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Linux leader Red Hat’s stock price recovered slightly Friday, but its market value has still dropped 30% since Oracle announced on Wednesday that it will offer lower-cost support of its applications running on Red Hat.

Software radical Richard Stallman helped build the Linux revolution. Now he threatens to tear it apart. The free Linux operating system set off one of the biggest revolutions in the history of computing when it leapt from the fingertips of a Finnish college kid named Linus Torvalds 15 years ago. Linux now drives $15 billion in annual sales of hardware, software and services, and this wondrous bit of code has been tweaked by thousands of independent programmers to run the world's most powerful supercomputers, the latest cell phones and TiVo video recorders and other gadgets. But while Torvalds has been...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- IBM has filed two patent infringement lawsuits against Amazon.com for unspecified damages, the company announced Monday. The lawsuits are over five patents that IBM alleges that Amazon has infringed upon, which it says the online retailer uses in its customer recommendations and purchase system, web site navigation and the way its stores data on its network, according to an IBM spokesman. IBM says it has notified Amazon.com several times of the alleged infringement since September 2002, but the companies have not been able to resolve the issue. The suits were filed in two District Courts for...

Yes I know - not really an appropriate topic for FR, but at least it's in "General/Chat" Internet information on this type of thing is sparse at best. What I need is information on old equipment that has the TN3270 WITH the "Enhanced" (RFC2355) support. Old software suitable for an AS/400 would be even better. At least, if someone could point me in the right direction - somewhere that isn't Microsoft or Webby-oriented - it would be greatly appreciated...

Mercury Computer Systems will help will design a system for soldiers in the battlefield utilizing gaming and artificial intelligence technologies, a Mercury executive said Thursday. The project is the latest to tout alternate uses for the Cell Broadband Engine processor, originally developed by Sony and IBM for use in the PlayStation3 console. Working with visualization experts Barco Federal Systems and the Ft. Huachuca Battle Lab in Arizona, Mercury, based in Chelmsford, Mass., will help create a computer system that will give fighters such as soldiers, pilots, and seamen better ways to sense and interpret data—and to act on it. The...

IBM has announced it will move its global procurement headquarters to China from its present location in New York. The new base will be located in Shenzhen, where the company already has 1,850 employees involved in procurement. IBM said Thursday that no jobs will be lost in New York as a result of the move. The Big Apple office will continue to function as a global procurement unit. Chief procurement officer, John Paterson, who will head up the Shenzhen office, said global businesses must now locate their business units wherever makes the most sense, based on "the imperatives of economics,...

For more than three years the SCO v. IBM lawsuit has been part of the backdrop of all Linux discussion. Initially, following SCO's filing in 2003 there was some genuine concern, at least among the less technically inclined, that there may have actually been some code from proprietary sources that had found its way into the GPL'd Linux codebase. The technical community gave SCO's claims little credence from the first and were quite annoyed by the many very public claims voiced by representatives for SCO. Those pronouncements and the antagonism of the Linux aficionados has raised the various lawsuits above...

The chief information officer of Massachusetts' Information Technology Division (ITD) resigned earlier this week, citing a lack of funding for the state's IT programs. Louis Gutierrez had been a champion of open standards and was a strong supporter of the state's plan to implement the OpenDocument format (ODF) and his resignation could slow the ODF rollout, which is scheduled to go live in January. Gutierrez had been sounding the alarm over the lack of funding since August when the state's legislature failed to approve a bond issue that would provide financing for various IT programs including the move to ODF.

In the ongoing saga of SCO v. IBM, one peripheral question has been the extent of Microsoft's financial support for SCO. Groklaw has dug up an interesting bit of data in the case, namely that Microsoft supposedly promised venture capital firm BayStar that they would guarantee their multimillion-dollar investment in SCO.Buried in IBM's recent motion for summary judgment against SCO is a Declaration from BayStar general partner Larry Goldfarb. Near the beginning of the long-running legal soap opera, BayStar invested $50 million in SCO. In exchange for their investment, BayStar received 20,000 shares of preferred stock in SCO.In his declaration,...

Summary Judgment Motions: Where the Rubber Hits the Road on Evidence Production Wednesday, September 27 2006 @ 02:36 AM EDT Now that IBM has filed motions for summary judgment regarding all of SCO's claims, it's obvious what one purpose of filing such motions would be -- to win without having to bother with a trial. But since winning 100% of all the summary judgment motions you file would probably put your firm in the Guinness Book of World Records, what else might be the benefit of filing them? Ask yourself: What is the most annoying aspect to this case so...

IBM, the world's largest computer services company, will take in up to 3,000 new staff in the eastern Indian city of Kolkata to meet robust demand for outsourcing, a company official said. 'We are very bullish to fill up this capacity very soon because the business is growing and customers are showing more and more interest in sourcing of global delivery services,' Amitabh Ray, vice-president for application services at IBM India, said. The new centre at Kolkata, an emerging IT hub, will provide application development and application maintenance services. In June, IBM said it would invest $6 billion in India...

