Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

You can never be thin enough, have enough money or a fast-enough wireless connection. That’s why everyone wants 801.11n, vendors are still locked in a standards war, and no one should spend any serious money on an 802.11n deployment. That’s why I’m not sure why Duke University plans on deploying more than 2,500 Cisco 802.11n […]

If I had a $100 million lying around, I really think I could find a better investment for my money than buying SCO. I could invest in, say, high-quality stocks, bonds, gold, New Orleans real estate, collectable Pez containers or, just the other day, I got this interesting investment opportunity from someone whose wealthy husband […]

There are reorganizations, and then there are Reorganizations. Microsoft just had one of the latter kinds. While I don’t follow Microsoft as closely as I do Linux and its companies, I do keep an eye on the Evil Empire and, frankly, and this was quite a shake-up. Some of these changes didn’t come as any […]

Whatever else you can say about new Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, you can’t say he thinks small. At the JBoss World 2008 tradeshow Feb. 13 in Orlando, Fla., Whitehurst said Red Hat plans not only for JBoss Enterprise Middleware to take 50 percent of the enterprise middleware market by 2015, but for JBoss’ revenue […]

If I had a billion dollars, I’d be rich (with my apologies to Barenaked Ladies). If I were trying to buy Yahoo, I wouldn’t even be in the running. Microsoft offered $44.6 billion, or $31 a share, a 62 percent premium on Yahoo’s share price at the time, for Yahoo. And what did the Yahoo […]

I find it hard to believe that it was 10 years ago that Eric Raymond and Bruce Perens deliberately coined the phrase “open source.” To me, it seemed like only yesterday that Eric and I, who’ve known each other for-cough-30 years-cough-had talked about the need for a term for “free software” that didn’t carry all […]

When Firefox 2..0.0.12 came out on Feb. 7, it brought with it fixes for three critical security holes and seven others that were not quite so serious. According to the security advisories, many of these problems were also fixed in the Thunderbird 2.0.0.12 e-mail client. Unfortunately, there is no Thunderbird 2..0.0.12. The Mozilla Foundation‘s press […]

Get over it. We are never going to see OS/2 open-sourced. If you want to run OS/2 today, the closest you’re going to get is Serenity System’s eComStation 2.0 RC4. But, it just might be possible for Linux desktop users to get one of OS/2’s best features: SOM (System Object Model). IBM, I’m told by […]

Blog-It’s not like anyone has asked for Windows XP to run on the Linux-powered One Laptop Per Child XO laptop, but Microsoft is getting ready to deliver it to us anyway.In an eWEEK news story by Peter Galli, Orlando Ayala, senior vice president of Microsoft’s Unlimited Potential Group, said Microsoft is conducting field trials to […]

Just how stupid does Microsoft think we are? Well, I guess we must be pretty stupid, because Microsoft comes right out and tells us that it’s release to manufacturing Vista SP1 on Feb. 4 , except that if you read further down in the announcement letter, Microsoft says it’s not really releasing it for another […]

Microsoft’s plan is to start retiring Windows XP on June 30. Some users, however, want to keep XP around for years to come. According to Popular Science, there’s a grassroot effort afoot to force Microsoft to keep selling XP to customers in shrink-wrapped packages and to OEMs. What’s driving this movement? Two things: First, it’s […]

Linspire, the company behind the commercial Linspire and the Freespire community desktop Linux, announced Jan. 31 that it was offering a new custom desktop Linux Build Service to its partners. The service is designed to make it easier for resellers and white box vendors to quickly deliver affordable custom desktop Linux configurations to customers. Linspire […]