Baseline articles from October 2006

Baseline archives from October 2006

Rivals Charge Microsoft Wants to 'Hamstring' Them.
October 2, 2006... BRUSSELS, Oct 2 (Reuters)--Microsoft is working to hamstring software companies trying to overcome "inherent weaknesses" in Windows security, rival McAfee Inc. charged in a full-page ad in Monday's Financial Times. McAfee, Symantec and...

Juniper Expands Security Gateway Lineup.
October 2, 2006... Juniper Networks introduced three new security appliances on Oct. 2, adding unified threat management tools to its existing hardware in an effort to market the gateway devices to branch offices and other remote enterprise operations. The...

Apple Releases Security Update for Mac OS X.
October 2, 2006... Apple Computer on Sept. 29 issued a security update that promises to fix several critical flaws in Mac OS X. In issuing the 2006-006 security update, the Cupertino, Calif., company patched and updated 12 flaws in Mac OS X Version 10.4.8....

Oracle Juices Up Berkeley DB.
October 2, 2006... Oracle spruced up one of its recently acquired embeddable databases, Berkeley DB, releasing on Sept. 27 Version 4.5 with multi-version concurrency control and more. The new features are designed to improve performance, availability and...

Microsoft Buys DesktopStandard.
October 2, 2006... Microsoft has acquired DesktopStandard, a developer of group policy-based enterprise desktop management products, in a move designed help customers leverage the value of policy-based management and their investments in Active Directory, the two...

HP Says No Battery Recall Necessary.
October 3, 2006... Hewlett-Packard has no plans for a battery recall, despite efforts by several of its competitors to replace millions of notebook PC battery packs. The Palo Alto, Calif., computer giant said that, following a review, it did not see reason...

McAfee Snaps Up Another Compliance Specialist.
October 3, 2006... McAfee announced on Oct. 3 that it has signed an agreement to acquire Citadel Security Software, which specializes in applications used to mitigate risks posed by software vulnerabilities and monitor IT systems for policy compliance. Under...

IBM Boosts SOA Offerings.
October 3, 2006... IBM on Tuesday rolled out four new tools--and almost a dozen consulting offerings--related to service-oriented architecture (SOA). Big Blue touted its customer experience and acquisition streak with the launch, as it tries to narrow the...

Memo Suggests HP's Hurd Knew of Probe in July 2005.
October 3, 2006... NEW YORK-- Hewlett-Packard Co. Chief Executive Mark Hurd may have known as early as in July 2005 the company was looking into private phone records as part of its leak investigation, The Wall Street Journal reported in its online edition on...

Cingular Completes AT&T Integration.
October 3, 2006... Cingular Wireless completed its integration of the AT&T wireless network it acquired less than two years ago. Originally the company promised that the network integration would be accomplished by the end of 2006. However, the massive...

Microsoft Security Antitrust Concerns Heat Up.
October 3, 2006... With rivals' complaints over Microsoft's move into the security applications space growing louder nearly every day, antitrust analysts said it appears likely that the software giant may soon again be locked in a battle to defend its business...

Report: Ill-Prepared Workforce Looms.
October 3, 2006... Young people entering the U.S. workforce lack critical skills essential for success, finds a survey released Oct. 2 by a consortium of business research organizations. The consortium, made up of The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for...

Microsoft Likely to Ship Vista On Time: Analyst.
October 4, 2006... SEATTLE--Microsoft Corp. will most likely ship its upcoming Windows Vista operating system on time and meet its deadline for both corporate and retail consumers, a Wall Street analyst said on Wednesday. Goldman Sachs analyst Rick Sherlund...

Fujitsu to Recall 287,000 Sony-Made Batteries.
October 4, 2006... TOKYO (Reuters)--Japanese electronics maker Fujitsu Ltd. said on Wednesday it would recall 287,000 notebook PC batteries made by Sony Corp., bringing the number of Sony batteries recalled to more than 7.5 million. Fujitsu last week joined...

Report: HP Ex-Chair to Be Charged in Probe, not CEO.
October 4, 2006... SACRAMENTO, Calif (Reuters)--California's attorney general will seek indictments on Oct. 4 in Hewlett-Packard boardroom leak probe against former Chairman Patricia Dunn and others but not Chief Executive Mark Hurd, BusinessWeek reported in its...

5 to Watch as Baseline Turns Five.(Editorial)
October 4, 2006... As this issue marks the fifth anniversary of Baseline, there's always the temptation to look back and marvel at how far we have come since 2001. For example, we all knew five years ago that the Internet was going to change everything, but very...

