eWEEK EDITORS

With both of its parents struggling to shake off their staggering debt loads, the joint telecom venture called Concert is looking more and more like an unwanted child. The international enterprise, created by AT&T and British Telecommunications while in an expansionist mood, now seems a liability in unforgiving financial markets. Like AT&T, BT is in […]

The federal communications commission is once again at the center of a passionate spectrum debate, this time over the 12.2-gigahertz to 12.7-GHz band that direct broadcast satellite providers use to deliver television and broadband service. But the spectrum skirmish might just be cover in a higher-stakes battle for customers, as upstarts make their move into […]

Even as parts of the dot-com era reach extinction, some really weird practices are still being stirred up in startup land. Consider the following plea for help that was e-mailed to one of our sources (and probably to most of the known world). It asked that the contents of an e-mail message be forwarded with […]

1. How well does the open source code youre considering match up with your existing environment? If you are considering Linux, do you run IBMs AIX or Sun Microsystems Solaris Both have been geared to run Linux applications. If you need speed of networking and special security features, FreeBSD or a commercial version from Berkeley […]

Customer: American Honda, Torrance, Calif. (www.honda.com) Size: 1,300 dealerships Business: Automobiles Business Need: Bottom-up MRP and inventory control Solutions Provider: Syncata Hardware: Compaq server, IBM RS/6000 Software: Microsoft Visual Basic, Sybase 11, Unix/C Deal Maker: Existing relationship Results: Faster inventory turns, more customized cars

Ive said it before, and Ill undoubtedly say it again: The foundation of strong application and operating-system security is testing, testing and more testing. Most software security problems arise from design and coding errors, rather than a lack of some security-specific feature. The only way to catch those errors is to put the software in […]

Ian Clarkes new company, Uprizer, would love to sign up major entertainment companies as clients. So it might seem a bit odd that Clarkes personal home page recently featured this call to arms: “The Music Industry has been raping our wallets for too long . . . Boycott CDs, tapes, whatever form of music you […]

How can Ciena feel good about its place in the network equipment world when its stock has plunged about 60 percent from a 52-week high of $151 per share? Because its chief competitors have fallen much farther: Sycamore Networks, 95 percent; Lucent Technologies, 85 percent; Nortel Networks, 82 percent; Cisco Systems, 79 percent; and Juniper […]

In what its characterizing as a first move toward offering customers the ability to license software as a service, Microsoft Corp. last week added a subscription licensing capability to its stable of volume licensing options. The subscription program for EA (Enterprise Agreement) volume licensees takes effect Oct. 1. Under the program, the Redmond, Wash., company […]

Free at Last Novell plans to give its eDirectory technology away for free. CEO Eric Schmidt said developers, hardware makers and software companies could make use of eDirectory. Novell, which is merging with Cambridge Technology Partners, hopes to make eDirectory a standard in the face of competition from Microsofts Active Directory. Brit Split British Telecommunications […]

The open source success stories, such as Apache and Linux, are well-known, but the tale doesnt necessarily end there. Open source development is an ongoing process, and todays unknown project and anonymous developers are tomorrows cant-live-without-it piece of the infrastructure. Here are four projects that you may not have heard of. OpenNMSOpenNMS is a next-generation […]

At first glance, the work seems so noble. After late nights and long hours, bleary-eyed programmers take their valuable code and toss it onto the Internet as a gift to the world. The ultimate sacrifice? Not exactly. Upon closer examination, the motives often are less pristine and the vision cloudy. Although every contributor is drawn […]