Fahmida Y. Rashid

Some OpenOffice.org developers have created a new version of the OpenOffice.org application suite called LibreOffice that will be free of Oracle oversight, the newly formed Document Foundation announced Sept. 28. The Document Foundation will manage and oversee all the work for LibreOffice. Essentially a vanilla version of the latest OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice includes the Go-OOo updates […]

The beta release of Fedora 14 is available for download, Red Hat Release Engineer Dennis Gilmore said in an e-mail to the Fedora developer mailing list on Sept. 28. “Mark your calendars, and get ready to break out and have some fun: Fedora 14 will launch in early November,” Gilmore wrote. The beta is the […]

The Obama administration is working on a proposal that would make it easier for law enforcement and security officials to eavesdrop on online chatter, including e-mail, instant messaging and social networks, reported The New York Times on Sept. 27. The proposed legislation will likely come before Congress next year. The White House-sponsored bill would require […]

Malicious cyber-criminals aren’t just targeting Twitter users; LinkedIn members are in their crosshairs, as well. LinkedIn members were reportedly deluged with spam e-mail messages masquerading as connection requests from the career-oriented social networking site Sept. 27. Clicking on these requests sent users to a Website that displayed “PLEASE WAITING…4 SECONDS” before redirecting them to Google. […]

Companies are steadily marching toward virtualization, but they have to plan for more virtual and physical servers to see the benefits, said Gartner on Sept. 27. Despite the fact that more than 80 percent of enterprises have a virtualization program or project, only 25 percent of all server workloads will be in a virtual machine […]

Novell has released a new version of its popular SUSE Linux distribution optimized to run SAP applications, deepening its already close relationship with the enterprise software vendor. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP applications “simplifies both physical and virtual deployments of SAP solutions, including the SAP NetWeaver Enterprise Search application, SAP NetWeaver Business Warehouse Accelerator […]

The smart-grid market in the United States will grow 70 percent to $9.6 billion by 2015, according to a Sept. 24 forecast from GTM Research analyst David Leeds. The market research company currently pegs the market at $5.6 billion. The term smart grid refers to a next-generation electricity delivery network designed to monitor household and […]

Panasonic is targeting mobile workers with the Toughbook U1 Ultra, its latest feature-packed ultramobile PC designed for rough handling on the road and in the field. Weighing a mere 2.3 pounds, the Toughbook U1 Ultra comes with a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 processor, a roomy 64GB solid-state hard drive and 2GB of memory, and runs […]

Schools and libraries will soon be able to use E-Rate funds to purchase “dark fiber” lines, or unused fiber-optic connections, the Federal Communication Commission said on Sept. 22. As part of the FCC’s national broadband strategy, the funding will help these institutions move from basic Internet access to broadband. E-Rate, also known as the Schools […]

Thanks to a decade of shrinking IT budgets, the global IT debt will total approximately $500 billion in 2010, said a Gartner analyst on Sept. 23. The gap can potentially widen to $1 trillion by 2015, according to the market research firm. “This problem, hidden from sight, is getting bigger every year and more difficult […]

IBM opened three new analytics centers in Europe on Sept. 23, strengthening its offerings in the growing business analytics market. The announcement follows just days after IBM’s $1.7 billion acquisition of Marlborough, Mass.-based Netezza, a data warehousing and analytics appliance vendor. Last week, IBM also acquired OpenPages, another Massachusetts company with an analytics package designed […]

One day after the Great Twitter Meltdown, details of how pranksters gleefully redirected users and spewed out retweets full of gibberish continue to emerge. What’s surprising is that instead of criminals and attackers intent on taking over computers or stealing information, most of the perpetrators were just curious users trying to see what they could […]