Jim Wagner

UPDATED: The prospect of higher oil prices following Hurricane Katrina is expected to have a short-term damaging effect on expected IT spending among businesses, reports research firm IDC Tuesday. IT and line-of-business expectations for IT spending over the next 12 months fell from last month’s 6.1 percent to 2.9 percent, analysts at the Framingham, Mass., […]

Security vendor Symantec is looking beyond its agent-based compliance management capabilities with the $209 million purchase of BindView Development Corp. . The deal, still subject to regulatory and BindView shareholder approvals, gives the Cupertino, Calif., security company the ability to offer a more comprehensive security and policy compliance offering for customers, according to officials. “Not […]

UPDATED — The next version of Microsoft’s popular Office suite is going to include native support for PDF documents, according to what one of the suite’s program managers wrote over the weekend. Brian Jones, a program manager for Office, wrote in his blog Sunday about the inclusion of the popular archival and presentation format in […]

IBM is consolidating emerging technologies for people with disabilities under one Web site to promote the use and development of applications that target those users, officials announced Monday. The accessibility resource site within Big Blue’s alphaWorks is the third area of focused research — semantics and visualization are the other two — featuring technology downloads, […]

The U.S. is flatly opposed to any proposal that cedes control of the Internet to the United Nations (U.N.), despite a shift in support from the European Union (EU). The comments were made in the wake of talks to create a subsidiary intergovernmental group to manage the Internet. “We will not agree to the U.N. […]

Microsoft put major updates to Office 2003 and Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) on its Web site today, officials said Tuesday. Service Pack 2 (SP2) builds on the features and bug fixes discovered since the first service packs for the two products were released. In addition to security and performance bugs already addressed in previous updates, […]

UPDATED: The Chinese government has outlined new measures to limit the spread of what the communist country considers harmful news items, according to news reports Sunday. The new measures seek to regulate what kind of information finds its way to the roughly 94 million Internet users in the country and who disseminates the information. News […]

Cisco Systems has licensed Macromedia’s Flash technology for a Web conferencing offering in the making, officials announced today. Cisco said it would use Macromedia’s Breeze and Flash platforms in order to deliver a comprehensive Web and audio conferencing offering for small- to medium-sized businesses (SMB). MeetingPlace Express is designed to put conferencing features behind the […]

The Eclipse Foundation accepted its first mobile vendor, Nokia , to its board of directors, officials announced Monday. The Finnish mobile phone manufacturer, which joins the open source Java tools group as a strategic developer member, plans to donate several components of its own developer software tool to launch a mobile Java application project at […]

UPDATED: Dell is offering its low-cost Latitude 110L notebook pre-loaded with the Mandriva operating system, officials at the Parisian Linux distributor announced Friday. According to the company, the notebook has been certified and will be sold directly by Dell to students starting today. The Mandriva-powered Dell notebook will cost approximately $928, Mandriva officials said, running […]

The board of directors for the International Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) departed from the norm with its approval of the .cat domain extension, officials announced Thursday evening. The board also deferred a decision on the highly controversial sex domain, .xxx, stating concerns over draft compliance and process terms. The establishment of the […]

IBM and Red Hat announced Friday they will sink more resources into their 15 innovation centers worldwide to lure software developers in Brazil, Russia, India and China (BRIC) to the Linux operating system, as well as IBM’s middleware and servers. ISVs who sign up to IBM and Red Hat’s partner programs are eligible to receive […]