A decade-old concept of moving a desktop computer’s everyday tasks onto the Web is gaining steam.

The idea of treating the Web like an operating system–and loosening dependence on Windows desktop applications–dates back to the Netscape browser’s debut in the mid-1990s.

Technically, so-called Web OS software still relies on an underlying operating system, like Windows or Linux, to translate a user’s actions to hardware functions. But proponents of the Web OS or "Webtops" are bringing more end user computing into the Web browser, arguably making the choice of operating system less important.

ComputerWorld has put together a list of the top technological flops that actually made it to market, so vaporware like Apple’s Copeland or Microsoft’s Cairo aren’t listed. Sad to see the ebook listed, but the publishers have no one to blame but themselves. What flop comes to your mind that may not be on that list?

A small startup, Adaptive Planning, has taken the next step in offering alternative application technology by combining on demand and open source to build business intelligence-based performance management software. The question is, now that the company has built it, will users come?

The goal for Adaptive Planning is to "dramatically expand" its base of users who will move forward from free, hosted versions of its software to paid subscriptions, according to William Soward, the company’s president and CEO. To do that, the company announced a free version of its Express Edition On-Demand software.

Symantec has fixed a serious flaw in its Enterprise Security Manager product attackers could remotely exploit to hijack targeted machines. The antivirus giant said in an advisory that all versions of ESM are vulnerable to a remote code execution attack.

Attackers with knowledge of the agent protocol could deploy malware that allows them to control the host computer. Adding to the problem is that the ESM agent runs with administrative privileges. Automated and manual fixes are available on the Symantec Web site.

Staying in touch constantly by using laptops, BlackBerrys and other wireless devices has blurred the line between a person’s professional and personal life, according to a new survey.

Seventy five percent of people questioned in a survey by Yahoo! HotJobs said they used their wireless devices equally for work and personal reasons.

Nearly 30 percent were so attached to them they only switched them off while sleeping.

Intel has been granted a few more days to explain how it is trying to locate a long list of missing emails in the legal discovery phase of a 2-year-old court battle initiated by its major competitor, Advanced Micro Devices.

A U.S. District judge on March 7 originally gave Intel 30 days to try to recover more than 1,000 lost emails that it was required to keep for an antitrust lawsuit filed by AMD in 2005.

The top three highest paid chief information officers in 2006 work for financial services firms.

Timothy Shack of PNC Financial Services had a total 2006 compensation of $5.94 million, followed by Gregor Bailar of Capital One at $4.5 million and Steven Sadoff of Knight Capital Group at $1.99 million.

In an examination of proxy statements with the Securities and Exchange Commission filed from Jan. 1 through April 5 there were 13 CIOs who made more than $1 million. Total compensation includes equity incentive plans, stock options, bonuses and other items counted as pay such as transportation, expenses, insurance premiums and various benefits.

A new study from Eracent shows that IT purchase decisions are widely driven by return on investment, potential savings and risk abatement. The survey also shows a trend in funded IT initiatives towards consolidation and compliance. The top 3 funded IT initiatives reported in the survey include server consolidation (76%), license compliance (68%) and hardware refresh (66%).

As Marcus Foerster mentioned in last week’s article, one big subject at this year’s Lotusphere was how to get business value out of Web 2.0 applications that have already been in use on the public Internet for the last few years. This is the second in a two-part series gives an overview on the new Web 2.0 features discussed at Lotusphere, displays ways to generate business value and gives ideas on how social computing can be integrated into your business applications. Let’s see where this all takes us.

Read this DominoPower article.

The Mozilla Foundation is looking at disabling support for the Windows animated cursor format as a workaround for the ANI vulnerability that has left Windows systems open to exploit and complete takeover for the past week.

Firefox users who use automatic update should get an update notification for the workaround. Users who have turned off update notification can use the "Check for Updates…" item on Firefox’s Help menu.