Articles by

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-source users know that forking an open-source project op...

IBM has taken an experiment -- Blue Gene/L, the world's fastest supercomputer -- and turned it into a commercial, albeit expensive, off-the-shelf product The Blue Gene project began five years ago with the goal of creating a family of supercomputers that could have more commercial applications because they were tuned to bandwidth efficiency, design...

Bluetooth just got faster and its lobbyists are claiming the technology is moving full speed ahead with a new three-year road map The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) today announced the adoption of Bluetooth Core Specification Version 2.0 + Enhanced Data Rate (EDR), which is designed to improve the technology....

In one of the largest instances to date of widespread big-rigging on auction site eBay, eight sellers have been ordered to pay US$90,000 in fines and restitution after admitting to engaging in practices that artificially drove up the prices of their auctions The sellers began to pay restitution to buyers who ended up paying more than they needed to...

Tesco, the UK retail giant that sells everything from groceries to insurance, has opened its own online music market The download site contains about half a million song files in the Windows Media Audio (WMA) format....

Microsoft has agreed to pay Novell US$536 million to settle a long-simmer private antitrust claim over its NetWare operating system, a deal that also calls for Novell to withdraw from the European antitrust proceedings against Microsoft Microsoft said the deal, which came about after lengthy private mediation, does not require it to license any Nov...

In the latest supercomputer news arriving before the release of theTop500 list this week, IBM has announced collaboration with theSpanish government on a super system made with blade servers IBM said the "MareNostrum" system, built with 3,564 Power processors ineServer BladeCenter JS20 blade servers that run on the Linux operatingsystem, performs ...

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 desktop rival "In recent years, the IT industry has ...

Last week I wrote about three companies that had either followed an Apple-like strategy (Gateway), utilized ex-Apple employees (OQO), or executed on a founding Apple principle (AMD/Microsoft) This week we'll examine three more companies that owe a lot of what they are to Apple, as part of my not-so-subtle look at what might have been had Apple been...

I met Steve Wozniak after he spoke at last month's MIT Emerging Technologies conference. Standing on the stage, trying to jockey my way among the pack wanting to greet "Woz," I was torn between wanting to talk to this luminary of Electronic Design's Hall of Fame and feeling I was adding to his hounding When it comes to EEs as celebrities, Wozniak i...

An industrywide survey shows that corporate networks are being bombarded with spyware infiltration in record numbers, but relatively few corporations are deploying adequate solutions to combat the threat The survey, conducted by Equation Research for Internet security firm Webroot Software, canvassed more than 275 IT managers and executives nationw...

Another entertainment industry group has decided to try to staunch the flow of file-sharing by suing those who participate The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) announced Thursday that it will go the route of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), which since September 2003 has sued more than 6,000 people it claims have il...

Amazon.com, the owner of the "1-Click Shopping" patent, is no stranger to either side of patent infringement battles. Now it finds itself in yet another dispute, this one against Cendant Publishing Cendant filed suit in U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Del., Oct. 29 against the e-commerce giant claiming that Amazon is using Cendant's patented pro...

Verizon Wireless said it has reached an agreement to buy all the spectrum licenses held by NextWave Telecom for US$3 billion in cash, just the latest instance of consolidation in the wireless industry and one that ends a years-old legal dispute with regulators Verizon, the second-largest wireless carrier behind the newly merged Cingular-AT&T Wirele...

U.S. supercomputing efforts are making up for the country's earlier loss of the speed title tothe Japanese Earth Simulator, with two new systems poised togarner top spots on the Top500 Supercomputer list due out next week The U.S. Department of Energy this week announced that the IBM BlueGene/Lsystem at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory achie...

In a move to diffuse Microsoft's "Get the Facts" campaign that openly slams open source, Novell has launched a Web site bent on "unbending the truth." This comes at the same time that open-source advocate Chris Stone, Novell's vice chairman, office of the chief executive officer, unexpectedly left the company to "pursue other opportunities."

Microsoft is again pledging to improve the security of its software by starting to notify customers of upcoming patches. However, the promise came just as experts warned that attack code exploiting a known flaw in Internet Explorer has begun to circulate The US-CERT and Secunia said the newly discovered code attacks an as-yet unpatched flaw in Inte...

While Sun is hyping the impending release of Solaris 10, the newest version of its Unix-based operating system, debates about the company's plans to launch an open-source version of its software are reaching new heights Some analysts are calling it a risky move, others are calling it a no-brainer in the face of increasing competition from other ven...

Making inroads into the next major market for software isn't going to happen from enterprise vendors trying to wedge expensive, large application footprints into a product strategy that appeals to medium-sized companies. Despite Oracle, Siebel and others proclaiming they can make this strategy work, the bottom line is that the financial pain of doing this is just too much for companies with their cost structures to bear...

In this year's election, around 40 million people cast their votes digitally instead of by paper. For many, this was a relief because it meant avoiding discussions over hanging chads. But some computer experts warn of grave problems with electronic voting, making one wonder if technology makes voting better or worse The potential problems with di...