Up to 5,000 Oracle/PeopleSoft employees are about to be fired. 'What's not known,' write Roger Strukhoff and Matt Vande Voorde, reporting direct from Pleasanton, CA yesterday, 'is how many of those jobs will be plucked from the sprawling PeopleSoft campus, which dominates the Hacienda ...

Distancing itself ever further from arch-rival Microsoft, whose CEO Bill Gates tried during his keynote at CES 2005 to liken open source software development to a kind of modern-day communism, IBM will today be giving away rights - so it is announcing - to 500 of its software patents.

In case anyone doubts that the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2005 that ended yesterday in Las Vegas marks a turning-point in the geek technology market, here is a round-up of some of the week's highlights, featuring Microsoft, Samsung, Hitachi, and HP. The bounceback has begun.

Oracle, which has been counting PeopleSoft revenues as its own since December 29, took control of PeopleSoft two days before the end of 2004 and immediately started cleaning house, beginning with PeopleSoft's top managers. Oracle expects the deal to close by January 18 and is promising...

Hewlett-Packard said it would marshall its resources to develop more offerings aimed at consumer entertainment. Carly Fiorina is scheduled to provide details at the annual CES in Las Vegas, on Friday.

Yesterday at CES 2005 in Las Vegas Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect at Microsoft, and Judy McGrath, CEO and chairman of MTV Networks, addressed conference attendees. Gates was talking at CES for the seventh successive year.

The latest advancement in IP telephony, which offers free Web-based phone service, is a cordless handset that offers the benefits and features found in traditional cordless phones.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation - whose watchword is 'We believe that the world's toughest problems can be solved - if we work together' - is giving $3M to help those struck by the natural disaster that's wreaked such havoc in South Asia. Amazon.com has helped channel even more, $3...

According to a document just filed with the SEC, the founder of PeopleSoft - David Duffield, who stepped in as CEO when Craig Conway was suddenly fired by the PeopleSoft board - is no longer with the company. He resigned last week as CEO, chairman, and director in the wake of Oracle's ...

SYS-CON Media today announced further details of the upcoming cross-platform technology event, Web Services Edge 2005 East - International Web Services Conference & Expo (www.sys-con.com/edge), to be held in Boston at the Hynes Convention Center, February 15-17, 2005. More than 3,000 i...

In a transaction that is supposed to be the largest software acquisition ever, Symantec, the consumer anti-virus house, is buying Veritas, the enterprise storage and backup manager, for $13.5 billion in stock. The price works out to roughly $30.75 a share, better than a $5 premium over...

In an all-cash deal worth approximately $10.3 billion, Oracle is going to acquire 100% of PeopleSoft's shares, at a newly increased price of $26.50, a $2.50 increase on its 'best and final' offer which expired in November. PeopleSoft's board has approved the deal. 'We believe this revi...

Once publicly free of the PC division, will IBM either buy, or form a close joint venture, with Apple - to sell its PCs, which coincidentally are now built around IBM's PowerPC chip? That's the question being asked by tech-savvy commentators who wonder what will happen next if Big Blu...

IBM released a new plug-in for Eclipse that makes developers' jobs easier, by providing visualizations of Web services transactions.

Google Scholar is the latest search engine from Google, designed to provide access to scholarly articles and abstracts available through open access publishing.

'Novell seeks to blame Microsoft for its own mismanagement,' says Microsoft in a public statement released in response to the suit just filed in federal court in Utah by Novell alleging that Microsoft unfairly dislodged WordPerfect from its market leadership position in the word-proces...

The PeopleSoft board today recommended to its shareholders that they give Oracle the cold shoulder and reject its $24 per share bid for the company, seriously undervaluing it - says PeopleSoft - at just $8.8BN. Larry Ellison issued a statement saying that the offer is good till midnigh...

Version 1.0 of Firefox, the free browser, is officially released today, after more than 7 million people downloaded it during its 'preview release' period. The Mozilla Foundation, which inherited much of the underlying software code from Netscape, hopes Firefox will take a 10% chunk of...

Web services will continue to play a vital role within enterprises, as companies strive to create cost-effective solutions that can be integrated into existing infrastructures. J2EE and Microsoft's .NET are the two primary platforms used in Web services. And while these two platforms c...

Larry Ellison has raised Oracle's offer for PeopleSoft to $24 a share from $21 - a hike of 14%. This is the fifth new offer since the hostile takeover saga began last June.

