Andy Patrizio

Some remarkably blunt internal e-mails from Microsoft executives indicate that the company eased the minimum requirements for PCs to be considered “Vista Capable” so Intel could sell a sub-par chipset with the certification logo. The e-mails, part of the evidence in a 2006 class action lawsuit against Microsoft over the Vista Capable marketing program, were […]

UPDATED: Citing increased expenses and a number of one-time charges related to everything from acquisitions to legal affairs, Dell’s profits fell a little short in the fourth quarter, and it warned that despite many improvements, the company wasn’t out of the woods yet. Revenue was up a healthy 10 percent, to $16 billion for the […]

AMD and IBM this week announced they had produced a working test chip utilizing Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography to produce the first layer of metal connections across the entire chip. This may sound like something only an electrical engineer could care about, but like Intel’s high-k metal gate breakthrough a year ago, this has a […]

IBM this week introduced the first major overhaul to its System z mainframe line in three years. This latest big iron from IBM could be a welcome development for the company, which has seen its mainframe business struggle for several months. For the last two quarters, both Gartner and IDC have noted that IBM’s System […]

Server sales continue inching upward, with blades proving the market’s lone hot area, according to new stats from market researcher IDC. The company’s fourth-quarter 2007 sales figures show that worldwide revenue growth totaled 2.4 percent compared to Q4 2006, with sales of $15.7 billion. For the entire year, the market saw 3.6 percent growth, reaching […]

AVG Technologies is the latest antivirus vendor to beef up its security suite to cover as wide a range of threats as possible by including link-scanning technology it acquired late last year. AVG (which changed its name from Grisoft earlier this year) isn’t as well known in the U.S. as Symantec, McAfee or Trend Micro, […]

Less than one year after its first foray into Xeon-based embedded chips, Intel has refreshed the line with newer processors and a new chipset that drastically improve performance and cut some of the power draw. As part of the upgrade, Intel is promising licensees a seven-year life cycle support program, considerably longer than the lifespan […]

Someone at Sun Microsystems is going to get spanked, and Intel is holding the paddle. A PDF document from Sun’s Austrian offices found its way onto the external Sun network and was immediately grabbed by visitors. Sun removed the offending file but once something gets on the Internet it’s impossible to contain. The document outlines […]

Remember that ’80s comedy about two losers trying to pretend their dead boss was alive so they could enjoy the good life? They don’t make them like that any more. I was able to tolerate maybe 20 minutes of “Knocked Up” before being utterly disgusted. Anyway, I had a weekend at Bernie’s of my own, […]

A Silicon Valley startup says it can deliver a 90 percent reduction in the cost of a decked out server by a breakthrough in memory technology. MetaRAM, founded by Fred Weber, a former chief technology officer at AMD, is going public today with its MetaSDRAM. The technology doubles the memory on a memory stick by […]

A team of researchers led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), said they have found that a number of disk encryption technologies aren’t quite so safe. They said their research was inspired by computer scientists who noted the fact that memory does not clear on reboots or in a low power state, The problem is […]

Worldwide server shipments in the fourth quarter of 2007 grew 3.8 percent over the same quarter in 2006, while server shipments for the year were up 7.4 percent over the previous year, according to a report from Gartner. The x86 market continued to grow in units sold, while the RISC market fell in terms of […]