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Three years ago, IBM, Sony and Toshiba announced a partnership aimed at developing a new processor for use in digital entertainment devices like the PlayStation. Since then, the product has seen a billion dollars in development work. Two fabs, one in Tokyo and one in Fishkills, New York, have been c...

The SCO Group on Wednesday unveiled an array of new Unix products, as well as channel support and training programs. The announcement comes less than a week after the company reported disappointing financial results that included a quarterly drop from US$21.4 million to $10.1 million. Among the new ...

This week's column is about the nature of the software needed to go with the elections administration hardware laid out in last week's column. In brief, the idea was to ignore political reality long enough to imagine a system in which the voting support application runs on the local servers but capt...

What would your answer be if a selection team charged with hiring a new CIO to develop and implement an organization-wide "strategic systems architecture" were to ask you what management considerations most differentiate use of Windows from use of Linux? The right answer, I think, is that the...

Major vendors, like HP and IBM, are embracing Linux. Does that mean that Linux is no longer, practically speaking, free? Some technology experts -- even those keen on Linux -- have widely differing opinions. In an interview with the Australian IT press, Steve Vamos, the managing director for Microso...

The SCO Group late Friday disclosed that one of its investors is extremely unhappy -- and wants its money back. But the Lindon, Utah-based Unix provider apparently isn't going to resolve the legal controversy without a fight, at least for now. In a letter released to other investors by SCO, BayStar ...

Arguments that Linux poses a threat to national security if its use on Pentagon projects continues unchecked are "short-sighted and self-serving," and are merely an attempt to cultivate "uncertainty and doubt" in the marketplace. So said Dr. Inder Singh, chairman and CEO of LynuxWorks, a San Jose-ba...

The developer of one of the world's most high-profile, open-source databases, Sweden's MySQL AB, this week launched MySQL Cluster, a new open-source database clustering technology for applications that need continuous availability. The MySQL Cluster combines a clustering architecture with the MySQL ...

Sometimes bitter humor is the only sensible response to absurd injustice. A few years ago, for example, a lot of frustrated Apple fans were sure that if Steve Jobs walked across San Francisco Bay, the PC press would thunder "Jobs Can't Swim!" Or, more topically, if Sun won a major legal victory agai...

About a month ago we had some people over for dinner, and the discussion drifted to top-10 lists of the Letterman variety. As part of that conversation, I got challenged to name the top 10 worst IT decisions ever -- something I couldn't do then and still can't do now, which is why I'm asking for you...

If you read a report sponsored by the Flat Earth Society in which an independent research organization found the world to be flat, would you believe it? I'd guess not, but any reputable research organization hired to survey the society's membership on the question would have to come to that conclusi...

If you were to make up your own list of the top 10 issues likely to affect computing over the next five to 10 years, would you include liability reform in the American legal system? I think you should, even if you live, as I do, in Canada or some other country where American law doesn't apply direct...

A few years ago, the only IT system I wasn't responsible for at a multimillion-dollar company consisted of a SCO server with an ancient accounting application maintained by the remaining representative of the company that had originally sold it. At the time, I thought old Vitki (not his real name) w...

The people who run Toronto's municipal IT infrastructure have managed to ground themselves so securely between rocks and hard places that they're about to charge the taxpayer another hundred million or so to bail them out. It really is too bad, but Toronto's not exactly beloved by the rest of the co...

While watching CNN last week, I suffered one of those brain spasms that leave you holding an idea you can neither rationally assess nor forget about. I still can't assess the idea -- and I'm about to ask you for help on that -- but my attempts to do something with it did give me a deeper insight int...

Last week, Novell announced its purchase of SuSE for $210 million -- $50 million of it direct from an IBM investment in newly issued convertible preferred stock. This deal raises two difficult questions: What's Novell up to, and why, if the people behind SuSE wanted to cash out, didn't they do an IP...