STReport Headline News II |
Ongoing Talks in Instant Messaging Wars? Standards
task force weighs options in AOL-Microsoft spat. Both Microsoft and AOL have submitted technical information to the Internet Engineering Task Force, an industry standards body that is drafting a standard for instant messaging. Their purported aim? That users of all services--Microsoft's MSN Messenger, AOL's Instant Messenger or ICQ, Yahoo Messenger, Tribal Voice PowWow, and any interested others--be able to talk with one another. "We are delighted that Microsoft and America Online are contributing to the development of a standard," says Vijay Saraswat, who leads the IETF's standards committee. Engineers, researchers, and vendors from around the world are developing an open protocol called Instant Messaging and Presence Protocol. Draft protocol specifications may be available as soon as January 2000. On Thursday a committee will submit an early blueprint of the messaging standard to the IETF Application Group for review and comments. Washington (STR) - America Online (AOL) released a new version of its Instant Messenger software which lets users check stock prices and read customized news headlines while also chatting online. AOL also said it is working with an industry group "to establish standards to ensure that instant messaging systems are interoperable, while continuing to respect users' privacy and security." The company made no mention of its dispute with Microsoft (MSFT) about its attempts to make messenger software compatible with AOL's.
Is this more of Compaq's Critical Imploding or, is it a significant financial signal of things to come? In a stunning move, Compaq has laid off more than 100 people in labs in Redmond, Wash., who worked exclusively on porting Windows NT to the Alpha platform. The company has effectively discontinued support of Microsoft's operating system on Alpha. According to a source inside Compaq West (formerly DECWest), a set of labs used to port Windows NT and 2000 to the Alpha platform, Compaq pulled the plug on NT for Alpha earlier in the week. "Compaq was very clear that Alpha would be used for Linux, Tru64 Unix, and Open VMS," said the source, who requested anonymity. The source said that the decision came as a surprise to Microsoft officials, and the software giant was considering pulling out the Alpha code currently written into Windows 2000. The dilemma now facing Microsoft officials is what to do with the hundreds of Alpha systems now beta testing 64-bit versions of Windows 2000. "All of the development is being done on the Alpha, so how can you just pull the plug?" the source said. The atmosphere inside of Compaq West was described as "awful" and "grim" by insiders. Employees are being incentivized to stay on board until the completion of Service Pack 6 for Windows NT 4.0. Inside the halls of Compaq West, opinions on the reason for the pullout varied from the speed of the Intel eight-way architecture obviating the need for Alpha to low percentages of NT-on-Alpha users. Analysts concurred with the latter. "Alpha is the sole survivor of the various RISC implementations, and Microsoft has been getting some mileage out of having [Windows NT] on that platform," said Dwight Davis, a Kirkland, Wash.-based analyst at Summit Strategies. Davis said the timing of Compaq's decision was tricky for Microsoft, where officials have been working feverishly to get Windows 2000 out the door in 1999. "Alpha as a platform has been very much a niche product anyway, and tended to be a high-end niche product [which is an area] where NT has not been particularly strong anyway," Davis said. "With Windows 2000 around the corner, you would think there might be something of a surge in interest of that system on Alpha." "This makes me wonder about the prognosis for Alpha," Davis said. "At Compaq there has been major management shakeups, and this could be something that's fallen by the wayside. It's a very expensive venture and maybe hasn't generated the kind of return Compaq would like to see on it." The move is not likely to be the last from Compaq. Another employee that preferred to remain anonymous said that Michael Capellas, the newly appointed CEO addressed the support division last week and expressed dismay at the number of support personnel. "He was very evasive, but he said that the company would have to study the situation very carefully and make some decisions," said the employee. "He said they were going to have to find out what those people were doing." Microsoft and Compaq officials did not immediately return phone calls seeking comment. Compaq Makes Play for Leadership in enterprise Markets NEW YORK, August 17, 1999 - Seizing growth opportunities in the exploding e-business market, Compaq Computer Corporation (NYSE: CPQ) today unveiled its new 8-way ProLiant 8000 and 8500 servers and business-critical services that will change the competitive landscape for e-business infrastructure, redefine the server marketplace and drive new major revenue opportunities for the