Stories about: HIS Limited

I sometimes wonder why there aren't any movies made about IT superheroes. Sure, there's always Superman (able to leap tall buildings in a single bound) and Batman (the caped crusader), but what about WANman -- the IT superhero that accelerates high-latency traffic and saves the company from additional Internet bandwidth costs? Well, the tights and cape might not go over well (except on casual Fridays), but any IT staffer that can give enterprise users more performance is well on their way to superhero stardom.

Nicholas Carr, of IT Doesn't Matter fame, spoke with Computerworld's Joyce Carpenter about his new book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google.

If you had any doubts about Sun Microsystems' commitment to open source, it's time to set them aside. Sun put its money where its mouth is Wednesday, with the announcement that it would buy open source database vendor MySQL for a whopping US$1 billion. If the price tag set tongues wagging, however, it was no more tantalizing than the question that immediately sprung to the minds of IT managers everywhere: Now that Sun owns MySQL, what on earth does it plan to do with it?

Sun just announced its acquisition of MySQL, but for several months the open-source database has been getting the performance tracing integration with the Solaris platform that it needs to follow through on Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's committment to performance improvements.

The US space program should look to collaboration and open systems to drive the next wave of human exploration and innovation, Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt said Thursday.

In agreeing this week to pay US$1 billion for MySQL, Sun Microsystems said it hopes to make MySQL's open-source database more attractive to enterprise users. But Sun has a lot of work to do, according to some MySQL users.

SAP and Business Objects have announced the first joint products from their merger, although the planned tight integration of the companies' software will take longer to achieve.

Fact met fiction Wednesday when a Hollywood actor and director sat down with two MIT physicists to compare the reality of teleportation to the special effects version in the upcoming movie, Jumper.

People who prefer Apple's Macintosh computers over PCs have long been considered to be on the artsy, hip end of the personality spectrum -- and now a study proves that "Mac people" indeed are more liberal and open-minded than average folks.

Former EMC executive Steve Redman has joined McAfee as president for the Asia Pacific region.