The Unix Competition Is Still as Heated as Ever
by Dan Olds

The Unix wars continue to rage as three vendors--IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Sun Microsystems--compete for the modest growth of this very large, but mature, market. Customers are faced with trying to keep abreast of technology advances and making sense of vendors' claims about their own vast superiority and their rivals' pitiful ineptitude. Gabriel Consulting Group's latest semi-annual Unix Vendor Preference Survey goes straight to the data center to find out what real IT workers have to say about the major Unix vendors on a wide-ranging set of criteria including technology, quality, support, and TCO. READ MORE >

The Server Biz Enjoys the X64 Upgrade Cycle in Q1
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

There is a lot of vintage server iron out there in the world, and most of it could only be classified as energy efficient if the characterization was being done by a pathological liar. The same holds true for a lot of RISC/Unix iron. And with energy costs rising, companies wanting to scale their applications without paying for new data centers, and the desire to have systems that can better exploit virtualization, server makers enjoyed a pretty good first quarter for shipments and sales from January through March, according to statistics compiled by Gartner. READ MORE >

Intel and Itanium Partners Gear Up for Quad-Core Tukwilas
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is always a bit slow news-wise around the Memorial Day holiday, and that was as good a reason as any for some of the key members of the Itanium Solutions Alliance to start talking up the future 'Tukwila' quad-core Itanium processors, which are expected to start shipping to server makers at the end of 2008 and to appear in servers in early 2009. Another good reason to talk up the Itanium is that competitive dual-core and quad-core chips, many of them running the data center workloads that Itanium was designed for, are already on the market, eating up mindshare. READ MORE >

As I See It: The Programmer as Artist
by Victor Rozek

It has been variously described as art, science, a teachable skill, a creative process, and an exercise in logic. And because it can boast of having all those properties, the nature of programming remains as elusive as good government. The challenge in pinning down the essence of programming is that no single descriptor is exact or sufficient. Almost anything you can say about it elicits a 'yes, but. . .' reaction. READ MORE >