Jim Wagner

Despite the approval of Java 2, Standard Edition (J2SE) 1.5 by an executive committee on technical standards, three of the country’s largest software vendors have voiced concerns over the specification’s lack of support for an interoperability scheme. IBM and BEA Systems , which make middleware tools for developers, and systems vendor Hewlett-Packard are taking issue […]

Officials at business intelligence (BI) software outfit Cognos released an upgrade to its Enterprise Planning Series (EPS) software Tuesday aimed at offering companies a more sophisticated alternative to spreadsheets. EPS 7.2 ties into metrics and monitoring functions in the company’s corporate performance management suite (CPM). It delivers real-time reporting, forecasts and plans, something officials said […]

The Mozilla Foundation, an open source organization that spun off from Netscape last year, released the latest preview version of its alternative Web browser Monday. It was developed concurrently with the Mozilla software suite popular with many businesses today. This time, the standalone Web browser is called Firefox 0.8. It’s the second time in a […]

Officials at business technology optimization (BTO) software maker Mercury Interactive announced Monday an upgrade to its Portfolio Management offering, in a bid to give CIOs more options when tracking IT projects. Portfolio Management 5.5 expands on a product first introduced last June when the Sunnyvale, Calif., acquired IT governance software vendor Kintana. The software tracks, […]

The Department of Defense (DoD) on Friday shut down its online voting experiment for overseas military and civilian citizens. An internal memo from Paul Wolfowitz, DoD deputy defense secretary, to David Chu, personnel and readiness undersecretary, earlier this week described the Secure Electronic Registration and Voting Experiment (SERVE) as unable to insure legitimacy of votes. […]

Sun Microsystems has set loose the latest version of Java 2, Standard Edition (J2SE) for desktop applications. Released Thursday, the J2SE software development kit beta version 1.5, code-named Tiger, is the first major improvement to the Java programming language since two years ago when version 1.4 was released. In this release, officials promise increased performance, […]

Security software maker Oblix is acquiring Web services management concern Confluent Software for an undisclosed amount of stock, internetnews.com has learned. The merger, expected to be announced Monday, would solidify the emergence of the independent services oriented architecture (SOA) industry, or companies that create software that makes XML-based communications between applications and servers in a […]

In a bid to show it’s serious about getting its database software into small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), Oracle has announced price reductions and giveaways along with the general availability of its Database 10g for Linux and Unix servers. A Windows version will be available in a few weeks, Oracle officials said. Officials at the […]

The SCO Group took its intellectual property challenge of Linux to Harvard on Monday and received a cold reception from area students opposed to the company’s legal tactics. In a presentation hosted by the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology on Monday, Darl McBride, SCO president and CEO, and Chris Sontag, senior vice president and […]

Microsoft officials launched a last-minute reminder to Windows users Monday afternoon to prevent the spread of the MyDoom.B virus that’s targeting its home page. MyDoom.B is a variant of the W32.Novarg.A@mm (MyDoom.A) e-mail virus — which targeted the SCO Group Sunday — that sends Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express users an official-looking email with a […]

Security officials at Macromedia released two patches Wednesday evening in order to fix a hole in its newest Web authoring tool, ColdFusion MX 6.1. Both patches are available at the company’s security Web page directories. This is the fourth vulnerability found in ColdFusion MX since its launch in August. The first vulnerability springs from ColdFusion […]

In his keynote speech at Oracle Appsworld on Wednesday, CEO Larry Ellison talked a lot about data — an appropriate topic given that he leads one of the largest database software providers in the world. Oracle , however, hasn’t always acted like it in recent years. With the advent of enterprise-spanning business applications, the Redwood […]