Articles by Jack M. Germain

Coverity cut its startup teeth seven years agotrying to figure out how to commercialize static analysis and softwarecode integrity. The company, whose software developer tools are usedby some of the biggest firms in the industry, released in NovemberCoverity 5, a completely reengineered software analysis solution Many companies are still looking fo...

MIPS Technologies announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas on Tuesday its plan to develop a new line of set-top boxes with Android inside ...

Tremont Electric may very well be travelingalong the same path once crossed by the Little Engine That Could. Thetwo-year-old startup is headed where several other power generationcompanies want to go but have yet to get off the research anddevelopment tracks If the inventor and developer of the nPower PEG (Personal EnergyGenerator), Aaron LeMieux, ...

Using the latest version of the Opera Web Browser (version 10.10) is like meeting up with an oldfriend and finding out he or she now has issues with the relationship Opera 10.10 has several impressive new features, but a few glitchesreally limit the usefulness of this version. In fact, the only way forme to continue using Opera was to reinstall an ...

Data mining is becoming a crowded field filled with software providers using similar strategies. Their basic goal is always the same. The analytics platforms are designed to slice and dice data to make sales trends and buying opportunities more evident The firms that can deliver this product more accurately and more rapidly grow their reputations a...

Mark Shuttleworth, founder and CEO of Ubuntu commercial sponsor Canonical, announced on Thursday that he is stepping aside to develop cloud products and begin new partnerships. He named Chief Operating Officer Jane Silber to take his place as CEO of Canonical ...

Google finally released a beta version of its Chrome Web browser forLinux on Dec. 8, slightly more than one year after releasing itsChrome browser for Microsoft Windows. The wait was worth it,especially given the more than 300 extensions already available tocustomize the new browser Because Linux distributions are numerous, Google ported the Chrome...

Lunascape, a newcomer to the growing field of Web browsers, released its official/stable version of Lunascape 6 Orion on Friday, a little more than one month after introducing the Alpha version Orion is an innovative browser that could easily win over users from popular browsers Firefox and Opera. Orion's features can change the competing browser l...

The Boxee video-on-demand software maker aimsto change the way consumers get free movie and TV entertainment from the Internet with its first hardware venture, called "Boxee Box." The open source software company debuted its new hardware device at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Monday. The new device, essentially a TV set-top...

Sun Microsystems this week released VirtualBox 3.1, including several key enterprise features aimed at maintaining minimal downtime on virtualservers ...

Canonical's Ubuntu 9.10,otherwise known as "Karmic Koala," could be for the Linux communitywhat the recently released Windows 7 OS from Microsoft is to theWindows world. Of course, this latest release that replaced Ubuntu9.04 did not have as much to do in bettering its predecessor as didWindows 7 had in overcoming Vista Still, no operating system ...

Does the mobile phone world really need yet another platform, opensource or otherwise? South Korean-based electronics firm Samsung answered yesto that question on Tuesday when it announced thelaunch of Bada Bada, the Korean word for "ocean," is a new open platform that Samsunghopes will become a top phone OS in the future. Samsungenvisions its new ...

In a move that resembles a major food vendor giving away its prizerecipe -- minus the secret sauce -- to all of its customers and competitors, Yahoo onMonday donated the source code for its Traffic Server software to theApache Software Foundation through the Apache Incubator Project Yahoo hopes to grow a community of productusers who return to use ...

In the field of computer technology, some topics are so frequently and fiercely disputed that they almost resemble religious feuds -- Mac vs. PC, for instance, or open source vs. proprietary software Other topics, though, don't see nearly the same level of high-profile debate. Take the invulnerability of AES (the Advanced Encryption Standard) encry...

Windows 7 is on my wish list. I wish Microsoft didn't raise theequipment ante required to run its new operating system. I wishMicrosoft built in an easy upgrade path from Windows XP. I wishMicrosoft provided Windows 7 with some kind of Wow Factor that gave me acompelling reason to change my computing strategy....

Unix software firm SCO Groupannounced a corporate restructuring plan Monday to sever ties withCEO Darl McBride and reduced the company's workforce. The restructuring wasdesigned by the firm's Chapter 11 bankruptcy trustee, Edward Cahn These moves and other corporate adjustments will help the companycontinue its longstanding court battle against IBM...

Cross-site scripting (XSS)/SQL injection attacks have been blamed for numerous data breaches, perhaps most notably the nightmare of the Heartland Payment Systems data breach. This type of attack has been around for at least a decade However, the growing popularity of Web 2.0 applications and the tendency for programmers to continue with old, insecu...

Today's volatile economy is pushing more companies to consider themerits of a virtual workplace for some or all of their employees.Often, however, the idea fails to goanywhere because neither managers nor their workers are sure how toget started Also, attitudes among some old-school managers pose hurdles that blockworkers from pursuing virtual work...

It is rather challenging to hit a moving target when it keeps changingdirections. That's a bit like how Cameron Brain, CEO of Open BoxTechnologies, felt when he set his sights ona particular business market while still in college In 2006, Brain and a group of classmates at Rensselaer PolytechnicInstitute in Troy, N.Y., started to dabble in online s...

Openbravo announced on Tuesday its next-generation enterprise resourceplanning (ERP) product, called "QuickStart," an alternative to thecompany's generally more labor-intensive community package QuickStart represents a change in strategy for Openbravo. Unlike the ERP product that bears the company's name, QuickStart is not open source. It is propri...