Client Server News articles from March 2006

Client Server News archives from March 2006

Microsoft calls the EC a dirty name.(European Union. European Commission threatened to fine Microsoft Corp.)
March 6, 2006... Microsoft promised the European Commission that things would get ugly if it persists in harrying the world's largest software company. Thursday the pair traded blows again. Microsoft accused the EC of being biased, colluding with its...

Oracle to muscle into search.(Larry Ellison talks about the plans of the company at OracleWorld)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... Larry Ellison isn't about to let Eric Schmidt and his kid bosses lap up all that rich search gravy or hand over the leftovers to Microsoft and Yahoo. From OracleWorld in Tokyo, he announced that Oracle is going to elbow its way into search...

Google scares the bejesus out of its investors.
March 6, 2006... You have of course heard by now how Google CFO George Reyes apparently put his foot in his mouth at a Merrill Lynch conference Tuesday precipitating a run on the stock and an intra-day 13% crash to $338.51 on fears that Google will slow and...

Apple's half-way to Intel nirvana.(Apple Computer Inc., partnership)(new product)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... Ah-ha, so the scuttlebutt was right. Apple Tuesday unveiled a new $599-$799 Mac mini fitted with Intel's Core Duo chip and promised four times the performance of the existing PowerPC-based generation along with greater expandability. The widget...

Hey, buddy, need a fork lift?(Intel Corp. partnership with Hewlett-Packard Co.)
March 6, 2006... The day before the full-court press that Intel and HP put on on Thursday--including a fly-by by Larry Ellison--Sun proved that its intelligence apparatus wasn't stone cold dead--well, it is a small Valley--and tried to remind everyone of its...

A little DRAM'll do ya.(Hynix Semiconductor Inc., United States. Department of Justice, a case)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... As a result of a long and involved international Justice Department probe, four Hynix executives DS Kim, CK Chung, KC Suh and CY Choi are going to plead guilty to fixing DRAM prices and will soon be doing five-eight months in an American prison...

Gateway to pay HP $45m to make patent misery go away.
March 6, 2006... Gateway is going to pay HP $47 million to settle the 27 patent infringement claims HP voiced in three federal lawsuits, three International Trade Commission probes and a suit against the Gateway-purchased eMachines in the last couple of years....

HP & Peregrine start mating.(Peregrine Systems Inc.)
March 6, 2006... Not quite three months after closing the acquisition, HP says it has hit the first milestone in integrating Peregrine Systems' asset management technology into OpenView: it has combined OpenView's Service Desk and Peregrine's AssetCenter so...

Quantum & StorageTek kiss & make up on the courthouse steps.(Storage Technology Corp.)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... Sun is collecting $25 million from Quantum on behalf of its StorageTek subsidiary to settle a patent infringement suit brought against Quantum in 2003, two years before Sun acquired StorageTek. A limited cross-license agreement is part of the...

Corel gets into Lenovo's act.(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... Well, it seems that Lenovo, despite it's increasing Chinese face, has inherited some of IBM distaste for Microsoft and is going to bundle Corel's Small Business Center software with the new China-created, Thinkpad-inspired, Lenovo-branded line...

IBM brings new meaning to the expression 'cat & mouse game'.(development of a new identity management software)
March 6, 2006... IBM is taking another shot at Microsoft from behind the cover of open source this time targeting Microsoft's upcoming Passport-replacing Active Directory-based proprietary InfoCard identity management widgetry. IBM, Novell and a...

Oracle freebie goes gold.(Linux Watch)(Database 10g Express Edition)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... Oracle's freebie starter kit Database 10g Express Edition went GA Tuesday. It was in beta since October on both 32-bit Windows and Linux distributions like Red Hat and Novell. It's designed to run on uniprocessors with up to 4 gigs of user data...

Novell hires new channels boss.(Steve Erdman and Susan Heystee)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... Turns out ex-Dell exec Steve Erdman has gone to work for Novell as vice-president and general manager of channels and alliances, reporting to Susan Heystee, president of Novell Americas, another Dell refugee. Erdman replaces former...

