Microsoft Tuesday gave security vendors like Symantec and McAfee, who two months ago very publicly complained of being locked out of Vista because of Microsoft's new 'you-can't get-to-the-64-bit kernel' PatchGuard widgetry, draft APIs that are supposed to let them access the operating system enough to create products.

Matsushita Electric, also known as Panasonic, claims to have come up with a better rechargeable lithium-ion battery that unlike Sony's infamous lithium-ion batteries, which sparked the largest recall in computer history, won't start fires.

Opteron and the Athlon64 are 'aging' architectures according to Nollenberger Capital analyst Hans Mosesmann and Intel's Core 2 Duo eats its lunch in 95% of all PC applications. AMD is also, as everyone knows, late in moving to 65nm.

AMD has only started making 65nm chips and Intel has already started making 45nm ones so AMD said that it and its buddy IBM would have 45nm parts in mid-'08 using newfangled ultra-low-K interconnect technology and immersion lithography, which should give AMD a performance-per-watt edge.

Somebody's gonna have a very merry Christmas - once they sober up. Clustered storage start-up Isilon Systems Inc went public last Friday nominally pricing its shares at $13 although the broad market never saw that price - it opened $25 ending up 78%. It has yet to give back any ground. It was the third biggest opening day gain of the year - the biggest if you just count technology.

Intel, in its newfound mission to bring low-cost computing to the third world - and compete with One Laptop Per Child - is going to develop an electronic version of the Quran in partnership with two Saudi Arabian ISVs and a training computer for teachers outfitted with the Saudi government-approved K-12 curriculum.

Remember back in, oh, 2001, when a couple of engineers were nabbed at San Francisco Airport just before boarding a plane to China and had their grips searched and out poured all these confidential trade secrets from Sun Microsystems, Transmeta, NEC and Trident Microsystems?

Apple is going to be late handing in its an annual report to the SEC because of its backdating investigation, which has so far resulted in its ex-CFO Fred Anderson leaving the board and casting its ex-general counsel in a bad light. Apple's year ended September 30.

Dell is doing one of those two-in-a-box management things and putting server chief Brad Anderson and desktop chief Jeff Clarke over the new Business Products Group. Notebook boss Alex Gruzen will run the Consumer Products Group on his own. Both Anderson and Gruzen are HP graduates.

Lehman Brothers, which thinks that AMD is capacity-constrained, also thinks that Intel may be aggressively pricing products and quotes China-based Commercial Times, which cites PC OEMs as its sources, as saying that Intel may again cut prices on its P4s by better than 60% on January 21. Lehman, acknowledging that Intel has not confirmed the story, believes the 'pricing environment for MPUs is one of the most crucial variables impacting AMD' and attributes Intel's aggressiveness to 'AMD's margin shortfall in 3Q06 - and remains a risk that we acknowledge the company has limited control over.'

A letter written to Hurd by a couple of Michigan Democrats says the transaction didn't appear to be pre-scheduled. They want to know whether he made the sale while 'in possession of potentially damaging material facts that shareholders' lacked.

HP has apparently dropped an expected shoe. In a widely picked-up story the New York Times said Thursday that HP has sent the highest of high-powered Silicon Valley lawyers, Larry Sonsini, packing, severing his long-standing advisory ties with its board. He was the board's outside counsel and the guy who, after the fact, mind you, sanctioned the company's pretexting caper as 'within legal limits' without cracking a law book.

HP has managed to wriggle off the hook with the California Attorney General's office as far as its silly headline-rich boardroom-directed spying adventure goes. It's cut a deal to avoid prosecution on the civil charges that the AG has been contemplating. The complaint, which carries an injunction, was filed along with the settlement Thursday in the Santa Clara County Superior Court. There was no finding of liability and no civil charges will be brought against any current and former directors, officers or employees of the company.

Aladdin Knowledge Systems , the leader in Software DRM, identity management and content security solutions, today announced that a growing number of ISPs, including Smile-Internet Gold , one of Israel's largest ISPs, are implementing Aladdin's eSafe SecureSurfing(TM) solution to offer business customers unmatched, management-free security services. In addition to a successful, ongoing program that offers consumers 'clean pipe' Internet access, a new Smile-Internet Gold offering brings the same award-winning service to businesses.

'Managing a series of applications from multiple vendors is like driving a car with multiple dashboards,' said Chris Kenworthy, senior vice president, McAfee, Inc., as McAfee today announced the latest release of Total Protection for Enterprise 2.0.

