Microsoft's answer to Sun Microsystems latest legal gambit - a Tuesday lawsuit asking a federal court to bar the software-maker from using the Java Compatible logo: Spare us the theatrics.
Microsoft product manager Joe Herman said company lawyers were reviewing legal motions filed by Sun in the ongoing litigation between the two companies, but so far had seen nothing new.
"It's just more theatrics than anything," he said. "We're a little disappointed that Sun continues to pull PR stunts rather than focus on customers."
In an October lawsuit, Sun sued Microsoft for breach of contract for allegedly developing a noncompliant version of Java for Internet Explorer 4.0. Microsoft contends that its versions of Java are fully compliant under its Sun agreement and has countersued, alleging that Sun has failed to provide all technical components required to properly implement the language.
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A Cray sale: The first order is in for the Cray T3E-1200, a supercomputer that can execute 1 trillion floating point operations per second and is scalable to 2,048 processors, Silicon Graphics announced today. The US Army High-Performance Computing Research Center is buying the first such mega-machine for use in 3-D simulation and modeling of computational fluid dynamics problems.
Pollution control, deployment of parachute systems for space stations' return vehicles, and paratrooper deployment from large aircraft are among the first jobs the teraflops supercomputer will tackle.
Silicon Graphics hailed the T3E-1200 as the world's only commercially available teraflops supercomputer with features including a 600-MHz processor, increased memory bandwidth, and improved price/performance - as low as US$64 per megaflop. Its precursor, the T3E-900, has been used to determine climate models to predict the moves of El Niño. (18.Nov.97)
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Computer theft, the old-fashioned way: A Microsoft plant in Scotland was robbed last week, and the gun-toting thieves got away with some 200,000 certificates of authenticity and 100,000 CD-ROMS. Microsoft told Dow Jones News Service that three plant workers were bound and locked in an office during the 10 November incident in East Kilbride, Scotland. The certificates of authenticity, if used on counterfeit Win 95 computers, could be worth some US$16 million, the company said, and it is warning distributors to be on the lookout. (18.Nov.97)
