Local Services Feel the Squeeze by Alan GreenblattLocal governments are used to being victimized by a certain form of trickle-down economics. As much as states are fond of complaining about being saddled with mandates and program costs from Washington, they regularly turn around and hand similar marching orders to cities and counties. So, even as states petition Congress for help with their weakening budgets, localities are worried they may be hit the hardest.
MORE >>Computer makers are recalling 100,000 laptop battery packs made by Sony Corp. after 40 reports of overheating, according to a U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission notice Thursday.
MORE >>Barack Obama's presidency will have a large and nearly immediate impact on state and local governments, according to David Sanger, chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times.
MORE >>Microsoft new exploit index aims to help IT prioritize which bugs to patch first
MORE >>Think you don't need to be concerned with PCI compliance because you're not an e-commerce organization? You may want to reconsider that, writes TechNewsWorld columnist Ed Moyle. Any organization that handles credit card transactions -- even if that's not its main business focus -- should abide by PCI standards for safeguarding card holders' personal information.
MORE >> $3 Billion in DHS Preparedness Grant Programs by TechWeb NewsThe Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) Federal Emergency Management Agency today released Fiscal Year (FY) 2009 Application Guidance and Fact Sheet for Preparedness Grants for 14 federal grant programs, totaling more than $3 billion available in federal funding to assist state and local governments in strengthening community preparedness. More than $27 billion has been provided since 2002 to strengthen the nation's ability to prevent, protect, respond and recover from terrorist attacks, major disasters or other emergencies.
MORE >>Public safety officials and chief information officers (CIOs) from many of the largest cities and counties in the US, as part of the Digital Communities 700Mhz CIO working group initiative, have banded together to protest the FCC's new proposed rules for the 700MHz D-Block auction.
MORE >>Business leaders want their own staff to have a say in IT purchases, deployment decisions
MORE >>It’s awfully hard to get legislators or the public excited about an IT program when the words that describe it sound like gibberish.
MORE >>Even if the Wall Street bailout works, state and local governments will have fiscal problems for a long time.
MORE >>Government Web portals have come a long way since the early 1990s, when the main objective of the public sector's first foray on the Internet was posting bare-bones text, such as phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
MORE >>We save more and more stuff, drives get bigger and bigger, yet we must keep buying more disks to keep pace. Meanwhile, energy costs are through the roof. We can't go on like this.
MORE >>Done the right way, consolidation can create enormous cost benefits and efficiencies. Done the wrong way, it can leave an enterprise even worse off than before.
MORE >>Managing Access Can Prevent Security Headaches
MORE >>IBM Corp. is throwing its considerable weight behind an idea that seemed to have faded: broadband Internet access delivered over ordinary power lines.
MORE >>IT orgs harness wiki power to handle everything from tech training to project management.
MORE >>Presidential elections may capture the public's attention, as Barack Obama's victory did last week, but the less glamorous work in the U.S. Congress tends to prove more important for technology topics.
MORE >>Say the word "virtualization" and people usually think of servers -- and it's not hard to figure out why.
MORE >>Gone are the days when an agency could store all of its data on a small server.
MORE >>The software maker's decision to ease hardware requirements also angered some partners, including HP.
MORE >>The future of home IT could be closer than you think
MORE >>At roughly 4:30 p.m. Eastern time last Tuesday, the volume of junk e-mail arriving at inboxes around the world suddenly plummeted by at least 65 percent, an unprecedented drop caused by what is believed to be a single, simple act.
MORE >>Most of us have been plagued with a blue screen of death, a laptop that refuses to connect to a home wireless network, or a cell phone that just doesn't feel like making calls.
MORE >>When an emergency strikes it's already too late to determine whether your municipal systems are able to handle the massive communication needs of responders and citizens. Bill Grubner Jr. of Genesys Lab suggests five best practices and five mistakes to avoid in preparing your communications systems for the worst.
MORE >>President-elect Barack Obama, widely regarded as the techiest president yet, may have to give up one of the trappings of geekdom: his BlackBerry. In fact, he may have to give up e-mailing altogether, unless he's willing to have all of his messages open to public scrutiny.
MORE >>Project management continues to challenge IT executives. It's one thing for CIOs to expertly match IT solutions to their organizations' business needs, but a whole other thing to develop and implement the solution.
MORE >>Ellen Spertus, a graduate student at M.I.T., wondered why the computer camp she had attended as a girl had a boy-girl ratio of six to one. And why were only 20 percent of computer science undergraduates at M.I.T. female? She published a 124-page paper, “Why Are There So Few Female Computer Scientists?”, that catalogued different cultural biases that discouraged girls and women from pursuing a career in the field. The year was 1991.
MORE >>Companies waste money and energy letting obsolete machines keep running.
MORE >>We ran printers until they said it was time to change the cartridge -- and found that some left more than 40 percent of their ink unused.
MORE >>