company. Compaq's strategic investments in developing 8-way technology and business-critical services are the latest building blocks in rolling out the Compaq NonStop e-business strategy. Building on its worldwide leading market share of 32.7 percent in PC servers (more than IBM and Dell combined) and its 28.9 percent market share in web servers (more than Sun Microsystems and IBM combined), Compaq is aggressively targeting the fast-expanding Internet Service Provider (ISP) and Applications Service Provider (ASP) markets. Compaq's goal is to extend its leadership position to the ISP and ASP markets by 2001. According to Forrester Research, the combined value of the ISP and ASP markets are expected to expand from $7.85 billion today to $27.2 billion by the year 2001. This represents a significant engine for Compaq growth. "Customers are looking to deploy their e-business solutions faster, at lower cost and with minimum risk. We will address these needs and drive aggressive market growth in industry-standard computing among enterprise customers through our ability to deliver business-critical services to e-business customers requiring 24x7 support," said Enrico Pesatori, SVP and Group General Manager, Enterprise Solutions and Services Group, Compaq. "Our 8-way ProLiant servers deliver superior scalability, reliability and availability, and match the server performance of market rival Sun at one-third of the cost." Leveraging its strength in the Windows NT, SCO, Netware, and Linux marketplaces, its strategic partnerships with key industry players, its innovative industry-standard solutions, and its experience in delivering business-critical and integration services, Compaq is well armed to be the vendor of choice for companies deploying Compaq NonStop e-business infrastructures. "Our customers require a reliable and cost-effective platform that can scale-up to meet their demanding Web, e-commerce and messaging requirements," said Deborah Willingham, Vice President, Business and Enterprise Division at Microsoft Corp. "In today's competitive marketplace, the combination of Compaq's 8-way SMP architecture and Windows NT Server 4.0 Enterprise Edition provides customers a high-end infrastructure with exceptional price/performance to effectively run their business. The forthcoming Windows 2000 advanced server will offer our mutual customers additional availability and scalability enhancements for their Internet-based and line of business solutions." Bobby Patrick, Vice President of Strategy and Product Development, DIGEX (NASDAQ:DIGX) said, "As a leading provider of Web and application hosting solutions in a booming market, we have to provide our customers with a competitive and uninterrupted service, 24x7. The deployment of ProLiant 8-way servers in our IT infrastructure means we are always open for business. We are able to provide our customers with leading-edge Internet applications on-demand and realize significant cost savings at the same time." "Just as Compaq defined the PC server economic value model 10 years ago with the SystemPro server, today Compaq is bringing a new economic value to enterprise customers, ISPs and ASPs," said Mary McDowell, Vice President and General Manager, Industry Standard Server Division, Compaq. "Compaq and Intel co-developed the new 8-way Profusion Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) architecture to provide new levels of power across a broad range of applications. Together, we are driving the whole industry forward by making this architecture available to other server manufacturers." Compaq Profusion-based ProLiant 8-way servers push Windows NT further into the enterprise and offer e-businesses innovative technologies, new levels of scalability, better up-time guarantees and price: performance benefits. The ProLiant 8000 and 8500 have been beta tested and optimized for a wide variety of applications at more than a hundred sites, making them ready for commercial deployment. Prices for the 8-way ProLiant servers range from $20,000 to $80,000 for configured systems. The ProLiant 8000 server delivered record-breaking TPC benchmark results of 40,013.30 transactions per minute at $18.86/tpmC. With this latest benchmark, Compaq now holds the number one position for 8-way, 4-way, 2-way, and 1-way processing in TPC-C Results by Performance. As part of its comprehensive 8-way ProLiant server solution, Compaq offers easy-to-purchase CarePaq service modules that range from 24x7 uptime and 4-hour response time guarantees, to business-critical expertise for planning, deploying, maintaining and managing the most demanding e-commerce environments. Compaq Background Compaq products are sold and supported in more than 100 countries through a network of authorized Compaq marketing partners. Customer support and information about Compaq and its products are available at http://www.compaq.com . this
outfit is $2 million in the hole and they're holding
meetings half-way 'round the globe?? What's wrong with
a conference room or two in the Nation's Capitol??
