the first Android devices are on schedule to appear before the end of the year.

Microsoft Corp. re-released one of its Aug. 11 security updates yesterday, explaining that it had posted an incomplete version to its own download center last week.

The admission was the third time in the past two months that Microsoft has had to re-issue a security-related update.

[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

Users who manually downloaded MS08-051 since Aug. 12 to patch Office 2003 should obtain the second version as soon as possible, Microsoft said. People who obtained the update via Windows Update or through their company's Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) server, or who updated other versions of Office, do not need to reinstall MS08-051.

That update patched three vulnerabilities in PowerPoint, the presentation maker included with Microsoft Office, including one that Microsoft labeled "critical," its highest ranking. MS08-051 was one of 11 security bulletins released last week that patched 26 bugs , the most Microsoft has tackled in a single month for the last year and a half.

According to the revised bulletin published Thursday, the PowerPoint 2003 patches originally posted to Microsoft's Download Center were the wrong versions. "While these versions did protect against the vulnerabilities discussed in the bulletin, they lacked other important security and reliability updates," Microsoft said in the revamped MS08-051.

The company said it had posted the correct versions to Windows Update and Office Update from the start. "This only affected the packages on the Microsoft Download Center; Microsoft Update and Office Update contained and were distributing the correct versions of the binaries and did not need to be updated."

Anyone who updated PowerPoint in Office 2003 Service Pack 2 (SP2) or Office 2003 SP3 by grabbing the update from elsewhere -- in other words, directly from Microsoft's download site -- must reinstall the second edition of the patches, either by downloading the revised bits from Download Center or through Windows Update/Office Update.

Microsoft gave a third option to users unable to immediately replace the flawed patches. "If you choose to not reinstall the update, you must manually set the registry key in order to block PowerPoint file types as a workaround," Microsoft advised.

Second tries of security updates have become commonplace of late for the Redmond, Wash., software maker. In June, Microsoft, citing unspecified "human issues" , was forced to re-release a fix for a flaw in Windows' implementation of Bluetooth , the short-range wireless protocol. And just last week, it re-issued a July patch for a bug that had prevented some network administrators from using the WSUS patch-management tool to deploy security updates.

Microsoft was unavailable for comment.

Intel used its developer's forum this week to lay out its solid-state drive plans as well as talk up its Internet connectivity efforts. The partnership between Microsoft and Novell, once billed as an unholy alliance between enterprise server software rivals, was extended on Wednesday. SAP users listened to the company pitch its support service price hike. Apple and Amazon learned about doing business the Chinese way after the country's government supposedly blocked access to their sites.

1. Embedded chips to drive Internet adoption, exec says , Intel laptop platform to boost graphics, power use and Intel shows off PC, server solid-state drive road maps

[ Video: Catch up on the biggest stories of the week with the World Tech Update . ]

Intel looks to have the first devices in a new line of SSDs (solid-state drives) ready in the coming weeks, the company revealed at the Intel Developer Forum. The 80G-byte model should debut in September, while the 160G-byte version is slated for the first quarter of 2009. Intel also used the event to promote its efforts in the Internet connectivity space, a market that the company hopes to capitalize on by offering chips that allow Internet access from assorted devices, including phones and cash machines. Intel the following day said that -- surprise -- its next low-power chip for mobile phones is being tested. Finally, look for Intel's next-generation laptop platform to offer better graphics and power management.

2. SSDs are hot, but not without security risks : Now, a word of caution on SSD security. A researcher claimed that the devices aren't as secure as imagined. While SSDs may have better data security than a standard hard drive, concerns arise with their physical security. NAND flash chips commonly found in digital cameras are used in SSDs. These chips lack fixtures that prevent them from being taken out of the casing, the researcher said. Hackers could unsolder the chips from the SSD and use a flash chip programmer and data recovery software to access the data. A chip hacker claimed to have discovered another breach by using an ultraviolet laser to disable encryption locks from fuses on chips that secure SSDs. Data arrays can then be read via traditional devices, such as ROM readers. While SSDs aren't commonly used, the technology is becoming more popular as their price decreases.

