Beaverton, Oregon, Creates Open Source Biz Incubator
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The city of Beaverton, Oregon, has launched a business incubator that will focus on and help to foster the business prospects of open-source technologies, as I hinted it would do last week. Beaverton, as most of you know, is where Open Source Development Labs is located and where Linus Tovalds gets a paycheck these days as a fellow. But Beaverton is bigger than OSDL, and the Open Technology Business Center wants to foster a vibrant tech community there. READ MORE >

SGI Partners to Launch 'Bright' Linux Clusters
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The idea of having a preconfigured server shipped to you is old hat: Every server vendor worth its salt lets you configure a machine online before you buy it, and you get a finished system shipped right to your data center door. Customers in the high performance computing (HPC) market, where parallel supercomputers have been hand-made for decades, have had about enough of this. They want clusters that behave like, are preconfigured like, and sold like monolithic systems. These are so-called "bright clusters," and supercomputer maker Silicon Graphics is partnering to target this fast-growing market with its Linux-based Altix machines. READ MORE >

IBM Delivers Nocona Blades, Readies Opteron Blades
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM is trying to keep the heat on its rivals in the blade server business by getting the coolest chips possible into its blades. To that end, the company has announced that the low-voltage variants of the "Nocona" Xeon DP processors have been certified in the blades that go in its BladeCenter chassis. The company also announced a new switch from Nortel Networks, and the top xSeries brass are hinting at plans for Opteron-based blades this year. READ MORE >

Mad Dog 21/21: Technical Fowl
by Hesh Wiener

February 9 is the start of Chinese New Year 4702, variously known as the Year of the Rooster or the Year of the Green Chicken (or Green Hen). For computer buffs, however, a more suitable name might be the Year of the Big Blue Double Duck Out, which followed the At Least Five Years of the Ostrich. IBM will be selling its PC business, which has been consistently losing money for the past five years, to a Chinese company. Additionally, IBM will shift manufacturing of some Intel, AMD and some Power servers to a joint venture with another Chinese firm. READ MORE >

  But Wait, There's More

Black Duck, ActiveGrid Join OSDL . . . Linspire Spearheads IRMA Project to Port Linux Code to 78 Languages . . . Rogue Wave C++ Suite Ported to Power-Linux . . . Arkeia Backs Up SQL Server Data to Linux with New Plug-In . . . IDC Closes the Book on 2004 IT Spending, Projects to 2008 . . . HP Board to Clip Fiorina's Wings, or Force Her to Delegate? . . . IBM Gives Data Centers What They Really Need: SOMA . . . READ MORE >

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