Without Microsoft's money, Novell looks pretty puny.(earnings of the company)
March 6, 2006... Novell said Thursday that it earned a thin $2 million in its first fiscal quarter ended January 31, a wash as far as earnings per share go, on revenues of $274 million, down roughly 5.5% year-over-year. The company earned $392 million, or...

Novell claims SuSE leads in China.(Linux Watch)(openSUSE.org.cn)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... Novell is waving around some new research from a Chinese researcher by the name of CCID Consulting that says that Novell continues to lead the Linux market in China with 25.1% of the revenues, a claim that many a company has made before. Novell...

Microsoft broadens live expo beta.(Microsoft Windows Live Expo)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... Microsoft said Tuesday it would release a national US beta of Windows Live Expo, opening up its previously closed beta. The widgetry includes classified ads that are "geo-tagged" by ZIP code, not city, specifically defining where the...

BEA buys SOA house Fuego.(BEA Systems Inc., service oriented architecture)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... BEA Systems has acquired privately held Texas-based business process management (BPM) house Fuego Inc for $87.5 million in cash plus some untold amounts for retention and performance bonuses. The deal is already closed. Fuego's widgetry...

Intel to make chips in Nam.(planning of semiconductor assembly and test facility in Ho Chi Minh City at Vietnam)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... Some Boomer veterans of America's Vietnam adventure may have to brace themselves but Intel is going to put a $300 million semiconductor assembly and test facility in Ho Chi Minh City aka Saigon that will eventually employ 1,200 people. ...

Key legacy walks out on Oracle.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 6, 2006... An SAP employee blog says that Larry Barbetta, the head of Siebel analytics, the unit that Oracle was setting great store by, couldn't come to terms with Oracle on contract terms and skedaddled. Barbetta was supposed to run the combined...

From rocket books to rocket ships.(Gemstar-TV Guide International Inc., NuvoMedia Inc., acquisition deal)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... Martin Eberhard, the guy who started NuvoMedia in 1997 looking for a market for its electronic Rocket eBooks only to sell it to Gemstar/TV Guide for $187 million and before that was co-founder and chief engineer of Network Computing Device,...

New twist on the halo effect.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... This bit of news is going to cause dismay to its armies of enemies--and raise more than a few eyebrows and doubtless many voices when they hear about it--but according to research done Richard Edelman, the head of Edelman PR, and written up in...

Dell has hopes.(BILLY GRAMS)(company future)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... Dell CEO Kevin Rollins told a Goldman Sachs conclave Wednesday that the company, which has disappointed of late, expects growth to pick up after this quarter. Growth this quarter is only supposed to be 6%-9%, a far cry from Dell's typical...

Google wants to be this big.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... Google apparently wants to be a $100 billion company. At least that's what analysts at its analyst meeting Thursday think Google CEO Eric Schmidt said. In Google's annoyingly coy way, Schmidt left it to them "to judge whether that's $100...

About that new user interface.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... Office automation doyenne Amy Wahl remarks that Microsoft could be taking its life in its hands by changing the user interface on the upcoming Office 12, now restyled Office 2007. She says that when an established product is overhauled like...

AMD serves Skype.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... AMD has dragged Skype into its antitrust suit against Intel. It's subpoenaed the VoIP house gone to eBay looking for documents explaining how come one feature in Skype 2.0, the ability to place 10-person conference calls, is available only to...

Nothing suits Persnickety Intel.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... Intel is cautioning resellers about how important it is to properly cool its new Pentium D dual-core chips. But as one reseller reported "Since we use rack-mounted equipment, I scanned the list and could not find a single approved rack-mount...

Giant troll get a day in court.(Compression Labs Inc., Forgent Networks Inc., a case)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... Forgent Networks and its Compression Labs (CLI) front operation, which is suing most of the industry for treading on its image compression patent, are due to have their Markman hearing on March 9. CLI is suing Acer, Agfa, Apple, Canon, Dell,...

VMware prepares to pay Tidy Sum to Spark Virtual Appliances.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... VMware is sponsoring the Ultimate Virtual Appliance Challenge contest with prizes totaling $200,000 to get virtual appliances developed using its Player and Server freeware. As it explains, virtual appliances are pre-built, pre-configured and...