3. SAP, user group to shed light on enterprise support : Americas' SAP Users' Group held its first Web seminar this week on SAP's enterprise-level support service, which recently became mandatory for all customers, leading to cost increases over time for many. SAP claims that customer environments are growing more complex, so the additional services and cost could ultimately help enterprises and save money. Some businesses, however, question whether smaller organizations with less complex IT systems need more support. This session, hosted by an SAP marketing official, emphasized how enterprise support can foster innovation and protect a user's SAP software. As SAP gears up for future information sessions, third-party service providers are readying SAP support packages.

4. Microsoft to alpha test Office 14 before end of year : While Office 2007 may seem fresh to users, a Microsoft employee blog posting revealed that the company starts alpha testing Office 14, the successor to the current productivity suite, in November or December. The Monday posting, which was eventually pulled from the site, was recruiting people for a program that allows them to try out the monitoring and analytics components of Office PerformancePoint Server. Microsoft's public relations firm confirmed that the next version of Office is in the works but said that discussing its features and timing is premature.

5. Google Issues Long-Awaited Android SDK Update and Android phone could come in November : The first phone running Android, the Linux mobile phone operating system from Google, may debut in November if the hype around HTC's Dream phone proves accurate. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission released documents on Monday approving sales of the device, which is rumored to be the first handset using Android. At HTC's request, the FCC kept some of the documents, such as the manual, confidential until Nov. 10. The documents didn't reveal what software comes with the phone, and Google and HTC have been mum about the Dream's OS. In other Android news, Google released an updated SDK (software development kit) on Monday after developers criticized the slow progress. The update fixes bugs, includes user interface changes, and adds features like a camera, music player and picture viewer.

6. Judge dissolves gag order against MIT students : A U.S. District Court judge lifted a gag order that prevented MIT students from discussing security flaws in the ticketing system for Boston's public transportation network. The three students planned on presenting their research at the recent Defcon hacker conference until the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority obtained the gag order. Upholding the order would discourage scientists from publicizing research for fear of litigation, said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Freedom Foundation. The MBTA wanted a five-month extension of the order to fix the flaws. Despite the gag, the student's research was readily available. Defcon organizers included their work in conference material, MIT posted their research paper on its Web site and some material became public information after the MBTA filed its gag order motion.

7. Two years on, Microsoft and Novell extend partnership : Two years after forming a partnership that brought a Linux champion and foe together, Novell and Microsoft announced an extension of their interoperability pact. Microsoft will purchase up to US$100 million in coupons for Suse Linux support from Novell. An analyst said that the extension proves that customers have taken to the deal, which began with Microsoft buying $240 million in Novell coupons for its customers to purchase. The companies claim that $157 million of the coupons from the initial investment have been redeemed. The arrangement makes Microsoft look good for playing nicely with a rival. Meanwhile, figures from IDC indicate that Novell captured market share from Red Hat, its competitor in the enterprise Linux market, since entering the arrangement with Microsoft.

8. Comcast: No new traffic management plan yet : Reports circulated this week that Comcast has developed a plan to manage its network traffic. The method involves slowing traffic for heavy users for up to 20 minutes during busy periods of network use. The company said that this proposal is one of the leading options, but Comcast has yet to make a final decision. The telecom caused controversy last year when information emerged that it was slowing BitTorrent P-to-P (peer-to-peer) traffic in an effort to ease network congestion. The measure served as a rallying point for net neutrality advocates, and this month, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted to ban broadband providers from blocking or slowing specific applications on its network. Comcast's traffic management approach wouldn't target a certain application, the company said, complying with the FCC's ruling.

9. Did Nokia pay for vulnerability information? : The IT industry tends to shun the practice of paying for product security flaw information, fearing scenarios where businesses are blackmailed to keep an exploit from hackers. However, Nokia's cagey answers on how it obtained details of a vulnerability in its Series 40 operating system raised the possibility that it cut a check. The security researcher who discovered the issue wanted ¬20,000 (US$29,500) to compensate for the six-months he spent collecting the data. The researcher also claimed that only reputable companies that paid would get the full research. He didn't reveal if Nokia paid him, but the Finnish phone maker said it has a complete copy of the research. Nokia said that the researcher performed a lot of research, so it understands why he wants the work monetized.

