Articles by Jay Lyman

Novell is set to boost Linux training for universities with a week-long "boot camp" for Linux educators and a series of three Suse Linux Enterprise textbooks -- created with Thomson Course Technology -- that cover Linux use, development and advanced administration The new Linux courseware, to be incorporated into curricula at hundreds of colleges a...

Online video distributorGuba.com has sealed a deal that will let it distribute downloadable versions of films fromSony Pictures on its Web site More than 100 feature-length movies, including "Memoirs of a Geisha," "Hitch" and "Underworld: Evolution," will be available on Guba, the companies said. Guba has attracted an audience of nearly a million u...

Freescale Semiconductor staked out an industry first with the commercial availability of its speedy, non-volatile Magnetoresistive Random Access Memory (MRAM) technology, which the Austin, Texas, company is already producing in volume The MRAM solution joins the speed of static random access memory (SRAM) and the stability of flash memory, and coul...

Fixed and wireless phone giant Verizon this week filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) details of a possible plan to spin off its U.S. print and online yellow pages business The company said it had not yet made a final decision on the directories spinoff, but signaled it would divest itself from directory publishing one way or ano...

Corporate data centers are running ever more efficiently, and even delivering on the promise of self-monitoring and automation, but there is always the chance that something, somewhere, somehow might go terribly wrong To confront the risk, organizations need solid assessment strategies, and ways to identify where staff, skills, infrastructure or sa...

Software development toolmaker Trolltech, which provides its Qt and Qtopia development software for embedded, mobile and Linux systems developers, completed its initial public offering (IPO) and earned a listing on Norway's Oslo Stock Exchange this week. Its ticker symbol is TROLL The firm's dual licensing approach allows users of its software to d...

Nintendo is reportedly planning to best its price advantage over Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's Playstation3 (PS3) with a time advantage as well, aiming to beat Sony to the market by more than a month with the Nintendo Wii Nintendo is sticking to game play, rather than pushing processor and graphics performance, with its next-generation console an...

Hewlett-Packard, like other leading server vendors IBM and Dell, sees a server future that is thin, cool and efficient as the blade server market continues to grow at a steady pace Thanks to cost-savings, scalability and manageability, thin blade servers are appealing not only to typical, larger high-performance computing (HPC) customers but to sma...

A stolen Veterans Affairs employee's laptop containing personal information on 26 million U.S. veterans was recovered this week Investigators with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said the sensitive data on the laptop's hard drive had not been accessed, according to a "preliminary review of the equipment by computer forensic teams."

Linux leader Red Hat has been named in a patent infringement lawsuit in Texas in connection with its recently acquired JBoss Hibernate 3.0 technology In its complaint, which is provided online by the blogPatently-O, Delaware-basedFireStar Software claims the now Red Hat-owned object/relational persistence and query service product infringes on a pa...

Voice over Internet Protocol vendor Vonage announced Thursday that it will begin selling a portable VoIP phone that plugs into any PC for voice communications The new V-Phone, US$39.99 with a $9 activation fee and $15 to $35 service plan for varying numbers of minutes, works wherever users have USB access to a notebook or desktop PC linked via a br...

TheEclipse Foundation this week unveiled a grouped,open source software release dubbed "Callisto" that it considers a shining example of open source software development for theenterprise The foundation's biggest feat with respect to the release -- a collection of 7 million lines of code contributed by 260 developers from 15 vendors around the glob...

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) this week released guidelines for Web developers to make Internet browsing more mobile-friendly The powerful industry and standards group said the "important milestone," its Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0, would advance its objective of making mobile browsing as easy as desktop browsing by giving developers critic...

With a new generation of video game consoles, increasing online game play and distribution, cross-platform development and play, in-game advertising and more, there are earth-shaking changes going on in the video game industry Competition among game publishers is more heated than ever, which means a smart strategy, future-focused perspective and st...

Intel rolled out its new server processors this week with hopes of stemming market gains by rivalAdvanced Micro Devices' popularOpteron server chips Intel's new dual-core Xeon 5100s, previously codenamed "Woodcrest," are the first Core microprocessors to hit the market. They represent a big step forward in replacing Intel's Netburst technology, whi...

Like numerous other large Internet, technology and media players, Google is getting more into video, now testing a free video offering supported by advertising that accompanies sports, animated, amateur and other videos Google said video normally selling from between 99 US cents and $15 is now available for free, thanks to banner ads across the top...

It has worked for geeks, but can the popularDigg technology news site -- an enormous online water cooler that attracts masses of readers who determine the top and most-viewed article rankings -- surface with success in mainstream news? Fans of Digg, which has grown to rival other Internet news giants such as Google and Slashdot, say that bringing a...

Longtime Linux distribution vendorXandros is not touting the latest Linux kernel functionality,KDE 3.42 user interface, or other cutting edgeopen source gems of the new version of its desktop operating system Instead, Xandros has dubbed version 4.0 of its OS the "Digital Lifestyle Linux Desktop," and touts wireless capabilities, music manager with ...

Software and search heavyweightsAdobe andGoogle joined forces this week, announcing a multi-year distribution deal that pairs the Google Toolbar with Adobe's downloadable Macromedia Shockwave Player The Adobe deal is widely viewed as yet another weapon in Google's arsenal against its entrenched rivalMicrosoft. Indeed, the deal means that Internet E...

Microsoft made a major move into robotics this week as the software giant previewed its Windows-based Robotics Studio robot software development platform Along with a list of robotics partners including Lego, White Box Robotics, and universities around the globe, Microsoft said its robotics development tools would address fragmentation of different...