Novell Previews Open Enterprise Server 2, Delays SLES 10 SP1
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Operating system supplier Novell last week gave customers a sneak peek at the forthcoming version of its Open Enterprise Server platform, which mixes Linux and NetWare into a single, malleable product. That future software, called Open Enterprise Server 2 and code-named "Cypress," is expected some time in 2007--and exactly when, Novell is not saying. OES 2 will include a number of tweaks, some of which are dependent on the first Service Pack for Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10. READ MORE >

Hitachi Brings BladeSymphony Blade Servers to North America
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Hitachi America, the North American subsidiary of Japanese conglomerate Hitachi, wants a bigger piece of the IT pie in this hemisphere, and to that end the subsidiary last week announced that the BladeSymphony blade server product line it sells in Japan has been tweaked with a new set of processor and virtualization technologies and will now be available in the United States and Canada. READ MORE >

AMD Creates Two-Socket Athlon FX Variant, Demos Quad-Core Opteron
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices last week announced part of its answer to rival Intel's launch two weeks ago of quad-core chip modules, branded the "Clovertown" Xeon 5300s for entry servers and the "Kentsfield" Core 2 Extreme for high-end PCs. AMD did not deliver a quasi-quad core chip, like Intel did, based on the AMD 64 cores, but rather did a variant of what high-end PC buyers have already been doing: building two-socket machines based on Opterons. READ MORE >

As I See It: Behavioral Redlining
by Victor Rozek

Ever since people began gathering information about each other, the gatherers have used the data to control and punish the gatherees. King Herod, for example, used census data to hunt down families with infants hoping to preempt the coming of Christ by killing all of the male babies in Bethlehem. For centuries thereafter, birth records were used to determine social status--noble or commoner, free or slave, tax beneficiary or tax payer--and to keep common folks firmly in their place. READ MORE >