Stories about: IT Matters

Google plans to aggressively add new applications and capabilities to its Web-hosted Apps software suite for businesses, and will likely leave the price unchanged as it builds out the service, a company official said Tuesday.

Storm is a shadow of its former self, Kraken is just another name for Bobax and the biggest botnet goes by the mouthful of "Srizbi," a noted botnet researcher said Wednesday as he released the results of his census of the various armies of hacked computers that spew spam.

I found Oracle's statements on open source, tendered at the Linux/Open Source on Wall Street conference, intriguing to say the least. I'll begin by making it clear that I don't doubt the veracity of the database giant's experience with its customer base.

Windows may boast the lion's share of the desktop education market, but the economic and technical benefits of open source software has seen many schools and education institutions implement various flavours of Linux across their desktops and server back-ends.

Jim Zemlin is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. Formerly executive director of the Free Standards Group, Zemlin also has served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, providing products and services for the Apache Web server. Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner's Open Source Conference and Linux World.

Nobody's going to tear down the Internet and rebuild it from scratch, but academics at Stanford University are imagining what the new blueprint would look like if they did and they hope their work will lead to an Internet that works better in 20 years than it does today. Tim Greene talked to the leader of the effort, Associate Professor Nick McKeown, about how the project is going.

The city of Paris is accelerating its move to free and open-source software as part of a strategy to reduce its dependence on suppliers. It plans to replace more of its server software with free and open-source alternatives, and to install open-source applications on desktops, city officials said Thursday.

Only about 2 percent of the thousands of developers working on open-source software projects are women, a number that women already involved in the open-source movement want to see increased.

Claiming it had showed off a dual-core x86 90nm Opteron at its facilities in Austin, Texas, on Tuesday, AMD tried to steal the thunder of Intel, which claims to have laid the multi-threaded foundation needed for operating systems and applications to make the leap to multi-core with its HyperThreading widgetry and has been saying it will trot out a dual-core Xeon at the upcoming Intel Developer Forum.

Linux has fought its way to the gates of the enterprise by equipping itself with smoother installs, better usability and a wider range of applications. But as it approaches victory, is it also adopting some of Microsoft's more controversial technical practices and becoming too Windows-like?

My desktop machine has been cramped for space for at least a year. I've had to shuffle games, data, applications and digital images on and off the system as I needed them. There just wasn't enough available space on the two existing drives, and it was past time to do something about it. That's what I'm writing about this week: adding a new hard drive to your existing Linux system.