ITAA hires headhunters to find new boss.(information technology association of america)(Brief article)
March 6, 2006... The Information technology Association of America (ITAA) has hired the headhunters at Korn/Ferry--specifically Lorraine Lavet in northern Virginia--to find it a president hopefully by summer. The incumbent Harris Miller resigned in January and...

Google buys Web word processor.(Writely.com, Upstartle LLC)
March 13, 2006... If you listen carefully you can hear Google making like a snapping turtle around raw hamburger again. Microsoft, of course, being the provocative hamburger. Google has just bought a little four-person company called Upstartle LLC that got...

Made-in-India bug bites IBM bad--leaves welts elsewhere.(new Global Business Solution Center in Bangalore)(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... Well, it appears that IBM is going to move the design and development of all its vaunted consulting software--the stuff it depended on to get it out of the hole it got into a year ago--to Bangalore, that not-that-long-ago...

Microsoft takes Euro complaint to US courts.(European Commission)(United States)(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... After Microsoft accused the European Commission of colluding with its worse enemies and sitting on the proof last week, it took its claims to US federal courts in New York, Massachusetts and California and asked them to compel IBM, Novell,...

HP stockholders want Carly to return her golden parachute.(Carly Fiorina, Indiana Electrical Workers Pension Trust Fund and the SEIU Affiliates)(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... The prize for the most popular lawsuit of the week has got to go to the 31-page class action-in-waiting that institutional stockholders Indiana Electrical Workers Pension Trust Fund and the SEIU Affiliates' Officers and Employees Pension Plan...

Otellini's gotta go: Cramer.(company forecasts)(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... Wall Street maven Jim Cramer called for the head of Intel CEO Paul Otellini on his "Mad Money" segment on CNBC the other day, saying that if Otellini didn't leave Intel was bound to hit 16 bucks. Intel was at $20 and change when he said it. ...

Intel unwraps its new Core microarchitecture--and prays.
March 13, 2006... Intel Tuesday started unwrapping more of its next-generation Core microarchitecture, the multi-core Pentium M-based widgetry that's supposed to contribute to its ultimate salvation, but hasn't had a name until now. Intel is depending on the...

Google accused of ripping off GDrive idea.(mi2g shared with Google)
March 13, 2006... Guidance-shy Google confessed to the SEC late Tuesday that it had accidentally made its first "non-projection" and posted a PowerPoint slide on its investor web site last week during its analysts meeting--a slide it didn't show to the assembled...

Google evidently needs its Feng Shui adjusted.(Google agreed to settle a pay)(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... Google's vaunted aura looks like it needs some adjusting. Lately it's been arm wrestling with the Justice Department, collaborating with the Communist Chinese, putting its foot in its mouth on Wall Street, posting supposedly secret...

Rosetta stone to decode Itanium.(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... One of the reasons Apple hasn't come apart at the seams because of its jump from the PowerPC chip to Intel is because of the so-called Rosetta software that translates users' PowerPC-based software into Intel-speak. That widgetry comes...

Infiniband & iWARP United under OpenFabrics Canopy.(OpenFabrics Alliance)
March 13, 2006... Scratch the OpenIB Alliance. It doesn't exist any more. Now it's the OpenFabrics Alliance and it's armed with an expanded mission to address RDMA-over-Ethernet, a k a iWARP, meaning it's not Infiniband-bound anymore, but it's also not going...

Salesforce.com packages up another offer.(new service Unlimited Edition)(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... Salesforce.com has launched a new service for large enterprises called Unlimited Edition, an offer to support any number of applications that customers acquire via its App-Exchange platform and throws in increased storage and additional...

Microsoft buys Alohabob.(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... In the name of Windows, Microsoft has bought Apptimum Inc, a little Florida-based company whose Alohabob PC Relocator products automatically transfer applications from one machine to another, particularly new machines. Terms were not disclosed....

VMware & Microsoft back VT; Intel Moves to VT-d.(Intel Virtualization for Directed I/O)(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... Intel turned up at its Developer Forum with its next-generation virtualization in tow. It's called VT-d or Intel Virtualization for Directed I/O, described as providing hardware assistance in assigning I/O devices to virtual machines to...

