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Arguments that Linux poses a threat to national security if its use on Pentagon projects continues unchecked are "short-sighted and self-serving," and are merely an attempt to cultivate "uncertainty and doubt" in the marketplace. So said Dr. Inder Singh, chairman and CEO of LynuxWorks, a San Jose-ba...

The developer of one of the world's most high-profile, open-source databases, Sweden's MySQL AB, this week launched MySQL Cluster, a new open-source database clustering technology for applications that need continuous availability. The MySQL Cluster combines a clustering architecture with the MySQL ...

Sometimes bitter humor is the only sensible response to absurd injustice. A few years ago, for example, a lot of frustrated Apple fans were sure that if Steve Jobs walked across San Francisco Bay, the PC press would thunder "Jobs Can't Swim!" Or, more topically, if Sun won a major legal victory agai...

Listening to some Linux critics, you might think that the open-source operating system is more of a threat to U.S. national security than a gaggle of Islamic jihadis lugging rocket-propelled grenade launchers around Fallujah, or mad Pakistani nuclear scientists selling secrets to rogue states. At ye...

Japanese scientists have built their largest distributed computing grid yet, a supercluster that performs 11 trillion floating operations per second, at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). As Japan's largest public research organization, AIST is charged with ...

About a month ago we had some people over for dinner, and the discussion drifted to top-10 lists of the Letterman variety. As part of that conversation, I got challenged to name the top 10 worst IT decisions ever -- something I couldn't do then and still can't do now, which is why I'm asking for you...

Microsoft this week released a portion of its source code through an open-source license, posting the code on SourceForge, an online source-code repository, in its most high-profile code disclosure ever. The move is designed to help the company improve the toolset's documentation and to allow the op...

With financial and technical support from Hewlett-Packard, Foundry Networks and other leaders in Silicon Valley, students at the University of San Francisco (USF) this week launched a grand project to create an instant, do-it-yourself supercomputer. But technical problems with some of the PCs disabl...

Two years in the making, the Open Source Vulnerability Database (OSVDB) this week debuted online, providing the public with a constantly updated catalog of the Internet's ever-changing security vulnerabilities. The project is sponsored by Digital Defense and Winterforce and is available at osvdb.org...

Want to know why most business analysts and venture capitalists simply don't get it with respect to Unix? Take a look at the computer books they study while working toward their MBA, financial analysis certificate or accounting designation, and you'll understand that their ignorance isn't entirely t...

Industrial policy has long been discredited as an economic strategy in the United States, but not in Asia. The government of Japan, for example, has always worked closely with companies in IT and consumer electronics to influence corporate winners and losers, but the results have been exceptionally ...

The standard chip-making process, based on using lithography to etch circuits in silicon and other materials, has been in use since the mid-1970s, with change expressed mainly in increased manufacturing precision as decreases in the wavelengths used allowed the development of ever smaller components...

Computing giant IBM is seeking a declaratory judgment in its ongoing defense and counterclaim lawsuit with SCO, which has based its $5 billion suit against Big Blue on copyright and contract issues surrounding SCO's intellectual-property claims to Linux. While SCO, which has threatened and sued user...

The creators and distributors of the Gnome open-source desktop software project are investigating a server breach that reportedly did not affect released Gnome sources and the project's source-code repository, but nonetheless delayed the latest update scheduled to come out this week. The sysadmin te...

Two weeks ago, I wrote a column on LinuxInsider to think out loud about the fundamental differences between Microsoft's operating systems and Unix variants like Linux, Darwin, BSD and Solaris. That drew the usual kinds of responses: Some people said nice things, others critiqued my work, and a lot o...