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How different would the IT world look if Sun and Hewlett-Packard joined forces in the operating system arena? Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy has already imagined such a scenario. The executive is urging its bitter rival to unite its HP-Unix operating system with Sun's Solaris Unix operating syst...

Windows has overcome Unix to claim the server sales crown for the first time, according to IDC's latest Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker. The Windows server market continued to show solid growth, with factory revenues increasing by 4.7 percent year over year. Overall, Windows servers accounted for...

The Free Standards Group announced this week the opening of a Linux certification lab in China. The lab will certify Linux distributions and applications to the Linux Standard Base and will be maintained by the FSG and the China Electronics Standardization Institute. It is the first certification au...

IBM and Novell partnered this week to offer customers a single subscription option for servers running SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 in the IBM BladeCenter chassis. The companies said the new chassis subscription model will help customers maintain control over the cost of computing by potentially r...

IBM and Sun yesterday announced a 10-year extension of their Java technology agreement along with plans to deliver IBM middleware support for the Solaris 10 operating system on SPARC, x86 and x64 systems. Analysts said the agreements play a key role in Sun's new direction. "The next wave of economic...

High-tech heavy hitters such as IBM, Novell and Oracle are among those showing support for the Linux Standard Base (LSB), a set of standards designed to improve compatibility between Linux distributions. The Free Standards Group (FSG) yesterday announced a long list of Independent Software Vendors (...

Red Hat unveiled its updated enterprise Linux distribution today and used the occasion to take a shot at rival Sun. "It's the beginning of the end of Solaris in the enterprise," Paul Cormier, executive vice president of engineering at Red Hat, said of Enterprise Linux v4, which the company said is ...

Some friends of mine are considering setting up a new company around an e-commerce idea and asked me to research the cost of the IT infrastructure needed. As part of that, I went Web shopping for a low end server to get them started, and found some surprises. Note that all pricing data shown below i...

Sun Microsystems officially started down the path to an open-source version of Solaris on Tuesday with a partial release of source code which ultimately will be OpenSolaris. Being released under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL), which was reviewed and approved by the Open Sourc...

In a move to steal market share from Microsoft Windows, Novell has unveiled Linux Desktop 9. The company claims the new release is robust enough to offer a viable alternative for enterprise Windows users. At the same time, the company also announced of settlement of its antitrust suit against its de...

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...

About a month ago, I compared the cost for Apple's desktop, server and laptop products to their nearest Dell equivalents and discovered that Macs generally cost less than comparable PC products. That was a bit of surprise, but the truly astonishing thing that came out of the comparison was that Dell...

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.

Thin client vendors have shown a greater presence at this week's LinuxWorld conference than in the past, with Wyse Technology, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems all offering new products. The moves set the stage for broader deployment of the technology in the coming year. IDC analyst Bob O'Donnel...

To kick off its big JavaOne party for its software developers in San Francisco this week, Sun Microsystems made a flurry of announcements aimed at rekindling enthusiasm for the once high-flying company's future prospects. But some critics of the Santa Clara, California enterprise remained unimpresse...