Linux turnover
Novell, the networking company from Utah, is taking over SuSE, the German Linux distributor, for £126m. The deal should increase SuSE's sales in the US, where Red Hat is focusing on the corporate server market. Novell is losing money and needs to enter areas where it can reverse its declining sales. It has already taken over Ximian, which offers a Linux desktop, and more acquisitions may follow. Meanwhile Red Hat has dropped Red Hat Linux and abandoned its attempt to sell boxed copies of Linux with instruction manuals and support. It is replacing it with the more expensive Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), for business users, and the free Fedora, for hobbyists. RHEL will be updated every 12-18 months, and will be supported for five years. Red Hat is not guaranteeing to provide any bug-fixes for Fedora, which will be "built exclusively from open source software", but plans to release three updates per year. www.novell.com/news/press/archive/2003/11/pr03069.html
www.redhat.com/about/presscenter
PC boom
Commercial PC sales rose by more than 17% in Britain in the latest financial quarter, with notebook purchases leaping by 25.8%, according to market analysts at IDC. Desktop PCs only saw a 5.9% increase, but server shipments rose by 19.2%. Dell has seen strong growth and has retaken the overall market leadership from Hewlett Packard, whose sales dropped slightly. www.idc.com
Spam uncanned
The idea that EU anti-spam legislation, Directive 58, will succeed has taken a knock in a survey by Sybari Software, a messaging specialist. In a poll of European businesses, only half thought that local legislation could be enforced. Eight out of 10 firms are concerned that unsolicited emails will cause employee productivity to fall, and many would like to see higher fines for spammers rather than prison sentences. Almost all the companies are in favour of having anti-spam technology. www.sybari.com/home
E-vote vote
"Computerised voting is inherently subject to programming error, human error, equipment malfunction and malicious tampering," according to a petition that calls for improved security in electronic voting. The petition, which says that voters should be able to check their e-vote before submission, had been signed by 350 people earlier this week, including LibDem MP Richard Allan. The website suggests voters could check a printed copy of their e-vote, which would be retained by polling stations to allow checks or recounts. "It's about trust, for the voters and the candidates," says co-organiser Jason Kitcat.
<A HREF="http://www.free-project.org/resolution"" TARGET="_NEW">www.free-project.org/resolution
Closeted PCs
HP is previewing its Consolidated Client Infrastructure (CCI) at Comdex this month, showing how PCs can be split between the desk and the wiring closet. CCI applies blade server principles to desktop PCs by moving all the motherboards to a rack-mounted chassis. A dumb terminal or notebook PC provides desktop access and should improve remote management and allow local disk and application sharing. The new CCI blades could also include a stand-by motherboard in case of a malfunction. Blades are expected to cost £1,200 with a Pentium M 1GHz processor or £600 with a 1.8GHz Transmeta Effice chip.
<A HREF="http://www.comdex.com/lasvegas2003"" TARGET="_NEW">www.comdex.com/lasvegas2003
UK e-tops
The UK is the best country for allowing citizens to interact with government through the internet, says a UN study, E-Government at the Crossroads. The UK is one of only 15 countries that allow citizens to comment on policies online. The report says the US is the best for overall e-government readiness, followed by Sweden, Australia, Denmark and the UK, which also came fifth in quality of websites.But, one kind of interaction - with other countries' law enforcers - is less welcome to privacy campaigners, who are complaining that British citizens' personal data can be transferred to 37 European countries without evidence of a crime under UK law, under a Council of Europe treaty.
Think!
IBM says it has just produced its 20 millionth ThinkPad notebook computer. The brand was launched in 1992, three years after the popular Compaq LT range. The ThinkPad's combination of American business design and Japanese technology (from IBM's Yamoto lab) was a winner, making the distinctive black machines one of the longest-surviving ranges in the PC industry, albeit never the cheapest.
www.pc.ibm.com/ca/thinkpad/anniversary
