The Business Technology Center (Altadena, CA) is a new high-tech incubator with room for 30-50 companies -- mostly software/Internet spinoffs from Caltech and JPL. It supports "an emerging technology corridor from Cal Poly Pomona to the City of Hope Cancer Center in Duarte to Caltech to the Huntington Medical Research Institutes in Pasadena, then to JPL and all the way out to the media gulch in Glendale and Burbank." [LA Times, 12Oct98. Edupage.]

Dawn Cohen notes that the new law increasing the limit on high-tech visas also deems foreign workers subject to export-of-technology restrictions. An employer can't hire a person on an H1-B visa to work on software that couldn't be exported to that person's country of origin (e.g., Indians working on encryption software). This may slow the issuing of visa approvals. . [, 27Oct98.]

Ed Zandler of Sun is claiming a 3-year lead on Windows NT with Sun's new Solaris 7.0 Unix operating system. Solaris is 64-bit-addressable, and runs on Sparc and Intel-based servers. It has only 12M-13M lines of code, vs. about 35M for Windows NT. [NYT, 27Oct98. Edupage.]

Sun is offering Solaris 7.0 free to developers and educational institutions. It is also supporting both Linux and Java by licensing its source code for the Java Development and Compatibility Kits. [TechWeb, 29Oct98. Edupage.]

IBM, Sequent, and the Santa Cruz Organization will develop a single Unix-based OS that will run on Intel and IBM microprocessors. [NYT, 27Oct98. Edupage.]