These ostentatious,
irresponsible goofs have got to go! Under the proposal, Internet domain names that are "abusively" registered by speculators in violation of a trademark or another's rights could be cancelled or transferred after the parties undergo a dispute-resolution process. But while the big corporations, trademark law firms and professional associations were able to foot the tab to send representatives to Chile for the meeting, most of the little guys were not. Instead, they were relegated to participating remotely over the Internet, e-mailing objections and comments that were selectively read to the crowd of about 200. "A lot of issues that are of interest to a large group of stakeholders not present here are suddenly on the table," Alan Davidson, of the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C., who made the trip, pointed out to the board Wednesday. "A large group of stakeholders have not been able to be part of this because of resources or because a lot of them don't know that they should care." Kathryn Kleiman of the Association for Computing Machinery, a scientific and educational organization, told the ICANN board that the definition of "cybersquatting" needs to be better defined. The broad definition offered by a United Nation's organization that developed the dispute-resolution proposal likely to be embraced by ICANN Thursday could penalize small users or noncommercial users who have valid claims to domain names, said Kleiman. She also recommended that some type of penalty be developed to ward off "reverse hijacking" from overzealous trademark holders who unjustly go after the little guy. The staff of ICANN has recommended that the board adopt the dispute-resolution policy regarding cases of cybersquatting where complainants can demonstrate that the owners registered the names in bad faith, seeking to deprive some entity of a trademark or other right. But ICANN has qualms about several factors that still need to be worked out, including concerns about an imbalance between appeal rights of challenger and domain name holder and the need for a sort of user's guide that spells out the rights of domain-name holders. Some of the remote participants urged the ICANN board to delay its vote because it has yet to recognize a group of individual domain-name holders, while it has allowed the participation of categories of registrars, trademark holders and other Internet users. Mikki Barry, president of the Domain Name Rights Coalition, wrote that she "feels there is not a consensus of the Internet community" and that "too many people could be labeled cybersquatters who aren't." During the public commentary, the ICANN board mostly listened as it sat at a dais on the stage of a meeting room at the University of Chile. "We've heard a lot of input on this," said ICANN interim Chairman Esther Dyson. "We understand there needs to be more specific input in the drafting committee, and it will be considered." ICANN is seeking to develop consensus for policies regarding a host of issues involving the privatization of the domain-name system. The U.S. government, which decided to get out of the business of the Internet's administration in favor of industry self-regulation, last year approved that ICANN take over the task. Since the domain-name system was commercialized in 1993, it has been administered by government contractors, most prominently Network Solutions (NSOL) Inc., the Virginia company that built a multibillion-dollar business by selling names in .com, .net and .org. While the measure to limit cybersquatting is the most prominent item on ICANN's agenda, it is by no means the only proposal creating controversy. The nine-member interim board is also likely to approve a measure to extend its own term for an additional year, ending Sept. 30, 2000, at which time the board is to be replaced by a larger board made up of elected representatives from various stakeholder groups. The ICANN board meeting was opened to the public following calls from Congress and even the Commerce Department, which has been generally supportive of ICANN. In the past, portions of the group's meetings have been closed. On the eve of Congressional hearings this summer, ICANN also took other steps to address mounting criticism, including nixing a $1-per-domain-name fee to support ICANN financially. The group is now seeking $2 million in loans to pay its bills until an alternate fund-raising scheme can be developed. While Thursday's board meeting will be open, complaints were made that other committee meetings were closed to the public this week, including a meeting of an influential government advisory group that plans to recommend to the ICANN board that country-code domains should be considered public property. Paul Twomey, an Australian government representative who heads the committee, argued that the closure was needed because representatives of some 28 governments would not have been as frank had the press attended the meeting.
