Stories by: James Evans

Optical equipment manufacturers are on the brink of releasing equipment that will pave the way to 40G bps (bits per second) network transmission speeds that are four times current data rates - the equivalent of transmitting seven CD-ROMs worth of data in one second.

A group of 24 IT companies are banding together to form the TV Linux Alliance, which will focus on developing a Linux environment for the digital set-top box market. The companies, which come from cable, satellite and telecommunication sectors, are seeking to shorten the time to market, lower development costs and simplify the development of the Linux set-top boxes, the companies said in a statement released at the National Cable and Telecommunications Association (NCTA) conference in Chicago.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has approved plans for the .biz and .info top-level domain (TLDs) name suffixes and registration for at least one of them will start later this month, the Internet overseeing body said Tuesday.

Cisco Systems on Tuesday announced enhancements to its Cisco 10000 Series family of edge-services routers, offering service providers IPsec (Internet Protocol Security) and MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) Virtual Private Network (VPN) technology.

Compaq Computer Corp. has been awarded contracts to build what it claims will be the largest supercomputers in both Japan and Australia, the company said Wednesday.

TiVo, a provider of digital video recorder devices, will cut 80 employees from its payroll amid efforts to save US$60 million for the current fiscal year, the company said in a statement.

Larry Augustin, chief executive officer (CEO) of VA Linux Systems, is leading a company that sells Linux-based servers. Augustin spoke with the IDG News Service about what the economic downturn means for the open-source OS and whether Linux can make it on the desktop.

Computer Associates International (CA) on Friday announced it will provide support for IBM Corp.'s new operating system, z/OS, on CA zSeries mainframe machines.

Three months after IBM Corp. shipped its eServer Z900 Series, the company on Monday announced the availability of its new 64-bit OS for the mainframe machines.

Dell Computer Corp. on Monday announced that it will begin phasing out its PowerEdge 2400 and PowerEdge 2450 servers so it can bring in the new PowerEdge 2500 and 2550 models. The new servers will be shiped with either Windows NT/2000, NetWare 5.1 or Red Hat Linux 7.0.

Sun Microsystems on Wednesday announced that it has begun shipping four models of its new Unix midrange Sun Fire servers. The servers are powered by Sun's UltraSPARC III processor 64-bit chip and start at $US73,195.