News


TPC-C Benchmark Heats Up, Windows Back on Top

HP hoisted its Superdome-Itanium-Windows combination to the top of the premier OLTP scalability benchmark on Tuesday, about a month after originally gaining the top spot and little more than a week after IBM displaced the combo with a system based on its own AIX/RISC/DB2 stack.

[email protected] Worm Makes the Rounds

A new mass mailing worm spoofs Microsoft's domain name to deliver a payload disguised as an attachment from Microsoft. The worm was discovered by anti-virus vendors over the weekend and it picked up momentum Monday as users fired up their mailboxes for the work week.

Newspaper: Microsoft Ran Slush Fund to Counter Linux

Microsoft created a slush fund to heavily discount or even give away Windows in cases where the software giant was about to lose large international deals to Linux, according to published reports.

Flaw Appears in Itanium 2

Intel acknowledged a flaw this week in its Itanium 2 processors that have been shipping since July. The problem could cause systems to crash.

HP Ships ProLiant ML350 G3

HP on Wednesday began shipping a new two-way ProLiant server that shows how far the Windows/Intel/industry-standard hardware bloc has come.

AMD Releases New Athlon

AMD bumped up the performance of its Athlon XP line this week with the release of its 3200+ model.

IBM Bumps Microsoft from Top Spot in TPC-C

Mere weeks after its years-long drive up the TPC-C benchmark performance charts culminated in the top position, Microsoft lost out late last week to a Unix system from IBM. Microsoft, no doubt, will be back, but the result shows that the Unix camp has far from ceded the premiere OLTP scalability benchmark to the upstart Windows-Intel side of the market.

Fizzer Bubbles Up

A mass-mailing worm known as Fizzer broke out late last week and is getting more attention from a prominent security vendor Monday.

Critical Flaw Found in Windows Media Player

Officially, your users shouldn't be downloading Windows Media Player skins at work. Realistically, some of them probably are, and it's worthwhile to pay attention to a critical new security vulnerability patched by Microsoft Wednesday night.

Ballmer Promotes Digital Rights Management

Microsoft put a new emphasis on Digital Rights Management technologies, such as the service planned as an add-on for Windows Server 2003, on Wednesday night with an e-mail to customers from company CEO Steve Ballmer.

Longhorn Betas in 2004, GA in 2005

NEW ORLEANS -- The next client version of Windows, code-named "Longhorn," will appear in two beta versions during 2004 and come to market in 2005, a Microsoft official said Wednesday at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference.

Microsoft Hands Out Preview of Windows for AMD 64

NEW ORLEANS -- Microsoft gave hardware developers a taste of the Windows operating systems it is working on for AMD's 64-bit processors this week at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference.

Windows Server Roadmap 'Out of Band'

NEW ORLEANS -- Just because Windows Server 2003 launched a few weeks ago doesn't mean Microsoft is finished with it. In a WinHEC keynote Wednesday about the future of Windows servers, Dave Thompson detailed dozens of major improvements to the server platform that will be released in the coming months and years.

Microsoft Begs Hardware Developers to Use Watson

Take solace from the annoyance of those pop-up Windows Error Reports in the knowledge that Microsoft is bugging its industry partners just as much to exploit the information surfaced by the reports.

'Athens' Prototype PC Aimed to Improve Worker Productivity

NEW ORLEANS -- Microsoft and HP unveiled a slick new prototype PC at the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference on Tuesday that is designed to improve worker productivity while reducing workspace wiring and clutter.

Palladium on Display at WinHEC

The Next-Generation Secure Computing Base, better known by the code-name Palladium, will be a major feature of the next client version of Windows and is getting the spotlight in New Orleans at Microsoft's conference for hardware partners.

CA Enhances Unicenter for On-Demand Computing

Computer Associates this week introduced new and enhanced Unicenter offerings designed to facilitate corporate on-demand computing initiatives.

Unisys Unveils Windows Datacenter High-Availability Program

Unisys this week declared its Microsoft Datacenter High Availability Program ready to go.

Cumulative Patch Released for BizTalk Server

Microsoft on Wednesday put out a cumulative patch for its BizTalk Server enterprise integration products, fixing two newly discovered vulnerabilities. The most serious of the two problems could allow a attackers to execute code of their choice.

Unisys Puts Three Tiers in One Box

Unisys Corp. is making a bid to house the standard Windows three-tier infrastructure entirely in one massive cabinet. The configuration is based on the ES7000 line of Intel-based servers that the Pennsylvania-based company has offered for the last three years.