Moving on

After 13 years with Network World, I’ve decided it’s time to try something different.

It has been a terrific experience. As an editor here I’ve had a front-row seat for the many changes in networking – which is to say I’ve seen the many changes to IT, to my own industry of publishing, and to the way we all do our business and go about our lives.

Think about cloud computing, mobile devices, social networking sites – all these things and more have transformed the world, and they all require computer networks.

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IBM names Virginia Rometty president and CEO

IBM Tuesday announced that Virginia Rometty will become president and CEO of the company, effective Jan. 1, 2012. She succeeds Sam Palmisano, who will stay on as chairman.

Rometty will be the first female CEO of the company. Currently, she serves as IBM's senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy.

Palmisano has been president and CEO of IBM since 2002. During his tenure, IBM got out of commoditized businesses that it helped build, such as PCs, printers and hard drives, to focus more on services and higher-margin businesses.

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Oh Siri, you so silly!

Featured at Apple’s launch of iPhone 4S last week – before we mourned Steve Jobs and then realized the iPhone 4S was headed for a demand tsunami – was a little thing called Siri. As users start playing around with it, they are discovering that Siri has a built-in sense of humor.

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Live blog of Apple's iPhone 5 event

Apple is making an announcement today regarding next steps with its iPhone, but won't be streaming the news. We are presenting a live blog from the event, courtesy of Macworld, so keep your browser tuned here at 1 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, Oct. 4.

Technical difficulties! Try here.

10 excellent IT how-to videos

Videos get a bad rap among IT staffs. The perception is that most videos flying around the Internet depict morons falling off their skateboards or teenagers mangling pop songs. Plus, they eat up lots of bandwidth. And most IT professionals don’t have the time to watch videos even if they weren’t fluff.

However, often there is good information delivered via video, and there are a few that IT pros should take a look at. Here are 10 IT how-to videos worth a look, either hosted here at Network World or garnering top ratings at YouTube. Enjoy.

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10 years later, and still so far to go

It's hard to believe it has been 10 years since the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01 claimed so many lives and changed our society forever.

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5 misperceptions about deploying IPv6

We’ve been very fortunate to have author Shannon McFarland blogging for us as part of our Cisco Subnet community, and he has just completed his list of top five misperceptions about IPv6 deployment.

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MaaS confusion: "As-a-service" gets out of hand

While researching this story on cloud computing and management, I was reintroduced to the term “management-as-a-service,” and I had to laugh.

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Would anyone like to say a few words?

Yeah, journalists love to proclaim technologies as "dead" – and if you take us literally, we're almost always a bit premature with those proclamations. But when we say something is dead, what we're really saying that it's on the way out of the mainstream, and irrevocably so.

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Gigamon ships its first terabit-scale monitoring switch

Network monitoring vendor Gigamon will ship its first chassis-based switch later this month, one with a 1 Tbps backplane and room to grow.

Gigamon builds switches that filter high-speed traffic coming from a network tap or a mirror port, prepping it for applications that analyze the data. Previously, its switches have been mostly fixed in their configuration, although they could be stacked if customers wanted to use more than one in the same location.

That approach has its limitations, however, when you are dealing with very large and very high-speed networks.

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Apple's introduction of iCloud

In case you missed it, here is the play-by-play of Apple's introduction of iCloud, the new Mac OS X, and other products at WWDC 2011, courtesy of Macworld's editors.

Big thanks to Jason Snell and Dan Moren for making this available.

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My favorite Network World moment

As Network World turned 25, we published a great collection of stories from reporters and editors about great moments working here, both professional and personal. I should have written my story, too, because Network World helped change my life.

It was October 1998, and I had just started at Network World a couple of months before as a reporter covering network management software. I was at NetWorld+Interop in Atlanta. (Remember when it was “N+I”? Remember when it was in Atlanta?)

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Worst hackers ever?

We always hear about the big data breaches, the most devastating viruses, and the most denying of the denial-of-service attacks. But for every hacker with that level of deviousness, there are a thousand wannabes out there. Some get ridiculed, some get arrested.

Here are a few favorites, as reported by the Internet:

1. “Virus” targets Whac-A-Mole

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Interop's still got some kick

This week's Interop in Las Vegas is proving why the trade show is still around after 25 years, with some early fireworks and new products that demonstrate just how vital the networking industry remains.

We had predicted in our Interop planner that cloud computing and virtualization would dominate the show, and yeah, we know that was an easy prediction to make.

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Cisco rails against 'tactical, multi-vendor approach' to networks

With Gartner in recent months arguing against single-vendor networks in general and Cisco's message in particular, Cisco today fired back.

In a live webcast, Cisco executives decried the "good enough" network and what it sees as common myths about networking. They argued that there are distinct benefits for buying into the single-vendor vision, including higher innovation, less downtime and better integration with applications.

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Crazy is as crazy does

It was all too easy to laugh at the headline "Cell phones are 'Stalin's dream." But now who's laughing?

Free software advocate Richard Stallman raised eyebrows with that comment to Network World editor Jon Brodkin. Some called him crazy, but some said he was right. And suddenly several things are coming to light that kinda back him up.

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March mobile madness: The most amazing videos from CTIA

The CTIA Wireless conference always showcases the latest and most innovative products in mobile and wireless, and this year's show is no exception. Check out these videos from the show floor that will make your jaw drop.

Radar detection? There's an app for that

Cobra Electronics demonstrates its iRadar, a radar detector for your iPhone (and now Android) that also offers laser alerts, red-light camera alerts and speed trap alerts. The company also shows its Bluetooth-enabled keychain that can help find a lost phone.

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Send us your fave raves

Do you have a favorite enterprise IT product you can't live without? Tell us about it and we'll share your raves with our readers.

Please send your submissions to Ann Bednarz at Network World ( abednarz@nww.com ) by April 4. Please note: Submissions must be received directly from IT professionals, not through a third party.

Items to address:

1. Please provide your name, title and employer.
2. What's your favorite product? (vendor name and product name)
3. Why do you like it?
4. How has it helped you and/or your company?

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Android-iPhone browser speed test called 'flawed'

Blaze Software stirred up an Apple fanboy hornet's nest today when it released the results of a speed showdown between browsers on Google's Android and Apple's iPhone - and bloggers are now claiming that those results are flawed.

The study said that Android's Chrome Web browser was, on average, 52% faster than iPhone's Safari browser.

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Wiring closet winners and losers

IT management software vendor SolarWinds recently held a photo contest to find the cleanest, most catastrophic and most creative wiring closets.

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