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Despite problems such as not having third-party application support, Linux is a powerful and reliable operating system -- and has a promising futureLinux, the Unix-like operating system that has been a computer scientist's plaything for the better part of a decade, is beginning to get some serious attention from federal agencies. The Defense Department, intelligence agencies, the General Services Administration and other organizations are running pilot projects and even small-scale production jobs using Linux. The operating system powers computers acting as World Wide Web servers, mail servers and occasionally desktop devices.Linux is a robust, reliable operating system that can go years between failures, and it has the support of tens of thousands of programmers. And best of all: It's free. Don't start shredding your Microsoft Corp. Windows NT and Unix licenses just yet, though. Linux has some problems. It has trouble handling multiprocessor environments, and it lacks third-party applications. And despite some recent major advances, many users dislike its user interface. Linux was written and developed by computer scientist Linus Torvalds in 1991. On the surface, it looked like just another version of Unix. But the operating system is not Unix, asserted Erik Troan, director of engineering for Red Hat Software Inc., a Durham, N.C., vendor of Linux. It is very Unix-like, he acknowledged, but it does not share the AT&T Unix code base. Torvalds made the new operating system part of the Open Source movement. That means anyone can download the software from the Internet without charge. Users can modify the kernel in any way, as long as those changes are delivered back to the community at large. The user community took Linux to its heart. "In those early days, it really was an operating system by geeks, for geeks," said Don Heffernan, deputy chief information officer at GSA. "But over the years, users and vendors have added the kinds of user interfaces and applications that have made it a possible production operating system." Why has the operating system proved so popular? Some say it has been tapping into users' displeasure with alternatives. "Users are just disgusted with Windows 98 and NT," said Cheryl Mahoney, inside sales manager for Linux reseller Spectrum Systems Inc., Fairfax, Va. "They want something else." Most federal users are familiar with Unix, and the Unix-like nature of Linux makes it a comfortable alternative, Mahoney said. Also, users who have worked with the Linux code have an almost paternal interest in the operating system's success. "There is a lot of momentum, passion and capability behind it," said Vivek Mehra, vice president of product development for Cobalt Networks Inc., a Mountain View, Calif.-based manufacturer of server appliances based on Linux. Mark Wollschlager, technical services director for the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria, said the court is using Linux to operate its new intranet server. "It's free, you can run it on just about any old computer that's lying around, and it doesn't require procurement and competitive bidding," Wollschlager said. "It appeals to systems people because they can play with it, and it doesn't cost an arm and a leg." The system also has "an astounding reputation for reliability," said Jonathan Prial, director of integrated solutions and Linux marketing for the IBM Software Group. But Mark Hopkins, government programs manager for applications software vendor Corel Corp, said that the fact that Linux is free is driving its popularity and will keep it at the forefront for years to come. Because Linux is free, and because any number of users can use the same CD to install the software, it is difficult to get a good read on the total number of users. According to a Web survey of registered users at the Linux Counter site, there probably are about 11 million Linux users worldwide. Certainly, the number is going to grow rapidly. International Data Corp., Framingham, Mass., reported that the number of commercial Linux shipments will grow at twice the rate of all other server-based operating environments through 2003. Sandra Potter, research director of Linux Services for Aberdeen Group, Boston, said no one has begun to track the use of Linux in the federal government. But she guessed that most federal agencies have at least passing familiarity with the operating system. "The government has the same problem everybody else has," Potter said. "They have to set up a Web site or a collaborative project, and there's no budget for it. Well, they'd have to be living under a rock to not at least think of Linux." IBM's Prial said more people are using Linux than is commonly believed. "It's more than a couple of boxes, but it is not yet under the watchful eye of the CIO," he said. Where Linux is installed as a working system, it is almost always at the server level. According to Prial, 95 percent of all Linux installations are Intel Corp.