Articles by Staff Writer

Cable giant Comcast has announced that, despite being rebuffed by Walt Disney CEO Michael Eisner, it will move ahead with a US$54 billion bid to acquire Disney. According to Comcast, its offer would be a tax-free transaction. In a public letter addressed to Eisner, Comcast CEO Brian Roberts wrote: "It is unfortunate that you are not willing to ...

High-speed Internet access provider Covad has announced it will roll out Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services to its business and consumer customers. The company noted that, following market trials planned for mid-2004, the rollout will start by the fourth quarter in most of its Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) In conjunction with the ...

Larry Kramer founded MarketWatch.com as part of a joint venture between Data Broadcasting Corporation (DBC) and CBS back in 1997. After years of turmoil, the company, which publishes business news and financial information and tools, recently achieved profitability in the fourth quarter of 2003 and for the year as a whole Also, in January 2004, Mar...

The world of data storage can be as confusing as Alice in Wonderland's Tulgy Wood to organizations seeking the best and most cost-efficient way to gather and save information. Acronyms abound -- SAN (Storage Area Network), NAS (Network Attached Storage), DAS (Direct Attached Storage), SAM (Storage Area Management) and HSM (Hierarchical Storage Management) to name a few -- and trying to sift through them and arrive at the right choice can be enough to make an IT manager yearn for the days of file-cabinet forests...

Oracle has raised its bid to acquire rival PeopleSoft to about US$9.4 billion, or $26 per share. Oracle's amended offer is a little less than 19 percent higher than PeopleSoft's Tuesday closing price of $21.89 per share In response to the news, PeopleSoft's share price rose to $23.18 by midmorning Wednesday, while Oracle's share price dropped sligh...

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) has announced its first Chinese member organization: Beijing Co-Create Open Source Software Company, Ltd., which plans to work on the Linux kernel and promote Chinese adoption of Linux on the desktop Beijing Co-Create is the second Far East organization to join OSDL this week. On Wednesday, NEC Soft, a divisi...

Not everyone watches the Super Bowl just for the football. Given that many of the previous 37 Super Bowls were duller than watching golf on TV, some people would argue that the advertising is as much, if not more, of a reason to watch This year, AOL has posted several classic Super Bowl ads on its Web site and has teamed with CBS in an interactive ...

Amazon.com, perhaps the premier e-commerce site, announced late Tuesday its first-ever full-year profit. According to the company's balance sheet, 2003 net income totaled US$35 million. In 2002, despite booking a small fourth-quarter profit, the company recorded a full-year net loss of $149 million "Our commitment to year-round free shipping and lo...

Virginia Tech, whose G5 Mac-based supercomputing cluster made headlines last fall as the third fastest supercomputer in the world, has announced it plans to migrate the cluster from Power Mac G5 desktop computers to Apple's recently released Xserve G5 1U server According to Virginia Tech, the team that assembled the original cluster of 1,100 Power ...

Jerry Ungerman, president of firewall leader Check Point Software Technologies, oversees the company's worldwide sales, marketing, business development, product management and technical services. In this role, he helps Check Point provide its customers and partners with integrated network security solutions The E-Commerce Times spoke with Ungerman ...

On Tuesday, The SCO Group accused Novell of libel, claiming Novell has interfered in bad faith with SCO's Unix copyrights. SCO's lawyers filed the lawsuit in state court in Utah, where both companies' headquarters are located, asking for "preliminary and permanent injunctive relief, as well as damages." "SCO takes this action today given Novell's r...

Check Point Software Technologies has unveiled its new InterSpect integrated security appliance. According to the company, InterSpect works to protect enterprise networks from attacks that originate internally. Gene Manyak, product marketing manager at Check Point, told the E-Commerce Times that the new appliance protects businesses from applicati...

Earlier this week, Microsoft posted a security patch for a flaw that affects control of VoIP (voice over IP) traffic in its Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2000. The company rated the flaw's severity as critical and urged users to patch it immediately According to the Microsoft Security Bulletin released last Tuesday, the security vulnera...

Intel has revealed that its fourth-quarter revenues reached a record US$8.74 billion, with net income of $2.2 billion, or 33 cents per share -- more than double the year-ago tally. While some of those profits resulted from a tax break of approximately 9 cents per share, the company also took a $611 million writedown in the quarter Calling Intel a b...

Judging by its strategy, firewall vendor NetScreen is committed to a holistic view of enterprise security, leading the charge to integrate and deepen the firewall beyond its original parameters. The company's recently released Deep Inspection Firewall, for example, is designed to prevent application-level attacks, respond proactively to other security concerns, and integrate well with other enterprise security applications. Moreover, NetScreen's recent acquisition of Neoteris, a leader in SSL VPN (virtual private network) solutions, adds another weapon to its broad security arsenal...

Apple is angling to reinvent the PC world 20 years after the arrival of the first Macintosh. Toward that goal, company CEO Steve Jobs has announced GarageBand, the latest addition to the iLife product family, and a 4-GB mini iPod that sports sherbet colors. However, price may be an issue: At a relatively steep US$249, the mini iPod costs just $50 less than Apple's 15-GB iPod...

When the E-Commerce Times asked industry experts what tops the typical CIO's wish list, Scott Tiazkun, research manager for enterprise applications at IDC, joked: "Relief from the nightmare of being pulled from a dank, small hiding place by enemy software vendor sales personnel!" Tiazkun's response turned out not to be an anomaly. Others voiced sim...

IBM has unveiled new grid and autonomic computer services that, according to Bruce Williams, the company's general manager of integrated technology services, will "bring together industry specific business consulting knowledge with advanced technology skills ... [to help] companies ... improve core business processes that are critical to their success and growth."

With perhaps another 18 months before its case against IBM for copyright infringement goes on trial, SCO has chosen (perhaps ironically) to take its battle against open source out in the open. On Thursday, company CEO Darl McBride posted the first of what he said would be "a series of letters ... in the months ahead ... examin[ing] the many issues SCO has raised ... over violations of our UNIX intellectual property contract."

Since its October 24th release, Apple's latest iteration of its BSD-based OS X software, version 10.3 or "Panther," has received more plaudits than pans throughout the high-tech community. Indeed, aside from a couple of initial glitches, including a hard drive-damaging flaw that has since been fixed, the launch has been seen as a highly positive d...