1. "Eight-Day IT Outage Would Cripple Most Companies,"
Computerworld, January 10

This week's sobering news comes from a Gartner poll that found most business continuity plans couldn't handle a regional disaster lasting more than a week because they aren't designed to cope with severe outages that go beyond seven days. Companies need to make their business continuity and disaster recovery plans more "mature" and that could mean pumping more money into the IT budget as well as enterprise-wide collaboration, says Gartner analyst Roberta Witty. The analyst firm surveyed 359 IT professionals from the U.S., the U.K. and Canada and found that 60 percent say their business continuity plans don't go beyond seven days. Most company plans are focused on dealing with internal IT disruptions and not something larger, that could also hurt facilities. That's despite the lessons that should have been learned from Hurricane Katrina and Sept. 11, not to mention all of the theoretical disasters such as pandemics, civil unrest and various other forms of terrorism that have been discussed in recent years.

2. "Update: New York Launches Antitrust Investigation of Intel,"
InfoWorld, January 10

New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo is going after Intel, launching an official antitrust investigation into the chip giant. Cuomo's office is investigating whether Intel violated state and federal antitrust laws, coercing customers to exclude Advanced Micro Devices from the global market for PC CPUs. His office served Intel with a wide-ranging subpoena to gather information on pricing practices and whether the company used its market power to exclude rivals. Intel aims to comply with the subpoena and defend its practices, a spokesman says.

3. "CES 2008 Picks and Pans,"
PC World, January 10

"Slouching Toward Convergence 2.0,"
PC World, January 10

For those of us who can't possibly sort through all of the news about products on display or announced at the annual International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, don't despair! PC World's CES team has assembled a list of the gear that they liked the most and the least. This year's show was heavy on talk of "Convergence 2.0," which is apparently the addition of Web 2.0 services and content into what has become a CES trend standard -- the connection between communications tools, consumer electronics and other devices. Devices that connect to wireless broadband, new mobile services and deals between content companies and computer vendors all made headlines.