Microsoft Monopoly Confirmed, Aug 02, 2001

An appeals court refused on Thursday to reconsider its decision that Microsoft illegally mingled its Windows operating system and Internet browser, handing the software giant a setback in its four-year antitrust battle with the government

What is Cooltown? Imagine visiting a car dealer with hundreds of cars on the lot. Inside the showroom you are handed a small device called a "taggy." It's smaller than a PDA or a cell phone, so it's no problem to carry with you as you stroll the lot. Each time you find a vehicle you like and want more information on, you click the taggy. A beacon on the vehicle emits an identification number captured by the taggy. When you've finished, you take the taggy back into the showroom, send the data you've collected with the taggy to an IRDA/Internet enabled intelligent device, and wait for the specific brochures, pricing, and warranty information to be printed for each car you selected. That's one example of how Cooltown technology can be used.

The hardware portion of Cooltown consists of the taggy, the beacon, and a Linux powered computing device called a baseboard. The design and reference documents for all three are GPL'd, so anyone wanting to build the devices is able to do so. They can also improve, extend, and modify the designs. So long, of course, as they follow the GPL when they do so. Now that is really cool. Naturally, the software portion of Cooltown is GPL'd as well. Spasojevic said the code is hosted on a site set up for HP by SourceForge

Dell Computer Corp. has ceased shipping Linux on its desktop and notebook PCs.

Citing slow demand for the operating system on client PCs over the last several quarters, a Dell spokesman said the PC maker chose to stop preinstalling Red Hat Linux on desktop and notebook models.

We think grid is really going to be a very, very big thing," said Dave Turek, IBM's vice president for Linux emerging technologies.

The ultimate goal behind computing grids is to create clusters of servers connected to one another so that users can tap into the grid and get the computing power they need when they need it.

Grids allow communities of researchers to securely tap computing power on demand and to share resources that might otherwise be difficult to pull together, Turek said.

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