IBM & Cognos strike SOA alliance.
March 13, 2006... IBM has struck a new expanded nonexclusive three-year strategic alliance with Cognos on the business processes front that now involves joint development, marketing and sales of SOA-based solutions so customers can optimize their analytics...

AMD tries to spook Intel.(new products from Advanced Micro Devices Inc. at Intel Developer Forum)(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... On the eve of Intel's Developer Forum, AMD trotted out three new dual-core Opterons including a eight-way 885 that'll put 16 cores in a server, the two-way 285 that'll put four cores in a server and the one-way 185, the only one of the three it...

AMD enlists Chinese against Intel.(a case by Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(China Computer Federation, China Computer Users Association, China Semiconductor Industry Association)(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... AMD is thrilled that the Chinese are going to try to promote brand neutrality and encourage folks to turn a blind eye to Intel's inducements. It says that three influential IT industry associations designed to ensure fair competition in...

ODF wing turns evangelical.(new OpenDocument Format Alliance formed)
March 13, 2006... There is now--as of last Friday--an OpenDocument Format Alliance--composed of all the usual suspects--like Sun, IBM, Novell, Oracle and Red Hat plus about 30 other entities like the American Library Association--that intends to push the luck...

SCO keeps losing money.
March 13, 2006... SCO lost $4.581 million in its first fiscal quarter ended January 31, or 23 cents a share, on revenues of $8.865 million, down from $7.343 million year-over-year, a fact it attributed to continued competitive pressures --"primarily from...

Novell moves the deck chairs around.(Linux Watch)
March 13, 2006... After turning up last week with no earnings to speak of in its first fiscal quarter and with revenues dropping, Novell has hired Roger Levy out of Lucent Technologies to replace David Patrick and run its Linux and open source business unit...

Novell previews new Linux Desktop.(SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop)
March 13, 2006... Novell, as it said it would, unveiled its SuSE Linux Enterprise Desktop at CeBit, the successor to the Novell Linux Desktop 3. It thinks that it's now positioned to serve the proverbial sweet spot of the market, the general office worker. ...

GCC tweaked for Itanium.(GNU Compiler Collection)(Itanium Solutions Alliance )(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... The new-fangled Itanium Solutions Alliance is underwriting Itanium-specific improvements to the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) coordinated by the Gelato Foundation, the community dedicated to advancing Linux on Itanium. The funding supports...

Scooter watch.(Hewlett-Packard Co., Sun Microsystems Inc., partnership)(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... According to an open e-mail posted on Sun's site a few days ago, Sun CEO Sun Scott McNealy has proposed to HP CEO Mark Hurd that they converge HP-UX and Solaris and combine their resources and developer communities. See...

Microsoft to Linux: 'be afraid, be very afraid'.(Microsoft to license its technology )(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... Microsoft the other day announced that it had gotten its 5,000th US patent, remarking in the process that these patents make it possible for Microsoft to license its technology and that it's following the example of IBM, which has some 25,000...

Intel Apples rare.(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... Piper Jaffray says it's pretty hard to get your hands on one of Apple's new Intel-based MacBook Pros either through the company's retail stores or at Apple.com. It said it found waiting lists. The broker observed that "Apple can't sell what it...

What ho, Montecito.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 13, 2006... Intel's delayed dual-core Montecito Itanium chip is now due in Q2.

Google the sieve.(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... Ironic how the tight-lipped we'll -just-tell-you-what-we-want-you-to-know Google appears to be leaking like a sieve lately. One of its closed beta testers apparently sent some screen shots of Google's long-delayed new AJAX calendar...

Open but not open.(Open AIM a free developer's kit )(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... On Monday AOL created a thing called Open AIM, a free developer's kit for creating plug-ins and third-party applications that connect to its instant messaging client--basically access to the Triton API, AOL's new IM client--but they're not...

Dream machine.(trade shows of information and technologies industry)(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... Kingston Technology Europe Ltd and hard-disk maven Western Digital turned up at CeBit with a super-clocked 5.46HGHz PC that they co-developed and call the Dream Machine. They put an Intel 3.8GHz P4 chip on steroids. Asetek A/S is cooling the...

