Stories by Patrick Thibodeau

The top trends affecting technology infrastructure over the next five years can be summed up as largely a list representing where IT and users are battling for control over technology.

Microsoft, Yahoo and several other top vendors are making it easier for small and mid-size companies to hire specialized IT consultants located anywhere in the world by working with providers of online employment marketplaces that use eBay-like features to match workers with employers.

IBM veteran Pat Toole was recently named CIO at at the company and given much broader responsibilities than his predecessors in the post, which now oversees a far more centralized IT operation.

The White House's data.gov effort is spurring the creation of some entertaining and informative applications from private developers.

The U.S. has upgraded the supercomputer used to develop weather forecast models, a system so critical to meteorologists that the government has bought a second, identical system as a backup.

Continued delays in the completion of Oracle Corp.'s pending US$7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems Inc. have put the latter into a limbo that appears to be devastating its computer server business.

When eBay Inc.'s PayPal unit suffered an outage Aug. 3, one of the companies affected was Sailrite Enterprises Inc., a sailing supply company in Churubusco, Ind. Sailrite lost its customer payment services for six hours.

Washington State breaks ground this month on a new data center and office complex that two state lawmakers have called a "mistake." A better approach, they argue, might include turning over some of the state's computing resources to commercial cloud providers, such as Google Inc. or local favorites, Amazon.com Inc. and Microsoft Corp.

Job offers for IT graduates are generally down across the board, but that's not stopping a New York woman from suing to get her tuition money back.

There are signs that an increasing number of people who have been forced out of their jobs are starting their own businesses.

The salaries of IT managers are retreating, and most affected by the trend are managers running technology operations at mid-sized companies with less than $500 million in annual revenue, according to a semi-annual study from Janco Associates Inc.

Iran's government in recent days has tried to cut off Internet access for most of its election protestors by shutting down routers at the nation's perimeters, ripping satellite dishes off roofs, cutting cables and turning off telephone switching networks.

Just off the North Sea coast in the United Kingdom, Hewlett-Packard Co.'s EDS unit has built a data center that largely relies on cold sea air to keep servers chilled and -- by doing so -- cut the center's cooling power needs in half.

The real impact of the nearly $800 billion stimulus package on shrinking IT employment remains in the future, despite President Obama's plan, announced today, to expedite hiring of some 600,000 people over the next 100 days. Many of the jobs in this summer boost will be aimed at the construction and education fields and at young people.

Oracle Corp.'s announcement last week that it plans to buy Sun Microsystems Inc. raised questions about, well, almost every aspect of the blockbuster deal that would unite two Silicon Valley icons.