Microsoft Tools to Combat Vista Piracy.
October 4, 2006... Microsoft will unveil Oct. 4 a new software protection platform and accompanying technologies that it plans to incorporate into a variety of products, starting with Windows Vista and Windows Server Longhorn, in hopes of combating piracy. ...

IBM to Spend $100 Million on Mainframes.
October 4, 2006... IBM will spend $100 million over the next five years to make the mainframe easier to use. The program will focus on such areas as greater automation, modernizing the user interface and easing the way users manage the software on the...

Schwarzenegger Quashes RFID Bill.
October 4, 2006... The long-awaited California bill to regulate the use of radio-frequency identification in state and local documents has been quashed. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger quietly vetoed SB 768 last weekend. Buried in a list of 73 bills...

Wyse Ships Wireless Thin Client.(Wyse Technology V-Class )
October 4, 2006... A new series of wireless thin clients is being shipped by Wyse bound for customers ranging from airports to health care facilities. The new V-Class clients integrate high-end thin clients that Wyse is already selling for wired networks with...

Calif. Seeks Indictment of Ex-HP Chairman Dunn.
October 4, 2006... SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters)--California's attorney general filed a criminal complaint on Oct. 4 seeking indictments of former Hewlett-Packard Chairman Patricia Dunn and four others for their roles in a probe into board leaks. The complaint...

Serena to Buy Pacific Edge.
October 4, 2006... Serena Software announced that it has agreed to acquire Pacific Edge Software, a maker of project and portfolio management software. Serena, based in San Mateo, Calif., builds ALM (application lifecycle management) software. The...

Analysts: New Anti-Piracy Tools Will Delay Enterprise Adoption of Vista.
October 5, 2006... The new anti-piracy and validation tools that Microsoft plans to ship starting with Windows Vista and Longhorn Server will help ensure that there will be little corporate uptake of these operating systems in 2007, according to analysts. ...

Bank Offers Check Deposits Over the Net.
October 5, 2006... Wachovia, the fourth-largest bank in the U.S., is now offering a new banking technology that allows corporations to scan checks and send their deposits electronically over the Internet. Wachovia Treasury Services announced on Oct. 4 the...

5 Most Important Technologies: Yesterday and Tomorrow.
October 6, 2006... As part of its 5 Year Anniversary special report, Baseline asked two longtime information-technology market watchers--David F. Carr, Baseline's technology editor, and Michael Vizard, editorial director of the Ziff Davis Enterprise Group--to,...

Trend Micro Offers Security Appliance to Protect E-Mail Networks.
October 6, 2006... Responding to demand from its customers for more hardware-based systems, Trend Micro introduced its new integrated messaging security appliance on Oct. 9, the final piece of the company's strategy to build devices to host each of its software...

Labs Sees Light at the End of Vista Testing Tunnel.
October 7, 2006... It's been a long and winding road, but the Microsoft Windows Vista release that's been floating vaguely in the near future (for years now) finally appears to be close at hand. First, though, comes what eWEEK Labs hopes to be the last in an...

Special Delivery: Fast WANs and App Acceleration.
October 8, 2006... Technology executives are centralizing data while their employees are dispersing far and wide. They're all waiting anxiously for the WAN to deliver hot applications--fast--to mobile workers hankering for performance. Technology managers...

CA Aims to Help Improve IT Governance.
October 9, 2006... CA on Oct. 9 will make its biggest bid yet to help IT customers get more of their budgets under control when it introduces a major new release of its Clarity project and portfolio management software. Clarity 8, in development since before...

Salesforce.com to Debut New SAAS Development Platform.
October 9, 2006... It aint AppExchange 2.0. It's Apex 1.0. And it very much has the potential to change the way on-demand applications are built and deployed. Salesforce.com will announce Apex, a new Java-based application development language and...

Technology Special Report: Disaster Recovery.(Brief article)
October 9, 2006... From Sept. 11 to Hurricane Katrina, businesses have wrangled with the nuts and bolts of recovering from catastrophes. Data replication software, which copies corporate information to an offsite location, is one of the key components of any...

FDA Cites Need for Hybrid Pros.(Food and Drug Administration)(finding project managers who understand the business requirements)(Brief article)
October 9, 2006... Seeking business efficiencies by merging the knowledge of technologists and industry professionals has been an ever-evolving process. But chief technology officers, such as Jeff Cooper, director of IT shared services at the Food and Drug...

Tomorrow's IT Workforce: Tech-Savvy, Business-Focused.
October 9, 2006... ORLANDO--We're in the midst of a workforce sea-change, as the vast crop of Baby Boomers, now dominant among the IT workforce, retires, to be replaced by tech-savvy twenty-somethings over the next decade. That was the message voiced by...

