“At the National Association of Broadcasters annual trade show on Wednesday IBM(R) announced five new IntelliStation M Pro workstations and 12 new NetVista(TM) A60 business and A60i home desktop systems, all boosted by advanced Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 processors at speeds up to 1.7GHz(superscript: (1)). The IntelliStation M Pro features new Fire GL4(superscript: (2)) graphics based on IBM’s copper chip technology, boosting performance in ways designed to simplify the
manipulation of large three-dimensional models.”The new IntelliStation M Pro is the first in the industry to offer the
new Fire GL4 graphics card. Microprocessors based on IBM’s copper chip
technology — launched only two years ago on high-end IBM servers —
improve performance dramatically as compared to chips based on aluminum.
Pioneered by IBM researchers, these microprocessors are smaller, denser,
faster and cooler than their aluminum counterparts. They are also more
reliable and less expensive to manufacture.

“This new graphics card offers high-end performance and function at a
lower price,” said Doug Oathout, director of marketing, IBM IntelliStation.
“It provides existing and new customers with many of the capabilities of
high-end 3D, enabling them to attain new levels of productivity.”

In addition to offering the new Fire GL4 card, the industry’s
next-generation 3D graphics accelerator, IBM also offers the Fire GL2
(superscript: (2)) card. They are among a comprehensive range of
performance 2D- and advanced 3D-graphics solutions certified by IBM for
IntelliStation compatibility. They include the Matrox Millennium G450 and
NVIDIA Quadro2 MXR graphics adapters, both supporting dual displays for
enhanced productivity.

Also at NAB today, LGI Media Technologies announced plans to use IBM
IntelliStation workstations and other IBM technologies in its new
Hollywoodbury Studios in Woodbury, Minn., near Minneapolis-St. Paul.

“IBM provides a complete and synergistic solution, and we are excited
to go forward with the IBM technology partnership,” says LaSalle Gabriel,
the president and CEO of LGI. “It is our mission to stay ahead of the
market with leading technology and software solutions.”

Other enhancements to the IntelliStation M Pro line-up include:

larger hard drives, up to 40GB(superscript: (3)) in size, for greater
storage capabilities;
increased memory supported by the Intel 850 chipset with up to PC800
RAMBUS ECC, delivering more data;
user-friendly mechanical design allowing for tool-free access
accommodating six adapters (five PCI slots, one 4X AGP Pro 50) and 7
storage devices (4 bays open); and
more operating system choices, as systems are preloaded with
Microsoft(R) Windows(R) 2000. IntelliStation also supports Windows NT(R)
4.0 and Linux(R) 6.0

IBM IntelliStation workstations provide owners with a three-year,
parts and on-site labor limited warranty(superscript: (4)); free
24x7x365(superscript: (5)) technical support is standing by for the duration of the warranty, augmented by the IntelliStation
“Ask Engineering” rapid response team. Through the Web, users can directly contact IntelliStation system engineers on
issues ranging from setup to optimizing system components for peak performance with mission-critical applications.

New NetVista A60 and A60i Desktops

The NetVista A60, designed for business users, and the NetVista A60i,
built for productive individuals at home and small businesses, now feature
Pentium 4 processor speeds of up to 1.7GHz. First introduced in the fall
of 2000, the NetVista A60 and A60i series of personal systems occupies the
high-performance category of the IBM NetVista family of desktop products.

In addition to boasting the fastest processor speeds available from
Intel, the A60 and A60i desktops provide users with huge hard drives, some
models featuring up to 80 gigabytes of capacity. Additionally, the A60 and
A60i desktops offer four bays and four slots, providing users with a high
degree of expandability.

While the A60 line is built for performance, it also packs in a number
of useful software tools that allow users to run their businesses more
efficiently. Easy-to-use NetVista software tools like IBM Backup and
Restore and IBM Data Transfer help people transfer their data and
electronic personality settings from previous personal computers, and
provide one-button restore capabilities in the event of software glitches
or system crashes.

Pricing and Availability

The new IBM IntelliStation M Pro with 1.7GHz Pentium 4, available immediately, starts at $3,320(superscript: (6)). IntelliStation M Pro
workstations with 1.7GHz Pentium 4 and the Fire GL4 card are available in June, starting at $4,820(superscript: (6)). The new NetVista A60i
starting at $1,234(superscript: (6)), and the A60, starting at $1,239(superscript: (6)), are available for order now. All can be purchased directly
through www.ibm.com or by calling 1-888-SHOP-IBM.

(c) International Business Machines Corporation 2001. All rights
reserved.

IBM and IntelliStation are registered trademarks and NetVista is a
trademark of International Business Machines Corporation in the United
States and other countries. Microsoft, Windows and Windows NT are
trademarks or registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. Intel and
Pentium are registered trademarks of Intel Corporation. Linux is a
registered trademark of Linus Torvalds.Other company, product and service
names may be trademarks or service marks of others.

