Oracle to support Itanium

Oracle is to expand its support for HP`s Itanium-based Unix servers and plans to bring a version of its E-Business Suite to market by the end of the year, reports News.Com.

Itanium is central to efforts by HP and Intel to be strong in the high-end server market and the companies are leading a multiple-company alliance that has pledged to spend $10 billion on Itanium product development, marketing and software company recruitment in the next 10 years.

At the same event, Oracle announced it will charge based on the number of processors in a server partition running its software, instead of counting all the processors even if many are devoted to other tasks. In December, Oracle lowered prices for multicore chips. Oracle no longer charges twice as much for dual-core Intel processors, including Montecito, the first dual-core Itanium model due for release later this year.

Google has fixed a flaw in its Gmail Web-based e-mail service after the problem was disclosed by a blogger, reports ZDNet.

According to the report, the flaw could allow JavaScript code to run when viewing a message in Gmail, potentially allowing malicious code to be used by an attacker to compromise a Gmail account.

Google says the flaw was fixed "very shortly after the initial blog post went up" and because the vulnerability was fixed quickly, Google believes the flaw was never exploited in any attacks.

British Telecom (BT) says 99.6% of UK homes and businesses will be able to get higher speed broadband from the end of this month.

According to the The Register, 78% of BT customer lines should be able to support 4Mbps, while 42% will get 6Mbps and above. Users who live or work very close to their exchange may get up to 8Mbps.

BT says it is upgrading 5 300 exchanges to support these speeds, excluding 150 smaller exchanges, where users will have to make do with 1Mbps.

The US Department of Justice is investing online music pricing at the world`s major music labels to determine whether the labels colluded to set wholesale pricing for song downloads, reports News.Com.

The report says the investigation could also be related to licensing renegotiations with Apple for its iTunes store. It quotes music industry sources as saying some subpoenas may have already been issued in connection with the probe, while other labels had been tipped off that subpoenas would likely be coming in the next few days.

Apple Computer`s iTunes music store dominates the industry, charging 99c for each of the majority of its songs, but some music labels have indicated they want to institute variable pricing. Rival online music stores include those run by music subscription service Napster, retailer Wal-Mart Stores and RealNetworks.