Last year's Yankee Group TCO study attracted criticism when it became clear that that the sample group was taken from a mailing list aimed at Windows system administrators.

Last year's Web-based survey was funded and carried out by Sunbelt Software, a vendor of Windows utilities, which publicised the survey solely through a mailing list called W2Knews, billing itself as "the World's first and largest e-zine designed for NT/2000 System Admins and Power Users". In the 16 February edition of W2Knews, which launched the survey, the company said it and Yankee Group were "surveying Windows Sites" to see how they were "responding to the Linux phenomenon and the TCO question".

In a report published by research and analysis firm Quocirca, entitled "Migrating to Linux on the Desktop", the company found not only was it a myth that you had to be a power user to cope with Linux, the complete opposite is true.

Microsoft is expanding its "Get the Facts" campaign against Linux by talking about the reliability of Windows versus Linux systems, a company executive said this week at the Open Source Business Conference here.

"Reliability has been challenging for us. It is an area that has been very noisy," says Martin Taylor, general manager of platform strategy at Microsoft. "Customers say that reliability is very important to them and that they are hearing that Linux and Unix are more reliable than Windows."

A five-member coalition of high-tech heavyweights, including IBM, Oracle and Nokia, has thrown its weight behind the European Commission in its anti-trust court battle with US software giant Microsoft, the group's lawyer said.

Andrew Morton clarifies his statement from November

Linux devotees need not worry about the Linux kernel ever forking into multiple, incompatible derivatives, Andrew Morton, lead maintainer of the 2.6 version of the kernel, said at the Open Source Business Conference here on Tuesday.

The 29th edition of FOSE opened today at the Washington Convention Center with a three-day slate of exhibits, demonstrations, discussions and meetings on IT and government.

A well-known security consultant on Tuesday urged cash-strapped businesses to consider using free, readily available open-source security tools and applications to help cope with the rising spate of malicious hacker attacks.

A flaw has been discovered in the popular open-source browser Firefox that could expose sensitive information stored in memory, Secunia has warned.

Yahoo Inc. Chief Executive Terry Semel took advantage of a rebound in technology stock prices and sold 10 million shares of Yahoo worth $230 million last year, making his annual haul one of the largest ever for a corporate executive.

The hardware review world is going to hell in a hand basket, and the reasons are money, stupidity, and PR people that are too effective. Low morals on the part of many in the scene are also to blame, but they only contribute to the problem. Some are too stupid to do more than reword press releases and swipe slides from PDFs, others are flat out bought.

Friendster scales the network with open source

When the upstart social networking site skyrocketed to success, its engineers turned to free software to handle the load.

Windows and Linux are neck-and-neck when it comes to the cost of maintenance. Analyst Yankee Group questioned 509 companies and organisations and found that the hourly cost of Windows downtime was three- to four-times higher than that of Linux server downtime.

When entrepreneur Byron Sebastian started his company last year, he set his sights on the business software industry's ultimate cash cow: maintenance contracts.

Young children who watch a lot of television are more likely to become bullies, a new study reveals. The authors suggest the increasingly violent nature of children's cartoons may be to blame. "What I suspect is these violent animated shows are causing kids to become desensitised to violence."

Hard drives for mobiles and other portable gadgets could store up to a terabyte of data in the next few years, using a century-old recording process. Hitachi has said it can fit 230 gigabits of data per square inch on a disk using "perpendicular recording". Perpendicular recording was pioneered by the late 19th century work of Danish scientist Valdemar Poulsen, who demonstrated magnetic recording with his telegraphone.