1. GHz only measures microprocessor internal clock speed; many factors affect application performance.
2. Fire GL2 and Fire GL4 are trademarks of ATI Technologies, Inc. and are used under license.
3. GB equals 1 billion bytes and MB equals 1 million bytes when referring to storage capacity; accessible capacity may be less.
4. For information regarding the terms and conditions of IBM’s limited warranty, please visit our Web site or call 1-800-772–2227.
Copies are available upon request. For warranties including on-site service, a technician is sent after IBM attempts to resolve
the problem remotely.
5. Response time varies. May exclude some holidays.
6. IBM Direct price; does not include taxes or shipping and is subject to change without notice. Reseller prices may vary. IBM
reserves the right to alter product offerings and specifications at any time without notice.

Warthawg writes: “ITWorld: ‘My apologies to John Griffin, but after reading Linus Torvalds’s
autobiography Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary,
I feel that a better title for the book might be Dweeb Like Me.'”

Infoworld: “With the Activation Wizard, users are required to activate all new or preinstalled
versions of Microsoft’s software. The process is completed by filling out an
electronic form with the 25-character product identification number that comes with
each software product. The software is then issued an installation identification
number using PKI (public key infrastructure) technology specific to the computer it is
installed on.” Time for everyone to switch to Linux – casual copying encouraged!

“IBM and Sun unveiled new versions of their Unix operating
systems this week. Just like the children’s game Rock ‘Em
Sock ‘Em Robots, the two computing behemoths seem locked
in a battle, trying to knock each other’s block off. The latest
fight is in the management-capability arena.” More at Information Week.

– by Jack Bryar –
Open Source Business –

A billion here. A billion there. As the late U.S. Sen.
Everett Dirksen once said, after a while you’re spending real money.
IBM’s recent billion dollar purchase of Informix software looks like real
money — but it was spent on a dying company. Further, it was spent on
to support a software design that’s starting to look seriously out of
date. Go figure.You may have read that IBM has
just bought the rapidly shrinking remains of what used to be
Oracle’s chief competitor among major database software
publishers. A few months ago Informix began to divide itself in half, as it began
to devise a strategy to divest itself from its core database
business. On Tuesday, Big Blue acquired the assets of that database business,
leaving the rest of Informix to re-name itself Ascential Software.

The market responded by dropping IBM’s stock price a
couple of points. The analysts who commented weren’t negative but
they were cynical. The Gartner group suggested that the $1 billion dollar
purchase price represented little more than an
attempt to buy market share. Naturally Oracle dismissed the deal,
suggesting that IBM will likely inherit more of Informix’s recent problems than
much of 100,000 independent-minded database customers.

Most analysts think that IBM’s purchase was aimed at making sure that Oracle didn’t acquire those same customers, and was intended to turn the heat on the competition
just as Oracle’s sales had begun to flatten out.

A far more interesting question is why IBM’s leaders thought the purchase of a
dying Unix database firm with six separate and shrinking database
products would do anything for them. The relational database business is getting
rather interesting, and not necessarily in a good way, if you’re the
vendor of closed proprietary database software.

Traditional database systems have a problem: They’re old, and they
are beginning to look it. Increasingly, new applications are requiring a
new way of looking at data sets. The Web, and a variety of proposed
e-commerce and other data exchange applications require universal, incredibly
flexible and completely open database structures. It looks like the new format
for data exchange between these universal databases is going to be
XML, the shortened-up, Web-ready version of the Standardized General
Markup Language (SGML) that’s been used for years to express the layout and
content of electronic documents.

XML is basically a common format being used to
describe and wrap of content elements — only the old definition of
content is being rapidly broadened, to the point that the distinction
between documents and data is being effectively erased. The old definition of
wrapper is being broadened too, as descriptions have evolved into a form of
encoding that can guide how future programs interpret and manipulate the
content.

XML is being developed in an open environment, and, at least for the
moment, it has the same kind of messy, disorganized energy that Open
Source software developers have managed to get used to. New standards
committees are being spawned indiscriminately. There are lots of proposed and half
finished designs splattered all over the ‘Net.

The expected payoff for all this energy is a new set of highly
sophisticated applications such as Enterprise Information Portals (EIPs), which
are flexible frameworks for cooperative processing using application
elements such as data/document content management, warehousing
and archiving, content publishing, data mining and conditional
information sharing; a type of program that is really quite beyond the capabilities
of today’s standard database platforms.

The problem for many database developers is that, the more
application designers look at XML, the more traditional database systems look like
legacy platforms to be overcome. Instead of database platforms that
shoehorn XML into old-fashioned database tables there’s building demand for a
new database structures that make better use of native XML.

