The Left and Right Hands of Sun
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Sun Microsystems hosted its annual financial analyst meeting in New York on Wednesday, and the two officemates who run the company--president and chief executive officer Jonathan Schwartz and chief financial officer Michael Lehman--suffered through BlackBerries interfering with their microphones for a few hours to calmly and rationally describe Sun's strategy for growing the company now that its finances have more or less been put into balance and it has a respectable product line again. READ MORE >

Core Transition Complete as Intel Ships 'Tigerton' Xeon MPs
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

At long last, chip maker Intel's transition from the NetBurst architecture embodied in its Pentium 4 and related Xeon DP and Xeon MP processors for servers to the new Core microarchitecture that debuted nearly two years ago is complete. Yeterday, Intel launched the quad-core 'Tigerton' Xeon 7300 series processors, which are geared to midrange and high-end servers and which give the high-end Xeon line the kind of performance, price/performance, and performance per watt that Intel needs to compete well against alternatives from Advanced Micro Devices. READ MORE >

NetApp Sues Sun Over File System Patents
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Network storage vendor Network Appliance this week filed a lawsuit against Sun Microsystems, contending that Sun's Zettabyte File System infringes on a number of patents held by NetApp. Apparently, Sun and NetApp have been having increasingly aggressive talks about the matter, and there were even some issues that came up between StorageTek, now part of Sun, dating back to 2004, before Sun paid $4.1 billion to acquire STK. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: Leverage
by Hesh Wiener

Archimedes was talking about leverage, one of his favorite topics. He said, 'Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.' The Sicilian from Syracuse probably knew more about mechanical leverage than anyone of his era, which was the third century BC, but he didn't know about financial leverage. Some people are still finding out about financial leverage, particularly on Wall Street, and doing it the hard way. What they cannot learn from Archimedes they might try to garner from IBM, which looks like it knows a little more about the topic than most companies. READ MORE >