News


Skype Outage Caused by Microsoft Update

A two-day outage that left millions of Skype users unable to use the popular Internet phone service was caused by an abnormally high number of restarts after people had downloaded a Windows security update, the company said Monday.

Companies Clamping Down on Messaging

Whenever a doctor, nurse or administrator in Georgia's DeKalb Medical Center sends an e-mail, the message detours through a special box in the three-hospital system's computing cluster. The box analyzes the e-mail, scanning for sensitive information like patient names, prescription histories and Social Security numbers.

Judge's Ruling Signals 'Game Over' for SCO

The Utah federal court judge's ruling on August 10 -- that SuSE Linux distributor Novell does, in fact, own the copyrights to the UNIX operating system -- signals a major legal blow for The SCO Group. It ends a nearly-five-year-old legal campaign that sowed fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) among Linux users and developers.

Airline Sues Google Over Keyword Ads

American Airlines is suing Google Inc. over the Internet company's sale of keywords ads for rivals triggered by its own trademarks.

HP 3Q Profit Beats Wall Street Estimates

Hewlett-Packard Co.'s third-quarter sales and profit breezed past Wall Street's estimates as the technology bellwether continued to cash in on healthy sales of laptop computers and lucrative printing ink. Shares inched higher on a boosted financial forecast.

SOA for Your Home

Peter Rhys Jenkins brought home several important points about service-oriented architecture (SOA) -- literally -- at this week's IBM SHARE conference in San Diego. Rhys Jenkins is senior integration solutions architect for IBM's worldwide WebSphere team.

Dell To Restate Earnings After Probe

Dell Inc. executives have finally wrapped up a yearlong internal investigation into accounting problems at the computer company, and the mistakes could end up costing them as much as $150 million.

Eclipse Process Framework 1.2 Gets Released

The open source community hit a milestone in improving software project management with a release on Aug. 1 of Eclipse Process Framework (EPF) version 1.2. The framework now includes version 1.2 of the EPF Composer authoring tool, as well as version 1.0 of the group's first process, known as the Open Unified Process (OpenUP).

Script Start Going Open Source

Entrigue Systems will release Script Start, a Windows logon scripting tool, free of charge to open source developers in September. The aim is to spur custom development of Script Start -- something for which its users have been clamoring, according to Entrigue President Jon McDonald.

Longtime Rivals IBM, Sun To Collaborate

Two longtime rivals in computing, IBM Corp. and Sun Microsystems Inc., plan to cooperate on some server technologies, a move that could put pressure on their joint competitor Hewlett-Packard Co.

Google Distributing Sun Office Software

Two years after announcing a somewhat vague software-distribution partnership, Google Inc. and Sun Microsystems Inc. have clarified their tactics for jointly attacking Microsoft Corp. and its ubiquitous Office software.

Citrix Buying VMware Rival for $500M

Citrix Systems is buying XenSource Inc. for $500 million, marking the second big deal this week in thte virtualization segment.

Review: New IMac Tempts a Windows User

Apple Inc. has dropped "Computer" from its name, but its computer business is still growing, even if the iPod player is the company's real star.

Private Funds Needed for Safety Network

The nation's emergency communication system is inadequate, and the government has come up with a solution -- a nationwide wireless broadband network that will operate on a highly valuable portion of the publicly owned airwaves.

VMware's Stock Rises 76 Percent in Debut

VMware Inc.'s shares soared by 76 percent in their stock market debut Tuesday, reflecting a belief that the software maker is on the leading edge of a trend.

AMD Spec for Easier Multithread Development

Advanced Micro Devices yesterday published a proposed specification for a new class of hardware extensions designed to increase the performance of applications running in multicore environments.

OpenSolaris: Murdock Speaks on Project Indiana

Those who suggest that Sun Microsystems' Project Indiana is about making the Solaris operating system more Linux-like are missing the point, said Ian Murdock, Sun's chief OS platform strategist. Headlines such as "Sun Hopes for Linux-like Solaris" and "Sun OpenSolaris To Become More Linux-like," drive him crazy.

Virtualization Rules the Day at LinuxWorld

Another LinuxWorld San Francisco has come and gone. The event combined LinuxWorld with the inaugural Next Generation Data Center show, drawing an estimated 11,000 attendees last week.

VMware Sets Much-Anticipated IPO at $29

Rapidly growing software maker VMware Inc. priced its initial public offering at $29 per share Monday, setting the stage for one of Silicon Valley's most anticipated stock market debuts since Google Inc. mesmerized Wall Street three years ago.

Oracle 11g Ships, But New Features Cost Extra

The recently launched Oracle 11g database server is now shipping but today's release announcement came with a twist: Some of the new features come at an additional cost.