Stories about: Fred

Here's the legend: at a computer trade show in 1981, Bill Gates supposedly uttered this statement, in defense of the just-introduced IBM PC's 640KB usable RAM limit: "640K ought to be enough for anybody."

Two Democrats in the US House of Representatives have introduced a bill that would subject broadband providers to antitrust violations if they block or slow Internet traffic.

Linux, Apache, JBoss, and other open source technologies are kicking sand in the faces of the big boys on the operating system and middleware tiers, but when it comes to the database world, open source is still a 97-pound weakling. And despite some heady growth numbers, that's not likely to change anytime soon.

Models and designers from around the world participated in the Seamless: Computational Couture event, showing off designs that incorporate technology.

At the Consumer Electronics Show this year it's clear that consumers are making choices that are driving industry changes, and nowhere is that more evident than in the digital-music business.

Sony BMG Music Entertainment will crack open the door to its music vaults on Jan. 15, taking the DRM copy-prevention wrapper off a limited selection of downloadable tracks.

It was 1996, the bandwidth between Australia and the rest of the world was miserable, and Andrew Tridgell had a problem. He wanted to synchronize source code located in Australia with source code on machines around the world, but sending patches was annoying and error-prone, and just sending all the files was painfully slow. Most people would have just waited a few years for trans-Pacific bandwidth to improve; instead Tridgell wrote rsync, the first known instance of content-based addressing (also known as content-addressed storage, or compare-by-hash), an innovation which eventually spread to software like BitTorrent, git, and many document storage products on the market.

For a decade, IPv6 proponents have pushed this upgrade to the Internet's main communications protocol because of its three primary benefits: a gargantuan address space, end-to-end security, and easier network administration through automatic device configuration.

IBM could establish a strong presence in the market for embedded operating systems with the acquisition of financially ailing Wind River Systems, a deal that is reportedly in the works.

"People-ready business." That's Microsoft's latest slogan from hell, and it probably would have passed quietly into the dustbin of marketing history had it not been for a recent blowup in the blogosphere.

Oct. 18, 2000, might go unnoticed in the long history of Sun Microsystems, but it marked a critical moment in the history of a company that celebrates its 25th anniversary this week.