Apple is promising a fast turnaround for the next major release of OS X. Version 10.5, dubbed Leopard, should hit the streets in spring 2007. Beyond such front-end improvements as improved search, chat, and application linking, a number of under-the-...
Like it or not, buyers of x86 servers, clients, and workstations face a major platform shift as the 32-bit CPUs, operating systems, and applications slowly fade into history. That historic migration will have dramatic impact. After all, 64-bit comput...
Inexplicably, we've gotten through much of 2006 without Linux completely kicking Unix out of the market. Analysts and Linux faithful are at a loss to explain how Sun Microsystems' server revenue climbed almost 14 percent since the second quarter last...
My city's symphony orchestra is marvelous. In a lesser setting, any of the orchestra's musicians would be a marquee soloist, front and center. But as an orchestra, about 100 consummately talented artists become one. The visual spectacle and the socio...
I've kept a practically subterranean profile since Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference a few weeks ago. I have so many venues at which to serve the many pots of content I've got bubbling upstairs that spreading it evenly and avoiding redundancy is...
A reader recently shot me a note saying that after studying some of my work related to Advanced Micro Devices, he has spotted a pattern: I always side with the underdog. This reader crystallized the prevalent viewpoint, one expressed by most of my co...
Before I get to the news of the week, I need to wrap up some old business. As I had hoped, Apple opened its OS X x86 system-level code on the first day of its Worldwide Developers Conference. That's a courageous decision. It was accompanied by the op...
Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) is no Mac pep rally. It's a gathering of geeks ready for a deep dive into a pool of technologies. But WWDC also has a tradition of new product intros, and last week was no exception, with two major hardw...
For readers' convenience, I'd like to summarize the long list of present best practices in client-system security implemented by all InfoWorld readers. When you sit down at a client computer that's not hooked into a locked-down corporate network, you...
From the moment I got the call, I knew there was much more to AMD's acquisition of ATI than was being reported. My mind immediately leaped to the ramifications the acquisition would have on ATI's relationship with Intel OEMs. Intel couldn't be jazzed...
I imagine that some nonattendees see Apple's <a href="http://developer.apple.com/wwdc/">WWDC</a> (Worldwide Developer Convention) as a huge pep rally where Steve and the rest of the Apple brass take turns preaching to the converted. That's just wrong...
AMD's planned US$5.4 billion merger with Canada-based graphics chip vendor ATI Technologies prompted some indignant sniffing about "desperation" among the technology sector's chattering class. That kind of second-guessing is natural, especially on th...
Barely 10 years ago, I ventured that all systems would be virtualized, and that IT law would dictate that no operating system may have unregulated direct contact with system or storage hardware.
I have prepared an account of the history of .Net and Java that's intended to balance more fanciful post-mortem accounts (of .Net and Java, not of me). It reads thus: Sun created Java to cash in on the success of Visual Basic and to convince developm...
Intel's first server-targeted core microarchitecture CPU, the Dual-core Xeon Processor 5100 (aka Woodcrest), has made its debut. A client CPU line branded Core 2 Duo launched as well, so in servers, desktops, and notebooks, Pentium 4 (aka Netburst ) ...