10. China Blocks Apple's ITunes, Amazon Over Tibet Songs : While China pledged Internet freedom during the Olympics, an album promoting peace in Tibet possibly irked Beijing enough to block Apple's U.S. iTunes Music Store and parts of Amazon.com. Internet users in China confirmed Wednesday that they received error messages when attempting to reach the sites. Apple doesn't run a China iTunes store, but people with a U.S. credit card can purchase merchandise from the U.S. store. While Amazon.com remains accessible, attempting to access the album's page and download page prompts a message that the server connection was reset. This message is common when attempting to reach blocked sites.

Red Hat confirmed Friday that hackers compromised infrastructure servers belonging to the company and the Fedora Project, including systems used to sign Fedora packages.

In the Fedora breach, company officials said they had "high confidence" the hackers did not get the "passphrase used to secure the Fedora package signing key." Regardless, the company has converted to new Fedora signing keys.

[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog and newsletter, both from InfoWorld. ]

Red Hat's Fedora project leader Paul Frields made the announcement Friday on the fedora-announce-list with the subject line "Infrastructure Report." When contacted, Red Hat officials pointed to Frields' announcements as the company's official statement.

In the Red Hat compromise, the intruder was able to sign a small number of OpenSSH packages relating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 (i386 and x86_64 architectures only) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (x86_64 architecture only).

As a precaution, Red Hat released an updated version of those packages, a list of tampered packages, and a script to check if any of the packages are installed on a user's system.

"This is a significant issue and they have to work to address it," says Jay Lyman, an open source analyst with The 451 Group. "These are some of the growing pains of a distribution becoming more complex. They are building more and more into their operating systems, and with that comes more complexity and more challenges. But what I think is most important here is the response."

Red Hat first hinted at a problem on Aug. 14, when Frields wrote that the Fedora infrastructure team was investigating an issue that could result in some service outages. The message was followed up on Aug. 16 saying the team was "continuing to work on the problem."

By that time, there were grumblings and rumors online and in discussion groups that internal systems may have been hacked, which indeed was the case, and was confirmed Friday by Red Hat.

In his announcement, Frields said changing the Fedora signing keys could require "affirmative steps" from every Fedora system owner or administrator, and said, if needed, those steps would be made public.

Frields also said that through checks of Fedora packages and source code that the company did not think packages had been compromised and said "at this time we are confident there is little risk to Fedora users who wish to install or upgrade signed Fedora packages."

The Fedora Project released alpha code for Fedora 10, its next version, earlier this month.

On the Red Hat side, the company issued an OpenSSH update and guidance on how users can protect themselves.

The company said it was "highly confident" that the Red Hat Network, an internal system that makes updates and patches available to its customers, was not compromised by the hacker.

The company, however, said it was issuing its alert for those who "may obtain Red Hat binary packages via channels other than those of official Red Hat subscribers."

Frields also made it clear that the affects of the intrusions on Fedora and Red Hat were not the same and that Fedora packages are signed with keys different from those used to sign Red Hat Enterprise Linux packages.

The certification process for WiMax devices will allow vendors to get new products out to mobile broadband users in one-third the time it takes to put a phone on a carrier's 3G network, Intel said Thursday at its developer conference.

For today's cellular networks, it typically takes six to eight weeks for a carrier to certify a handset or other device for use on its network and an additional four to six weeks to finally approve it for sale, said Prakash Kripalani, a wireless marketing executive in Intel's WiMax Ecosystem group. By contrast, the WiMax Forum industry group will take a major role in approving components and devices, making things easier for operators and ultimately cutting time to market down to about a month, he said.

[ Get the latest on mobile developments with InfoWorld's Mobile Report newsletter. ]

Makers of cell phones and other mobile devices have long complained that carrier approval processes create a bottleneck in getting innovative gear out to consumers. Last December, Palm cited delays in carrier approval of a key product as one factor leading to a revenue shortfall and loss in its fiscal third quarter.

The approval process will be significantly different for mobile WiMax, the high-speed wireless system emerging as a successor to 3G in some areas, according to Intel. By concentrating the approval of new client hardware in the WiMax Forum, a group modeled somewhat on the Wi-Fi Alliance, WiMax backers hope to cut out duplicative efforts by carriers, Kripalani said.

