Back to Vegas; Back to School

A friend of mine, familiar with the hotel industry, once complained about the Comdex crowds, "They don't gamble and they order pizza up to their rooms!" Comdex returns to Las Vegas Monday, and while there may not be many high rollers on the scene, you will find the people and organizations that could fire up the economy and change the way we live and work.

CRN and VARBusiness will be there, of course, covering breaking news throughout the week, keynotes from Bill Gates, John Chambers and Larry Ellison, new product announcements, and all the action from the floor. Monday night, CRN hosts its fifth annual Hall of Fame dinner, recognizing the industry's most significant leaders. Catch all the action in our News Center.

A Class By Itself

This week, VARBusiness re-launched it's

Solution Provider University, your home for in-depth tutorials on technology, business, and sales. The first new course, Security 101 is a four-part examination of security issues that every organization must address. Solution Provider U. also opens the doores on its SPU Library, a collection of thousands of whitepapers and analyst reports brought to you in partnership with BitPipe, who helped produce the CRN Test Center's Tech Library. Credit for the redesign goes to VARBusiness' Dana Silverstein and Chandra Steele, along with ChannelWeb's Brad Baymack.

Monkey Wrench

Suppose you staked your career on radically reshaping one of the oldest, largest and most storied technology companies in the world, but found yourself locked in battle, not only with skeptical analysts and a deeply suspicious company culture, but with the sons and daughters of the company's legendary founders? Such is the unenviable situation of Carly Fiorina, whose efforts to merge Hewlett Packard with Compaq Computer, already under fire, were rocked this week when Hewlett and Packard children, still owners of significant portions of the company, announced their opposition to the deal.

Best of the Week

Not so fast: Ten attorneys general rejected the federal government and Microsoft's proposed settlement of their three-year-old antitrust case. It's uncertain if the states will agree to some minor tweaks in the agreement, or are pushing to get altogether stronger remedies ordered by federal judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly. What's certain is, it's not quite over yet.

Cisco provided some spark to the market this week with it's announcement of a "solid quarter," according company CEO John Chambers. With revenues advancing 3% over the prior quarter, Chambers was circumspect about the future, but upbeat about sales of high-end routers, IP telephony, storage, wireless and firewall equipment.

Finally, if you are walking around the Comdex show floor this week, few accessories will have more geek appeal than a DiskOnKey, a 128 MB USB storage device that fits on your keychain. VARBusiness' Chris Bucholtz has the story.