Business Tech

Updated at 2:15 p.m. PDT: adding information about Dell system.

The main message of the new Core i5 chip is simple: it's cheap--even cheaper than Intel chips based on older technology.

The i5, which brings Intel's new "Nehalem" microarchitecture into the mainstream PC market, immediately makes many, if not most, of the older desktop processors obsolete. Consumers need look no further than pricing on sites like Amazon. The i5-750 lists for $250, while the older--based on Intel's last-generation "Core 2" microarchitecture--Q9650 lists for $319.

The official pricing from Intel in quantities … Read more

AOL announced Tuesday that it has appointed former Yahoo executive Brad Garlinghouse, famed for his "Peanut Butter Manifesto" at that company, as the new president of its Internet and Mobile Communications segment.

Garlinghouse also will run AOL's Silicon Valley operations from its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters and serve as the West Coast lead for AOL Ventures, the company's venture capital arm. He will report directly to AOL Chairman and CEO Tim Armstrong, who was named to those posts in April.

Garlinghouse's most recent position was as an in-house senior adviser for Silver Lake Partners.

"… Read more

Red Hat has launched a project to create an application programming interface that will let developers write applications for use across many kinds of clouds.

The Deltacloud project, introduced on Thursday, aims to provide a "cloud broker," according to Red Hat Chief Technology Officer Brian Stevens. It will provide drivers that map the API to external clouds such as Amazon's Elastic Compute 2 (EC2), as well as to internal virtual clouds.

"We want to foster an ecosystem of users, tools, and products for the cloud," Stevens told ZDNet UK. "Developers can write to a … Read more

eBay has finally found a way to hang up on Skype.

The e-commerce giant plans to sell its Internet telephone service unit to an investor group that includes Netscape founder Marc Andreessen's new venture. Under the deal, eBay will receive approximately $1.9 billion in cash and a note from the buyer in the principal amount of $125 million, for a total of $2.025 billion. The participants expect the deal to close in the fourth quarter.

The investor group, which will take a roughly 65 percent stake in Skype, is led by Silver Lake and includes Index Ventures, … Read more

Work began this week on restoring what will be the world's oldest working stored-program electronic computer.

Volunteers at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park--about 50 miles northwest of London--will rebuild the Witch machine--a computer first used in 1951 for atomic research.

Witch, or the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell, was based on telephone exchange relays and 900 Dekatron gas-filled tubes, which could each hold a single digit in memory. Paper tape was used to both input data for and store the output of the machine.

The device is not the oldest electronic calculating device but … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--If the average person has heard of virtualization at all, the idea probably left little impression beyond something to do with running corporate data centers packed with computing hardware.

But the era in which virtualization directly affects ordinary folks, too, is on its way.

The company in the forefront of the technology, an EMC subsidiary called VMware, drew 12,488 people to its VMworld conference here this week, and one theme of the show was the growing push to move the technology beyond the server realm. Initially that means PCs, but the company demonstrated its technology on mobile phones, … Read more

IBM and Hewlett-Packard could not have planned it any better.

The European Union has launched an in-depth investigation into Oracle's acquisition of Sun, potentially delaying the merger by several more months. In doing so, the EU is actually guaranteeing the demise of Sun's hardware business and gifting it to Sun's competitors by misunderstanding the deal's impact on open source, generally, and on MySQL, specifically.

If you haven't been paying attention, the delay on the merger due to U.S. and EU scrutiny has already resulted in two shockingly bad quarters from Sun. Many enterprise customers … Read more

Arguments for and against the cloud are starting to calm down a bit, and most people agree that the cloud is somewhere in your future, if not in your present.

Instead of arguing semantics of application development and delivery, the discussion should really be around how to deal with a mix of on-premise and on-demand, a combination that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

I spent the first half of this week in Las Vegas at a nontech trade show, and missed both VMworld and the Red Hat Summit. However, watching and reading from afar, I noticed two … Read more

Networking giant Cisco Systems and storage area networking company EMC may be teaming up to form a new joint venture to provide technology services to big companies, the Wall Street Journal reported Thursday.

Citing unnamed sources who have been briefed on the plans, the Journal story said the new joint venture, code-named Alpine, would target large businesses and would focus on installing Cisco server and networking gear and EMC storage equipment into data centers.

It's unclear when the joint venture might be announced, according to the newspaper. So far, Cisco has declined to comment on the speculation. And an … Read more