Red Hat Betas Enterprise Linux 4
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Commercial Linux distributor Red Hat announced last week that its has put out Enterprise Linux 4, its next update of Linux using the 2.6 kernel, out for its first beta test run. Beta 1 is a public beta, which means that Red Hat is encouraging Linux shops of all stripes and persuasions to give it a spin--but please, not in a production environment. The beta includes not only the server variants of the Enterprise Linux 4 software, but also a desktop variant. READ MORE >

IBM Blue Gene/L Tops Supercomputer Performance Charts
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM may be running a little bit late in getting Blue Gene/L to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, but the company was crowing last week that a subset of that U.S. government research lab's future supercomputer had undergone benchmark tests in Big Blue's Rochester, Minnesota server factory and had squeaked by NEC's Earth Simulator massively parallel vector supercomputer to become the most powerful supercomputer in the world. READ MORE >

HP Sets Up Blade Server Division, Readies Opteron Blades
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

While Sun Microsystems was hogging all of the press while it was visiting Wall Street, Hewlett Packard, which has two of the early pioneers of commercial blade servers (counting HP and Compaq separately), decided to create a new division dedicated solely to blade servers. The division was not just created as a PR stunt (although the timing surely looks like it was), but reflects the reality that blade servers span multiple hardware and software units and need to be presented as a single, integrated product line to customers. READ MORE >

As I See It: Trust but Verify: Computer Science and Democracy
by Victor Rozek

Some years ago, I traveled to Taiwan on business. One evening I was eating dinner in a small town that boasted having a single stoplight. The restaurant was near the controlled intersection, and I couldn't help but notice that everyone pretty much disregarded the light and drove through it as if it wasn't there. "Why do they ignore it?" I asked my Chinese translator. "Ah," replied the man, "the light has only been installed for a few years, and no one trusts it yet." READ MORE >

  But Wait, There's More

Red Hat Buys Netscape Server Code from TimeWarner . . . Ex-Microsoft Hotshot Backs SourceLabs Support Biz . . . Lycoris Gets Into Linux Server Distribution . . . Hanrahan Named OSDL's Head of Engineering . . . Cray Lands Two Linux Supercomputer Deals . . . Gartner Says Microsoft, IBM Lead in Web Services, SOAs . . . IT Offshoring on the Rise, Government Study Finds, But More Data is Needed . . . READ MORE >

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