RSA Security Inc. today announced that it has completed its previously announced acquisition of Cyota, Inc., a privately-held company that delivers online security and anti-fraud solutions to thousands of financial institutions worldwide, for total consideration of $145 million. This includes $128.8 million in cash for all of the outstanding capital stock of Cyota, $5.5 million in cash to fund a three-year retention pool and RSA Security's assumption of all vested and unvested Cyota stock options, which represents approximately $10.7 million in value.

IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Disk Storage Systems Tracker shows IBM's external disk storage revenue growing significantly faster than the overall storage marketplace for third quarter 2006, growing revenue 14.3 percent year-to-year, compared to the overall external disk storage marketplace, which grew at 9.9 percent. IBM increased its revenue share year-over-year, and according to IDC, IBM grew revenue faster than Dell, Hitachi, and HP, all of which lost revenue share.

HP has introduced the industry's first blade workstation solution which combines the benefits and security of a centralized data center with workstation-class performance. Based on HP BladeSystem infrastructure, the HP ProLiant Blade Workstation Solution gives users the ability to quickly and seamlessly access workstation compute power from anywhere in the world using thin client devices or Microsoft Windows-based workstations, PCs and notebooks.

Sun Microsystems has announced that Rush University Medical Center in Chicago has deployed a Sun technology infrastructure to run a critical new Electronic Medical Record (EMR) system. The Sun system, comprised of the Solaris 10 Operating System (OS), UltraSPARC IV+ processor-based Sun Fire servers and Sun StorageTek solutions, provides the rigorous high-availability environment required for the hospital's patient information system from Epic Systems Corporation.

McAfee, Inc. , today announced the availability of a podcast from McAfee(R) Avert(R) Labs on the 'Top Ten Security Trends in 2007.' The podcast accompanies today's press release entitled, 'McAfee Avert Labs Unveils Predictions for Top Ten Security Threats in 2007 as Hacking Comes of Age.' In the podcast, McAfee identified the threats it believes businesses and consumers will face in 2007 as computer criminals become more organized and professional in their approach. WHO: David Marcus, security research and communications manager, McAfee Avert Labs with special guest Niall McKay, freelance reporter and broadcast journalist WHERE: The podcast is now available for download under the Company News and Events section at http://www.mcafee.com/ About McAfee, Inc.

SmoothWall has announced the latest version of Advanced Firewall, its multi-function network security solution for demanding enterprise security requirements. New additions in this version include automatic fail-over to a standby system, improved load balancing, VoIP gateway protection and spam filtering.

Sun Microsystems saw its year-to-year total server market share grow 1.1 points, the most of any top six server vendor, according to the IDC Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker. It was the third consecutive quarter that Sun?s market share grew. Sun's saw its year-to-year total server revenue grow at 15.8%, more than double the growth of its closest competitor.

Kroll Factual Data, a subsidiary of Kroll Inc. and a provider of business information services to the mortgage industry, has announced its migration to Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Real Application Clusters to establish a highly available and scalable foundation for its Web-based information services.

HP has announced that AMD has purchased several hundred HP BladeSystem c-Class server blades powered by AMD Opteron processors to support the development of its chip designs. AMD chose the new HP ProLiant BL465c servers over competitive offerings for their industry-leading performance, power and cooling efficiencies and system management capabilities.

Sun Microsystems has announced that Kodak will offer the Sun StorageTek 5800 storage system as an integrated storage option for its CARESTREAM Information Management Solutions. By making its Versatile Intelligent Patient Archive (VIParchive) software available with the StorageTek 5800 system, Kodak's CARESTREAM Solution will offer radiologists and healthcare IT managers a new storage option that improves reliability and performance, while helping to lower costs.

HP outshipped all other major vendors in the worldwide server market for the 18th consecutive quarter, according to third quarter 2006 figures released today by IDC. HP surpassed market growth in the worldwide blade server market, with 43.8 percent year-over-year factory revenue growth. HP also grew faster than the market in units shipped in blades and, with 35 percent revenue market share, had more than three times that of the third-ranked competitor.

IDC has announced that IBM continues to hold the number one position in worldwide server revenue share, growing revenue by 6.6 percent, year over year, and increasing its revenue share to 33.1 percent. The growth was driven by IBM's continued leadership in the highly strategic mainframe and blade segments.

IBM has announced that the AIX 5L V5.3 operating system has been awarded a certificate of conformance by the Open Group's Platform Forum for the UNIX 03 standard, which offers clients with greater flexibility. UNIX 03 is the latest UNIX Product Standard developed by the Open Group Platform Forum for the Single UNIX Specification version 3.