For devices aimed at Sprint Nextel's U.S. WiMax network that is set to launch starting next month, Intel will go one step further. Along with Sprint itself, the chipmaker will "pre-certify" communications modules to smooth their path through Forum certification, Kripalani said. The earliest tests of mobile modules at the WiMax Forum have taken about four weeks, including one-time troubleshooting, he said. Granted, Intel and Sprint's pre-certification still takes six to eight weeks, but the companies expect to shorten that process considerably, he said.

For the next year or so, Sprint will continue testing new devices itself, but after the carrier is comfortable with the WiMax Forum's process, it will rely mostly on the group's testing, Kripalani said. Ultimately, new hardware should get certified within a week or two and carriers will accept the devices for their networks in two to four weeks, depending on the type of device, Intel believes.

With WiMax, Sprint is steering away from the typical U.S. practice of carriers selling devices themselves. Gear for its WiMax network will be sold by manufacturers in retail stores. Given that difference and Sprint's huge bet on WiMax, that carrier might be able to achieve faster approvals, said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupitermedia. It's an attractive idea, given that products today often take two to six months to reach the market, he said. But Gartenberg is skeptical about the broader implications.

"The real question is, longer term, will carriers cede control?" Gartenberg said. "I think the answer is no."

Those who want to use Sprint's new WiMax network should start to see some Sprint-approved laptops in October, according to Kripalani. The network is scheduled to launch first in Baltimore, then in Washington, D.C., and Chicago by the end of this year. In 2009, it will launch in Philadelphia, Boston, Providence, Rhode Island, and Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas. A deal that will merge Sprint's WiMax business into a joint venture with Clearwire is expected to be approved by the end of this year. Clearwire has said it expects to launch mobile WiMax in Atlanta, Las Vegas, Portland, Ore., and Grand Rapids, Mich., by year's end.

Managers' reality check: Your top workers can almost always get another job, even in a shaky economy.

"The best employees are being recruited at any given time. Managers need to make that assumption and create an environment that's going to make them want to stay," says Paul De Young, a talent management practice leader at Watson Wyatt Worldwide, a global consulting firm.

[ Get sage advice on IT careers and management from Bob Lewis in InfoWorld's Advice Line blog and newsletter. ]

Are you really doing that? Or do your management tactics have people scurrying for the exits? Before you answer, consider these cautionary tales that can help you avoid pushing your own top talent out the door.

Mistake No. 1: Keep the creative juices bottled up."Programmers and developers have their own views -- reasonably strong views -- on how to do things, so it's not uncommon to hear that there are clashes between them and managers," says Pradeep K. Khosla, founding director of CyLab and dean of the College of Engineering, both at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Khosla points to an acquaintance who quit his programming job because he wasn't allowed to pursue his ideas about the IT architecture he thought the company needed.

The better way: Even the most talented workers won't get their way all the time, but managers need to balance employees' creative ideas against corporate policies and programs.

"The organization has to create a culture from the top management down that gives people an opportunity to be creative," De Young says.

And though most companies can't adopt a model like Google's, which lets engineers spend 20 percent of their time pursuing their own projects, De Young says many can and should allow their top staffers some time away from their normal duties to delve into projects that stretch their imaginations.

Mistake No. 2: Micromanage your staff.It's hard to imagine the founding executives at a $1 billion company demanding that they approve all IT expenditures over $1,000, checking employees'time sheets and requiring retention agreements for workers seeking job-related training.

But Adrian M. Butler, vice president of IT-telecom and support services at Accor North America Inc. in Carrollton, Texas, knows an IT director who found himself working for those executives.

The tight management control was a clear and extreme case of micromanagement. "It led people to feel there was a lack of trust in their abilities," Butler says, noting that the IT director left his job after just two months.

"He didn't feel empowered in the role," Butler says, adding that the manager who hired the IT director also left for similar reasons.

The better way: This problem is tough because the tendency to micromanage is more a personality trait than a policy decision, says Franz Fruehwald, CIO at Catholic Human Services-Archdiocese of Philadelphia. He has also experienced that type of manager in the past.