On to 100 cores.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... Intel says it has started to formally research how to get 10-100 cores on a die, how to develop the multithreaded software to support it, how to get around problems like all those threads converging on the same bit of memory at once and how to...

AMD hands out medal.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief article)
March 13, 2006... AMD has dubbed ex-DEC Alpha designer Bruce Gieseke a Corporate Fellow, the biggest medal it could pin of his chest for creating the company's Direct Connect Architecture, which provides increased data flow in AMD chips and hence multi-cores. He...

IBM's one short.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 13, 2006... IBM's VP, worldwide distribution channels Frank Vitagliano, who worked his way up from the mailroom, resigned the other day. A press report says he's going to Juniper.

Microsoft eats greens.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 13, 2006... Microsoft has acquired the iSCSI technical assets and IP of one String Bean Software for Windows Storage Server 2003 so direct OEMs can build hybrid NAS and iSCSI appliances. Fujitsu Siemens already had a deal with String Bean for its iSCSI...

Umm, about those image problems you've been having ...(BILLY GRAMS)
March 13, 2006... According to USA Today, Al-Qaeda sympathizers have been using Orkut, the Internet service owned by Google, to rally support for Osama bin Ladin, share videos and web links promoting terrorism and recruit non-Arabic-speaking Westerners.

Azul sues Sun before Sun can sue Azul: fragile Java peace finally rent by litigation.
March 20, 2006... Azul Systems, the start-up run by Cobalt Networks veteran Stephen DeWitt--the guy who sold the joint to Sun for what turned out to be a completely unsupportable $2.1 billion in stock in 2000 before the world caved in on Sun and Sun wrote the...

AMD slips its tether.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)
March 20, 2006... In the aftermath of the Intel Developer Forum last week, chip groupie Nathan Brookwood wrote an obit of sorts saying that IDF marked the end of Intel's monopoly. He figures the world has changed and that since AMD "sipped from the fountain...

Microsoft picks up loose change.(investment management on marketing)(Brief article)
March 20, 2006... Well, Bill Gates is going to walk across the street to pick a mere three grand. Microsoft, which is on a small business jihad, says it's going to lower the minimum transaction that Microsoft Financing will underwrite from $10,000 to $3,000 and...

Microsoft to try folksy approach.(management of Microsoft Corp.)(Brief article)
March 20, 2006... Microsoft has earmarked $500 million for a sales and marketing campaign that pushes Vista, Office 2007, Windows Mobile, the next Exchange Server, Server 2003 and SQL Server 2005 as "People-Ready" tools, it said, that work together and empower...

EC calcifies on Microsoft compliance.(European Commission)
March 20, 2006... The European Commission sent Microsoft another chastening note late last week telling the company that it wasn't buying Microsoft's claims that its server protocol documentation met any reasonable definition of usability or that it was too...

Sossaman out.(to introduce a AdvancedTCA-compliant singleboard computer )(Brief article)
March 20, 2006... Sossaman, whose name sounds like some ancient Arab hero, but is in fact Intel's first low-voltage dual-core Xeon, may go down in history as the Intel chip that made it out when it was supposed to. The first public whiff of its existence came in...

Fujitsu Siemens intros 16-core blade.(Brief article)
March 20, 2006... Going where other OEMs have said there is little demand, Fujitsu Siemens has announced what it calls an eight-socket blade for its Primergy Advanced Blade Ecosystem BX600 S2 and pointed it at server farms and the data center. The new BX630...

IBM opens R&D to resellers.(International Business Machines Corp. open research and development centers)(Brief article)
March 20, 2006... IBM has decided that--starting next quarter--it would be to its best advantage to give its business partners, who kick in 35% of its revenues, access to its Research Division, something it hasn't done before, in the name of delivering more...

AMD pushes new Opterons out.(new products from Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief article)
March 20, 2006... AMD is getting those new dual-core Opterons it announced last week around IDF out quicker than thought. HP, which is selling enough Opterons to make Intel spit and is picking up the new low-end and high-end AMD chips, said it would start...