Gartner Warns to Cut Infrastructure Costs.(Gartner Symposium/IT expo)(Brief article)
October 9, 2006... ORLANDO, Fla.--If this is October, it must be time to truck down to Orlando to hear warnings, opportunities and forecasts from the Gartner analysts. All those elements were present as the annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo got underway here on Oct....

ERP Market Surges in 2006.(enterprise resource planning)(Brief article)
October 10, 2006... The enterprise resource planning (ERP) market is experiencing double-digit growth this year, and is expected to continue to grow at an average of 10% over the next five years, Boston consulting firm AMR Research reported Tuesday. Jim...

Microsoft Patches 10 Vulnerabilities, 6 Critical.
October 10, 2006... Microsoft released 10 individual security patches on Oct. 10, addressing a handful of critical problems in Office programs along with several equally serious issues in its Windows operating system. In all, the software maker issued patches...

For IT Managers, Best to Be a Small Fish in Big Pond.
October 10, 2006... The career path of IT managers often sputters and stalls in small enterprises, according to research released Oct. 10 by the Info-Tech Research Group's Indaba division, a London, Ontario-based provider of IT research and advice. IT...

Gartner: Googazon Could Dominate Web Retail.(Gartner Symposium/IT expo)(Brief article)
October 10, 2006... ORLANDO, Fla.--As the World Wide Web evolves into a collection of Web services, one or two huge players could come to dominate retail search. Gartner analyst Hung LeHong laid out that scenario at the annual Gartner Symposium/ITxpo here. ...

Customers Praise New Salesforce.com Apex Platform.
October 10, 2006... Granted, it's only been one day since Salesforce.com announced Apex, its new programming language and platform. Not enough time for anyone to really digest what's going on, right? Wrong. The response to Apex from customers (and, not...

Oracle Settles Lawsuit with Federal Government.(Brief article)
October 11, 2006... Oracle has agreed to pay $98.5 million to settle a lawsuit that claimed PeopleSoft overcharged the federal government for software it purchased during an eight-year period, the Department of Justice announced Oct. 10. The lawsuit, which...

Technical Hiccup Delays Microsoft Patches.
October 11, 2006... Microsoft was unable to offer immediate access to its monthly collection of security patches as a result of a procedural issue in distributing the content to users Oct. 10. While the company appears to have remedied the situation, at the...

Microsoft to Lose Another Senior Executive.
October 11, 2006... Microsoft is losing another senior executive with a long history at the software maker. Rick Devenuti, senior vice president of enterprise services and IT, will be retiring after 19 years with Microsoft "to focus his attention on his...

Tech Worker Wages See a Bump in Q3.
October 11, 2006... Hourly wages for skilled tech workers in the third quarter of 2006 improved over the year before, according to the Yoh Index of Technology wages released Oct. 11 by the Philadelphia-based talent management company. Wages increased .1...

Tutorial: Are You Meeting Quality Goals?
October 12, 2006... There are three types of quality assurance (QA) project reviews: deliverable, compliance and health. Deliverable is any tangible outcome or item produced to complete a project; this can range from a client's approval of a project plan to...

Primer: End-Point Device Security.
October 12, 2006... What Is It? End-point security protects against threats to the network "end points" controlled by users, mostly their personal computers. One big change to corporate security: Large amounts of data can be quickly and easily copied onto a...

Nortel Flips the Channel to 4G.
October 12, 2006... BOSTON--In a booth outfitted to look like a comfy living room, replete with couch and streamed network TV showing on a widescreen IPTV, Nortel on Oct. 10 unveiled what it's calling the first end-to-end mobile MIMO-powered WiMax setup to deliver...

Microsoft Restructures Its Windows Core OS Division.
October 12, 2006... Microsoft has restructured its Windows Core Operating System Division into five teams in a move designed to better focus on PC hardware and provide a richer set of customer solutions. The software giant is also making changes on the...

Goodbye Eudora, Hello Thunderbird.
October 12, 2006... Eudora, once one of the most popular e-mail clients, is finally being retired. Instead of simply abandoning Eudora's customers, however, Qualcomm is partnering with Mozilla Corp. to create "Penelope," a customized version of Mozilla's...

Transmeta Files a Patent Lawsuit Against Intel.
October 12, 2006... Transmeta, a Santa Clara, Calif. company, has filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Intel, claiming the microprocessor giant has used its architecture and power efficiency technologies in its products. The lawsuit, which was filed...

RFID Vendors Raise the Stakes with New Products.
October 12, 2006... With the design and deployment work for the U.S. Department of Defense's extensive RFID network completed in late September, industry experts expect a ripple effect across the supply chain industry, with more companies moving to add RFID...

