Microsoft Faces New Browser Foe in Google, Sep 02, 2008

On Tuesday, Google will release a free Web browser called Chrome that the company said would challenge Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, as well as the Firefox browser.

...the Asus Eee is the one machine that has captured the hearts of minicomputer fans. In the United States, it costs $299 to $499. “This is the world’s first disposable notebook,” said Bob O’Donnell, a vice president at IDC, a computer industry research firm.

If you and your friend do not want to spend a lot of money, putting the Linux operating system on the old PC is a much less expensive option. Many versions of Linux have a graphical point-and-click interface these days, but they still may have a learning curve for new users.

Microsoft sees the ultra-low cost PC market as a significant opportunity and plans to pursue it with vigor, according the Kevin Turner, Microsoft's chief operating officer.

European antitrust regulators on Wednesday fined Microsoft $1.3 billion for failing to comply with a 2004 judgment that the company had abused its market dominance.

With an aim at easing the marriage of open source and the mainframe, Novell is teaming with IBM to make it simpler to install SUSE Linux 10 on to System z servers.

Tonium plans to make the Linux-based software on the Pacemaker public, so users can innovate and share their improvements with others

A cerebral computer-scientist-turned-executive, Eric E. Schmidt has spent much of his career competing uphill against Microsoft, quietly watching it outflank, outmaneuver or simply outgun most of its rivals.

Mr. Rubin is one of the primary architects behind another product that also smacks of potential über-coolness — the Google Phone.

Advocates of Linux, the free open-source operating system, like to say that buying a standard-issue computer involves a Microsoft Tax, because you have no choice but to pay for Windows. New versions of Linux and inexpensive hardware like the new Everex gPC TC2502 make that tax avoidable.

Microsoft has given up its nine-year fight against antitrust regulators in Europe, saying yesterday that it would not challenge a court judgment from last month and would share technical information with rivals on terms the software giant had long resisted.

David Pogue's review of the Linux-powered laptop for the developing world.

Linux runs the Google servers that manage billions of searches each day. It also runs the TiVo digital video recorder, the Motorola Razr cellphone and countless other electronic devices.

One Laptop Per Child, an ambitious project to bring computing to the developing world’s children, has considerable momentum. Years of work by engineers and scientists have paid off in a pioneering low-cost machine that is light, rugged and surprisingly versatile. The early reviews have been glowing, and mass production is set to start next month.

In a decision that may finally settle one of the most bitter legal battles surrounding software widely used in corporate data centers, a federal district court judge in Utah ruled Friday afternoon that Novell, not the SCO Group, is the rightful owner of the copyrights covering the Unix operating system.

Virgin America calls their new in-flight entertainment system “Red,” but it is really a gigantic sociological experiment in airborne distributed computing.

The Zonbu PC also uses a Gentoo version of the Linux operating system and will come with a range of software applications like the Mozilla Firefox browser, Skype voice-over-Internet service, OpenOffice software suite and many games.

Nearly a decade after the government began its landmark effort to break up Microsoft, the Bush administration has sharply changed course by repeatedly defending the company both in the United States and abroad against accusations of anticompetitive conduct, including the recent rejection of a complaint by Google.

Shares of Novell, which sells networking software and computer-consulting services, fell 5.4 percent yesterday after fourth-quarter sales missed estimates.

When computer industry executives heard about a plan to build a $100 laptop for the developing world’s children, they generally ridiculed the idea. How could you build such a computer, they asked, when screens alone cost about $100?