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Which IT Skills Are Pulling Big Bucks? (49:13 minutes)
Posted: Feb. 7, 2010
Outsourcing, of course, has made a big impact on the IT job market over the last few years, only it's sometimes called "managed services." Companies are still very nervous about hiring full-time talent. Security, however, is a tremendous place to be in IT right now. Companies wants skills in forensics, biometrics, data leakage prevention, intrusion detection and compliance.

Weekly Recap: The E-Book Empire Strikes (14:20 minutes)
Posted: Feb. 5, 2010
In this episode: Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair tells Congress Internet security is creaky; Sen. Dick Durbin asks tech companies about China policies; Amazon faces off with Macmillan; iPad looks to shake up the e-book sector; Cupertino sends out iMac screen fix; Twitter investigates account break-ins; AOL posts first earnings since Time Warner split; study suggests that cellphone bans are ineffective.

Listen to audio reports of top tech news stories, enjoy insightful commentaries and learn about new products. Download ECT News podcasts and listen to them on your MP3 player, or use your favorite media software to listen to them on your computer -- no separate device required.

The Great Mainframe Shakeout (28:46 minutes)
Posted: Jan. 31, 2010
Context applications are the plain-vanilla enterprise apps that are there for commodity productivity reasons, not for core innovation, customization or differentiation. IT budget planners are looking at ways to unshackle these context apps from expensive legacy systems like mainframes and instead run them on much lower-cost types of infrastructure.

How Smart Can Analytics Get? (51:12 minutes)
Posted: Jan. 24, 2010
According to Forrester, the average company's data warehouse today is somewhere between one and 10 terabytes in size. So what happens to analytics over the next decade, as the norm moves toward the petabyte range? How will this hunger for precise analysis, combined with a flood of raw new data, set the stage for powerful, advanced analytics outcomes?

Weekly Recap: Google and the Freedom Business (14:34 minutes)
Posted: Jan. 22, 2010
In this episode: Google wins praise from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for challenging China's government; flaw that hackers used in Google attack traced to IE6; France and Germany warn against Microsoft's browser until patch comes; Android phone launches scuttled in China; iPhone rumored to take shine to Bing; Bing opts to dump data sooner; gaming industry caps bad year with good month; Amazon brings the app store idea to Kindle e-readers.

FOSS Feats and Follies: Q&A With Red Hat's Paul Frields (26:44 minutes)
Posted: Jan. 22, 2010
Last month, more than 200 Fedora Project developers and contributors gathered in Toronto for FUDCon, the Fedora Users and Developers Conference. Paul Frields, Red Hat's Fedora Project Leader, talks about FUDCon, what lies ahead for the next generation of FOSS, and how to address some of the lingering problems of Linux communities.

The Elasticity of the Cloud (21:38 minutes)
Posted: Jan. 17, 2010
When working in newer cloud-computing environments, traditional capacity planning no longer cuts it. Old-fashioned capacity planning focuses on the peak usage of the application. The dynamics of the cloud add another dimension. One must factor in not only a peak usage case, but also moderate and low-level usage cases -- in other words, elasticity planning.

Weekly Recap: Google to China: Tear Down This Wall (14:54 minutes)
Posted: Jan. 15, 2010
In this episode: Google and China go to battle over Internet censorship; the new Nexus One smartphone starts getting some static; Palm gives its webOS phones a bump; Forrester sees brighter days ahead for IT; Facebook's Zuckerberg thinks privacy is so 2009; McAfee spots Facebook as it tries to pump up its security muscles; Roxxxy brings a new level of personality to the fake plastic girlfriend scene.

Data Center Migration: Easy as Changing the Engine Mid-Flight (39:07 minutes)
Posted: Jan. 10, 2010
Congratulations, you've completed your new data center. The hard part now will be to move all your existing data into the new place without a massive service interruption. It's about as easy as changing the engine on a plane in the middle of a flight. With sufficient advanced planning, however, it can be done.

Weekly Recap: Nexus One: You Can Look, You Can Buy, but You Can't Touch (10:55 minutes)
Posted: Jan. 8, 2010
In this episode: Microsoft shows off tablets and shares some Natal news at CES; box office receipts outpace DVD movie sales for the first time in years; Google launches the Nexus One, as well as a new way of selling smartphones; Apple gets into mobile advertising; Chrome edges out Safari in browser market share; scientists say cellphone radiation does something very interesting to mice predisposed to developing Alzheimer's-like symptoms.

CIOs, Get Ready to Defend Your Spend (25:02 minutes)
Posted: Jan. 3, 2010
With a new year comes a new IT budget, and while 2010 hopefully won't be as lean as 2009, CIOs will still need to fight for what they can spend. Make sure that every person you have, every piece of equipment you have, every decision you are making, is in the context of something that is supporting an immediate business need or a key element of business operation.