Archive

The use of electronic voting in this year's U.S. elections has the makings of the greatest IT-related disaster yet. Barring a miracle, this is a done deal, a disaster unfolding as we watch. The problem, unfortunately, is that it's too late for alternative technologies to come in while a number of ju...

A new Yankee Group survey shows only 4 percent of Unix users and 10 percent of Windows users have any desire to switch platforms. The Yankee Group report, called "Linux, Unix and Windows TCO Comparison," advises corporations to delay a Linux migration -- or any software migration -- until they can s...

The SCO group reported a net loss Tuesday in its fiscal third quarter, with a significant revenue drop from the comparable quarter of the same period last year. The company noted that its Q3 revenue in 2003 was approximately US$20 million, compared with $11.2 million this year. SCO has pointed to a ...

Veritas Software has entered into an agreement to acquire KVault Software (KVS), a provider of e-mail archiving software, in an all-cash transaction valued at US$225 million. With the addition of KVS, Veritas hopes to offer customers software to store, manage and archive corporate e-mail and data. T...

Novell announced Monday that it is consolidating some of its business units in order to concentrate more fully on Linux and identity management. Four business units have now been made into two, which will also necessitate management changes at the company. "Open source offers choice in markets previ...

A recent blog posting by a Microsoft project manager spawned a blizzard of discussion on one of the Internet's major tech forums and generated speculation that Microsoft may be ready to improve its relations with the open-source community. Josh Ledgard, a program manager for Microsoft's Visual Studi...

Intel, the world's largest chip maker, said Monday that it has built fully functional 70-megabit static random access memory (SRAM) chips with more than half a billion transistors using 65 nanometer (nm) process technology.

Michael Newdow may not be a household name to the open-source community. The California atheist sued a Sacramento school district to prevent his third-grade daughter from having to recite or listen to the Pledge of Allegiance because it includes the words "under God." But Newdow's case has some inte...

Orion Multisystems has announced two models of the Orion Cluster Workstation, a computing platform for engineering and scientific professionals who need to solve computationally complex problems. Orion's systems are based on clustering, which is a means of exploiting processor parallelism to generat...

As part of Software Freedom Day, set for August 28, OpenOffice will be translated into three African languages for the first time. After Saturday, the open-source desktop suite will be available to speakers of the South African languages of Zulu, Sepedi and Afrikaans. The new versions have been prep...

On Saturday, August 28, it is possible a new holiday will be born: Software Freedom Day. Organized by grassroots groups, the worldwide event is an effort to promote wider use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). One of the largest regions to see events associated with this day will be Asia, whic...

Linspire today announced the availability of Internet dialer software that provides direct access to the Internet for desktop Linux users via AOL's dial-up ISP service. AOL, a subsidiary of Time Warner, is the world's largest ISP with 29.7 million AOL subscribers in the U.S. and Europe. The AOL Dial...

Everyone knows PCs are faster than Macs, but Macs cost more. Right? There are two issues here: cost and performance. Right now I want to focus on the cost side of the myth, leaving performance for another column, possibly in late September. For today, I'm simply going to argue that Macs and PCs are ...

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has asked Microsoft to change an ad that claims Linux has been found to be over 10 times more expensive than Windows Server. The group evaluated the truthfulness of the ad after a number of public complaints were filed. In the ad, Microsoft cites figure...

Cisco Systems of San Jose, California, Monday acquired privately held P-Cube of Sunnyvale, California.