Management

Cisco is going to be finding out, the hard way, that open source isn't the same thing as free software.

Flashback to the 1980s, when a vendor tech can't figure out why a hard drive on this minicomputer fails every week -- especially since everything the computer operator says she does sounds fine.

When all the terminals at this company suddenly stop responding, this pilot fish soon finds the problem's cause -- and it's hard to miss.

It's the mid-1990s, and an empire-building VP's plan to replace Macs and Unix workstations collides with some very unhappy engineers and programmers -- and one fed-up pilot fish in the middle.

User catches this IT pilot fish in the hallway and asks her to look at his PC, because Microsoft Outlook takes so long to come up when he launches it.

Pilot fish at this international organization gets a panicked call from a system administrator in Africa, who tells him the switch configuration is gone.

Six months after this network engineer joins the technology review committee, he's called into a meeting to introduce some new technology.

It's demonstration time at this manufacturing company, where the engineering department is set to show off two financial information systems -- one of which is clearly not the favorite....

User calls this pilot fish, frustrated because he can't log into a supplier's Web site. The credentials are right, the log-in seems successful -- but something's not working.

It's easy to set up or buy your own Linux desktop, but it's much harder to set up hundreds of Linux desktops for a business: until now.

IT pilot fish at a rural hospital gets a call out of nowhere from a big medical equipment supplier, who wants to know all about the hospital's wireless equipment. And why would that be?

It's the second week on the job for this help desk pilot fish when a user comes in with a problem backing up some files. But there's a little more to it than that.

That's not my headline for Sun's general availability release of the newest version of MySQL, that's how Michael 'Monty' Widenius, MySQL's co-founder and today's MySQL's CTO describes it.

At this construction company, there's a regular need to document conditions at the job sites -- and it's down to a regular routine.

In my Editor's Note this week, I wrote about how CA has managed to banish the ghost of Charles Wang by maintaining an honest, open approach to discussing the company's troubled past, and by keeping a sense of humor about it all.