CNET buys Silicon.com

CNET Networks is buying the UK assets of Silicon.com. TheRegister reports that most of the 53 UK staff will be made redundant. About 20 staff members, including only three journalists, are expected to join CNET, although not even all of these are expected to become permanent staff. Silicon CEO Tom Bureau says the site will retain its editorial flavour and quality under the new CNET ownership. However, there are those who doubt this, and it is hard to see how the site will avoid becoming a CNET clone, says TheRegister. Silicon`s other European operations are also believed to be in trouble, and the new buy-out may only prolong the pain, as the European CNET operation has been given six months to turn the business around or face closure. [More at TheRegister]

IBM has Oracle firmly in its sights with the latest release of DB2, version 8. The new release, which appears to be particularly strong on manageability and performance, includes a range of self-managing properties, freeing itself of some DBA intervention. Among these automated features are index reorganisations, parralelism and query optimisation. One of the new tuning features that stands out is the rules-based configuration advisor. But perhaps the most interesting areas of improvement are the host of XML-related features which position DB2 more securely in the Web services space.

Sources: Reuters, TheRegister