Todd R. Weiss

Switch and storage technology vendor Vitesse Semiconductor Corp. is acquiring integrated circuit maker Cicada Semiconductor Inc. in a deal worth US$66 million in cash.

By the middle of 2004, office buildings, factories, shopping malls and other public buildings could be equipped with life-saving chemical detectors like the ones used on U.S. Navy ships.

It's been a merry holiday season for online retailer Amazon.com Inc., which Friday reported its busiest-ever holiday sales activity in the nine years it has been in business.

Utility software vendor Symantec Corp. has issued a patch to correct problems some users had with an antipiracy activation feature they encountered when trying to install Norton AntiVirus 2004 and other Norton products.

With questions emerging about how Linux was developed and whether it illegally contains code from System V Unix, the nonprofit Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) is going on the offensive: It's launching a media campaign to explain in detail how the Linux kernel is developed by a global community of developers.

In a move they said will give customers more technology choices, Sun Microsystems Inc. and content management vendor Vignette Corp. have unveiled a plan to bolster the integration between their product lines.

Despite changes and improvements made since the terrorist attacks in the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001, core parts of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)'s IT infrastructure remain vulnerable, making it harder for field agents to help protect the nation from future threats.

Veritas Software Corp. has announced that it plans to port all of its storage management tools to SUSE Linux AG's version of the open-source operating system.