Tech industry analyst Philip Russom asks: “Does IBM know what it’s gotten itself into?

On the upside, IBM’s acquisition of Informix Software promises to bring
approximately 120,000 new customers to the Data Management Group, the home of
the rising star DB2, as well as a few thousand talented database professionals and a
number of useful pieces of technology. On the downside, however, the acquisition
also brings a plague of problems, such as a history of business blunders by Informix
management, thousands of ticked-off Informix investors, and–worst of all–several
legacy database management systems (DBMSs) that entered Informix Software
through its acquisition of Ardent Software.” Read the column at ZDNet.

Slashdot has Craig Pfeifer’s review of Server-Based Java Programming, by Ted Neward: ”

If you are looking for a Java2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE) overview (Enterprise Java Beans (EJB), Servlets,
Java Server Pages (JSP)…) or an intro to Java fundamentals, this book is not for you. This book covers some
fundamentals of threads, classloaders and sockets, but the bulk of the text is the application of these
concepts. If you aren’t already familliar with how these features are commonly used, you might find yourself
doing a little prerequisite work to get the full value out of the material in these chapters.”

F*ckedCompany regulars are discussing this item: “Double your profit by cutting your office in half! : Rumor has it Sendmail.com is laying off people this very moment. Apparently about 60 jobs will be axed by the end of the week.”

From Slashdot: “One of the pilot-link main developers states on Advogato and on his site that Sony
is violating GPL by distributing binary only version of POSE that has been customized for their
Clie (their new Palm compatible device).”

From a ZDNet story: “File-swapping and instant messaging company Aimster has opened a new front in the
online music wars, asking for court protection as legal troubles threaten to send it down a
path similar to Napster’s.”

From InternetWire: Next week at the
Networld+Interop event in Las Vegas, Bluesocket
Inc, a developer of wireless local area network
(WLAN) equipment for managing and connecting
wireless devices to corporate networks and the Internet, will announce its Bluesocket Secure
Wireless Bridge, model WB-1000.

The Linux-based management server will curtail the practice of “skyjacking,” or the ability for
unauthorized users to freely gain wireless access to the corporate wireless network from nearby.

An anonymous reader points us to a ZDNet story about today’s Microsoft speech. Microsoft is sharing source code, but still distancing itself from Open Source.

TheStandard.com adds more context to today’s Microsoft executive speech on Open Source software. “Redmond lets its customers look at source code but doesn’t
let them tinker with it. In fact, the company says free code is
potentially criminal.”

Patrick Mullen writes, “The Duke of URL has posted a review of the Gigabyte GA-7ZXR motherboard, a KT133A motherboard with on-board Promise IDE RAID. The review covers all of its features, layout, benchmarks (Q3A, Kernel
Compilation, XHDBench), overclocking, the BIOS, and much more.”

CNet has more information on Venezuelan bank Banco Mercantil buying into “IBM’s strategy of using Linux on a mainframe
computer.

The bank, one of Venezuela’s largest, will move tasks currently running on 30 Windows NT
servers onto a mainframe running Linux, IBM said. Customers checking account information over
the Internet also will be using the mainframe’s services.”