Articles by Jack M. Germain

Power.Org will sponsor the first Power Architecture Developer Conference in the Austin Convention Center September 24-25 The vendor-neutral convention will gather Power.org's corporate members with developers, hardware andsoftware solution providers, academics and designers to show how open collaboration can break downbarriers to innovation. The tw...

Duff Anderson, vice president of research, development and knowledge delivery at iPerceptions, is apioneer in the attitudinal Web analytics field, endeavoring since 1996 to forge standards for onlineresearch methodologies and analysis. iPerceptions, with offices in New York, Montreal and Toronto,provides business intelligence strategies for Internet marketing...

Terra Soft Solutions, the developer of Yellow Dog Linux and the HPC Consortium, will hold Hack-a-Thon II in Austin, Texas, Sept. 22-25, two days prior to the start of its four-day Power Architecture Developer Conference Hack-a-Thon participants will work on a six-node Sony PlayStation 3 cluster to test their parallel and distributed coding skills....

Yahoo, Google, and MSN hold a huge lead in search engine technology over open-source alternatives. These search giants are competing in a battle among themselves to be a computer user's default search site for search Where can a computer user go to find an adequate open-source alternative to mainstream engines? Choices appear to be limited. A few e...

The laptop computer has been gaining on traditional desktop PCs for some time. Replacing one's desktop completely with a portable computer that has enough power to handle any common task is now a feasible option for consumers, and more are heading that direction. Laptops are siphoning off sales of desktops As more and more customers look to smaller...

Open source security products do not generally carry the same following as their business suite andoperating system brethren. However, the same reasons for supporting open source products in general also apply to open source security applications Open source security applications are free, or at least much less costly than their proprietary counter...

WiFi has became pervasive. Not just laptops, but an arsenal of palmed-sized devices including smartphones, PDAs (personal digital assistant) and mobile media players, now connect to the Internet using Wireless Fidelity technology However, many users are clueless about security and connect to password-protected accounts and financial Web sites think...

Open source applications have come into their own. For some time, open source programmers held much the same reputation as shareware authors. They were little more than experimenters and programming geeks who chose the alternate code-writing route because they could not or did not want to compete in the real software industry of commercial programming...

The face of the Internet is rapidly changing. For instance, Web maps are no longer about finding yourhouse online. A few years ago, map-making power remained in the hands of specialists. Today, map-making power is within everyone's grasp In the past two years, Web giants like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have created tools that let anyone with acces...

E-mail and other forms of electronic communications have become pervasive andessential to business growth and operational productivity. This new dependency onmessaging has created a whole new spectrum of major risks, vulnerabilities andrequirements for companies of all sizes In Part 1 of this two-part interview, Postini's President and CEO Quentin ...

Nokia Siemens Networks has joined the Linux Foundation and will become active in efforts to developCarrier Grade Linux (CGL) 5.0 standards Nokia Siemens Networks will work with the Linux Foundation specifically on Linux-based technologies for use in user plane and control plane network elements, as well as embedded applications. This is expected to...

E-mail and other forms of electronic communications have become pervasive andessential to business growth and operational productivity. Today, with more than 170billion e-mails and 580 billion IMs exchanged daily, companies have seen a 334percent annual increase in bandwidth, processing and storage requirements in thelast year This new dependency o...

WiFi is not just for laptops anymore. All sorts of devices now connect to the Internet via WirelessFidelity technology. Smartphones -- think Apple's iPhone, among others -- mobile media players and even gaming machines often come with WiFi features to enhance usability At the same time, more and more hotspots are popping up in hotels, resorts, airp...

The continuing rise in popularity of Linux applications has become a boon to job opportunities for software programmers. However, the working culture of the open source industry is different from that of proprietary software developers Code writers looking for a job as Linux developers need a unique set of job skills and work ethics often not deman...

A Congressional hearing on Tuesday investigating inadvertent file sharing over peer-to-peer (P2P) networks unexpectedly put a spotlight on LimeWire Chairman Mark Gorton over the government and personal information that can be acquired over P2P networks without users' knowledge. Gorton's company makes the peer-to-peer software LimeWire. He is also CEO of the parent company, Lime Group...

Five years ago, the only engineering or computer science majors setting their sights on a career in writing software code for an open source company were the most hardcore of computer nerds. That was something done only by the true computer geeks, and it usually required an independent source of income. Experienced programmers knew the gravy train existed at proprietary companies, most of which avoided experimental operating systems that nobody in the business world would ever use...

Intel announced Tuesday the release of Threading Building Blocks 2.0 as both an open source and commercial product. The company also launched a Web site that establishes an open source project around this product Threading Building Blocks (TBB) is a C++ runtime library that abstracts the low-level threading details necessary for optimal multi-core...

Other than perhaps the medical and legal industries, no field relies on jargon more than computer technology. Take, for instance, the use of words borrowed from other lexicons -- terms such as "virus, "Trojan," "intrusion prevention system," "spyware" and "attack vector." You might hear these terms spoken by physicians, Greek history professors, go...

An offer made earlier this month to pay whistle blowers US$1 million for reporting companies using unlicensed software has met little or no public outcry, unlike lawsuits initiated by the music industry against illegal music downloaders The Business Software Alliance (BSA), a global organization representing leading software manufacturers, is inten...

London-based Openads, the developer of a free, open source adserver used by more than 20,000 publishers in 140 countries, announced on July 5 the appointment of James Bilefield as CEO Bilefield brings more than 15 years of entrepreneurial, management and media experience to Openads from his work at two top Internet companies, Skype and Yahoo. At Op...