Stories by Robert McMillan

Sun researchers: Computers do bad math

On Feb. 25, 1991, during the first Gulf War, a Scud missile hit U.S. Army barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 28 U.S. soldiers. The barracks was defended by a Patriot missile defense system, which for some reason failed to track and intercept the incoming Scud. A year later, a U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) investigation into the Patriot's failure concluded that the battery's weapon control system suffered from a fatal flaw: It was bad at math.

IBM services bring grid to publisher

In a bid to extend the reach of grid computing outside of the academic and research fields that created it, IBM on Friday will announce that it has formalized five new grid services offerings within its IBM Global Services and IBM Consulting Services groups.

Interview: Red Hat founder sees irony in SCO lawsuit

Though the company he founded has been drawn into a legal dispute between The SCO Group and IBM, former Red Hat Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Bob Young has not had much to say about the SCO dispute. At least, that was the case until Wednesday, when Young published an open letter to SCO CEO Darl McBride criticizing him for his management of SCO and countering McBride's recent claims that the open source community is attacking intellectual property laws in Europe and the U.S.

Oracle patches SSL server bugs

Oracle has issued a security alert and software patches for a set of serious vulnerabilities in the security protocols used by some of its server products.

McBride letter continues SCO's Linux attack

Continuing its war of words against the Linux community, The SCO Group Inc. on Wednesday accused free software advocates of threatening the intellectual property protections provided by U.S. and European law.

Sun drops out of Eclipse negotiations

Discussions aimed at merging Sun Microsystems's NetBeans Java development framework with the IBM Corp.-backed Eclipse group have broken down, Sun said on Wednesday. The news ends months of speculation about whether Sun, the company that created Java, would join forces with IBM, one of Java's biggest supporters, and unify the two companies' efforts to create a standard open-source development environment for Java.

HP creates SMB storage line

HP is set to announce a new storage product line, today, that is aimed at small and medium-sized businesses. The StorageWorks Modular Smart Array (MSA) family will be made up of existing HP products, repackaged and re-branded to make them more appealing to smaller companies.

Researchers dispute Red Hat's Fedora trademark

There may be one hat too many in the open source world. Concerned that they will be forced to drop the name of their five year-old open source project, researchers at Cornell University and the University of Virginia (UVA) are readying a challenge to Red Hat's Fedora trademark, currently pending review by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

Cisco exec: SANs too expensive for SMBs

Networks that pool together storage resources may be common in the enterprise, but their cost so far has kept them from being deployed in more than 10 percent of small and medium-sized businesses, said a Cisco Systems executive speaking at the Computer Digital Expo conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.

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