The Change Mariner: Category: Industry

June 13, 2004

Microsoft's Cultural Revolution

Newsweek: But there are signs of change: from cars to couture, more Western companies are starting to crack the Chinese code. The outlook is improving for Microsoft as well, owing in part to a 180-degree shift in strategy. On several...

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 12:16 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

May 10, 2004

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...

Posted by Bob King at 9:57 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

April 29, 2004

Robotic Traffic Cones To Hit Our Highways

New Scientist: Herds of robotic traffic cones could soon be swarming onto a highway, closing down lanes and slowing the traffic. The new road markers have been developed by Shane Farritor, a roboticist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, in a...

Posted by Bob King at 10:46 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

April 18, 2004

Better Living Through Hacking

Boston.com: Today, a growing hacker culture is not only reclaiming the original meaning of the term but also applying its can-do ethic far beyond computer code to embrace everything from home electronics to home improvements. Just as the first hackers...

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 11:59 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

April 15, 2004

Project Avalanche: Corporate "Open Source"

WSJ.com - Portals: [Project] Avalanche is a legally constituted intellectual-property cooperative. Companies pay $30,000 a year to become members. They can then donate any in-house software they choose to the Avalanche library, with the project becoming the legal owner of...

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 1:33 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

April 14, 2004

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...

Posted by Bob King at 7:53 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

April 13, 2004

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...

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 3:51 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

April 3, 2004

Linux Brings Peace to Sun and Microsoft

San Jose Mercury: So what prompted the peace? Both firms are now under the threat from the spread of cheap, ``open source'' software, such as the Linux operating system. Dan Kusnetzky, an analyst with IDC, said customers are tired of...

Posted by Bob King at 8:26 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

March 13, 2004

Open Source Software Penetrates Government

InfoWorld: 2004 may be the year for open source software to catch on in a big way in government agencies. For years, federal, state, and local agencies have been using open source software - some in the open, some on...

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 5:11 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

March 9, 2004

Lingering Job Insecurity of Silicon Valley

New York Times: For computer scientists and engineers, the 1990's were close to paradise - until the technology boom collapsed. But even as business has started to pick up again, the job market they operate in has become the toughest...

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March 8, 2004

Indian Outsourcers Move Up Value Chain

InfoWorld: Although some American executives have begun to express reservations about offshore outsourcing, confidence abounds here as Indian technology leaders see burgeoning demand for increasingly sophisticated services. "It's unlikely that anything can go wrong for the Indian outsourcing industry," said...

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 7:15 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

March 4, 2004

Digital Slide Slows on HDTV

New York Times: Thanks to the wonders of technology, now you, too, can live like Bill Gates. No, you can't suddenly afford to build a $50 million house overlooking Lake Washington. You will not have heated floors, sidewalks and driveways....

Posted by Bob King at 9:11 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

March 1, 2004

Search Gets Personal

San Jose Mercury News: Nonetheless, Google, Yahoo, America Online, Microsoft and many smaller companies have invested in the [personalization] technology. While most will not detail how they plan to use it, they all say it could make their sites more...

Posted by Bob King at 5:02 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

February 27, 2004

Technology Jobs Moving To Asia

Yahoo! News: Technology companies are seeing a rebound in business, but top executives this week said any jobs added to meet growing demand will likely be in countries where labor is cheaper than the United States. Executives speaking at the...

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 12:39 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

February 15, 2004

Explosive PC Growth in China

Xinhuane (China): After a year of explosive growth in China, the world's number two personal computer maker Dell Inc. said Friday it hoped to triple its overall growth rate this year. The company may even be able to push its...

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 10:47 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

February 14, 2004

Mainsoft Link to Microsoft Source Code Leak

San Jose Mercury News: A small San Jose-based software company Friday emerged as a focus of the investigation into how parts of the secretive, underlying software code for Microsoft Windows were leaked and circulated on the Internet. The theft of...

Posted by Bob King at 9:58 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

February 12, 2004

Information Technology May Have Cured Low Service-Sector Productivity

New York Times: But the recent evidence compiled by Mr. Triplett and Mr. Bosworth shows that information technology may just be the cure for Baumol's disease. They found that from 1995 to 2001, labor productivity in services grew at a...

Posted by Bob King at 9:26 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

January 20, 2004

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....

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 10:33 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

January 7, 2004

Intel to Invest $200 Million in Home Media Networking

New York Times: For Intel Capital, the digital home represents the next major market opportunity. The fund has already invested in Bridgeco, a start-up designer of low-cost chips for linking home devices, and Entropic, which designs chips for home networking...

Posted by Bob King at 8:51 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

January 6, 2004

AOL to Add Spyware Detection to Service

New York Times: America Online will give its customers built-in software to detect and remove "spyware," hidden tools that can monitor Web surfers' online habits for marketing purposes, company executives said yesterday. The AOL move, which is to be announced...