Sun tape drive hedged by 100 patents.
March 20, 2006... Sun's StorageTek satellite has outed its next-generation T10000 enterprise tape drive complete with a hundred design patents and bragging that it's got twice the capacity of earlier StorageTek tape drives at 500GB uncompressed--or a terabyte of...

Red Hat plays the virtualization card.(Linux Watch)
March 20, 2006... Red Hat said in a webcast from San Francisco Tuesday attended by Intel, AMD and NetApp that it was going to tightly integrate the open source-developed Xen virtualization widgetry into its commercial operating system by the end of the year, a...

Anti-patent lobby claims first blood.(Linux Watch)
March 20, 2006... Anti-software patent activist Florian Mueller reports that anti-patent campaigners have successfully opposed a proposal by a pro-patent member of the European Parliament that would have supposedly resulted "in a flood of patent suits all over...

Linus finds GPL 3, well, unfree.(views of Linus Torvalds on General Public License)(Interview)(Brief article)
March 20, 2006... Well, there's more to Linus Torvalds' rejection of the Free Software Foundation's draft GPL rewrite than just its scathing rejection of DRM, which he doesn't much like. According to an email interview Torvalds gave Forbes reporter Dan Lyons,...

Open Country stakes out new turf.(Universal Linux System Management Suite, OCM 3.0)
March 20, 2006... Open Country, the venture-backed startup that calls itself the next-generation systems management house, has upgraded its proprietary Universal Linux System Management Suite, claiming that what it contends is practically Tivoli-like widge-try...

SCO runs with SCAMP notion.(new product from Santa Cruz Operation Inc.)(Brief article)
March 20, 2006... Told ya so. Told ya SCO would start pushing a SCAMP stack in opposition to the Linux LAMP stack now that the MySQL database has been certified on its proprietary OpenServer 6 operating system. It put out a press release Monday morning saying...

Changing of the guard.(market share of Microsoft Windows and Unix)(Brief article)
March 20, 2006... Windows has finally passed Unix. For the first time since IDC started its Server Tracker report in 1996, three years after NT debuted, Microsoft has passed Unix in the value of units sold. IDC says Microsoft did $17.7 billion worth of...

Vista's reportedly a Scorpio.(Microsoft Corp. announced the release of Windows Vista in November)(Brief article)
March 20, 2006... Vista is coming out in November according to the Microsoftee-produced "Official Microsoft Connections Blog" that briefly said, "Yes, Vista will be released in November of this year," according to Mary Jo Foley of Microsoft Watch, who claims to...

Would you sell your company to these ex-Apple people?(formation of a new company Acquicor Technology)(Steve Wozniak, Gil Amelio, Ellen Hancock)(Brief article)
March 20, 2006... Ousted Apple CEO Gil Amelio, ousted Exodus CEO Ellen Hancock, who also lost her job as Apple's CTO when Steve Jobs threw Amelio out, and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who hasn't held down a real job since he hit pay dirt, formed Acquicor...

IBM buys name recognition widgetry.(acquisition deal with Language Analysis Systems Inc.)(Brief article)
March 20, 2006... IBM is buying Language Analysis System Inc (LAS), a privately held Virginia company that develops multi-cultural name recognition technology, on undisclosed terms. It verifies the origin, cultural variations and meaning of names. IBM is...

Lenovo to lay off 1,000.(BILLY GRAMS)
March 20, 2006... Ten months after its acquisition of IBM's PC operation, Lenovo says that it's going to can 5% of its people outside China, folks in the US, EMEA and Asia, sacrificing some 1,000 jobs to save itself $250 million a year and hone its competitive...

Sony stumbles.(the launch of Sony Playstation 3 is postponed)(Brief article)
March 20, 2006... Sony on Wednesday confirmed press reports and stock market speculation that its vaunted Cell-based PlayStation 3, which is supposed to download music and movies and enable videoconferencing, would miss its scheduled spring launch. Now it's...

ISO snubs China's WAPI.(International Organization for Standardization standards)(Brief article)
March 20, 2006... ISO has rejected China's homegrown WAPI wireless encryption system as a standard and thrown its support behind the Intel-led 802.11i standard. China, which reportedly didn't share much WAPI info with ISO, canned the idea of making it mandatory...