Microsoft to offer bounty on hackers

Microsoft is expected to announce today that it will offer two $250 000 bounties for information that leads to the arrest of the people who released the MSBlast worm and the SoBig virus, CNET reports.

The two programs attacked computers that run Windows, causing havoc among companies and home users in August and September. The reward, confirmed by sources in the security industry and in law enforcement, will be announced in a joint press conference with the FBI, the US Secret Service and Interpol.

Novell, a software pioneer that was badly battered as it tried to take on Microsoft in the 1990s, jumped back into the fray yesterday, with a deal to acquire operating system vendor SuSE Linux for $210 million in cash, reports AP.

Combined with recently acquired Ximian, the SuSE purchase would make Novell one of the top suppliers of Linux, which has been growing in popularity in recent years as an alternative to Microsoft`s Windows operating systems and other proprietary software.

Meanwhile, ZDNet reports that this development and Red Hat`s decision on Monday to stop supporting its consumer versions have the open source community worried that the consumer is being left behind. Many Linux enthusiasts worry that the Linux community may have lost its two most popular distributions - Red Hat Linux and SuSE Linux.

Micro Focus International has announced technology for migrating mainframe Cobol applications to Windows and the .Net Framework, reports eWeek.

"Over the last 30 years, the mainframe has been a great applications platform," the company said, but added there were problems such as its overall cost of ownership, the speed of change of technology away from the mainframe, and difficulty of integrating applications with other systems.

HP has become the first company, reports ZDNet, to crack one million transactions per minute, using Intel`s processors, Oracle`s database and a stupendous 1TB of memory.

The system, an $8.4 million HP Integrity Superdome with 64 1.5GHz Itanium 2 processors running HP`s version of Unix, achieved a score of 1 008 000 transactions per minute on the widely quoted TPC-C test.

HP had the previous top score for the test, 824 000, using a similar system but with half as much memory and a somewhat smaller storage system.