Articles by Jay Lyman

IBM and Cisco have announced an initiative to simplify data storage with a network-hosted storage virtualization system. The two companies, which have collaborated extensively on storage area network (SAN) technology in the past, said IBM's TotalStorage SAN software tailored for Cisco's MDS 9500 directors and MDS 9216 switches will help cut the co...

Red Hat and SuSE today continued their Linux-fueled assaults on the enterprise market and proprietary vendor Microsoft with new releases that seek to broaden the open-source operating system's use in the data-center and replace Microsoft e-mail software and servers While Red Hat and SuSE are fierce competitors in the Linux distribution arena, both ...

Big Blue is again aiming at smaller targets with the announcement of its DB2 Content Manager Express, new content-management software intended to help small businesses store, manage and protect documents and other data IBM, which also announced DB2 Content Manager for Linux, said it has priced the Express version of its content-management software ...

Adding yet another piece to its portfolio of computer network security solutions, Cupertino, California-based security giant Symantec announced the purchase of SafeWeb for US$26 million in cash On the heels of NetScreen's $265 million acquisition of Neoteris earlier this month and F5's $25 million purchase of uRoam in July, Symantec's purchase mark...

Facing increased competition and negative perceptions -- yet still optimistic and ready to fight for its home turf on the desktop -- Microsoft made its new Office 2003 available to retail customers Microsoft said the new Office "system" -- consisting of six suites, 11 products, four servers, one service and "Solution Accelerators" -- will deliver p...

Japanese electronics leader NEC and mobile microprocessor mainstay ARM have announced a long-term collaboration initiative toward new multiprocessor-based cores for mobile devices and other multimedia applications NEC and Britain-based ARM said they will codevelop and comarket the next-generation multiprocessing core based on technology from both c...

The U.S. Department of Defense will begin testing Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), a technology that many have called the next-generation Internet and that the DOD has said is critical to national defense. The DOD is teaming with hardware and software vendors -- including Fujitsu, Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, HP, Sun and Nokia -- to test IPv6, which many believe will replace today's widespread IPv4 and provide the additional capacity and security required for more Internet-connected devices.

Moving the successful iTunes music download service from its own platform to the wide world of Windows, Apple this week entered a crowded marketplace that is still dominated by free peer-to-peer services Yet iTunes and other paid services, which differ only slightly in their rules for downloading, burning and transferring, take away file-traders' e...

Microsoft once again is discussing plans to overhaul its security just as the company has released five patches for seven newly discovered vulnerabilities in Windows desktop and server software Microsoft issued the patches for a range of Windows systems that could be compromised as a result of the vulnerabilities -- five of which were rated critica...

Fueled by continued demand for notebook computers as well as consumer and corporate spending, worldwide PC sales in the third quarter of 2003 grew nearly 16 percent from last year, about 5 percent above projections, research firm IDC said The IDC report, reinforced by similar Gartner findings of 14 percent growth compared with last year's third qua...

Recent high-end performance tests show AMD's 64-bit Athlon and dual Opteron processors beating Apple's G5 and Intel's Pentium 4, but analysts have downplayed the results, citing a lack of available 64-bit applications and the timing of the benchmarking results While Apple has claimed its Power Mac G5 is the world's fastest personal computer, the G5...

Furthering its unique technology that uses on-chip software to economize processor energy, Transmeta has introduced the Efficeon TM8000 family of chips, which the company hopes will broaden its markets The new Efficeon TM8000, announced at the Microprocessor Forum in San Jose, California, builds on the original energy-efficient Crusoe processor and...

A new file storage system designed to be backward compatible with today's Windows machines but also to move data-storage technology forward has been a long time coming from Microsoft. According to recent reports, the new file system will arrive with Microsoft's next operating system, called Longhorn, which is slated for release at some point in 2005 or 2006...

Promising quality improvements and furthering the competition for media players and broadband subscribers, Microsoft's MSN is offering free streaming video in a beta version that will be available to all MSN subscribers in the United States this winter The move comes as Microsoft seeks to broaden its MSN and Windows Media 9 audience in the face of ...

In a bid to keep up with rivals Intel and IBM, Sun has revealed more of its "Throughput Computing" strategy by unveiling the new UltraSPARC IV processor, which uses multithreading to speed performance twofold compared with the UltraSPARC III Sun said the UltraSPARC IV will begin shipping in systems during the first half of next year. It is part of ...

Japanese electronics giant Sharp is now selling its 3D-viewable Actius RD3D notebook computer capable of delivering three-dimensional images on its 15-inch screen -- without special glasses or additional software The notebook, on sale for US$3,299, is the first 3D LCD laptop on the market. While the RD3D is shipping without a substantial amount of ...

By soaking up laser light and converting it to electricity to power its propeller, a model airplane maintained flight as a team of NASA researchers used the light to power the craft from the ground Officials at NASA's Marshall and Dryden flight centers, as well as the University of Alabama in Huntsville, report the flight is the first use of laser ...

In an effort to fuse the variety of different diagnostic mechanisms used in today's increasingly complex network infrastructures, IBM and Cisco have announced a partnership to develop open software and standards to "help the network help itself." As a show of commitment to open standards -- consistent with Big Blue's push for "autonomic computing,...

The Napster song-swapping service has undergone a transformation from hotbed for piracy to legitimate peer-to-peer service in a large pack of formidable competitors Napster 2.0, to be officially launched October 29th by Roxio, will provide legal dollar-per-song access to a catalogue of 500,000 titles. However, the new version of the once rebellious...

In an effort to send a clear message through the noise of constant software security warnings, the SysAdmin Audit Network Security (SANS) research group has released its list of the year's top 20 vulnerabilities. The SANS institute -- which divided vulnerabilities into two lists of 10 for Windows and 10 for Unix/Linux -- put Microsoft's IIS and SQ...