Stories about: General Motors

Some of the most oft-repeated comments attributed to Bill Gates through the years were not uttered by Bill Gates. Take for instance "640K ought to be enough for anybody," which he supposedly said in 1981 to note that the 640K bytes of memory in IBM's PC was a significant breakthrough. Or his alleged comment that if General Motors "had kept up with technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving [US]$25 cars that got 1,000 miles per gallon."

As a lawyer, law professor and software programmer, Eben Moglen is passionate about technology, software and user freedom. A former board member of the Free Software Foundation and the founder, president and executive director of the Software Freedom Law Center in New York since 2005, Moglen has worked to protect and advance open source and free software. Moglen, 48, is a Connecticut native who grew up in Manhattan and began programming for pay at the age of 13. Eventually, he worked as a developer at IBM to put himself through college and law school. A longtime friend of free software advocate, Richard Stallman, Moglen recently talked with Computerworld about his work, his belief in open source and what he sees as the changing future of software in the world economy.

On the Internet, there's always a ghost in the room -- watching you, listening, recording your activities and interests, aggregating profiles or categorizing you, and whispering secrets and lies about you to others again and again.

Despite generating a hefty media buzz, social networking sites like MySpace.com and YouTube have not yet figured out how to use that publicity to generate significant advertising revenue, according to a report released this week by IDC.

News Corp. and NBC Universal will challenge Google's YouTube for online eyeballs and advertising dollars by launching a video-streaming Web site by the third quarter, News Corp. announced Thursday.

Portland Trailblazers fans are using a new social networking Web site set up last week by the team to join together and lobby the National Basketball Association to add Trailblazers power forward Zach Randolph to the lineup for Sunday's NBA All-Star Game in Las Vegas.

At a recent Sun Microsystems press event, Sun execs talked up plans to market the company's Solaris Unix OS to startups and small-to-midsize businesses. "Open source is what [customers] want to go after," said Peder Ulander, Sun's vice president of software marketing. "It's not so much Linux. Linux just happens to embody open source."

Automotive electronics manufacturer and a supplier to big names like General Motors Holden, Australian Arrow has migrated half its servers to Linux in two years to gain greater stability.

Users who helped spur the growth of Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) programming techniques through grass-roots efforts welcomed last week's news that several top vendors have joined forces to promote it to the open-source community.

Sun Microsystems' quarterly revenue has continued its decline in the fourth quarter, but the company has posted a profit on a one-time tax benefit.

Running a personal Weblog may be the latest craze sweeping the Internet, however, business IT is beginning to warm to the idea of a simple, organized way of online collaboration.