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Last week, I talked about the cell processor expected from Sony and IBM. This week I want to think out loud about what happens in the industry if Toshiba launches a PC based on this processor into the Asian market and IBM promptly follows suit with a series aimed at the American and European markets...

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...

Tokyo-based Turbolinux this week disclosed that it has developed a new Linux operating system for home PC users -- Turbolinux 10F. Turbolinux is said to be the best-selling Linux distributor in the Asia-Pacific region. "Japanese consumers are moving in large numbers to Linux," said Koichi Yano, pres...

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...

Online music store Napster announced this week a new cache-management technology that uses Linux, open standards and IBM services to provide its music service for universities, ISPs and businesses without impacting bandwidth or introducing security threats. The application, dubbed "Super Peer," will...

I've been puzzled by Sun's Linux strategy for a long time. On the software side, things make sense: Linux is Unix, so supporting Linux in the short term brings new value to Solaris in the long term. On the hardware side, however, I couldn't see any logical reason for Sun to sell x86 boxes until just...

Open-source developer the Mozilla Foundation has released a new version of its next-generation browser, dubbed Firefox after a name change and the addition of new features that bring the browser, according to the group, to "the bleeding edge of Internet technology." The browser was formerly known as...

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...

If you sell products, measuring sales in terms of dollars during some reporting cycle -- like a quarterly or annual period -- makes perfect sense. It's dollars you're interested in, so dollars you measure. That's not true, however, for the open-source community. If you give away the product, then us...

Apple this week released the latest source code for its Darwin open-source project -- Darwin 6.7 and 6.8 -- which corresponds to the Mac OS X operating system and its latest versions, 10.2.7 and 10.2.8. Among the most prominent of open-source projects from Apple, Darwin is based on FreeBSD 4.4 and i...