IBM lays off thousands

IBM has shed 15 000 jobs in the past quarter, reports The Register. The numbers include 1 400 from the microelectronics division and "14 213 Global Services personnel" in response to "the recent decline in corporate spending on technology-related services", according to the company`s latest financial statements.

Symbian is one of the prime beneficiaries of the rise in smart phone sales at the expense of personal digital assistant shipments highlighted lately by market watchers like IDC, reports The Register. Around 2.68 million handsets based on Symbian technology shipped during the first half of the year, up more than 1 000% from the 230 000 that shipped in the first half of 2002.

A US woman calling herself "Jane Doe" has filed a motion to uphold her anonymity in an ongoing legal battle between Internet service providers (ISPs) and the music industry over Internet piracy, reports Reuters.

The woman is a Verizon Communications customer who has been accused of offering songs for free download via an Internet file-sharing network. In recent months, the Recording Industry Association of America has subpoenaed more than 1 000 ISPs, demanding names and addresses of customers who share copyrighted music online with the aim of suing them.

The utilisation rate of the world`s chip factories rose to 85.9% in the second quarter from 82.8% in the first, according to a global semiconductor industry association. Forbes reports that capacity for all integrated circuits rose to 1 308 000 silicon wafer starts per week from 1 250 000 in Q2. Actual wafer starts, which reflect demand for chips, amounted to 1 124 000 from 1 035 000 in the first quarter.

Karen Smith, VP of Linux strategy and market development at IBM, has been telling a number of publications that no open source equivalent of Microsoft Office exists, reports The Register. Smith "does appear to be acquainted with OpenOffice and its StarOffice incarnation from Sun Microsystems", the site reports, so her comment "points to an obvious fact - neither OpenOffice nor StarOffice have all the bells and whistles of Microsoft`s suite".

Microsoft will launch cut-price software next month in an attempt to grab a larger share of the enterprise storage market. The company`s Storage Server 2003 software is designed to run as the operating system on network-attached storage (NAS) devices, reports CNet.

GFI has released a freeware version of GFI MailSecurity for Exchange/SMTP 8, its e-mail content security solution. The freeware version scans inbound and outbound mail using a single anti-virus engine, and can be used as additional protection by companies that do not yet perform virus scanning at mail sever level or at the gateway, and by those that run only one anti-virus engine.

Mac advocates awaiting OpenOffice.org`s release of its open source productivity suite with native support for Mac OS X will be waiting until 2006, unless they pitch in to help, reports Eweek. OpenOffice.org is delaying the projected release, originally expected in early 2004, until the first quarter of 2006, largely because of a lack of developers contributing to the effort, says Louis Suarez-Potts, community manager for the open source project.