Microsoft Rolls Out Betas for Management Middleware
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Microsoft hosted its third annual Management Summit in Las Vegas last week and detailed its evolving Dynamic Systems Initiative for self-administering, self-managing computing, while rolling out betas for various management servers that fit into the DSI. Some 2,000 IT professionals showed up for the event to hear Bob Muglia, senior vice president of the Windows Server Division, detail DSI and the new betas. READ MORE >

The First Steps Toward Open Source Insurance Taken
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The hardest thing for proponents of the open source programming model to fathom is that the lawsuits between The SCO Group and IBM are only going to be the beginning. From here on out, any company that has a vested interest in supporting the proprietary software licensing model that has by and large defined the software industry is going to attack open source on patent, copyright, and intellectual property grounds. Open Source Risk Management wants to help prepare customers for this eventuality and to cushion the economic and legal blows that open source users might face in the coming years. READ MORE >

Novell Launches Linux 2.6 Kernel in SuSE 9.1
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Novell has had a busy couple of days in the Linux market. Late last week, the company rolled out the personal and professional editions of SuSE Linux 9.1, the first SuSE implementation to employ the 2.6 kernel. SuSE Linux 9.1 Personal is not going to be very interesting to server customers, but if you have a hankering to build a Linux desktop, this one will be a radical improvement compared to prior SuSE implementations for Linux on PCs. SuSE Linux 9.1 Professional is going to be very useful for 64-bit workstations for developers, and it will also see use in low-end servers because it is significantly less expensive than the SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8.1 Standard Edition. READ MORE >

Intel to Remove Xeon's Advantages to Push Itanium
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

After nearly a decade of 64-bit processing in the RISC server market, it might be reasonable to accept that 64-bit computing for Intel X86 processors was a foregone conclusion. Since 1996, Intel has been making the case publicly for its 64-bit Itanium and its EPIC (explicitly parallel instruction computing) instruction set. It has not been an easy run for Intel, but the company has a plan to make Itanium take off: Remove the advantages that 32-bit and 64-bit Xeons have on Itaniums, and stress the advantages the Itanium architecture brings. READ MORE >

Maddog 21/21: Bone Appetite
by Hesh Wiener

Computing seems to have become, coincidentally, an aspect of cannibalism, just as cannibalism has once again become a prominent aspect of computing. In Germany, a computer technician is on trial for eating a part of an engineer he met via the Internet, killing the engineer, and subsequently eating a lot more engineer steak. In Northern California, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea, among other places, cannibals in the storage, electronics, and computing industries armed with flash memory are killing off and consuming the markets for a lengthening list of gadgets. READ MORE >

Important Notice

Guild Companies Windows & Linux is splitting into two new newsletters--one dedicated to Linux, one dedicated to Windows.
To subscribe to The Linux Beacon, use this link.
To subscribe to The Windows Observer, use this link.
After subscribing to one or both of the new newsletters, you should unsubscribe from Guild Companies Windows & Linux. To do that, use this unsubscribe link.

Acucorp
Hewlett-Packard
Unisys/Microsoft
Winternals Software
Geekcorps