But if you solicit honest feedback from close associates, you can recognize and curtail micromanaging behavior in yourself, he says. "I have a couple of direct reports who have the ability and permission to speak to me frankly," Fruehwald says. "I tell them,'You need to give it to me straight.'"

Mistake No. 3: Deny new opportunities and challenges.As a facilitator for the Regional Leadership Forum, a development program run by the Society for Information Management, Bart Bolton sees many promising IT workers. In fact, most who attend the nine-month program are sponsored by their organizations because they're considered high-potential employees.

But not all companies know how to manage such workers. Bolton remembers one senior IT manager who found that his boss wasn't willing to give him new opportunities after he completed the program.

"He wanted more challenges and more responsibility. They talked about it, and nothing happened," says Bolton, who is also a leadership consultant at Lifetime Learning in Upton, Mass.

The manager didn't stick around. Within a few months, he found a new position at another company where he felt he had more opportunities to grow.

The better way: Set realistic expectations, says Anne Marie Messier, founder of Straightline Management Solutions in Chelmsford, Mass. Tell workers why they're being sent for training and what they can expect once the training is completed. If you don't have immediate opportunities for advancement, letting enthusiastic workers know that they are on the short list for new challenges can go far in retaining them. But be sure to follow through.

Mistake No. 4: Don't listen to your employees.As a senior systems analyst working on a team to develop clinical and business applications at a hospital, Ben Berry worked with a medical doctor to determine business requirements for the entire institution.

Although he and the doctor shared responsibility for the task, Berry remembers that the doctor didn't want to hear anyone else's ideas. "He didn't take input from the team. He was trying to drive all the decisions. It was undermining the team, and I personally felt underutilized," says Berry, who is now CIO for the Oregon Department of Transportation.

Berry discussed the situation with his supervisor and the doctor directly. But nothing changed, so he left for a better position.

The better way: Use all the talent around you. "We hire people that we believe can do the job," Berry says. "If we don't allow them to use all the tools in their toolbox, or we try to pigeonhole people into doing it the way we've always done it, then we're doing a disservice to the individual, the team and the organization."

Open-door policies and consensus-building allow all staffers to contribute and voice their opinions, he says.

Mistake No. 5: Change the work environment without considering the impact on employees.When a national retailing company outsourced its IT operations and most of its business analysts, it learned how the talented workers who are left behind typically react: They bolt.

Bob Rouse, a professor of computer science and IT planning officer at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, knows the story. The outsourcing reduced the company drastically -- from about 2,500 IT employees to 1,000, he says. The remaining employees handled more work and different work than they had been doing. Moreover, many of the best employees had gone to the outsourcer, and because the surviving top-notch workers found themselves working with a weaker internal team, they had to pick up even more of the slack.

As a result, the company lost 10 percent of its top people within a year. "These were very marketable people who would never have considered leaving the company if it hadn't been [for the] outsourcing," Rouse says.

The better way: Keep the people in the business equation. Companies often focus on business objectives and financial goals when making tactical moves and forget that "there are human beings left behind," says Bob Eubank, executive director of the Northeast Human Resources Association in Wellesley, Mass.

To avoid an exodus of top performers after a change, executives and managers should tell workers about impending events as early as possible, Eubank says. Managers should be particularly attentive to their best workers, letting them know about postchange opportunities. If employees see opportunities down the road, he adds, "people are often willing to sacrifice."

Mary K. Pratt is is a Computerworld contributing writer in Waltham, Mass. Contact her at marykpratt@verizon.net. Computerworld is an InfoWorld affiliate.

Google has upgraded with a geolocation API its Gears browser plug-in, which is designed to let users work with Web-based applications when they aren't online.

The new API will let developers create applications that can obtain information from Gears about end users' geographic location, Google said Friday.

[ Keep up with app dev issues and trends with InfoWorld's Fatal Exception and Strategic Developer blogs. ]

To protect people's privacy, the Gears Geolocation API triggers an alert asking users if they wish to grant the application their location information.

Currently, the API allows mobile devices to obtain the location data from nearby cellular towers or on-board GPS systems, and later it will be able to detect Wi-Fi connection coordinates on both desktop PCs and mobile devices. For now, only some Windows Mobile devices that can do GPS or cellular tower identification are supported, but Google expects to bring more mobile platforms into the API's fold.