So, this fantastically modern new operating system that is designed to provide us all with the ultimate in gaming experiences isn't worth jack [censored] as it stands right now. I installed and attempted to run every game I have, and I ran them in compatibility mode, I ran them in forced 640x480 mode, I ran them in full-screen and in windowed mode, I ran them with Glass turned off, and I ran them as administrator.

Adobe Systems has introduced Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server 7.2, an enterprise rights management (ERM) solution for protecting and controlling documents throughout their entire lifecycle, from creation, through distribution and collaboration, to archiving and destruction. Now, organizations can conduct critical business processes more securely by protecting a broad range of financial, government, and engineering documents or other files across multiple formats, including Adobe PDF, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and Dassault Systèmes CATIA V5 files.

The former head of CA's worldwide sales, Stephen Richards, was sentenced to seven years in prison Tuesday for his role in the company's $2.2 billion stock fraud scheme. Earlier this month his former boss, ex-CA CEO Sanjay Kumar, drew 12 years. Both men are currently out on bail and are due to report to jail at the end of February. They both pleaded guilty to charges of securities fraud, obstruction, perjury and conspiracy in April, two weeks before they were supposed to stand trial, an oddity that has never been explained given Kumar's previous protestations of innocence.

AMD Sued for Patent Infringement Semiconductor design house Opti Inc has sued AMD in the famed Eastern District of Texas for infringing three Opti patents all entitled 'Predictive Snooping Technology of Cache Memory for Master-Initiated Accesses. The patents are numbers 5,710,906, 5,813,036 and 6,405,291. These are the same patents that Opti sued Nvidia over two years ago in the same venue. Opti and Nvidia settled this August when Nvidia agreed to license the widgetry for $10 million and payments of $750,000 a quarter for three years or until in stopped using the technology.

One of the reasons that AMD bought ATI just surfaced. At Supercomputing on Tuesday AMD started pushing what it called the world's first dedicated stream processor aimed at juicing up HPC with massive doses of floating point performance. And, no, it's not a new Opteron.

Intel is out with its first two quad-core processors, the Xeon 5300, a k a Clovertown, for servers and the Core 2 Extreme Quad-Core, a k a Kentfield, for desktops. Intel, which preens that it's ignited the quad core era, puts two dual-core Core 2 processors in a multi-chip package, an approach AMD, who's at best six months behind disses. It's generally conceded that AMD with its monolithic approach might have an architectural advantage over Intel because it's integrating four cores and four memory controllers on a single die.

Dell's fortunes just soured again - just when Wall Street was starting to think of it as a turnaround story even if it hasn't really done much to deserve that assessment. Anyway, first off, that 16-month-old SEC investigation that Dell tried to keep quite and didn't tell anybody existed until this past August has turned formal, suggesting there are problems with its books and how it recognizes revenues.

HP's alleged spy mistress, ex-chairman Patricia Dunn, pleaded not guilty Wednesday to felony charges stemming from the company's pretexting misadventure that was touched off by press leaks from the HP boardroom. It was the day before HP disclosed the SEC had launched a formal investigation into its antics. Dunn and her lawyer blame ex-HP board member Tom Perkins of VC Kleiner Perkins for waging the 'well-financed and highly orchestrated disinformation campaign' that brought her to this pretty pass.

MySQL has cut a 'strategic' co-developmen t/co-marketing deal with NitroSecurity to integrate the high-performance NitroEDB storage engine with the current release of the MySQL database server. It should be ready around the middle of next year so there's no pricing yet. MySQL has been amassing storage engines since Oracle threatened it by buying Innobase

At Supercomputing 2006, Sun Microsystems has announced that Sun technology is powering ten of the world's highest-performing supercomputers, as determined by the TOP500 Organization. Sun doubled its presence on the prestigious ranking, as compared to the TOP500 list released at Supercomputing 2005, with five new entries including the Mississippi State University (MSU) High Performance Computing Collaboratory (HPC2), Sun Solution Center for HPC (high performance computing) and Sun Grid Compute Utility.

IBM has announced that its BladeCenter system uses up to 30 percent less energy than HP BladeSystem. As energy prices rise to nearly 15 cents per kilowatt hour in New York City, 21 cents per kilowatt hour in Tokyo and up to 23 cents per kilowatt hour in London, businesses can save hundreds, thousands or even millions of dollars in energy costs each year depending on the size of their datacenter.

IBM has announced that InteleNet Communications, dealing in on-demand managed hosting and Internet services, has improved the reliability, accessibility and reduced energy costs in its sprawling 55,000-square-foot data center by using the IBM BladeCenter platform.