Client Server News articles from April 2004

Client Server News archives from April 2004

China's Linux Jihad Ain't Turning Out the Way It Thought.
April 5, 2004... China's Communist government has reportedly poured upwards of $50 million into the Red Flag Software Company to make it into the "Microsoft of China" and establish a national Linux standard so China could get out from under Microsoft's thumb....

Microsoft's $1.1b Settlement May Be Coming Unglued.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Microsoft is wondering whether it's got a deal or not to settle those California class-action complaints that between 1995 and 2001 it overcharged for Windows with $1.1 billion in vouchers. Some 600,000 claims into this thing and Judge Paul...

EU Appeals Judge May Try To Broker a Microsoft-EC Deal.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... The Wall Street Journal is running a story based on an interview with Judge Bo Vesterdorf, president of the Court of First Instance, where Microsoft would appeal the European Commission ruling, that suggests the judge might try to broker a...

Avocent Pays $100m for OSA: Now Why Do You Suppose They Did That?(OSA Technologies Inc)
April 5, 2004... Now why would somebody pay $100 million for a three-and-a-half-year- old start-up ISV dedicated solely to IPMI, the Intelligent Platform Management Interface for embedded manageability, that none of the first-tier OEMs are putting in their...

CA Hires Ex-Compaq CFO.
April 5, 2004... Computer Associates, which has admitted to cooking some of the books and is still mired down in an endless Justice Department-SEC investigation looking for the rest of them, has hired former Compaq CFO Jeff Clarke, the guy who led the HP-Compaq...

Sun Out To Snare Windows Developers with Java Version of VB.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Sun's Project Rave, now dulled down to something called Java Studio Creator and described by Sun as its "most significant developer tool in years," is being released for "public access" for the first time on April 8. Which is not to be...

IBM Breathes the Word 'Open' Around its Power Chip.(0)
April 5, 2004... IBM wants to assemble a battalion of third-party Power followers to make its proprietary chip, the platform for some of its key Linux gambits, more of a force in the world. For safety and reasons of fashion, as well as to spread the God...

IBM Buys Candle.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... IBM is acquiring privately held Candle Corporation on undisclosed terms. Founded by Aubrey Chernick in 1976, the El Segundo, California company is one of the oldest privately held ISVs in the US. Candle offers management tools that...

Google Takes on Hotmail, Yahoo with Free E-Mail.(Gmail)(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Google has soft launched a free search-based "Gmail" service, another poke in the eye for Microsoft and Yahoo. Gmail comes with a whopping 1GB of storage per user, enough to store half a million pages of e-mail. In comparison, Hotmail and...

TPC Whipping Up New Benchmarks.(TPC-C server)(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... The Transaction Processing Performance Council (TPC), which gave the world TPC-C server scores, is about a year away from locking down two new benchmarks: TPC-E and TPC-DS. Its signature TPC-C yardstick imagines a retail environment. TPC-E,...

Intergraph Takes Intel for Another $225m.
April 5, 2004... Intel's patent run-in with Intergraph has cost it another $225 million to finally settle a suit that got started in November of 1997. Let's see that makes a total of $675 million that Intel will have forked over to Intergraph. Intel had to...

CA To Remove its General Counsel from Government Probe.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Computer Associates has taken its long-time general counsel off the case that the government's interminable investigation of CA's accounting and revenue recognition practices has been building for going on three years. The company, which...

Gateway Pulls Plug on Retail Stores.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... The perpetually troubled Gateway will close down its 188 precious retail stores on April 9. The company, now basically under eMachines' management, said it would sell on the web and over the phone. The closings will eliminate about...

Remind Me. Did Gateway Buy eMachines or Was It the Other Way Around?(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Gateway's acquisition of eMachine is one of those takeovers where the acquiree winds up running the company sorta like the ill- conceived AOL Time Warner mismatch. They handed out jobs the other day at Gateway and eMachine guys are running...

Microsoft Debuts Office Compliance Tool.(Sarbanes- Oxley)(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Microsoft has released an Office Solution Accelerator for Sarbanes- Oxley that's designed so partners can use Office to comply with the new rules Sarbanes-Oxley is the US law that requires financial services providers to follow strict...

Yahoo Buys Top European Shopping Site; Google's Froogle Bows.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Yahoo Inc is spending $576 million to buy five-year-old venture- backed Kelkoo SA in Paris, which lets people look up the price of consumer goods and services and gets a fee when they click through to a merchant's site. Yahoo made its move...

