Archive

As regular readers of this column know, I'm a big fan of the Apple Macintosh, but I'm much less of a fan of Apple Canada in general and their dealers in the Toronto area in particular. This morning (Tuesday, October 19) I needed an external power adapter for a 17-inch titanium -- since it doesn't ha...

Unisys has joined forces with the SAS Institute to make Linux enterprise-ready for business intelligence in a move that demonstrates the server maker's commitment to meeting customer interest in open-source software and services. The effort is aimed at helping organizations migrate from the propriet...

When you ask business folk if they've considered hiring an IT consultant to move their company to an open-source platform, some think of a penguin logo and sleep-deprived, pony-tail-sporting developers. Others conjure up an image of an unkempt young techie with his feet up on the desk and Cheetos cr...

Sun Microsystems announced today that Orange SA, a London-based international mobile phone company, has chosen the Java Enterprise System to replace its current Sun software in Europe. Orange has operations in Benelux, and other western Europe regions. Orange has 22,000 employees and is a London-bas...

Black Duck Software has released code designed to help attorneys wade through the multifaceted intellectual property (IP) issues around open-source software. As part of its protexIP solution suite, protexIPTM/license management allows corporate legal teams to manage commercial and open-source softwa...

France built the Maginot Line in the 1930s, a supposedly impenetrable state-of-the-art defense system to protect the country from her long time enemy, Germany. It was meant to prevent a German invasion, but the Germans simply went around it, dealing the French a humiliating defeat in the spring of ...

JBoss is throwing its open source weight around in the business process management (BPM) ring, adding a workflow engine to its middleware platform with today's launch of jBPM 2.0. JBoss will compete with the likes of Oracle, BEA Systems, IBM and Microsoft for its share of a BPM market that Gartner p...

IBM is putting rivals Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems on notice with the announcement of two new p5 servers capable of running Linux and Unix and allowing users to run 254 virtual servers on each machine. "HP and Sun should be concerned about IBM's p5 because the price of the machines are relat...

Hoping to position itself to deliver its perspective on the epic legal battle over the future of Linux, the SCO Group said it would launch its own legal-defense Web site. The site, called Prosco.net, appears to be a direct reaction to the popular Groklaw.net site, which offers extensive analysis of ...

A day after visual computing company SGI announced its relationship with ATI Technologies, competitor Nvidia is boasting about its new alliance with Sun Microsystems. Sun has bundled Nvidia's Quadro graphics technology into its Java Workstations running Solaris, Windows or Linux operating systems in...

I've never gotten the hang of casual chit chat, and I blew it again the other day. We were at one of those things preceded by a wifely lecture about my behavior, and I really thought I was doing pretty well when the "conversation" meandered to I Robot. Since this was the first movie mentioned that I...

Gupta Technologies announced today that its SQLBase(R) 9.0 for Linux has been certified "Novell Ready" for SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 and 9. The Novell Ready designation means that the product has been designed to work with Novell's Linux family of enterprise-class software products. "GUPTA has ...

Sun Microsystems has settled its long-fought patent infringement case with Eastman Kodak, heading off a jury decision on the penalty. Faced with the prospect of paying damages of more than US$1 billion in federal court, the software giant reached an out-of-court agreement late last night, according ...

As con men the two pitiful rascals in "Huckleberry Finn" made their living by pretending to be what they were not, and then charging the gullible to share the illusion. A cynic might see parallels to Red Hat here: pretending to open source ideals while actually charging the MSCE community for the pr...

IBM has launched an aggressive bid to grab an even bigger share of the midlevel market for Unix-based servers, where Big Blue has recently made huge gains on competitors. IBM launched a family of products built around its Power5 microprocessor and made no bones about its desires to use them and thei...