Technology Special Report: Business Integration.
October 13, 2006... While the open-environment concepts of Web services and service-oriented architectures have gained popularity in recent years, organizations have been slower to adopt third-party tools to manage their performance. Those that have, however, are...

Microsoft Makes Changes to Vista in EU, S. Korea.
October 13, 2006... BRUSSELS/FIESOLE, Italy (Reuters)--Microsoft Corp said it had made changes to its new operating system Vista after what it called "constructive dialogue" with the European Commission and South Korea over regulatory concerns. "Microsoft...

Five Ways to Stay in Your Help Desk's Good Graces.
October 13, 2006... You've just arrived at work on a Monday morning after a long weekend and you haven't had your coffee yet. You land your laptop on its dock and take your seat, waiting for the familiar image of your desktop wallpaper to greet you. And you...

SOA: Getting Good Service.(Service oriented architecture)
October 13, 2006... Strategy SOA can help IT departments become more efficient while allowing them to put together systems that can boost their company's business. At many companies, IT falls on the cost side of the ledger. Which is why so many technology...

Is the Botnet Battle Already Lost?
October 16, 2006... It's dress-down Friday at Sunbelt Software's Clearwater, Fla., headquarters. In a bland cubicle on the 12th floor, Eric Sites stares at the screen of a "dirty box," a Microsoft Windows machine infected with the self-replicating Wootbot network...

Survey: Hacker Attacks Scariest Threat of All.
October 16, 2006... In a survey of IT security professionals attending the RSA Conference, one-third of respondents cited uncovering identity management as their biggest organizational concern. While 29 percent of respondents ranked e-mail viruses as their...

EMC Profit Falls, Staff Layoffs Coming.
October 17, 2006... BOSTON--- EMC Corp., the world's largest maker of corporate data-storage equipment, on Tuesday reported lower quarterly profit due to stock-based compensation and a tax benefit in the year-earlier period, and said it plans to cut 1,250 staff by...

Sun's Papadopoulos: Integrated Infrastructure Is the Future.
October 17, 2006... Sun Microsystems on Oct. 17 will unveil its Project Blackbox, an initiative designed to address such issues as power, cooling and infrastructure deployment for companies in such areas as Web 2.0 and high-performance computing. The plan...

Sun Unveils Data Centers in a Box.
October 17, 2006... Sun Microsystems believes the answer to some of the problems of power, cooling and speed of IT deployment in enterprise data centers could be found in a standard shipping container. Sun President and CEO Jonathan Schwartz and other company...

Microsoft CEO Forecasts $7.5B R&D Spend in 2007.
October 17, 2006... MADRID (Reuters)--Microsoft Corp will spend around $7.5 billion on research and development in fiscal year 2007, $1.3 billion more than previously committed, Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Tuesday. Ballmer gave the estimate in...

HP Offers RFID to Track Data Center Assets.
October 17, 2006... Hewlett-Packard announced Oct. 17 that it has completed a successful test using radio-frequency identification to track assets, specifically servers, in the data center. The technology, which was developed by HP Labs, used RFID readers and...

One in Three Workers Jot Down Passwords: Study.(Brief article)
October 17, 2006... NEW YORK--One in three people write down computer passwords, undermining their security, and companies should look to more advanced methods, including biometrics, to ensure their systems are safe, a new study shows. A study released on...

MySQL Adds Automation to Enterprise Subscription Service.
October 17, 2006... Open-source database developer MySQL announced a new version of its commercial subscription service, which will feature automated technology designed to help users monitor their databases more effectively. MySQL Enterprise is available as...

HIPAA Compliance: So-So and Stalling.
October 18, 2006... Three years after the deadline for compliance with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act to protect patients' health information, over a fifth of health care providers and over a tenth of payers say they are not meeting the...

Novell, IBM Partner on Integrated Linux Server Stack.
October 18, 2006... Let's say you own a small to midsize business, and you want to use Linux, but you're not crazy about the idea of mixing and matching software and servers. If that's you, Novell and IBM want to talk to you about their new Integrated Stack...

Firms Say Microsoft Fails to Keep EU Bargain.
October 18, 2006... BRUSSELS (Reuters)--Microsoft has failed to keep its part of a new bargain to cooperate with security software companies, falling short of commitments to the EU, two of the firms, McAfee and Symantec, said on Wednesday. Microsoft has had a...

Diskeeper Releases Automated Defragmentation Technology.(Brief article)
October 18, 2006... Diskeeper Corporation has included automated defragmentation functionality into the next iteration of its flagship application, Diskeeper 2007. The technology, dubbed InvisiTasking, allows system maintenance to run invisibly in the...

