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The newly released Solaris 10 includes a radical new technology called DTrace which lets you look inside the usual black box of a running production application to see exactly where the bottlenecks are and what their impact is. As a result, I've been telling clients with big Solaris operations that ...

Microsoft announced today that it would extend its indemnification program to all end-users of its software products. According to analysts, however, the move is more a way to ease customers' fears than a real value-add. The software giant's policy protects end users of software from the legal cost...

The Mozilla Foundation today officially released its open-source browser, Firefox 1.0, but the news won't come as a surprise to a great many computer users. Since it released its preview version in September, 8 million people have downloaded the super-fast browser, a direct descendant of Netscape. T...

While I was handing out candy on Halloween, a trick-or-treater came to the door dressed as an open-source project. There was code everywhere and volunteer contributors were coming out of his ears. It was a clever costume, but what made it really scary was the giant fork he was carrying. Open-sourc...

Recent low-key efforts by Adobe Systems to bolster its presence in the Linux community makes good business sense, according to one analyst who covers the company. Adobe, which makes well-known software brands Acrobat, Illustrator and Photoshop, is keeping all its bases covered by expanding its Linux...

About two months ago, I looked at the cost of the Macintosh relative to Dell PCs and discovered that not only are Macs cheaper than PCs once you upgrade the PCs to rough comparability, but the PC line is narrower than Apple's, with Dell offering nothing to compare to the 17-inch Apple powerbook, the...

Sleepycat Software opened the doors of its first European office today in the United Kingdom. The office marks the company's official expansion into European markets and will provide sales, marketing and support of Sleepycat's Berkeley DB, Berkeley DB XML and Berkeley DB Java Edition database system...

Computers are becoming pervasive learning tools in K-12 education, whether in individual classrooms or in a shared media center. Both Apple and Microsoft have donated millions of dollars worth of equipment to schools in order to aid education and spread their doctrine. But what about the growing inf...

In a move that gives Linux greater play in the data center, Dell has reached an agreement with Novell to certify Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on Dell PowerEdge servers. The companies said the deal would give customers more choices for fully-supported Linux platform developments. Dell Servic...

I love life and I love having choices. I guess you can say I am pro-life and pro-choice. Unfortunately, for most people those labels represent the opposing sides of a very divisive issue. The curious thing is that these terms are not really descriptive of the issue at all. In fact, unless you know...

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...

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...

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...

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...

For those who think the SCO Group v. IBM lawsuit has gotten too ugly to watch, there is a fresh fight in the open-source arena over the ownership of Mambo. Mambo, an open-source content-management system, is maintained by developers at the Mambo Group, and its copyright is owned by Australian...

Connoisseurs of 1960s TV might be familiar with Paladin, a Western that featured a San Francisco character with a business card that read "Have Gun, Will Travel." He was a dapper cross between a private detective and a bounty hunter who roamed through the West tracking down bad guys. He was mainly a...

The news is out: SCO is losing money. Fast. Considering that SCO has no revenue and lots of expenses, the news is not surprising. Raising revenue and cutting expenses might help, but neither will be easy. The company reported a significant net loss in the third quarter, which it blamed mostly on a l...

The techniques used to develop open-source software like Linux have proven to be so effective that they've been adopted by malware writers to improve their mischievous ways. "There's a community of worm builders creating, almost in an open-source fashion, Trojan source code that can be downloaded, c...

Enterprise infrastructure and wireless software provider Sybase announced on Wednesday that it will be offering the first free deployment version of Sybase ASE Express Edition for Linux, an enterprise-class Linux database. With the introduction of this edition, the company notes that enterprises, th...