Cisco Systems

Michael Dell has grown tired of discussing his company's reinvention.

He mocks suggestions that the company he founded is taking more risks than in the past and parries questions about how Dell's culture had changed.

"It's O.K. if everyone doesn't understand what we're doing," Dell said during an interview at Dell headquarters here, just north of Austin.

The Free Software Foundation filed a copyright-infringement lawsuit Thursday against Cisco Systems in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The FSF alleges Cisco violated its copyrights, including for GCC, binutils and the GNU C library, in various products distributed under the Linksys brand.

In doing so, the FSF said, Cisco denied its users their right to share and modify the software. Cisco acquired Linksys in 2003.

Nortel Networks on Monday announced it lost $3.41 billion in the third quarter and plans to eliminate 1,300 jobs amid an economic downturn trickling through the tech sector. Nortel also plans salary and hiring freezes, fewer management positions, and a suspension of certain preferred-share dividends.

Arista Networks on Thursday announced the startup has landed two big executive fish: Jayshree Ullal and Andreas Bechtolsheim. Arista, formerly known as Arastra, a vendor of high-performance 10Gbit Ethernet and cloud networking solutions, is looking to give Cisco Systems a run for its money.

Forget the switches and routers that built Cisco Systems into a giant, albeit somewhat boring, company at the core of the Internet.

These days, the company is peddling e-mail software, video conferencing systems, cable TV boxes -- even furniture -- as it tries to break out of the data center and get its products in front of ordinary office workers.

"Cisco is kind of like the Madonna of networking," said Mark Sue, an analyst with RBC Capital Markets. "It is continuously trying to reinvent itself."

Microsoft has elected to jettison certain licensing restrictions that previously discouraged its customers from moving the software giant's server applications within a server farm at will.

Beginning next month, Microsoft says its customers will be able to move any of 41 server applications as often as necessary without paying additional licensing fees. The goal is to enable data center managers to more effectively employ virtualization technology as the means for creating more dynamic enterprise IT systems, the company said.

Reports from IT directors and major IT suppliers indicate that the security hole in Internet Domain Name System servers is being patched -- but not everyone, nor every company, is responding quickly.

News of the flaw in some DNS servers was leaked to the public on July 8, catching many server administrators by surprise. The hope was that most servers could be patched and ready before the public became aware of the problem. But as a result of the leak, many servers worldwide remain vulnerable to attack.

A computer engineer who allegedly held San Francisco's computer system hostage was denied a reduction in his $5 million bond Wednesday after the prosecutor said the system had been rigged to melt down during routine maintenance.

Earlier this week, Terry Childs, 43, gave the disputed password to the system to Mayor Gavin Newsom in a jailhouse meeting arranged by his lawyer, The San Francisco Chronicle reported the mayor then gave the password to a team from Cisco Systems which had been working to open up the city's FiberWAN network.

Jill Smart, an Accenture executive, was skeptical the first time she stepped into the consulting firm's new videoconferencing room in Chicago for a meeting with a group of colleagues in London. But the videoconferencing technology, known as telepresence, delivered an experience so lifelike, Smart recalled, that "10 minutes into it you forget you are not in the room with them."

San Francisco's computer network was still being held hostage Thursday, allegedly by a disgruntled employee who programmed the system with a password only he knows. Terry Childs, 43, was jailed Sunday night. He has a 25-year-old criminal record in Kansas for aggravated robbery that had been disclosed at the time he was hired.

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