Posted by Bob King at 8:47 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

December 14, 2003

PowerPoint Makes You Dumb

New York Times: In August, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board at NASA released Volume 1 of its report on why the space shuttle crashed. As expected, the ship's foam insulation was the main cause of the disaster. But the board...

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 1:57 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

December 11, 2003

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...

Posted by Jennifer King at 2:35 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

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...

Posted by Bob King at 10:00 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

November 24, 2003

Major vendors to push Linux to the desktop

InfoWorld.com: Inspired by stirrings among corporate users for desktop Linux and with Microsoft�s forthcoming Longhorn operating system not expected on desktops until 2005, IBM, Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, and Dell are augmenting their corporate Linux desktop wares. Novell and Red Hat...

Posted by Norm M. Wada at 8:26 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

WGBH-TV Rolls Out Digital Asset System to Position for Convergence

TVWeek: PBS flagship station WGBH-TV in Boston unveiled a digital asset management center earlier this month that is designed to serve as a test lab for the television industry. The multimillion-dollar facility is also critical to the future of WGBH...

Posted by Norm M. Wada at 11:00 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

November 10, 2003

Microsoft to Change Xbox Business Model and Stop Hackers

Design Technica: ... Rather than buying devices which are effectively PC components from manufacturers, Microsoft's next generation plan revolves around licensing technology designs from key suppliers such as ATI, IBM and SIS Technologies, and then arranging for the manufacture of...

Posted by Norm M. Wada at 2:50 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

November 1, 2003

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...

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 11:30 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

October 27, 2003

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...

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 10:54 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

October 24, 2003

Open Source Everywhere

Wired: ... Open source has spread to other disciplines, from the hard sciences to the liberal arts. Biologists have embraced open source methods in genomics and informatics, building massive databases to genetically sequence E. coli, yeast, and other workhorses of...

Posted by Norm M. Wada at 12:15 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

October 17, 2003

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...

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 11:49 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

Seattle Losing Publicly Traded Companies

Seatle Post-Intelligencer: Seattle's publicly traded companies are quickly disappearing. Of the 61 Washington companies that completed initial public offerings in the past six years, 26 have either been acquired, filed for bankruptcy or relocated elsewhere. So far this year, Expedia,...

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 11:11 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

October 15, 2003

Oracle to Shift 6000 Jobs to India

Inquirer WHILE ORACLE is to send 175 jobs to India from its Rocklin site, it appears this is the thin end of the wedge and eventually 6,000 jobs will be relocated there. That's according to a report in the Sacramento...

Posted by Norm M. Wada at 10:21 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

October 14, 2003

To Whom May I Direct Your Free Call?

New York Times: In the fall of 2000, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis had not yet earned any powerful enemies, at least so far as they were aware. They were just two obscure Swedish entrepreneurs who had worked with three...

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 11:48 PM | See the full story

October 6, 2003

The Changing Face of Communication

San Francisco Chronicle: For Melvin Patterson, who has been completely deaf since he was a toddler, communication is a visual experience. In the past, conducting a conversation using traditional nonvisual telecommunications tools like telephones and pagers was frustrating. Text...

Posted by Jennifer King at 10:48 PM | See the full story

August 21, 2003

Worm turns PCs into spam machines

CNN Money Several Internet worms that have besieged computers for over a week played havoc again on Wednesday, including one called Sobig.F whose aim was to turn PCs into spam machines and was believed to be the fastest growing virus...

Posted by Norm M. Wada at 9:52 AM | See the full story

Sobig Email Virus Biggest in History

WebAdvantage.net: Received any emails lately marked �re:information� or �re: Wicked ScreenSaver�? Then chances are that you are one of the millions of email users who have been recipients of the Sobig virus. Do not open these emails and delte them...

Posted by Bob King at 8:06 AM | See the full story

July 1, 2003

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...

Posted by Norm Wada at 9:38 AM | See the full story

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...

Posted by Norm Wada at 9:34 AM | See the full story

June 20, 2003

Open Source Paradigm Shift

Gotzeblogged: Tim O'Reilly Talk: The open source paradigm shift is happening now as part of the wider internet paradigm shift. We're seeing commodity software with an open architecture, and information applications decoupled from both hardware and software. The main characteristics,...

Posted by Jennifer King at 10:19 AM | See the full story | TrackBack

June 9, 2003

Legal Dispute Unnerves Linux Users

New York Times: For the true believers in free software, Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, has long been the figurative devil. Yet suddenly, Mr. Gates has a rival for their animosity. The unlikely challenger is Darl C. McBride, the...

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 5:00 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

May 22, 2003

A Look at Alternatives to Microsoft

Gartner: Many governments and enterprises worldwide are trying to insulate themselves from Microsoft's growing influence on the IT industry. Linux and open-source software are increasingly interesting alternatives....

Posted by Timothy Fredel at 4:09 PM | See the full story | TrackBack

The Change Mariner Industry - Software