-based. He said 65 percent are running Web server applications, 15 percent are running mail servers, and 15 percent are running file-and-print servers. That jibes with the observations of Joe Klemmer, who, before his retirement this year, installed a Linux server for the U.S. Army Publishing Agency (USAPA). "The big case for Linux, especially in the government, is on the server end," Klemmer said. "It will work fantastically as an application server. You can replace NT servers with Linux boxes and still serve Microsoft hardware." In a few situations, Linux is being used for large-scale work. For example, NASA's Beowulf project is using Linux in the agency's massively parallel environment. But for the most part, Linux is in the testing and evaluation phase. Howard Levenson, business development manager for Silicon Graphics Inc., the workstation vendor that recently announced support for Linux, said most federal users have loaded Linux in their home machines before attempting to make it work at the office. Heffernan is one who has Linux running in his basement. "We [at GSA] haven't been actively using Linux yet," he said. "But we did decide to keep an eye on it, and it has come a tremendous distance." Before year's end, GSA will run a test project with Linux. Heffernan said the agency will not replace anything with Linux but will run it in a non-critical environment -- probably with Lotus Development Corp.'s Notes -- to see how it performs with low-end backup servers. The district court in Alexandria is using Linux on an intranet server, according to Wollschlager. He said price was a major consideration. "We could have done it several other ways, but it would have been about twice as expensive to go with NT, our other choice," he said. "The Cobalt Networks [Inc.] server appliance system the court bought this spring cost as much as just the NT server would have cost." The system, based on Red Hat's version of Linux, is easy to use. In fact, it is being managed by someone who is not a Unix systems administrator, Wollschlager said. Klemmer said the use of Linux by USAPA was accidental, born out of a requirement several years ago to put together a Web site. There was no support and no funding. It had to be done in an ad hoc way. Klemmer, who had been working on Linux since 1991, was able to do the whole thing in two days. Some mainframe applications, such as tracking and selling orders, were migrated down to the Web as Klemmer created a new front end. The system was installed on a spare Intel Pentium 133 computer. "I fielded the entire thing to the company at a total cost of 145 hours and a RAM upgrade," he said. "It didn't cost the command any money at all." Use started slowly, but it increased rapidly when an electronic ordering system was included. Today, the site has had more than 82,000 hits. Bill Josey, chief of USAPA's Information Management Division, Alexandria, said the organization uses Red Hat's Linux on two of its three Web server platforms, and it uses AIX on the third. He said he has been tempted to make things more consistent by running Linux on all three platforms, but he said he does not want to fix anything that is not broken. "It's free, and that's the difference between going to a contractor and [using] open source," Klemmer said. "For $50,000, we were able to field this entire online publication effort. Another organization has spent $750,000 -- for NT -- and they still haven't gotten it to work right." GSA's Heffernan said he has been amazed at how quickly Linux has become competitive in the operating system market. He chalks that up to the open-source philosophy -- not necessarily the fact that the operating system does not cost anything but the fact that the source code is totally open to anyone. The open-source approach means that users can make what they like of Linux. "Open source means you can customize to your heart's content," said Benoy Tamang, vice president of marketing for Caldera Systems Inc. It also means there is a vast cadre of people working to improve the product. "When you're involved with Linux, you get into that attitude of sharing knowledge," Klemmer said. This sharing gives the user more control, Red Hat's Troan said. "If you buy an OS with proprietary components, only the vendor can help you; you're locked in to a huge dollar investment," he said. "If they get a support contract from Red Hat, and we fail -- you can go to one of our competitors." Hank Schiffman, a strategic technologist at SGI, said Linux's modularity enables users to build in only features they need and nothing else. If a server does not need the graphics associated with a desktop, users need not include it, he said. "Because Linux is built for components, you can remove a lot, and it still runs well on a low-end system," said Derek Belar, Linux brand manager at Corel. "And you'll still have the OS you need to get the applications you need up and running." Despite all that fiddling, the operating system remains uncannily stable. Vendors such as Caldera and IBM report users who have been running Linux for two or three years without ever crashing. For Web servers and mail servers especially, this proves an attractive point. Although interest is high, sales have not been strong, said Spectrum's Mahoney, who said she believes the operating system lacks a user base. The companies selling Linux have been, for the most part, relatively small. That has raised concerns about support for big