Sean Michael Kerner

From the ‘who should we buy today?‘ files: Cisco today announced it was planning to acquire privately held Tidal Software. Cisco is paying $105 million cash and retention-based incentives and expects the deal to close by the end of its fourth quarter fiscal 2009. Tidal Software has several application automation and management solutions that will […]

From the ‘data is everywhere‘ files: Red Hat today announced a new open source effort called Teiid that is all about virtual Enterprise Information Integration (EII). The problem that it solves is one we’re all familiar with — data lives in multiple sources and environments and users don’t always want to have to physically move/copy […]

From the ‘what’s in a version number?’ files: TORONTO. The open source Asterisk VoIP PBX is now at its 1.6.x release — it’s a number that Asterisk is going to stay at for a long time.  That’s the message that Kevin Fleming,  Director of Software Technologies at Digium and co-maintainer of the Asterisk told attendess […]

From the ‘Java is still cool’ files: A year after first launching AppEngine,Google is now adding early support for Java. At launch AppEngine –which lets developers run their code on Google infrastructure — was Python only. Google has also added import/export support for its AppEngine database, which is a key thing. It means that it […]

Former hacker Michael Calce, AKA “Mafiaboy”Photo: Sean Michael Kerner TORONTO — In 2000, 15-year-old Canadian Michael Calce, better known by his online hacking alias as Mafiaboy, attacked high-profile Web sites — including CNN.com, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon.com, Excite and E*trade — and took them offline, causing over $1 billion in losses. He was convicted and spent five […]

Linux is often thought to be all about collaboration and contribution to a project. Yet the community doesn’t always get along, even as Linux’s supporters are enjoying new levels of success against entrenched proprietary vendors like Microsoft. To assess where Linux is today, to help hammer out some of the divisive issues in the community, […]

From the ‘apps for all‘ files: Novell’s openSUSE Build Service which enables developers to build application packages for multiple distros including SUSE, Red Hat and Debian/Ubuntu is set to be part of the Linux Foundation’s Linux Developer Network (LDN). Joe Brockmeier the openSUSE Community Manager told me that the idea behind having the build service […]

PHP is one of the most popular languages for Web development and is a critical component of the LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) stack. Now PHP is getting a stack of its own, thanks to the new Zend Server, which packages PHP for Web application deployment and monitoring. The new Zend Server PHP includes code acceleration, problem diagnostics, […]

From the ‘Ethernet everywhere‘ files: Ethernet continued to make inroads into carrier networks during 2008. According to a new report from Infonetics Research, service providers spent $17 billion in 2008 on Carrier Ethernet equipment. Infonetics forecasts that growth in Carrier Ethernet will continue to increase for the next five years. By 2013, Infonetics is projecting […]

Enterprises invest in technology from vendors to help filter out bad Web sites from touching their networks, but the same technology, at least some of it, can be had by consumers for free. And for networking vendor Blue Coat (NASDAQ: BCSI), the strategy is paying off. While Blue Coat is best known for Web filtering […]