After publicly retracting the results of J2EE versus .NET benchmark tests it conducted back in 2002, The Middleware Company (TMC) bravely ventured recently to revisit this minefield. From IBM's point of view, according to an internal document obtained today by WebSphere Journal, TMC ha...

Microsoft's Derek Denny-Brown explores the various issues he has with the XML 1.0 specification, including whitespace, allowed characters, and lastly XML Namespaces - 'which pushes an immense burden of complexity onto the APIs and XML reader/writer implementations,' argues Denny-Brown.

Any business-savvy engineer knows that algorithm improvements come at a price: the engineer's time. But what about asking programmers to be a little more lazy? Warren MacEvoy chews over some of the technology issues of the day and offers his own suggestions.

The current slate of Web services standards has evolved into a mature set of very useful API's and into service-oriented architectures, or SOAs. Enterprise integration, however, includes many requirements that are not met by SOAs alone. A movement is under way to augment Web services w...

The two-week trial in the Delaware Chancery Court over PeopleSoft's anti-takeover defenses began yesterday with a bang, with PeopleSoft director Steven Goldby testifying that CEO Craig Conway was fired on Friday over concerns about his 'situational ethics.'

These days Calvin Austin is one of the busiest people in the Java world: J2SE 5.0, that was also known as the 'Tiger' project, is being officially released today! JDJ's Yakov Fain was able to catch Austin, spec lead for Java 5.0, right before the plane from San Francisco to New York wh...

For over a decade, Tim Bray, one of the prime movers of XML, managed the Oxford English Dictionary project at the University of Waterloo. That was from 1988 to 1999. During the end of his time there he launched one of the first public Web search engines (in 1995), coinvented XML 1.0, a...

'When we hear about short-term job losses that result from outsourcing to India and China, we also need to consider the long-term benefits of these nations developing into prime markets for U.S. exports,' says Dr. Adam Kolawa, the co-founder and CEO of Parasoft. Outsourcing actually of...

With nearly a million downloads since March, Sun Java System Application Server 8 Platform Edition, a fundamental component of what Sun calls its Java Enterprise System, has rapidly become what the Santa Clara, CA-based giant is boldly calling 'the developer's platform of choice.'

The past several years have seen some significant technology trends, such as service-oriented architecture (SOA), enterprise application integration (EAI), business-to-business (B2B), and Web services. These technologies have attempted to address the challenges of improving the results...

Google has acquired one of the foremost minds in modern i-technology, and it knows it. If the search colossus, or anyone else, is in any doubt, just read what he had to say recently about the bloated nature of full-blown Web services, versus the simplicity of XML over HTTP.

SYS-CON Media is inviting BEA, Borland, IBM, JBoss, JOnAS, Macromedia, Microsoft, Oracle, Orion, Sun, and Sybase to an 'Application Server Shoot-Out' at the upcoming Web Services Edge Conference & Expo, in Boston next February. The shootout will be a live competition aimed at finding o...

What do a CNET technology columnist, 95.5 million telephone handsets, and Sun's president and COO all have in common? Answer: they all strongly favor Java. Is it a sign of better times ahead for the language once known as 'Oak'?

Service-oriented architecture (SOA), while its underpinnings have been around for years, has recently become one of the most talked about topics in the IT industry. The interest in SOAs is largely due to the emergence of Web services and their ability to expose business applications th...

The biggest announcement from JavaOne, according to Michael Yuan, was that Nokia is building a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework on smart mobile phones that could quickly change how an average technology user sees Web services.

Six weeks after stepping down as chairman and CEO, Sanjay Kumar, the 42-year-old Sri Lankan immigrant who lived the American dream and became chief executive of Computer Associates, the third-largest American software company, finally severed his connection with the firm on Friday afte...

Hard on the heels of the announcement by Sun's president and COO Jonathan Schwartz earlier this week that Solaris will be open-sourced comes confirmation from Sun's Java technology evangelist: 'We haven't worked out how to open-source Java - but at some point it will happen,' says popu...

Sir Tim Berners-Lee was in fine form at the 13th annual World Wide Web Conference, running this week in New York. He gave a keynote address yesterday devoted to the successor to the WWW, namely the 'Semantic Web.'

With Web services usage on the rise, organizations are seeing a growing complexity in the enterprise systems being built. The need for a robust management solution is critical, as organizations look for better ways to monitor and control their IT environment.

Microsoft's Antivirus Award Program, the $5 million fund to reward people for coming forward with information about those who release major worms and viruses, scored a major success when the Sasser culprit was brought to book at the weekend.