customers. Without a proven track record, start-up companies are viewed with suspicion when it comes to supporting the products they sell. The government has one unique concern about Linux: It has never been certified as Unix-compliant. Because some contracts -- especially those with DOD -- require Unix certification, Linux may be shut out of some large deals. Ironically, Linux probably could be certified as Unix-compliant with a little tweaking. But to date, no one has wanted to expend the time and money to achieve this. There's also concern about security. "The sentiment seems to be, 'If the source is available, people can hack it,' " Aberdeen's Potter said. But she also asserted that the concern is illusory. In fact, Linux security may be greater because of an entire population testing the operating system for back doors and other weaknesses. Others argue that the graphical user interface isn't good enough for desktop work, a concern that Red Hat's Troan considers outdated. Both Red Hat and Caldera have within the past few months issued new GUIs for Linux. Although both are said to be improvements compared with prior versions, at least one user commented that the new ones "stink too." Linux also is weak in symmetrical multiprocessing. Although large Unix servers can be configured with more than a hundred processors, Linux is not really designed for more than four processors. And the operating system lacks some extensions for large-scale storage solutions -- another factor that makes it inappropriate for enterprise-wide solutions today. In addition, the lack of application software is a concern. Vendors are beginning to port software over, but the process typically is a slow one. Mike Miller, senior vice president and general manager of North American sales for Computer Associates International Inc., Islandia, N.Y., said there has not been a great demand for Linux applications. So even though the company has ported its Ingress database from Unix to Linux, it is waiting for the market to determine what other software it should port over. Developments continue apace. Caldera's Tamang said his company hopes to make Linux "more PC friendly for the Windows crowd" and to make installation easier. In the application area, Corel has ported WordPerfect 8 and other office applications to Linux, and CA has made several announcements concerning management software. Third-party support is generally getting stronger. For example, IBM has agreed to support Red Hat's Linux, which should satisfy some concerns. The enthusiasm about Linux to some degree reflects the attitude toward Unix a decade or so ago, and some fear that it could suffer the same fate of fragmentation and marginalization. SGI's Schiffman insisted that the Linux community will not let that happen because interoperability is vital. "The community won't accept or allow anybody to break the momentum," he said. Aberdeen's Potter said momentum will definitely include the federal government -- for financial and security reasons. "The government needs to look more at open source. Open source has got to get on the procurement list," she said. Vulnerability in Netscape servers revealed A bug that allows hackers to gain illicit access to the Netscape Enterprise Server and Netscape FastTrack Server, has been discovered by Internet Security Systems (ISS) and its research team, the X-Force. The vulnerability in both Netscape servers uses a well-known hacker technique -- called buffer overflow -- to overload a server and then allows the hacker to overwrite the systems stack and gain access. The attack takes the form of an overly long HTTP GET request, according to ISS and X-Force. "The fact that it's a remote buffer overflow attack means that an attacker can exploit the vulnerability and remotely upload and execute arbitrary assembly language. An attacker can write an exploit to get the computer to do what ever they want," said Chris Rouland, director of the X-Force, a intrusion-detection research team within ISS. "Users of Netscape [Enterprise and FastTrack Servers] have to patch those systems to protect themselves from this attack." Netscape and ISS have collaborated to create a fix for the bug, in the form of the Enterprise 3.6 SP 2 SSL Handshake fix. It is available from Netscape at www.iplanet.com/downloads/patches/detail_12_86.html. Separately, Netscape on Wednesday announced an encryption and security upgrade for Netscape Communicator 4.61 for use with Internet-commerce sites, which is easier to download. While previously Netscape users would be required to download a full version of the browser to upgrade their level of encryption, the SmartUpdate service -- at home.netscape.com/smartupdate -- requires only a 36KBps file to provide 56-bit U.S. internationally exportable encryption or 128-bit U.S.-grade encryption. Currently, 128-bit encryption is believed to be unbreakable, and 56-bit is the maximum the U.S. government will allow to be exported internationally due to security concerns. Internet Security Systems Inc., and X-Force, in Atlanta, are at www.iss.net. Netscape Communications, a subsidiary of America Online Inc., in Mountain View, Calif., is at www.netscape.com.
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