Business Tech

A wide swath of technology stocks posted double-digit gains Tuesday, as the broader markets surged to exceptionally high levels as investors anticipated an interest rate cut by the Federal Reserve.

Cisco Systems, Amazon.com, Dell, and Comcast were just some of the tech players whose shares crested above 10 percent gains at the market's close, as the Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped a whopping 889.35 points to 9,065.12, up 10.9 percent.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq rose 143.57 points, or 9.5 percent, to close at 1,649.47, while the S&P 500 soared … Read more

Broadcom on Tuesday said that it completed the acquisition of Advanced Micro Devices' digital TV chip business--at a discount to the original price.

On August 25, the two companies announced a price for the unit of $192.8 million. But Broadcom now expects that AMD's digital TV business will have fourth-quarter revenue of between $15 million and $20 million, lower than previously expected, the Irvine, Calif.-based company said.

Accordingly, the price has been slashed to $141.5 million, about a 27 percent reduction from the original price.

Broadcom had said in August that AMD's DTV unit would … Read more

SAP reported its third-quarter results Tuesday, posting a 5 percent decline in earnings and nixing its revenue forecast for the year, given the uncertainty of the economic climate.

The German enterprise software maker, which reported its results prior to the market opening, saw its shares head slightly south as the morning progressed, falling to $30.02 a share, down less than 1 percent in intraday trading.

The company reported revenues of 2.76 billion euros, up 14 percent over the same time last year. Prior to issuing its third-quarter warning earlier this month, Wall Street had expected SAP to post … Read more

How about a 64-bit operating system with that 64-bit processor?

The 64-bit version of Windows Vista is not new. It arrived when Vista did. But making it standard on a crush of new consumer laptops being sold at Best Buy is a recent change.

All PCs now ship with Intel or Advanced Micro Devices 64-bit processors. Until recently, however, most consumer laptops have come with a 32-bit version of Vista. There are many reasons for this, two of the biggest being a lack of driver support and the larger memory requirements for the 64-bit OS.

But memory is no longer … Read more

Citrix aims to beat VMware at virtualization. A year ago it bought XenSource, the company created by the founders of the Xen open-source hypervisor, and switched the Citrix business focus to virtualization.

Citrix made XenServer, the commercial system based on Xen, central to its strategy, and applied a Xen brand to other Citrix products involved in delivering applications to desktops. XenSource staff gained senior positions at Citrix and have been setting the company's future direction.

Ian Pratt, the original project leader of Xen and a founder of XenSource, remains a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, but is now … Read more

Call it the elephant approach to sizing up the health of tech.

In two separate reports released Monday, Forrester Research CEO George Colony and Mayfield Fund weighed in on where they believe tech is headed in this challenging climate.

Colony, who took hold of the proverbial elephant's trunk, noted in his CounterIntuitive blog that the current recession will likely result in a tech spending slowdown, but nothing near the levels seen in the post-bubble-burst era of 2001 to 2003.

He noted CEOs and CIOs are indicating they plan to "change their way" out of the current economic … Read more

Canonical will release the newest version of its Ubuntu version of Linux on Thursday, Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth said Monday, but the company's profitability isn't on such a fast track.

Ubuntu 8.10, aka Intrepid Ibex in the company's alphabetically ascending naming convention, is the latest installment of Linux for desktop computers and servers in the company's six-month release cycle. Among the new features are support for 3G wireless modems, the ability to set up an encrypted and password-protected private directory, a guest account that can help out someone needing temporary use of a computer, and … Read more

The investment firm gobbling up shares of Sun Microsystems might look tough, but it usually avoids playing hardball with executives.

Sun got a wake-up call last week from its largest single investor, Southeastern Asset Management, which added the hardware maker to its list of companies for which it has switched from being a passive investor to an active one, with regard to corporate governance, operations management, and increasing shareholder value. But while the road ahead may be bumpy with this activist shareholder, which had $34 billion in assets under management as of the end of September, it will likely be … Read more

The economy may be under water, but the graphics chip market is on fire.

The market for graphics processing units (GPUs) saw the biggest increase in third-quarter shipments in six years, according to Jon Peddie Research (JPR), as AMD gained in both the desktop and laptop segments.

In the third quarter of 2008, more than 111 million GPUs were shipped, the market researcher said. During the same quarter last year, 91 million GPUs shipped, and 94 million units shipped in the previous quarter. That's an annual increase of 22.5 percent and a quarter-to-quarter increase of almost 18 percent, … Read more