IBM's Server-Centric Software Takes On Microsoft

The New York Time: The Workplace desktop, I.B.M. says, promises to deliver improved security and cost savings of up to 50 percent over the Microsoft desktop suites. Since central control resides in the server software, I.B.M. says, it is easier...

Linux Moves to The Desktop

Investor's Business Daily: A new operating system war is brewing on desktop PCs, and it's not Windows vs. Mac, or even Windows vs. Linux. This time, it's Linux vs. Linux. Red Hat and Novell - already foes in the market...

Google Challenges Microsoft Monopoly

TechWeb: While Linux advocates look to desktop software to challenge Microsoft's desktop championship, a new top-ranked contender is coming from a direction that's both unexpected and obvious: Google. But first, Google needs to overcome privacy concerns, as proposed terms of...

Video Games: The Battle for the Living Room

New York Times: Even as the Intel Corporation and the Microsoft Corporation, whose chairman is Bill Gates, are pushing a digital future in which they hope that the personal computer will be the hub for a variety of home entertainment...

The End of Passwords?

E-Commerce News: At the recent RSA conference, user authentication was a strong theme, and Microsoft chairman Bill Gates hinted at the direction of future technology in this area, predicting the traditional password is headed for its demise. In his speech,...

BitTorrent: The Third Wave of File Sharing

New York Times: Three years later, Mr. [Bram] Cohen, 28, has emerged as the face of the next wave of Internet file sharing. If Napster started the first generation of file-sharing, and services like Kazaa represented the second, then the...

VMS: Back to the Future?

Internet Week: The venerable VMS operating system just doesn't want to fade away, and one longtime observer thinks he knows why--it's stable. "It doesn't break," said Terry Shannon, publisher of Shannon Knows HPC newsletter. "It doesn't get viruses. It's unhackable....

Student Finds Largest Known Prime Number

CNN: More than 200,000 computers spent years looking for the largest known prime number. It turned up on Michigan State University graduate student Michael Shafer's off-the-shelf PC. The number is 6,320,430 digits long and would need 1,400 to 1,500 pages...

Shift To Open-Source Software Ups Ante For Microsoft, Oracle

Facing strong competition in online travel reservations, Sabre Holdings Corp. decided to overhaul its technology - allocating $100 million on a risky, new approach. Sabre replaced its mainframes with low-end servers and open-source software. Sabre, which expects sales of...

San Francisco Bay Transport Goes Contactless

USING RFID: The entire San Francisco Bay transport network is to be equipped with RFID contactless cards supplied by the French smart card firm, ASK. The contract awarded by the transport network calls for 400,000 dual interface cards. Inhabitants of...

PCs As Heart of Home Entertainment

New York Times: This is not your grandma's PC," said Louis J. Burns, the executive in charge of Intel's desktop computer division. The arrival of the more flexible personal computers, Silicon Valley executives argue, is aimed at permitting the industry...

Linus Torvald: Leader of the Free World

Wired: Linux's mainstream arrival is testament not only to the worth of the code contributed by programmers working out of love rather than pursuit of a paycheck, but to the power of its progenitor, who still gives a thumbs-up or...

IBM vs. Microsoft: The Future of the Internet

New York Times: One year ago, almost to the day, Samuel J. Palmisano, the chief executive of I.B.M., delivered a speech in New York that sketched his company's vision of the future of computing, which he called "on-demand computing." Today...

Text Mining: Digging for Nuggets of Wisdom

New York Times: Of course, no one, Dr. Liebman included, is arguing that these [software] products are actually reading anything. What they are engaged in is "text mining,'' a technique that academics have been experimenting with for years but for...

Web surfers flock to anti-virus sites

CNN.com: With computer users under siege from a variety of "worms," Internet buffs are rushing to Microsoft's anti-virus site to search for ways to combat the problem. Traffic to Microsoft TechNet from surfers logging on at home skyrocketed more than...

Kingsoft set to unseat Microsoft in China

Financial Times: Kingsoft, one of China's biggest software companies, is close to sealing a contract that will result in its flagship product replacing Microsoft's Office on hundreds of thousands of computers in schools in Shanghai....

Sinbad and Linux brave the high seas

Infoworld Now Tux, the Linux mascot, is rubbing elbows with Brad Pitt, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Michelle Pfeiffer. These Hollywood stars all give their voices to characters in DreamWorks LLC's "Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas," the studio's first animated film...

Linux Goes Consumer

InternetNews.com: Building on an alliance established in December to collaborate on the development of open source operating system Linux for digital consumer electronics, partners Sony and Matsushita Electric Industrial (Panasonic) Tuesday brought together six other firms to create the CE...