A look at some newsy stuff and interesting bits as well as those hopefully amusing byways of technology.
I have been a computer journalist for most of my working life although I did start in the wonderful world of accountancy. I have been editor of Compting magazine in London and prior to that held a number of editing jobs, including time spend at the late, lamented DEC Computing and was at one time London editor for Byte magazine. Outside of work, my main interests are travelling, football and baseball. I lived for some years in Boston, Mass, and became an incurable Boston Red Sox fan as a result. I have no particular qualifications for being a journalist other than a university degree and a lifelong curiosity about people.
Micro Focus has said that applications developed using its implementation of COBOL will be able to work with the Microsoft Azure Service Platform.The aim is for the two companies to deliver applications running Micro Focus software as software-plus-services on the Microsoft platform.
If it is October it must be Storage Expo and the annual UK show for all things storage is back again. This year the show is dominated by the large vendors.
It is busy days at VMware as the company said goodbye to its president and chief executive, faced rumblings from investors worried about the company's strategy and then decided to come up with a radical strategy to fix the latter point and fight off Microsoft and others at the same time.Dianne Green, the former chief executive and president, left earlier this month, and Paul Maritz, a former long-standing Microsoft executive stepped into her shoes immediately.
IBM is continuing to cut down its interest in the PC market as it announced on Monday that it was again selling some of its shareholding in Lenovo. IBM is selling 116.
On Wednesday, HP launches a system that doubles the number of blades that can be fitted on one unit, less than a month after IBM introduced the iDataPlex range which also doubled the number and likewise doubled the servers in one any one system.The move continues the industry trend of increasing the density of systems to get more efficiency, especially in the use of space in data centres as well as power usage.
The Gizmodo site writes that one of their number bumped into Michael Dell who was carrying a brand new ultra-portable.“He was nice enough to show me this laptop that he was carrying that he said no one's seen before.
Embargoes are tricky things. Embargoes are rules that some journalists live by, or not.
Citrix has given something of a boost to the performance of its web application delivery controllers with the addition of two NetScaler MPX controllers. The 17000 and 15000 slot in above the 12000 range and offer what the company is claiming is much improved performance within controllers that, according to Citrix, fit in the same form factors.
Capital spending on semiconductor manufacturing equipment is set to fall by 20 percent this year, according to analysts Gartner.The analysts say that a weakening US economy and a collapsing dynamic random access memory (DRAM) market will result in worldwide semiconductor capital equipment spending to total $47.
Desktop virtualisation promises the ability for corporations to rationalise their huge farms of desktop PCs by switching users into the virtual world. Citrix is hoping that its Xen Desktop product, which it launched on Monday, will do just that.