Recent Articles
-
When Is a Manufacturer Not a Manufacturer?
When I talked to Michael Chang a few days ago about his company’s decision to sell Microsoft XP Media Center in quantities of one, it soon became clear that this wasn’t a mom-and-pop operation screwing computers together in the backroom. No, what Chang and his company Directron.com have become is a maker of custom solutions.…
-
IBM Preps High-End Power5 Servers
IBM next month will begin shipping high-end servers in their pSeries and iSeries lines running on its Power5 processor. The Armonk, N.Y., company will launch the 32-way p590, the 64-way p595 and the 64-way i595, IBM officials will announce Friday. The virtualization features offered with the servers coupled with the dual-core capabilities in the Power5…
-
PayPal: Service Fully Restored
PayPal on Thursday reported that it had restored its online payment services after facing intermittent outages for more than five days. PayPal, owned by eBay Inc., said its full functionality had returned to normal for all users. A day earlier, the service began to improve, though the company said delays persisted for some users. The…
-
Sellers Deal with Fallout from PayPal Outage
PayPal’s international Columbus Day weekend meltdown appears to be over. The site is up and responding to most visitors. Money is flowing and shipments are rolling again. But like Mount St. Helens in 1980, the fallout from PayPal’s cratering will continue for a long time. Sellers are still digging themselves out from the ashes, seeking…
-
Microsoft Eases Rules on Selling Media Center
At least one reseller has been quick to act now that Microsoft has relaxed the rules about how its Windows XP Media Center can be sold. Michael Chang, president of Houston, Texas-based Directron.com, said his company has worked with Microsoft to make Media Center available to end-users in single-unit quantities. “It was never distributed that…
-
Google Delves into the Desktop
Google Inc. upped the ante Thursday in the growing desktop search battle, introducing an application that combines Web results with those from a user’s hard drive. In its beta release, Google Desktop Search supports only the most common file formats and applications. But Google plans in future releases to open access to application developers through…
