Server Sales Perk Up a Little Bit in the Third Quarter
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A bump in mainframe sales and the expansion of sales of blade servers were a big factor in a slight resurgence in server sales in the third quarter, according to market research from both IDC and Gartner. Both research firms tend to put out their numbers on the same day, and they take the pulse of the market in slightly different ways, but both agreed last Wednesday, when they put out their stats, that the third quarter was pretty good after relatively flat growth or declines in the prior several quarters. READ MORE >

Cray, IBM Win Final Round of Giant DARPA HPCS Program
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which is the research and development arm of the U.S. Department of Defense, has finally, and somewhat belatedly, awarded the third and final phase of the High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) supercomputer development program. The total budget for the final phase is substantial, weighing in at $494 million, and the funds are being distributed to the winners to develop the computing systems and programming tools for petaflops-scale supercomputers. READ MORE >

Sun Releases Java Under GPL Open Source License
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

About time. It only took two changes of the executive guard at Sun Microsystems and the better part of a decade, but Sun has finally began the process of open sourcing all of its Java technology. And in something of a shocker that quite literally left the audience of techies and the press speechless, Sun chose the GNU General Public License v2 as the means of letting go of Java. READ MORE >

As I See It: The Other "Tude"
by Victor Rozek

It's a wonder that the Thanksgiving holiday even exists. Consider that during their first years on the continent, the Pilgrims dug seven times as many graves as they built huts, yet still found reason to set aside a day of gratitude. Perched on the edge of an alien and seemingly hostile continent, knowing hunger, fear, and disease, they nonetheless saw value in expressing thanks. It was an extraordinary affirmation that deep within every manure pile lies a pony; or perhaps (from the natives' point of view) that no pile is so high that it cannot get higher. READ MORE >