Lisa Vaas

Ahhh, winter in Minnesota. On Thursday afternoon in St. Cloud it was 0 degrees with the windchill, and Michael Kress can assure you that throughout the Midwest people are very busily booking vacations to get the *&^% away from this misery. Kress is director of enterprise technology services at MLT Vacations Inc., a provider of […]

BOSTON—You walk the show floor with your eyes around nipple level, and everywhere you espy an unbroken line of blue exhibitor badges, because this is LinuxWorld, and everyone is here to sell, sell, sell. Ironic, no? From scruffy to scaling the stack, all in a few (short?) years. The big software and hardware vendors were […]

Mike Stonebraker is a database superstar. Not only is the former UC/Berkeley computer science professor the father of the popular relational databases Ingres and Postgres, he was also the founder of Illustra Information Technologies Inc., acquired by Informix, which in turn was acquired by IBM. The next project for this database pioneer takes shape in […]

BOSTON—Novell Inc. CEO Jack Messman delivered a Linux valentine to CIOs at the opening keynote at LinuxWorld here on Tuesday, taking pains to emphasize that Linux is business-ready in terms of security, certification, indemnification, and being able to run in entire hardware and software stacks, including on the desktop. “A great deal of progress has […]

Emic Networks has added JSP and J2EE application server support to its Application Clustering platform, a clustering technology that has supported the LAMP stack and now supports the LAMJ stack, the company will announce at LinuxWorld in Boston on Tuesday. The San Francisco company has also split its LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Python/PERL) or LAMJ […]

MySQL AB, maker of the worlds most popular open-source database, is offering platinum-level, round-the-clock support—formerly available only for large-scale deployments—for sites of any size, be they one or 1,000 servers. The Uppsala, Sweden, company plans to announce the new offering at LinuxWorld in Boston on Tuesday. The multitiered support offering, part of a bundling called […]

Several flaws have been discovered in IBMs DB2 Universal Database that can be exploited to cause DoS attacks, to reveal sensitive information, to read and manipulate file content, or to compromise vulnerable systems. An advisory posted Thursday on the bug-reporting site Secunia rates the flaws as moderately critical, with IBM having already issued a FixPak […]

Mondays launch of the Globus Consortium by HP, Intel, IBM and Sun Microsystems represented the second body devoted to the commercialization of grid to come into being in the past year, after the Enterprise Grid Alliance launched in April. Why do we need yet another grid outfit? Besides the EGA, we already have the Globus […]

BOSTON—”Talk about conflict of interest,” said a GlobusWorld attendee, arching his eyebrows at laughing colleagues as he bent over his breakfast. In a nutshell, that comment captures the growing pains of grid. While the conference—which is devoted to open-source grid computing and the open-source Globus Toolkit—is still populated largely by scientific and academic grid gurus, […]

BOSTON—As the April launch of Globus Toolkit 4.0 fast approaches, GlobusWorld opened here on Tuesday with the promise of bringing open-source, standards-based grid computing to a new level of usability, reliability and scalability and of bridging the gap between scientific and commercial grid. “Were really open for business,” said Ian Foster, in his opening keynote. […]

Just in time to counter security taints from last weeks MySpooler worm, which spread via weak MySQL passwords on Windows installations, MySQL on Friday got a clean bill of health from code analysis firm Coverity Inc. The five Stanford University researchers at Coverity, who analyzed the security of the Linux kernel over a period of […]

In the wake of the MySpooler worm that spread via weak MySQL passwords on Windows installations last week, database users criticized the open-source database for lax security lockdown on installation, saying that it should be held to the same high standards as traditional security whipping-boy Microsoft Corp. “Even … Windows forces you to create an […]