Sean Michael Kerner

PriceGrabber.com has been bought by GUS Plc’s Experian division for $485 million. The comparison-shopping site has been privately held since its creation in 1999. All of PriceGrabber.com’s management and employees, about 140 people, are expected to be retained. After the acquisition is completed, PriceGrabber.com will operate under the Experian Interactive group subsidiary of GUS Plc, […]

Apache Derby, a project created by a code donation from IBM, is now a part of Sun Microsystems’ solutions. Sun said it will combine Apache Derby with its patches and call it “Java DB.” The move adds yet another database to Sun’s increasing support of open source applications. The Apache Derby project began in August […]

SugarCRM 4.0 is set to debut this week with new features in the commercial open source CRM enhanced workflow, reporting and marketing automation software. The latest version is the seventh major release since SugarCRM started back in April 2004 in an effort to take on the CRM market with an open source development. Version 2.5 […]

Moving to IPv6 will present a number of challenges for the U.S. federal government, not the least of which is the associated price tag, which could hit $75 billion. A new 63-page report issued late last week by the IPv6 Summit and Juniper Networks offers U.S. federal agencies a bevy of suggestions on how best […]

Port scanning, the act of sweeping computer ports to discover what port may be open, has long been assumed to be a principal first step of any hacker. But that may not necessarily be the case, according to researchers at the University of Maryland (UM) who found that port scans are not reliable predictors of […]

Microsoft is getting ready for its final patch Tuesday of the year with two critically rated fixes up its sleeve. The company’s December Security Bulletin Advance Notification does not provide any additional details about the two issues that will be patched this coming Tuesday. The critical patch is expected to address an exploitable flaw in […]

TORONTO — Sun’s engineers continued to beat the community drum on day two of the Sun Tech Days Worldwide Developer Conference here. Sun engineers and tech evangelists touted the benefits of Java’s next generation of enterprise applications and encouraged the assembled faithful to participate in its development. James Gosling, CTO of the Java Enterprise and […]

The effort to put a Debian GNU/Linux based distribution into the enterprise consciousness may have picked up some steam this week. The DCC Alliance of Debian based GNU/Linux distributions released their DCC 3.0 core as part of an effort to further adoption and standardization and potentially offer an alternative to Red Hat and Novell/SUSE. The […]

TORONTO — Ten years after, he’d (still) love to change the world. The father of the decade-old Java programming language is urging the developers who made Java what it is today to make sure they’re building Java for tomorrow’s tech needs. James Gosling, CTO, Java Enterprise and Development Group, Sun Microsystems, kicked off the Sun […]

Virtualization efforts on Linux got a major boost today with the open source release of Xen 3.0. In conjunction with the new release, Xen’s commercial sponsor XenSource is also rolling out an application to help manage virtualization in enterprise data centers. Xen 3.0 is expected to make its way into Red Hat and Novell’s SUSE […]

Linux is coming to a consumer electronics device near you soon, thanks to Texas Instruments’s (TI) new DaVinci chip. TI’s DaVinci digital signal processor (DSP) based system on a chip is now shipping as part of an integrated offering together with MontaVista Linux. The move could potentially bring Linux into hundreds of millions of devices, […]

With over 50 million Web sites hosted on Apache HTTP servers, it’s hard to understate the fundamental importance of Apache to the infrastructure of the Internet. The Apache Software Foundation launched its latest stable release of the Apache HTTP Server, inaugurating the new 2.2.x branch of the venerable server application. Apache 2.2.0 is the first […]