Stacy Cowley

After days of increasingly heated rhetoric between Hewlett-Packard Co. and opponents of its planned merger with Compaq Computer Corp., the company caught a break this week as Alliance Capital Management Holding LP became the first major HP institutional investor to go on the record supporting the merger.

AOL Time Warner Inc. is not in negotiations to purchase Linux developer Red Hat Inc., a spokesman said Tuesday, despite rumors to the contrary sparked by a Washington Post article published Saturday.

The Internet revolution is alive and kicking and "has never missed a beat," proclaimed AOL Time Warner Inc. co-dhief operating officer Bob Pittman in a relentlessly upbeat keynote speech delivered in New York Tuesday at the start of Internet World Fall.

The United Nations launched Tuesday a new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Task Force, a group intended to form broad partnerships to advance the United Nations' development goals and bring the benefits of technology to developing nations.

The U.S. Senate approved Thursday a two-year extension of a ban on new Internet taxes. The legislation, already approved by the U.S. House of Representatives, now goes to President George W. Bush for his consideration.

Resistance to Hewlett-Packard Co.'s planned merger with Compaq Computer Corp. is growing, as reports surfaced Wednesday that David Packard, son of HP's co-founder, intends to join the Hewlett family in opposing the merger.

IBM Corp. is making another dramatic bet on the competitive advantages of backing the Linux operating system: Big Blue is donating a pricey software platform for integrating application development tools from various vendors to a newly formed open-source development advocacy organization, the company said Monday.

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) is preparing a data centre management software and services package that it claims will lower ownership costs 10 per cent to 50 per cent and offer businesses a system for dynamically reconfiguring a data centre's infrastructure to adapt to fluctuating resource requirements.