Technology Puts St. Bernards Out of Work
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GENEVA, Switzerland - Switzerland's noble Saint Bernard, famous for searching and rescuing avalanche victims buried in the Alps through the centuries, is finally bowing its sad, massive head, the fabled barrel around its neck replaced with a for-sale sign.    Heavy and slow in the deep Alpine snow, expensive to feed and already mostly replaced by helicopters and heat sensors, the once-proud Saint Bernards have found themselves obsolete and a drain on the resources of the religious order which has raised, trained and kept them since 1660 or 1670...
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A business research firm tries to estimate the âcost of unnecessary interruptionsâ in terms of lost productivity and innovation.
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All of the above spin out of the termination of Henry Bibby as USC&#39;s basketball coach. The program was imploding. Practice and games had become torture.
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Washington's new baseball team shut down business and promotional operations indefinitely yesterday as its move to the nation's capital teetered on the brink of collapse.
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By Julio Ojeda-Zapata, Pioneer Press, St. Paul, Minn.  Sep. 6--Dave Andrews knew something was horribly wrong when he couldn't open the digital-photo files on his computer. All those pictures of his kids were suddenly inaccessible, the Rosemount man recalls.
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There's a big yellow bar on the Twitter home page today saying it will be down for maintenence betw 10AM and 10PM today. I haven't heard any grumbling about this, but it's worth a bit of a grumble. What other basic form of communication goes down for 12 hours at a time? What if the web went offline for 12 hours at a time? It's unthinkable, because the web is built on the Internet and is decentralized and redundant. A single router or server can go down for a few hours, days or forever, and the web keeps on tickin.  Same with email. If Gmail started having twelve-hour planned outages, as much as I like Gmail, I'd switch. I can't be without email for any extended period of time.  Okay, let's give the guys at Twitter credit -- they stopped being flip about Twitter taking naps or showers. No one likes jokes when a line of communication is down. Now I'd like them to take another step. Assuming these long outages are really necessary, explain to us what they're for. I can take a guess -- something about their database needs changing, and all the data in all the files must be processed to implement the change. Any updates made while such a process is running would be lost, so the server must be shut off. But this is just a guess.  Another guess -- maybe they've hired a scaling expert who needs to make one final major adjustment before these outages are a thing of the past? No one would want to make such a promise, that's offering too much temptation to Dr Murphy, but that would be good news. Maybe Twitter is getting on to solid ground, finally.  It's fairly amazing that there isn't a viable Twitter clone out there yet. I'd also like to see something much more decentralized, based on static files, available to any Twitter-like system. It doesn't seem that far out of reach. With all the scaling troubles Twitter has had it's surprising that there haven't yet been any entrepreneurs willing to enter the space as competition to Twitter.  Users and developers are learning first-hand why centralized systems are so fragile. I'm sure they're doing a heroic job at Twitter, the best they can with what they have, but it's not good enough when the service takes a 12-hour break while many of the humans that depend on it are awake and working.
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By McNulty, Ian  Nearly every structure in St. Bernard Parish was inundated with floodwater after Hurricane Katrina. But even as the community's school district sat in the lingering waters, St.
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A Â£141m computer system used to process benefits payments is scrapped, the BBC learns.
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By David Robinson, The Buffalo News, N.Y.  Sep. 21--Computer Task Group has taken the interim tag off of Brendan M.  Harrington's title as chief financial officer.
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BusinessWeek Online - The announcement sent ripples of anxiety through the tech world. On Sept. 15, J.P. Morgan Chase &amp; Co.  said that it was terminating a seven-year, &#36;5 billion technology-outsourcing deal with IBM. For many, it's an article of faith that corporations will gradually hand off ever more of their technology operations to big service providers such as IBM, Accenture , and Electronic Data Systems . Yet here was the nation's second-largest bank taking its tech back because it was strategically too important to be left to an outsider. ...
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Digital technology has now replaced the old photo-finish cameras at Britain&#39;s racecourses, but still there are times when even a computer cannot help.
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Seagate Technology's base in Limavady may be about to close with the loss of hundreds of jobs.
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DUBLIN  - Ireland's major cable TV company, NTL, is closing down its domestic phone service after claiming that the Tellabs Inc.-supplied units used to connect phones to the cable could be dangerous.
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Dublin's hi-tech research laboratory, Media Labs Europe, is to shut down after running out of money.
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An American institution is in danger of fading away.
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Last year's HP Technology Forum was chased out of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina. This year, storm clouds of a different sort hang over the event.
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UK mesh pioneer taken out of administration