Cisco CEO John Chambers on Tuesday told a crowd of several thousand IT managers that networking isn’t simply about transporting data anymore. In his keynote speech at the Networkers 2005 conference, Chambers extolled the virtues of Cisco’s new AON (Application-Oriented Networking) framework, which essentially lets networks speak the language of applications.

IBM increased its dominance in the market for supercomputers used to solve the toughest research problems, claiming half of the world’s Top 500 supercomputers, while the share of Hewlett-Packard Co. fell sharply, according to a survey published on Wednesday. HP fell to 26 percent, or 131 of the most powerful supercomputers ranked in the semi-annual Top 500 List. That’s down from 170, or 34 percent, just six months ago. IBM scored broad gains, with 259 machines or 51.8 percent of the Top 500, up from 43 percent of the world’s most powerful supercomputers last November.

Concerned with the growth of identity theft, California lawmakers gave initial approval on Tuesday to a bill that, with other state safeguards, would require companies to notify consumers of all security breaches involving their personal information. The California Assembly’s judiciary committee voted 6-3 for the bill, which would apply to paper and taped records. Breaches of computer records are already covered by a state law.

Novell’s Mono open-source group had been successful in porting Microsoft’s .Net Framework, but Microsoft is insisting its Avalon and Indigo intellectual property rights requires that any attempt to produce open-source versions of these two will require licensing. Avalon is both an API (application programming interface) and a graphics architecture, while Indigo is an API and a communications subsystem. Together, they are to form two of the key pillars for the foundation of Microsoft’s next generation operating system, Longhorn.

SAP has hired several new executives, including a number of people who were lured away from competitors Oracle and Siebel Systems. In all, SAP said Monday that it has attracted more than 200 new workers from "competitive organizations" during the last 18 months, with much hiring being done in Silicon Valley in particular.

The royalty-free license under which Microsoft plans to make its upcoming new Office Open XML Formats widely available is incompatible with the GNU General Public License and will thus prevent many free and open-source software projects from using the formats, community officials say. In addition, a leading patent official is calling into question the validity and enforceability of the Microsoft Corp. license and suggesting that free and open-source software developers need not comply with its conditions.

CBL Data Recovery Technologies, international provider of computer data recovery services, has opened a Service Facility in Frankfurt in order to provide additional customer convenience. The Frankfurt Service Facility complements CBL’s existing full-service laboratory in Kaiserslautern, Germany.

If you haven’t had a chance to visit our sister magazine, Connected Photographer, this might be a good time. Buried deep within the brittle, crumbling pages of the Codex Sinaiticus may well be hidden answers to questions that have haunted historians and religious scholars for centuries. Digital imaging may be the tool that helps researchers find a real-life Bible Code. We’re running a fascinating feature article called "A real-life Bible Code: the amazing story of the Codex Sinaiticus", that tells the full story.

IBM will boost the processing power of its p5-575 server, a machine geared for high-performance technical computing tasks. Each p5-575 ships with eight Power5 chips, but each chip has only one of its two processing engines, called cores, activated. By the end of the year, though, Big Blue will ship the system with eight dual-core processors.

Ninety percent of the largest U.S. companies have procedures in place in case inappropriate or illicit images are discovered in the work place, and 50 percent have had to use these procedures for incidents in the past year, according to a study released Friday. The report, sponsored by software company PixAlert and conducted by research firm Delta Consulting, also found that when businesses pursued an investigation, 44 percent of cases resulted in a dismissal from the company.