Bryce writes "AT&T and IBM announced a series of strategic agreements under which AT&T will acquire IBM's Global Network business for $5 billion in cash. (That's a lot of stuffed suitcases going across the boards tables) IBM will outsource a significant portion of its global networking needs to AT&T. AT&T will outsource certain applications processing and data center management operations to IBM. The transactions could represent $2.5 billion in additional revenue to AT&T in the first full year of operation. The IBM Global Network business AT&T will acquire serves the networking needs of several hundred large global companies, tens of thousands of mid-sized businesses and more than one million individual Internet users in 59 countries. The acquisition boosts AT&T's strategy to rapidly increase the company's revenue, especially at its fast- growing networking services unit, AT&T Solutions. About 5,000 IBM employees will join AT&T as part of a You'll find the AT&T's press release and the IBM version "

The DjVu Wizard writes "Slashdot ran a story about AT&T Labs' new DjVu document image compression technology a few weeks ago. Versions of the DjVu viewer/plug-in for Netscape are now available for the following platforms: Linux/x86, Irix/SGI, Solaris/Sparc, MacOS8.0. DjVu allows users and web site designers to put high-resolution scanned documents in color on the Web by achieving compression ratios as high as 1000:1. A compressor for various Unix platforms is available free for non-commercial uses. Some Slashdot readers complained about a "spam" clause in our licensing agrement. Our lawyers listened, and removed the clause (it was never our intention to spam anybody anyway). At AT&T Labs, we read Slashdot and we support Linux. "

I had a few minutes and felt like writing something completely off the wall. So if you so desire, you can hit the link below and read "Rob's Ultimate Solution for Eliminating Spam". It's purely a joke, so don't take it too seriously.

Jeff sent us this InfoWorld Story where you can read that AT&T is suing Microsoft for not releasing their source code. Apparently they have a contract that entitles them to the code, and MS hasn't complied. This is getting crazy, I've lost count of how many major suits MS has against them.

ATT Research has introduced yet another picture format, djvu, which claims up to 1000:1 compression ratio. The method employed is to separate the image into to layers. The foreground contains the parts of the picture that have sharp edges, but contain few colours, such as text. It is compressed using a bi-level compression technique. The background contains the parts of the picture that vary smoothely, but contain many colours. This is compressed using wavelets. A linux binary of the compressor is available for download.

Zach Fine writes "Looks like AT&T is not happy simply running "the world's largest, most powerful long-distance network in North America" and wants to delve further into the cable television and local phone service markets. So they're merging with media giant Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI)"

Matthew Newhall has written an interesting piece on commercial vs. GPLd programming, and OS development. His solution is a free software advocacy commercial license. Will it work? Read and decide for yourself.

Ari Haviv sent us this story where you can read that Corel has made a bundling deal on its suite for Alpha/NT systems. Sure, it's NT, but its not x86..

Rumors are afoot that AOL reject a buyout offer by Ol Ma Bell, aka AT&T. These rumors said that AOL turned down the offer, but also said that the reported offer may have been a tenative move by AT&T, trying to get AOL shareholders to cozy up to the idea, but that may backfire by drawing other rival bidders into the fracas.

Ari haviv wrote in to send us this story where you can read that Corel and Lotus are both integration Voice Recognition into their office suites. This is one VR that might actually be feasible in the next few years. I can type at about the same rate as I can talk, but this would definately save everyone a lot of repetitive stress if it becomes standard. And reliable (that's a big If though)

Scott Francis sent us a link to an article this Seattle Times Article where you can read about a company called Pixel, who apparently has some clever patent pending (grr) software that allows them to shrink the desktop, and put icon bars and stuff around the edges. I'm curious to see if it really works. Currently it is a win95 only technology, but if this really works, it could certainly be put to good use somewhere. arielb also sent us a similiar article from wired. And the MySpace Homepage claims that Mac and Unix versions are coming.

This is the first of a series of articles investigating the interplay between Open Source Software and commercial vendors. The common thread will be to find out how authors have earned a living from writing and servicing GPL/Open Source Software.

The series kicks off with Michael Tiemann, one of the founders of Cygnus Solutions, and author of the C++ component of GCC. Cygnus is one of the pioneers in commercial support for open-source software. It sells support and customization services for the gnu programming tools (gcc, gdb, ld, etc). Initially, the Free Software Foundation applauded this, but more recently, RMS feels that by also selling proprietary software Cygnus has betrayed the principle of free software.

In this interview, Michael discusses what it takes to set up a business based on open source software, what Cygnus hopes to add to GCC, and why they took the decision to sell closed source software.

AT&T and MCI, amongst a host of other companies have agreed to work together to construct an underseas cable connecting the US and Southern Europe. The cable will cost about 236$ million, and will be operational by September of 1999. Once in place, this will effectively increase the bandwidth between these places by twenty-fold.