Stories about: Amazon.com

Amazon Web Services Thursday launched a public beta of its cloud-computing service running Windows Server and SQL Server, marking the first time developers and businesses can use the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) to build and host applications on Microsoft's software.

The sparsely populated floor at Linuxworld was a disappointment, but netbooks made an impact at this year's show, a sign that these lightweight machines may bring the Linux OS to a larger audience.

At the Black Hat computer security conference in Las Vegas next week, researchers will demonstrate software they've developed that could steal online credentials from users of popular Web sites such as Facebook, eBay and Google.

"We have come into real contention [for mindshare] in the enterprise," said Tim O'Reilly, CEO at O'Reilly Media, in his keynote address at OSCON, last week's Open Source convention in the US. "So we should be patting ourselves on the back, right? I'm not so sure."

Researchers at IBM have developed software that lets mobile users create slimmed-down Web pages that can be viewed more easily on a small device such as a mobile phone.

US consumers who want to try Ubuntu Linux but are intimidated by the idea of downloading and installing it themselves now have a less stressful option -- they can walk into their local Best Buy store and pick up a boxed version with support for US$19.99.

Red Hat on Tuesday made its JBoss Java middleware available through Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, eight months after it gave customers access to its Enterprise Linux on its technology partner's computing infrastructure.

You've no doubt heard of the "$100 laptop" project. The idea is to help poor kids around the world by providing them with simple, durable, usable and wireless laptops for downloading and using textbooks and educational software, playing games and communicating.

The University of Washington's technology staff demonstrated in 1989 what smart thinking and creativity can accomplish when it developed the Pine e-mail system, which quickly became widely adopted outside the university.

Open source icon Stormy Peters is co-founder of the non-profit GNOME Foundation and director of community and partner programs for OpenLogic. Peters recently discussed why enterprises don't know how much open source software they use, how newbies and non-programmers can become involved in the movement and why she thinks open source software is more secure than proprietary code.

The latest e-paper prototype from Fujitsu tackles one of the technology's biggest weaknesses: the amount of time it takes to refresh a page.