eWEEK EDITORS

Problem Long considered a rogue application, company executives are finding that instant messaging is a potential liability. Since its May 1997 debut as a free feature on AOL, instant messaging has caught on like wildfire. And if it began as a killer app for chatty teens, professionals were soon downloading it, too, not only for […]

Andy Oram, an editor at OReilly & Associates, was sitting at a lunch table at the recent MySQL user conference. On one side sat a DBA whos planning to migrate from Oracle to MySQL—an interesting trend that turns on its head a once common assumption: namely, that you start with MySQL and move up to […]

The company expects to expand production capacity by six times and market share by 2.5 times in fiscal 2005 from the level of fiscal 2003, said Masahiro Yamamura, executive general manager of Renesas Memory Business Group. “After the merger [of Hitachi and Mitsubishis units to form Renesas], R&D resources for memories were expanded and reinforced,” […]

Compared with peer companies, the S&P thinks Oracle is trading at a discount based on price-earnings and P/E-to-growth metrics, while its profitability is well above those peer companies. The depressed price is being caused by the business disruption around Oracles hostile bid for PeopleSoft, according to the S&P. Read the full story at BusinessWeek. /zimages/4/28571.gifCheck […]

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison sold over $252 million worth of Oracle stock in the past few weeks as part of an automatic-sales plan. Ellison adopted the plan earlier this year to sell off part of his substantial holdings. For the full story, go to Mercury News. /zimages/4/28571.gifCheck out eWEEK.coms Database Center at http://database.eweek.com for the […]

The creator of the Linux operating system, Linus Torvalds, has weighed in on the issue of backporting features from newer Linux kernels into older ones, calling the practice a good thing for the most part. Torvalds comments, in an e-mail interview with internetnews.com, came after SUSES CTO, Juergen Geck, told an audience at the Real […]

When Microsoft and Sun announced their rapprochement this month, one tangible benefit to both was the resulting settlement of patent disputes. Like Cold War superpowers agreeing to reduce nuclear stockpiles, Sun and Microsoft have stepped back from their own form of mutual assured destruction. At their level, patent fights can have no winners—but every IT […]

Rob Ashe, a 20-year veteran of Cognos Inc., was recently named the companys president and CEO, succeeding Ron Zambonini, who has been named chairman. In an interview following the promotion announcement with Executive Editor Stan Gibson and Senior Writer Dennis Callaghan, Ashe discussed his plans to turn the companys focus to corporate performance management, building […]

While Linux is by no means complete, the broad strokes have been filled in: the operating system, the server software, the database. But at the same time, the stereotype of the lonely programmer working in the wee hours is seriously outdated. The second generation of open source projects responds to specific business demands, and the […]

In releasing YaST (Yet Another Setup Tool) to open source, Novell has thrown down the welcome mat to management solutions aimed at homes and small businesses as well as enterprises, according to Novell officials. Although YaST drew lots of attention among developers at BrainShare, the Linux installation and administration tool had been released to the […]

The number of spammed stock tips has risen more than 300 percent between December and March, according to ClearSwift Limited. “The spammers are looking at a new angle to cash in. And its financial services,” said Alyn Hockey, director of research at the UK-based ClearSwift. The UKs Financial Services Authority has been issuing warnings about […]

A survey of office workers in England found that 71 percent were willing to disclose their password for a chocolate bar, according to organizers of the conference Infosecurity Europe 2004. The survey also found 53 percent of users said they would not give their password to a telephone caller claiming to be calling from their […]