Articles by Jay Lyman

New research by a pair of Harvard University academics suggests that Linux will never be able to displace Windows based on the simple economics of Microsoft's head start and its continuing ecosystem advantages In a paper titled, "Dynamic Mixed Duopoly: A Model Motivated by Linux vs. Windows," Harvard Business School researchers Ramon Casadesus-Mas...

Samsung on Monday unveiled a prototype for what could one day become a less expensive substitute for flash memory and at the same time touted a healthy flash memory market with high demand and prices to match The South Korea firm's new technology -- phase-change random access memory (PRAM) -- could eventually displace existing NOR flash technology ...

Intel this week announced the availability of its new hardware and software technology known as vPro, which the chip giant said can cut energy use and costs for enterprise IT shops while giving them more advanced remote management and security control Claiming vPro can deliver business IT organizations cost savings of as much as 40 percent, Intel s...

Leading Linux vendor Red Hat is developing a new software vulnerability database with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). The database will give vendors of both open source and proprietary software a place to post official statements and security related information pertaining to their own projects and products At Red Hat's ...

IBM is building a supercomputer capable of petaflop performance -- 1,000 trillion, or a quadrillion, calculations per second -- for the U.S. Department of Energy using a combination of more than 30,000 Cell Broadband Engine (Cell BE) and AMD Opteron processors The new supercomputer, dubbed "Roadrunner," will be built for the National Nuclear Securi...

Touting support for both Intel and AMD virtualization technology, Microsoft released a second beta of its Virtual Server 2005 Release 2 Service Pack 1 (R2 SP1) this week The capabilities of the free Virtual Server 2005 update -- including Active Directory integration, improved backup and recovery and offline management tools -- will eventually be i...

Samsung said it plans to demonstrate wireless connectivity that is 50 times faster than current WiMax technology at its fourth annual 4G summit in South Korea this week The firm claims that it has achieved mobile data speed of 100 megabits per second and fixed-point speed of 1 gigabit per second with its latest technology....

Sun Microsystems last week open sourced another chunk of Java development code, but some are criticizing the company for not declaring all of Java open source at once and under the same open source license Sun released source code for Java Mobile Edition development tools under the Common Development and Distribution License (CDDL). The firm claims...

An industry consortium that includes IBM, Chartered Semiconductor, Infineon and Samsung said this week they plan to make available the first silicon-functional circuits and design kits for 45-nanometer low-power process chip technology The 45nm manufacturing process shrinks the gap between transistors on each chip further from 65nm and allows manuf...

Intel unveiled its newest chips this week in announcing its new "Tulsa" server processors, the latest dual-core, 64-bit Xeon chips from the company The firm also announced that its "Merom" mobile processors are now shipping to notebook manufacturers including Dell for its recently acquired Alienware unit, as well as Gateway and Toshiba....

One week after it issued a faulty update to its popular Linux distribution, the Ubuntu project is still the subject of scorn among users of its open source software The Ubuntu update inadvertently broke users' interface functionality, forcing them into command line mode....

Microsoft has signed up Toshiba to provide the hardware for its pending iPod challenger, known as Zune In a certification submission to the Federal Communications Commission, Toshiba, maker of the industry-praised GigaBeat player, indicated the new Zune device would pack 30 gigabytes of music, photos and more, and would be capable of streaming to a...

The IT industry phrase "a single throat to choke" stems from the idea that it's beneficial to have a single, trusted provider ofsoftware support than several sharing that all-important responsibility. However, recent research indicates only a minority of organizations are looking to open source stack providers to serve in that role Instead, clients...

PC peripheral player Logitech has motorized the computer mouse scroll wheel with two new models that ease scanning and scrolling through large computer documents, spreadsheets, pictures, lists and other data The Fremont, Calif.-based company said its new mice -- the MX Revolution for desktop PCs and the VX Revolution for notebooks -- would provide ...

After a somewhat half-hearted effort to compete with Apple and the other digital music player makers, Dell signaled Wednesday that it will halt production of its DJ Ditty MP3 player The move comes as Apple continues to enjoy dominance in the digital audio player space -- it owns as much as 80 percent of the market. Dell's decision highlights the im...

Former eMachines owner Lap Shun Hui has offered to buy the retail operations of PC maker Gateway, to whom he sold his firm in 2004, for US$450 million Gateway saw its stock price rise more than 22 percent Wednesday following news of the offer and said its board of directors, as well as financial and legal advisers, were reviewing Hui's unsolicited ...

With multiple delays and dropped components for its next-generationVistaoperating system,Microsoft has stirred up plenty of confusion and criticism amongsoftware developers Now other software makers, such as Qt cross-platform development framework provider Trolltech, are trying to take advantage of what they describe as "developer alienation" due t...

Cisco sealed a deal this week to buy another consumer-oriented technology company, this time acquiring video-on-demand player Arroyo Video Solutions for US$92 million The Arroyo buy is representative of the dominant networking gear maker's overall effort to connect to homes the way it has to businesses, Yankee Group Senior Analyst Zeus Kerravala to...

Palm is aiming to make its next Treo handheld available in time for the upcoming holiday shopping season. It will unveil the new Treo based on the Windows Mobile operating system by year's end, the firm has vowed The company will first release the device for Vodafone customers in the U.K., Germany, Spain, Italy and the Netherlands. Earlier this sum...

Sony will continue to rule the video game kingdom through 2011 with its Playstation 3 console, research firm Yankee Group forecast this week. However, it will be sharing more of the market with Microsoft and Nintendo as growth slows for unit shipments among consoles overall With 44 percent of the cumulative, third-generation console sales in North ...