Knowing where a user is located opens the door to entirely new types of applications and allows developers to build additional functionality in existing Web applications.

The geolocation API is one of several enhancements in version 0.4 of Gears, a product Google released in May of last year to tackle the problem of offline access for Web applications.

While online applications have become increasingly popular as IT and business managers give more consideration to SaaS (software as a service) products, a big drawback has been the loss of functionality when users don't have an Internet connection.

Different options are available, but Google hasn't been particularly quick at adapting its Web services and software to Gears, making it available so far only for its RSS feed manager Reader and its Docs applications.

Zoho, a competitor to the Google Apps collaboration and communication hosted suite, also uses Gears for offline access in its suite, while Yahoo's Zimbra has its own technology called Desktop.

Other enhancements in Gears 0.4 include a Blob API for referencing arbitrary binary data, an extension of the desktop API, and localization of Gears dialogs in 40 languages.

Google also announced the AJAX API property that lets Web applications estimate users' locations using their IP address.

This story was updated on Aug. 22, 2008.

Congratulations, you won the lottery in a country whose name you can't even pronounce! A wealthy oil executive in a far-off land wants to give you millions of dollars, right now! Sexy girls want to meet you!

Now let's be honest. If someone came to your door and told you any of those things, you'd tell him to get lost. So why do people still fall for this stuff when it's in their e-mail, as if a poorly written message made a weird-sounding pitch any more legitimate?

[ Learn how to secure your systems with Roger Grimes' Security Adviser blog. ]

The saddest part is, the only reason annoying e-mail keeps filing your inbox is because it works. No matter the number of reports detailing e-mail hoaxes gone bad and tales of spammers taking people for all they're worth, people just keep on clicking.

Why? It's the law of percentages. The response rate for snail-mail spam is between 0.5 and 1 percent. That might not sound like a lot, but if you apply it to e-mail, it means a spammer can send 1 million messages -- without the cost of paper and postage -- and 5,000 to 10,000 people will answer. In fact, a study out this month indicates that nearly 30 percent of Internet users confessed to purchasing something from spam e-mail.

In 100 years, the spam boxes on our brain-implant chips will be maxed out, and we'll still be asking: Who's clicking on this stuff?

Here's PC World's list, in no particular order, of the top e-mail hoaxes that have come through inboxes and fooled millions.

Raise Bonsai Kittens in BottlesIt's amazing how many people were willing to believe this e-mail about a breeder in New York who raised kittens in bottles. Perhaps it's the horrible detail that outraged the recipients so much: The small animals are given a muscle relaxant to pacify them and to allow the breeder to get them in the bottle. They're fed through straws. Their skeletons take on the shape of the bottle. "Latest trends In New York, China, Indonesia and New Zealand." A bizarre case of animal cruelty? A sick joke?

Actually, it started as a fake Web site, Bonsai Kitten, the product of MIT students. The idea was so outrageous, it spread like wildfire via e-mail. Plenty of people fell for it, many begging animal-welfare organizations to help the small furry creatures. Even the FBI investigated. Perhaps it could happen -- after all, you can miniaturize a tree by pruning it and shaping it. But cats? Last time we checked, it's more or less impossible (not to mention probably illegal) to stop an animal from growing simply by keeping it in a small container.

Sign a Petition to Ban Dihydrogen MonoxideE-mail alerts outlining the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide swept the Internet in the late 1990s and still pop up today. Many ask that you sign and forward a petition to ban the chemical, which contributes to global warming, is a major ingredient in acid rain, causes metals to rust more quickly, and has been found in cancerous tumors. The chemical also contributes to the greenhouse effect and to erosion of our natural landscapes. It's even in food. Sounds pretty dangerous. You're ready to sign right now, aren't you?

Well, let us tell you one more thing about dihydrogen monoxide: It's more commonly known as water. You know, the substance that every single living being relies on to survive? The origins of this item are multifold, from flyers circulated at the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1989 (so 20th century!) to a junior high school student who surveyed 50 classmates in 1997 and got 43 of them to sign his petition to ban the chemical. He then won a prize at his science fair for his project, called "How Gullible Are We?" Several Web pages touting the chemical's dangers are still live. Don't fe