Microsoft's Hold on Chinese Ed Market Deepens.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Microsoft China has tied up with an outfit called Beijing Tengtu United Electronics Development Company, a subsidiary of Tengtu International Corporation and reportedly China's biggest K-12 software and content provider, and signed a so-called...

OpenOffice Reaches Prague.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... OpenOffice, the free open source edition of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice productivity software, has been upgraded to version 1.1.1, otherwise known as Prague, less than six months after hitting rev 1.1.0. The software is currently available...

MapPoint Location Server Bows.(MapPoint Location Server (MLS))(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Microsoft released its MapPoint Location Server (MLS) application designed to let businesses locate, track and manage their mobile assets and mobile workforce. With MLS, companies and developers are supposed to be able to integrate...

ebXML Becomes ISO Standard.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... ISO has blessed Oasis' four ebXML standards, the EDI-replacing, UN- backed stuff that Microsoft has earmarked for termination with extreme prejudice according to the New York Times. The Oasis standards will collectively become ISO Technical...

Win CE 5.0 Beta Here.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Microsoft has put out a beta of its upcoming Windows CE 5.0 OS, aka Macallan, for small-footprint devices. Windows CE 5.0, the latest rev of Microsoft's embedded operating system, will come with increased out-of-the-box hardware support,...

AMD & China's Founder Expand Their Deal.(Founder Group)(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... The arrangement between AMD and Founder Group, a spinout of Beijing Peking University that's reportedly the second-biggest computer maker in China, has been expanded to include the AMD64 chips. Initially Founder tied up with AMD for its...

Tadpole Tries its Legs.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Tadpole is looking more and more like, well, like a toad. After years of trying to make a living peddling Sparc laptops, the company has been trying its legs lately and besides its brand new Intel- based Linux box running the Java Desktop, it's...

Outsource or Perish.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... In what's definitely not music to the ears of worried workers, Gartner CEO Michael Fleisher told IT execs at the Gartner Symposium that companies have no choice but to outsource "if they want to survive and grow."

Microsoft Cuts Xbox Price.(Xbox)(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... As it's been threatening to do, Microsoft cut the price on Xbox by $30 to $150. Microsoft also cut the price of the Xbox Music Mixer to $20. It brings Karaoke to the gaming system. The price cuts are meant to make front-runner Sony...

EC Okays HP's Triaton Acquisition.(Triaton)(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... The European Commission has approved Hewlett-Packard's acquisition of German IT services provider Triaton. The commission said an analysis of the transaction showed that it wasn't anticompetitive and that HP's share of the IT services...

XNA To Unite Xbox, PC, Mobile Games.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... At the Game Developers Conference in San Jose the other day, Microsoft talked up its new XNA development platform, which is supposed to provide common tools to develop games for multiple Microsoft platforms including Windows, Xbox and Windows...

Brocade Pushes Switches for SMBs.
April 5, 2004... Brocade has rolled out two new SAN switches to its OEMs designed to address the cost and complexity of SANs for small and mid-size businesses and departments of large corporations. The two 2 Gbit/sec switches are the eight-port SilkWorm...

QLogic Revenues Fall Short; Stock Tumbles.
April 5, 2004... Storage networking house QLogic warned Tuesday that revenues for its fiscal fourth quarter ended March 28 would be lower than expected. The Aliso Viejo, California concern now expects to report revenue of $128 million compared to its...

Isilon Snags $15.5m.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Isilon Systems has raised $15.5 million in third-round funding. Lehman Brothers led the round, which also included participation of existing investors Sequoia Capital, Atlas Venture and Madrona Venture Group. Isilon said it would use...

Adaptec Debuts New Arrays for SMBs.(File Saver ESA1500)(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Adaptec has launched an application-specific storage array for small and mid-size businesses that automatically backs up corporate PC and laptop information unprotected by standard server backups. The new File Saver ESA1500 is a...

DR-DOS Redux.(DeviceLogics Inc. develops DR-DOS)
April 5, 2004... In October of 2002, after Lineo, the embedded Linux house and sister company of the SCO Group, wandered too close to the edge and fell off the cliff to its death, the Canopy Group, the Ray Noorda- establish VC fund and Lineo's owner, sold the...

Wal-Mart Web Site Peddles Linux-based Java Desktop.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Walmart.com is now selling four versions of Linux with Microtel's cheap boxes: Linare's, Lindows', Lycoris' and Sun's. We can't think of another instance of the xenophobic Sun bundling its software on somebody else's hardware. The...

No, No, a Thousand Times No.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... In case any naf was still harboring delusions that Sun might open source Java, Sun CEO Scott McNealy punctured his balloon last week at the FOSE conference. Refugees from a press conference with McNealy, who claimed Sun is the Petronius...

