Stories about: Infoseek

Imagine how different the tech industry might have been had Gary Kildall accepted IBM's offer, back in 1980, to license his computer operating system for a top-secret project. CP/M would have been the OS that shipped with the original IBM PC, and the world might never have heard the name of Kildall's competitor, who eventually accepted the contract: a Mr. Bill Gates.

Many data center problems are easy to solve once you know what's going on. The hard part is finding them in the gigabytes of data dutifully logged on a millisecond basis by all the hardware, databases and applications. Manually combing through all the tiers of log data to track down a transaction or problem is slow and expensive. This is where Splunk comes in, a tool that uses search technology to speed problem resolution.

Internally at Google it's dubbed the "Lake Wobegon Strategy" -- "only hire candidates who are above the mean of your current employees."

Googling may be the best way to find data on the Internet, but when it comes to searching through those impenetrable data center log files, a San Francisco startup wants you to try something new: Splunking.

Steve Kirsch is a pro at raising VC (venture capital) funding. He lists a star-studded cast of investors for his latest venture, an e-commerce software and services company called Propel, which includes Marc Andreessen, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and the private investment firm of Michael Dell, MSD Capital -- to name a few.

Telecom New Zealand Ltd. Wednesday suffered the same fate as Microsoft Corp. did recently, losing its web presence and some customer services for much of the day because of problems with its DNS servers.

German media conglomerate Axel Springer Verlag AG announced Monday a new venture capital fund to finance Internet startups. The fund, called AS Venture, will debut at the end of this year, said spokeswoman Carola Schmidt.

Targeting the growing e-services provider market, Hewlett-Packard has ushered in its Piranha A-Class entry-level server line. HP's strategy, homing in on the $1.3 billion Australian server market, takes a three-pronged approach.

Students having difficulty with their French homework can breathe a small sigh of relief. AltaVista Co. on Wednesday launched an updated version of its Babel Fish translation service.

Hewlett-Packard has launched a new line of entry-level Unix servers, part of a broader effort to earn the vendor a bigger slice of the estimated $US18 billion worldwide market for such computer systems, company officials said.

It can be surprising to discover that running the same query on several search engines can yield different results. This is because search engines are sort of like movie reviewers: They all have their own opinions. That's why you may want to use more than one search engine when looking for something.