Today's NAC Remains Vulnerable to Attack.
October 18, 2006... According to the latest figures from Forrester Research, some 40 percent of all enterprises in North America will have some form of Network Admission Control in place by the end of 2006, as businesses seek more effective ways to identify...

How to Pull Money out of Storage.
October 19, 2006... If one trend stands out more in 2006 than any other, it would have to be the way information-technology organizations have been driving the cost out of their hardware to free up more money to invest in applications. Most of the work thus...

SOA Big on SAP and IBM Agendas.
October 19, 2006... Enterprise software giant SAP is looking to bolster its position in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) arena, by launching a variety of consulting services aimed at helping customers transition to SOA. The new consulting services will...

Primer: E-Discovery.
October 19, 2006... What is it? E-discovery refers to finding and producing documents stored in electronic form in response to litigation or regulatory requirements. Civil litigants, regulators and criminal prosecutors now commonly ask for copies of selected...

Experts' Tips for Reducing Storage Costs.
October 19, 2006... Like death and taxes, there are two things that are certain in the world of data storage: You'll always want more of it, and it will never be cheap enough. So, we had an e-mail exchange with three storage experts to get some tips on how to do...

SAP Announces Solid Third Quarter.
October 19, 2006... SAP AG, after a less-than-stellar second quarter, rebounded nicely in its third quarter of 2006 with a 16 percent increase in new software license sales. In the third quarter, announced Oct. 19, SAP's new license revenues rose to $866...

Microsoft, IBM Hook Up for E-Mail Archiving.
October 19, 2006... Microsoft is hooking up with IBM for the first time to help large companies handle an increasingly worrisome problem: e-mail archiving for e-discovery, legal and audit reasons. Starting Oct. 19, Microsoft and its channel partners are to...

HP Takes Top PC Spot from Dell, Analysts Say.
October 19, 2006... Hewlett-Packard overtook Dell as the world's top PC vendor in the third quarter, according to research firms IDC and Gartner. This is the first time that HP has been in the No. 1 spot since Dell overtook it in the fourth quarter of 2003,...

Big Tech Firms' Sales Grew 19% in Third Quarter.
October 20, 2006... Most big technology companies had strong sales growth in the third quarter, with the search giant Google and the Indian outsourcing firm Wipro leading the way. On average, sales at big technology companies advanced 19% in the quarter ended...

Linux Desktop Vendor Xandros Reorganizes.
October 20, 2006... On Oct. 18, Linux distributor Xandros was reorganized, resulting in the loss of at least five jobs and a change in chief financial officers. The company, which positions its desktop-oriented Linux distribution as an easy migration path from...

Cha-Ching! The First 2007 IT Salary Guide Arrives.
October 20, 2006... Starting salaries for IT pros are expected to increase an average of 2.8 percent in 2007 over 2006, and more than 4 percent in high-demand areas, according to the 2007 IT Salary Guide from Robert Half Technology, to be released Oct. 24. ...

Cha-Ching! The First 2007 IT Salary Guide Arrives.
October 20, 2006... Starting salaries for IT pros are expected to increase an average of 2.8 percent in 2007 over 2006, and more than 4 percent in high-demand areas, according to the 2007 IT Salary Guide from Robert Half Technology, to be released Oct. 24. ...

Cost of Data Breaches Rises Sharply.(Brief article)
October 20, 2006... Leaks of sensitive customer information and other corporate data are costing companies in the United States substantially more in related financial and business losses in 2006, according to a new study published by the Ponemon Institute. ...

Do Not Enter.
October 22, 2006... With criminals stalking their operations and customers, Wells Fargo and SVB Silicon Valley Bank can't afford to fool around with online security. Just as riflemen rode shotgun on Wells Fargo stagecoaches in the 19th century, today, Wells...

Banks to Lawless Phishers: Do Not Enter.
October 22, 2006... With criminals stalking their operations and customers, Wells Fargo and SVB Silicon Valley Bank can't afford to fool around with online security. Just as riflemen rode shotgun on Wells Fargo stagecoaches in the 19th century, today, Wells...

Microsoft Hires Ruby Guru.
October 22, 2006... Microsoft has beefed up its efforts to make dynamic languages play well on the .Net platform with the hire of John Lam, an expert in the Ruby language. John Lam is the creator of the RubyCLR bridge between the Ruby language and the...

IT Issues Resurface at TIAA-CREF.
October 23, 2006... The IT issues at the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association -- College Retirement Equities Fund, one of the nation's largest private retirement systems, have once again reared an ugly head. Increasing problems with TIAA-CREF forwarded...