Practical Technology

As I reported on May 31st, 2011, Oracle has, with IBM’s encouragement, given the open-source OpenOffice office suite to The Apache Software Foundation (ASF). In a statement issued this morning, June 1st, Oracle’s Luke Kowalski, VP of Oracle Corporate Architecture Group, stated that the company was going to “contribute the OpenOffice.org code to The Apache [...]

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This weekend was filled with rumors about the fate of OpenOffice. Oracle essentially abandoned OpenOffice, after The Document Foundation’s LibreOffice fork but rumor has it that IBM wants the project to continue. The big question, which is still unresolved as I write this, is, “How?” At the moment, almost all of what I have are [...]

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Eight years ago, SCO, a long-time x86 Unix company, which had recently been bought out by Caldera, a leading Linux business of the day, shocked the IT world by suing IBM for stealing Unix code placing it in Linux. A Linux company suing Linux’s leading enterprise partner!? While SCO/Caldera did have reason to be annoyed [...]

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It’s looking pretty good for Watson, IBM’s Linux-powered computer cluster, as IBM engineers get it ready for its mid-February showdown with Jeopardy’s all-time champs, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. In a practice round, Watson already won a practice round and Bodog, the online gambling company and odds-maker has made Watson the favorite at 5/6. Even [...]

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“I’ll take evil, science-fiction computers for $2,000,” Alex. OK, we’re not quite there yet, but in the early going, IBM’s Watson supercomputer beat Jeopardy super-champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in a practice round. And, what is Watson running? Linux, of course. There’s nothing surprising about that. The fastest of fast computers have long used [...]

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