With the meteoric rise of the mobile application market, could there be enough buzz over at the Apple App Store and at Amazon to share a little success with those of us longing for attention?

Written by Chris Smith

The mobile application market is taking off like wildfire, and it looks like developers are not only having fun but making tons of money as well—at $1.99 per download! The Apple App Store is so successful, the number of downloads is no longer measured in millions; it's gone into the billions—10 billion downloads, in fact, since the App Store opened in 2008, according to court documents filed by Apple recently in its trademark infringement suit against Amazon. No wonder Amazon and its similar-sounding Appstore for Android don't care about a little thing like a lawsuit; there's gold in them there hills.

This year will see new technologies applied to the IBM i platform, requiring a redoubled commitment to training and personal development.

Written by Chris Smith

Given all the negatives that the economic downturn in 2009 caused, it's not surprising that 2010 ended with some uncertainty, even as many businesses began to get their feet on the ground. The lingering malaise may have been unfairly projected onto the IBM i platform, but there is now a true spirit of optimism emerging in the IT industry as January propels us rapidly into the heart of 2011.

Start planning now and help those near you understand what a geek really needs.

Written by Chris Smith

This holiday season, let's all get in touch with reality and quit pretending that we are someone we're not. If you have young children and you want to be Santa Claus, well fine. But everybody else needs to let the truth be told. You're a geek, OK? If you don't step up to the plate and admit it, how do you expect to get any geek gifts at Christmas?

A modern-day Jonas Salk seeks a cure for movement.

Written by Michael Stuhlreyer

Calling upon dwindling reserves of benevolence, I try to convince myself that Chris Harrison has the good of mankind at heart. I try to believe that he honestly believes he's advancing the human condition and that he believes his contribution will so improve life on Earth that he will earn a place alongside Salk, Edison, the Wright Brothers, and Crum (inventor of the honest-to-goodness randomly shaped, grease-fried potato chip, for those who slept through history class) in the pantheon of game-changers. He doesn't intend to nauseate me, I assure myself, but he does—like, well, a Pringle.

Common sense and a little skepticism may help protect us from an overreliance on complex analytics.

Written by Chris Smith

The volcanic eruption in Iceland last week has focused attention once again on how unprepared we are when managing technology—as well as managing the world around us. First we fail to predict a volcano that is pushing up from the ground like a teenager's pimple, and then we cancel more than 100,000 airline flights based on what now is claimed to be a flawed computer simulation. What's next?

Less than a week before the Super Bowl, a technophobe makes a mad dash for a big-screen TV.

Written by Michael Stuhlreyer

A certain frenzied logic takes over five days before the Super Bowl when the Saints are playing and your wife was born and raised in New Orleans and you can't possibly justify $3,000 a ticket plus airfare and hotel. The rationale is unassailable: I presently have a 30" television screen. A 30" screen just will not do. Therefore, I need a bigger TV.

Ever wonder what the free market in full indulgence mode looks like? Browse the list of Apple's Web apps.

Written by Michael Stuhlreyer

Editor's note: You asked for it, and you got it! Back by popular demand is our "Tirade" humor column.

The infinite monkey theorem states that a monkey hitting keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time will eventually type the complete works of William Shakespeare. Well, the monkey's still at work; no Shakespeare yet. But I'm convinced that all the monkey-babble typed to this point has not gone unused, that Apple and its legion of app developers continually sift through the mountains of nonsense words for ideas.

The corporation continues to keep layoff numbers secret but is obliged to report that executives received millions in bonuses and extravagant perks.

By Chris Smith

While wandering the aisles of Wal-Mart the other day, I noticed that the store's stock of resumé paper was completely sold out. I don't know why I should be surprised by this, but it made me wonder if a few thousand laid-off IBM employees might have been responsible. Perhaps they first met at McDonald's for coffee and then marched over to Wal-Mart together and swarmed into the store like a hoard of locusts, wiping the shelves clean of the precious commodity that everyone wants: resumé paper!