Welcome to the IT Week Insider

This week we run whooping and hollering around like some inbred idiot who has just been selected to appear on a low-brow, low-value, low-entertainment daytime gameshow. Fortunately for you, we aren't actually about to appear on The Weakest Count Deal Wheel of Misfortune - they wouldn't let us in the studio with the monkeys - but we are excited by this week's IT news. Strange but true.

Editor's choice:
Comment: IT Staff should look [after] the business
Our colleague Jimbo Murray does a lot of hanging about outside the locales of the "Let's do lunch - then purge" brigade. That is, he loiters near the offices of trendy fashion magazines. We are not sure why. As far as we know the restraining order lasts for another three years. Still, Jimmy does a lot of thinking when he's in the area, some of which is even about IT. This week, while pondering the ill-fitting shirts and decolletage strutting past, he also considered how IT staff tend to dress, and whether this affects their reputation within their organisations. We know what he means. Our MD always turns and runs when he spots us – we assume because the monkeys ate all our ties.

IT Week Podcast
Every week the team gets together and casts out some pods. Once we tire of this frankly pointless activity Madeline Bennett, News Editor, scrapes a few of the team together, points a microphone at them, and picks over their brains like so much carrion. This week the team discuss biometric passports, the Intel Developer Forum, and VeriSign's dominion over the .com domain.

Laptops offer both power and stamina
Hewlett Packard and Toshiba might sound like characters from the Great Gatsby - if you are an idiot. But they ain't. We have news for those just recently released from under a rock: these two make laptops. And pretty nice ones at that. This week the firms refreshed their business laptops - this means more than blowing the crumbs off their keyboards - and offered improvements such as longer battery life and improved performance. So what are you waiting for? Make with the click like a flirting cricket:

AMD unveils new dual-care Opteron chips
You know you are writing about IT when most of the words you write are helpfully underlined in wavy red. This week Microsoft Word has got in a bit of a tizz about AMD's Opteron chips, which quite frankly is pretty understandable. What sort of a word is Opteron anyway? It sounds like something the Mysterons might ask to look after things for a few days while they pop off for a well-earned break from terrorising humans. We know these newly revamped Opterons are definitely not marionette holiday cover, so what are they? Find out more, here.

Interview:
Microsoft brings BI to the Office party
We said, bring a bottle, or some girls, and what does Microsoft do? It brings business intelligence. Fair enough, because we weren't actually having a party, we just wanted some booze and someone else for the monkeys to chase. Anyway, Phil Muncaster was fortunate enough to be both sober and in the office when Microsoft's Chris Caren, general manager for business solutions, turned up. We sent the pair of them, a large glass of water and a notebook into a meeting room to find out why BI functions are now being built into Microsoft's productivity tools.

Interview:
Pick the best tools for the job 
When you hear 'Neon software architect' do you expect to see a software architect who has just fallen out of the movie Tron, or one who has just snarfed a bowl-load of Ready Brek? We do. But we put our disappointment aside when Neon software's president turned up at the office and requested an audience with Dave Bailey. Craig Isaacs, for that is his name, gives advice on procurement and outsourcing here. And no mention of a light Frisbee...

Editor's blog
IT Week editor Lem Bingley on the latest object in his in-tray: a lawyer's letter from AOL.

IT Sneak blog
Odds and ends from the weird world of IT.
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