One such product is Open Source. And on the same day that IBM
announced it had spent a billion dollars on Informix, a fellow named Falko
Braeutigam announced the first stable release of the Open Source database called Ozone.

Ozone is a complete, object-oriented database
management system built in Java, and capable of running Java database
applications.

Ozone isn’t exactly new. An earlier version, Ozone O.61 has been
around for a while. This mature 1.0 may be stable, but it hardly has all the
needed features required to chase the likes of IBM or Oracle out of the
market just yet. In some ways it’s relatively primitive stuff, but it
has little of the legacy burdens borne by the commercial products. It’s
open enough to serve as a universal platform, and it is the first database
platform to treat XML properly.

At some level, most commercial vendors have tried to map XML back
to their proprietary back-end database systems to achieve much of
their functionality. The Ozone approach is is cleaner and simpler — and
a more logical starting platform for down line XML development. Others
are developing additional content management layers among other
elements.

Ozone includes a fully W3C compliant Document Object Model
(DOM) implementation. DOM is a platform- and language-neutral interface that
allows various programs or scripts to dynamically access the content structure
and style XML-wrapped content through an open DOM interface rather than
a proprietary, and product-specific APIs. Product developers can use
the DOM interface to cooperate with each other, increasing type of
interoperability required to realize required to develop a variety of
cooperative processing and complex B2B applications.

Ozone may not be ready to compete with Oracle any more than
Informix apparently was. But it is a logical Open Source platform on which to
build the future “universal database” required by next-generation XML
applications. And it cost a whole lot less than a billion dollars.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.

David Sugar writes “Bayonne
(http://www.bayonne.cx) is the freely licensed multi-line voice
response telephony server of the GNU project (http://www.gnu.org) and a component of
GNU Enterprise (http://www.gnue.org). bayonne has
traditionally provided the ability to easily create scalable
telephony applications and original services that can be directly
integrated with traditional scripting languages and tools commonly
found on free softwaree platforms such as GNU/Linux. Bayonne offers
a wide degree of telephony hardware support and a modular
architecture thru the use of plugins.

In distributing the sixth milestone release of Bayonne, we have
chosen to focus on providing a free software platform for creating
and deploying next generation XML integrated voice applications.
Traditionally such systems have only either been available as limited
proprietary software, or only provided thru external hosting
services. In providing Bayonne with XML support, we intend to
deliver a free software solution that not only can be used for those
hosting telephony services, but which can also be integrated and
deployed entirely within the enterprise if so desired.

This initial release of milestone 6 has the first functional
snapshot of Bayonne XML services. This includes a plugin which
introduces a special XML dialect, BayonneXML. BayonneXML is intended
to become a superset of the existing CallXML dialect and will provide
support for additional features and functionality specific to
Bayonne. Our intent is to support a wide body of XML languages thru
plugins, including those that do fully conform to existing XML
language specs (CallXML, VML, VXML, XTML, etc), rather than providing
a server that can only execute a single dialect. This will allow
Bayonne to provide voice browsing to entirely other kinds of XML data
thru the development of additional plugins.

My decision to provide XML as part of milestone 6, rather than RTP
trunking, was based on the fact that the Common C++ XML parser is
already very stable, while the Common C++ RTP stack has only recently
reached usable functionality. Rapid progress is expected in ccRTP
over the next few weeks, and that will form the core of a new, and
final Bayonne Milestone, before final cleanup and release of Bayonne
1.0. In addition to ccRTP, there is certainly also need for further
development of URL streaming in Common C++. While there is now a
core team of committed developers in place for Bayonne, there are
many additional areas of development where we do need and could use
additional contributors. If you are interested in helping with
Bayonne development, join the mailing list thru
bayonne-devel-request@lists.sourceforge.net or send e-mail to me
directly.

”

PC World reports that Intel officials have turned up further pressure on rival Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) by demonstrating a 2GHz version of the Pentium 4 at the Intel Developer Forum held in Taipei. AMD’s fastest processor currently available is the 1.33GHz Athlon launched in March.

Kelly McNeill writes “In the new information age, code begets code and chemistry begets chemistry. Intellectual property rights that restrict musical duplication are not a threat to the average at-home musical innovator, but closed-source and lawsuit-ready software absolutely holds back the daily idea machine that slumbers within the walls of many companies today.”

The BBC reports that the Secure Digital Music Initiative is attempting to gag a group of researchers who recently broke the SDMI protection, by blocking the publishing of their papers on the topic.

InternetNews: “ISS claims perpetrators can equip their laptops with wireless technology, sit inconspicuously on a park bench, or in a car,
and casually monitor traffic, access applications, and hijack data flowing over someone else’s wireless network,
unbeknownst to the victim. To combat this threat, which sounds like it could be a plot line from an upcoming James Bond film,
ISS Wednesday drew the curtain on wireless local area network (WLAN) security software and consulting practices.”