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In a move to woo independent software vendors (ISVs) to develop open solutions tailored to vertical industries using IBM hardware, IBM today announced resources available from its new Virtual Innovation Center for Hardware This online information portal is designed to help IBM business partners more quickly build, port and deploy solutions and is f...

It's that time again: Holiday shopping is here. What's the latest fad for the kids? Where can I find the best selections, prices and product information? And what in the world can I get for Uncle Phil, who has everything and likes very little? If the questions remain timeless, finding answers has changed radically over the past decade. The Internet...

Once again we are on countdown for Christmas, and many of you will take the easy way out and give cash, checks or one of those pre-paid cards that allow recipients to buy what they want at an after-Christmas sale. But for me there is something of a letdown in getting cash for Christmas, and I tend not to remember the gift or associate the purchase with the gift giver. As a result, the only time I give cash is when cash is the thing the recipient most needs...

Dan Rather delivered Henry Copeland a Christmas gift three months early. On Sept. 20, the CBS news anchor was forced to admit that his network no longer had confidence in documents used to support a now-infamous 60 Minutes piece about President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard It was a dark day for mainstream media -- but a banner mom...

Working in the video-game industry is a dream job for those raised on "Super Mario" and "The Sims." Thousands of programmers and artists have flocked to companies such as Electronic Arts for the chance to create popular games like "James Bond" or "Madden NFL 2005." Living the Silicon Valley stereotype, they subsist on pizza and soft drinks, working...

A new generation of anti-spam artillery is helping Internet Service Providers fight more successful battles in the war against spammers IronPort Systems is arming some of the largest ISPs with a new type of Reputation Filter powered by the SenderBase E-mail Traffic Monitoring Network. This filtering system gives the computer industry a new tool in ...

Shawn Fanning's latest peer-to-peer (P2P) venture, Snocap, may have a long way to go to prove its success in the current online music landscape. The practice of file sharing, which has grown on free services such as Kazaa and Morpheus inspired by Fanning's earlier Napster venture, has also gone legitimate with a variety of licensed online music services from Apple, Sony and many others...

The need to identify and eradicate spyware programs will drive anti-spyware software revenues from US$12 million in 2003 to $305 million in 2008, according to an IDC research report From a minor annoyance for home-PC users to a major plight on enterprise environments around the world, the IDC report earlier this week said that spyware (also known a...

Many people have predicted that Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) would lose ground to Mozilla's Firefox. Today it is official in Europe German Web advertising firm Adtech AG today reported that Firefox has grown to more than 5.5 percent share and Internet Explorer has dropped below 90 percent in Europe for the first time in five years....

Lycos Europe waged war against spammers earlier this week but the ensuing battles have now resulted in it withdrawing its controversial Web site that offered an anti-spam screensaver, replacing it with a graphic that urges visitors to "stay tuned!" Lycos Europe announced on Monday it had created a downloadable screensaver aimed at putting spammers ...

In a move that could end an era by eliminating a pioneer from the personal computer industry, IBM has reportedly put its PC business up for sale and might already have at least one prospective buyer for the unit, which analysts say could fetch as much as US$2 billion Big Blue has refused to comment in detail but also has not disputed published repo...

Some people have the erroneous idea that a small business cannot effectively compete against larger competitors. This concept is quite far from the truth For example, if someone were to ask you, "What is a major source of job formations in America today?," what would you answer? If you said small business, you would be right....

In the last U.S. presidential election the candidates clashed on the issue of privatizing the Social Security system I'll leave the political debate to the professional politicians, but I would like to address this matter from the standpoint of millions of U.S. workers. Many of them are already banking on their 401(k)s as the largest part of thei...

The issue of government-provided broadband was in the news again this week as Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell signed a bill restricting the ability of cities to offer telecommunications services. This was a good move for a number of reasons At any level, government-provided broadband -- what some call "socialized" communication -- has always b...

Microsoft and Sun Microsystems say that eight months into their 10-year cooperative alliance, dividends are already being paid in the form of increased interoperability of their products The companies, which reached a groundbreaking deal in March that settled years-old lawsuits and brought the two bitter enemies together, said they are actively wor...

A coalition of over 60 European open-source service providers earlier this week united to form an organization dubbed the Open Source Consortium (OSC) The group's stated purpose is to act as an independent reference point to give an unbiased "proprietary-vendor free" voice for all organizations deploying or contemplating open-source software altern...

Two weeks before its regularly scheduled round of security updates for Windows, Microsoft released an out-of-cycle patch for its Internet Explorer browser in response to a month-old critical hole The vulnerability -- an HTML handling issue referred to as an "iframe" flaw that affects mostly older versions of the Windows operating system -- is not a...

Microsoft today announced it has filed seven lawsuits against defendants who allegedly sent spam e-mail that violated the federal Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) anti-spam law The suits are just the latest in a Microsoft legal barrage. The company has supported more than 115 legal actions worldwide aga...

Worldwide mobile phone sales surged in the third quarter and some vendors took more advantage of the uptick than others, with Nokia solidifying its hold on first place and onetime market leader Motorola slumping from second to third place as Samsung became No. 2 According to a report from Gartner, worldwide sales grew 26 percent in the third quarte...

Microsoft today handed aspiring bloggers a simple, free tool to get started, releasing a public beta version of MSN Spaces The tool is integrated into Microsoft's other Internet services, which the company has also upgraded. The latest version of its instant messaging service, MSN Messenger 7.0, is out in beta, and upgrades to its Hotmail e-mail se...