Sun Microsystems Inc.

Xerox Corp. said Monday it will buy Affiliated Computer Services Inc. for $6.4 billion in cash and stock, joining the expensive race among technology companies to broaden their offerings.

Xerox said the deal will create a $22 billion business that combines Xerox's copiers, printers and document management services with the "business process outsourcing" of Dallas-based ACS. Outsourcers like ACS take on tasks for other companies, such as helping to manage payroll or run health care plans.

Oracle Corp.'s billionaire CEO Larry Ellison padded his fortune with a fiscal 2009 pay package the company valued at $84.5 million, down about $100,000 from the year before and made up mostly of stock options that haven't vested yet.

On top of that, Ellison made $124.2 million by exercising 10 million stock options during the latest fiscal year, which ended May 31, according to the Redwood Shores, Calif.-based company's annual proxy filing Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

"We dominate this market. There's no one in the same hemisphere."

STEC Inc. Chief Executive Manouch Moshayedi is fond of sweeping, bold pronouncements. But it's hard to argue with him on this one.

Santa Ana-based STEC enjoys a rare position for a technology company these days: a near monopoly.

The company's hold is on an emerging market for drives that insiders call "solid state" because they have no moving parts.

In its latest move to increase Internet search traffic, Microsoft Corp. has turned to an old rival, Sun Microsystems Inc., for marketing help.

Under the terms of a deal being announced Monday, Sun will promote a Microsoft toolbar for the Internet Explorer browser to U.S.-based Web surfers as they download Sun's Java software -- which is required to view some Web sites. The toolbar has a built-in box for queries to Microsoft's Live Search and buttons that give people access to MSN content.

Battered by competition and slowing demand, Sun Microsystems Inc. swung to a big loss in its fiscal first quarter, dragging the server and software maker's results below Wall Street's forecast.

Sun also plans to write down the value of its business, a sign of the company's deteriorating competitive position and vulnerability to the economic meltdown. Shares fell more than 8 percent in after-hours trading.

A newly discovered flaw in the Internet's core infrastructure not only permits hackers to force people to visit Web sites they didn't want to, it also allows them to intercept e-mail messages, the researcher who discovered the bug said Wednesday.

Considering the silent nature of the attack and the sensitive nature of a lot of electronic correspondence, the potential for damage from this second security flaw is high. But there's no evidence yet that this method of targeting e-mail has been used in a successful attack.

The SCO Group Inc. will have to pay Novell Corp. more than $2.5 million in a technology-licensing dispute, but that's far less than the nearly $20 million to which Novell had said it was entitled.

U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball in Salt Lake City this week said Novell should get $2,547,817 from Lindon-based SCO, which is in bankruptcy.

Novell Corp. says SCO Group Inc. owes it nearly $20 million. SCO says it owes Novell virtually nothing.

Those two stances are the focus of a four-day trial that started Tuesday in federal court in Salt Lake City. The companies fighting over Lindon-based SCO's licensure of certain technologies in 2003 and 2004 and how much Novell should get from that licensing.

More than four years after filing a lawsuit about alleged misuse of the Unix operating system, the SCO Group will get its days in court, beginning today in Salt Lake City.

The defendant will be Novell Inc., which SCO sued in 2004. SCO also had filed a lawsuit over Unix in 2003 against International Business Machines Corp.

SCO's lawsuit against IBM claims the company had violated an agreement by inserting Unix code into Linux, a free "open source" computer operating system distributed by IBM that competes with proprietary Unix.