Stories by: David Legard

Singapore's Ministry of Defence (MinDef) has moved away from a predominantly Microsoft desktop policy by installing the open-source OpenOffice productivity software on 5,000 desktop computers.

The United Nations, through its International Open Source Network (IOSN) will organize the first annual Software Freedom Day on Saturday in an effort to educate Asian users about the benefits of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) and encourage its wider use in the region.

Users of mobile phones running the Symbian OS are vulnerable to a trojan contained in an illegally adapted version of the Mosquitos game, Symbian said on Thursday.

A number of Chinese software companies have joined forces with overseas vendors such as IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Novell to form the China Open Source Software Promotion Alliance, China's first open-source software organization, several Chinese media reported Wednesday.

Japan's Personal Media demonstrated at CommunicAsia a functional computer called the Teacube, measuring 2 inches (5 centimeters) on each side, to show the potential of the T-Engine platform for embedded systems.

The number of servers sold worldwide increased by 27.1 percent in the first quarter of 2004 to 1.57 million units, with a clear move by users towards low-end servers and the Linux operating system, research company Gartner said Tuesday.

A team of open-source developers has released software which emulates the PowerPC processor architecture and enables users to run Mac OS and some Unix OSes on PCs powered by Intel x86-architecture processors.

Microsoft's domination of the client operating systems market will fade over the next few years, according to Avneesh Saxena, vice-president for Asia-Pacific computing systems research at IDC.

The Spanish police arrested Tuesday in Madrid a 23-year-old man suspected of being the author of the W32/Raleka worm which infected over 120,000 computers in August.

The number of Internet security incidents reported by businesses in Asia in August rose 43 per cent over the figure in July, according to Singapore-based security company e-Cop.net.

The worldwide server market was worth US$10.6 billion in the second quarter of 2003, a scant 0.2 percent higher than in the same quarter last year, according to revenue figures released Friday by IDC.