Critical Mention, Inc. to Commercialize as Subscription Service for Business, Government and Media *********************************************** YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, NY, Sep 14, 2006 (MARKET WIRE via COMTEX) -- IBM Under the agreement, IBM Research will provide Critical Mention a multi-year license to its speech-to-text translation solution for Arabic and English sources, with the ability to expand to other languages in the future. "The ever-shifting nature of the market compels business professionals to quickly and easily monitor a wide range of foreign events and world media," said Arthur Ciccolo of IBM Research. "The unique TALES technology, combined with Critical Mention's advanced real-time search and...

<p>Tokyo, Dec. 17 (Bloomberg) -- Toshiba Corp. will begin commercial production as early as 2004 of a new processor capable of handling sophisticated graphics and sound over the Internet, the first product of its collaboration with International Business Machines Corp. and Sony Corp.</p>

IBM, in cooperation with fellow industry giants Sony and Toshiba, recently announced a new processor, called the Cell. While this in itself is not really cause for much celebration (except perhaps for the odd bedfellows involved in the project) the new multi-core chip might well prove to be something special. For one thing, it's going to be at the heart of Sony's upcoming Playstation 3 console, which we have a feeling may be slightly popular…The Cell processor is vastly different from conventional processors inside. This tiny chip contains a powerful 64-bit Dual-threaded IBM PowerPC core but also eight proprietary 'Synergistic...

Toshiba and Sony expect dramatic gains in electronics for entertainment. SAN FRANCISCO – IBM Corp. on Monday formally unveiled what it describes as a "supercomputer on a chip" that promises to dramatically increase the computing power in video-game systems, televisions and other consumer electronics.At an engineering conference here, semiconductor designers from IBM and partners Sony Group and Toshiba Corp. said their new "Cell" processor has 10 times more computing power than traditional chips in handling some applications.*********************************************** Cell is said to run at clock speeds greater than 4 gigahertz, which would top the 3.8 GHz of Intel's current top-speed chip....

LOS ANGELES--Today saw the second of the big three console makers announce its next-generation platform. At its pre-E3 press conference, Sony Computer Entertainment gave the world its first look at the PlayStation 3, as it is now officially called. While the device's price has not yet been set, its release window--spring 2006--has. Flanked by Sony Computer Entertainment America President and CEO Kaz Hirai, SCE head Ken Kutaragi introduced it as a "supercomputer for computer entertainment." The name was not unexpected, since Sony had been running an extensive teaser-ad campaign prepping the public for the PlayStation 3. The company had laid...

PlayStation 3 tackles world ills The PlayStation 3 is released in November The spare processing power of Sony's PlayStation 3 (PS3) will be harnessed by scientists trying to understand the cause of diseases like Alzheimer's.Sony has teamed up with US biologists who already run the distributed computing project, folding@home (FAH). The project harnesses the capacity of thousands of PCs to examine how the shape of proteins, critical to most biological functions, affect disease. FAH say a network of PS3's will allow performance similar to supercomputers. With 10,000 machines joined together the researchers calculate they should be able to do...

Since 2000, Folding@Home (FAH) has led to a major jump in the capabilities of molecular simulation. By joining together hundreds of thousands of PCs throughout the world, calculations which were previously considered impossible have now become routine. FAH has targeted the study of of protein folding and protein folding disease, and numerous scientific advances have come from the project. Now in 2006, we are looking forward to another major advance in capabilities. This advance utilizes the new Cell processor in Sony’s PLAYSTATION 3 (PS3) to achieve performance previously only possible on supercomputers. With this new technology (as well as new...

This news came out a week ago (edit: IBM’s press release came out this afternoon) but I didn’t have anything to add so I didn’t post it. I decided this morning that it was interesting and ought to get a mention just for the news.****************************Specifically, a supercomputing machine—dubbed “Roadrunner” and set to be fully installed by 2008 at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory—will run on some 16,000 Cell Broadband Engine processors and a similar number of AMD Opteron processors. The Cell chip was originally built for Sony’s Playstation 3 console, which has been delayed until November...

Mercury Computer is sampling a PCI-Express add-in card powered by a Cell processor running Yellow Dog Linux. The Cell Accelerator Board (CAB) targets rendering, ray tracing, video/image processing, and signal processing applications, and is said to deliver 180 GFLOPS (billion floating-point operations per second). (Click for larger view of Mercury CAB) Mercury claims the CAB will be the first Cell-based system for the "workstation" market, when it ships early next year. Mercury also claims to have shipped the first Cell-based computer in general, a 470 pound blade chassis that shipped in January. The CAB runs a Yellow Dog Linux BSP...