This pilot fish works for a company that provides IT services to city governments -- which is a great business, except in cases where the client is a long drive away and has constant, inexplicable problems.

 

It's 2020. The at-home telemedicine robot reminds me it's time for the doctor to check how well the burn on my arm is healing. The specialist is in a clinic located more than 45 miles away, but she thoroughly examines my arm through a wound assessment device built into the robot. After the consultation, my smart band reminds me that the mobile health vehicle will be at my workplace, and I should stop by to get my flu shot. I quickly acknowledge my medication reminder alert, take my meds, and then hop into my driverless smart car.

I have been on the road for the past few weeks, last week I was in the Middle East and this week I come to you from Scotland. These places would appear to the outsider as being very different places but not when it comes to IT. One topic that was common throughout most meetings that I attended was on the subject of the insider threat, something getting inside a network and causing a problem.

General Motors (NYSE:GM) is to stop advertising on Facebook (NASDAQ:FB). Just days before IPO, there are better times for this to leak. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers wonder what effect this will have on the share price and valuation.

Android may be on the brink of its biggest change yet -- a shift that could redefine the platform and send waves through the entire mobile market.

In IT service management news feeds are rising as a key repository for answers says Frank Slootman. And eventually social news streams will displace the fielded database as the dominant information repository for IT service management.

Facebook gets all the publicity, but when it comes down to what company people really like, Microsoft leads Facebook by a wide margin, as do Apple and Google. That's according to a just-released AP-CNBC poll.

When it comes to the iPhone 5, Apple doesn't have a problem -- it has an incredible opportunity. Millions of happy iPhone users are more willing than ever before to purchase a Mac or iPad, because they love their iPhone.

A major shift is underway in data center infrastructure procurement and design. Many public and private entities have shifted from making large hardware and software purchases in the form of components of servers, storage and applications to instead buying pre-packaged bundles, building blocks and/or PODS. This trend is part of a more modular data center design approach based on vendor tested and certified reference architectures.

Cybersecurity experts begin research on a computer network that can detect and defend itself from attackers by automatically changing its setup and configuration. The Air Force supplied $1 million to investigate applying intelligent adaptive techniques to cybersecurity. Will a moving-target defense applied to networks be a 'game-changer' or the start of Skynet?

In my last two articles, the context has been the opportunities and challenges that financial institutions (FIs) have with implementing private clouds successfully. But what about public clouds?

Rival vendors gather to explain cloud computing to congressional staffers.

Newt Gingrich's Newt 2012 organization is aiding and abetting spammers. Hard to believe, I know, but it turns out his organization is providing targeted email addresses for spammers to use. Don't let your organization make the same mistake. I'll explain all in The Long View...

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The Adobe Shockwave Player was just updated to correct security flaws on Windows and OS X. An Adobe tester page reports the installed version, if any, of the Shockwave Player. This is what Windows users can expect with Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer.

What stood out to me about The Avengers themselves was how dysfunctional they were as a team early on and how they remedied that quickly enough to save the earth. Here are five key things that we as IT professionals can learn from this team.