Think Tank Slams Open Source.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... The Institute for Policy Innovation, a non-profit libertarian- leaning public policy organization, has put out a short four-page white paper questioning the ability of open source to meet the hurdles of the mass market. It says "Open...

Angstrom Quad Opteron Blade Server Bows.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Little Angstrom Microsystems claims it's got the first quad Opteron blade server, the Titan64 QuadraBlade, which puts 52 blades or 208 Opterons in a rack. Each QuadraBlade chassis holds 13 blades and four chassis, what Angstrom calls...

Axentra Launches New Linux Server Appliances.(Axentra)(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Axentra has introduced three server appliances for small offices. Part of its OfficeSeries line, the new all-in-one network and Internet servers are dubbed the S-100, S-200 and S-500. The three Athlon-powered widgets are based on...

Fedora Beta Out.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Red Hat says the Fedora Core 2, test2 is available. In case that sounds like a secret code, it's supposed to be a beta of the 2.6-based Fedora Core that supports SELinux or Security Enhanced Linux, which means the security modules endorsed...

Linux More Expensive than Windows: Yankee Group.
April 5, 2004... After completing a new study, the Yankee Group says that Linux deployment is more expensive than Windows for large enterprise customers. The Yankee Group/Sunbelt Software study found that a significant Linux deployment or a switch from...

SCO & IBM Try Various Legal Holds on Each Other.
April 5, 2004... In the latest episode of the SCO-IBM imbroglio SCO asked the court to cut IBM's patent infringement counterclaims out of the base breach-of-contract case and deal with them separately so things don't get bogged down and technical and confuse or...

Microsoft Better at Fixing Security Holes.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Comparing all the Windows platforms that came out between June 1 of 2002 and May 31 of 2003 with all variants Red Hat, MandrakeSoft, Debian and SuSE, Forrester has concluded that Microsoft is better at patching vulnerabilities than the Linux...

OSDL Does China.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) is planning on setting up an office in Beijing in May or June. It's also been talking to the China Electrical Standard Institute (CESI) about standardizing its Linux specifications.

Longhorn Alpha This Year.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... It seems we can expect a Longhorn alpha to be released this year. Bill Gates said so at the Garner Symposium in San Diego on Monday. What happens after that is anybody's guess. Gates again said that 2006 is kinda the target date for final...

Siebel Goes for New Mainsoft Widgetry.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Siebel, a long-time Mainsoft customer, has signed up for its new Visual MainWin for J2EE widgetry, which basically .NETs Java and bridges the great .NET/Java divide (CSN No 535). Siebel is going to use the stuff internally as well as offer it...

Novell Outbid Sun & Red Hat.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... "We're not taking on Microsoft. The open source community is taking on Microsoft. It's the guerrilla vs. the gorilla." - Novell CEO Jack Messman, the guy who bought SuSE and wants to make the Linux desktop a reality, to the Wall Street Journal....

Senate Majority Leader Slams the EC.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... "I now fear that the United States and EU are heading toward a new trade war - and that the commission's ruling against Microsoft is the first shot. In imposing this anti-consumer, anti-innovation penalty, the commission has blatantly undercut...

10 Congressmen Slam the EC.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Ten Congressmen, evenly divided between the GOP and the Democrats, including this paper's own representative Peter King, have sent European Commissioner Mario Monti an open letter expressing their displeasure with his Microsoft ruling and...

State Department Reportedly Slams the EC Privately.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... CNET said it couldn't get the agency to go on the record but turned up government official who, it said, was directly involved and told the news service on condition of anonymity that the State Department has had a quiet word with the European...

Project Janus.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Sun evidently has a development effort afoot aptly codenamed Project Janus that's meant to let programs for Linux on x86, such as they are, run unmodified, if a tad slower, on Solaris x86.

Digital Content Patent For Sale.
April 5, 2004... An outfit called Skylight Software Inc says it want to sell a five- year-old US digital content distribution patent it owns entitled "Automated Software Metering of Digital Payloads" and numbered 6,199,054. The content could be documents or...

Forrester Ups Spending Projections.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Forrester Research has goosed its year-over-year forecast for IT spending growth in the US by a point to 5% because of better-than- expected economic and profit growth in the third and fourth quarters. A CIO Confidence Poll confirmed growing...

LinuxDefender in Prototype.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... Romanian-based anti-virus house Softwin, which makes the Windows- oriented BitDefender software, has got a LinuxDefender prototype or proof-of-concept that's based on Knoppix. The company says it incorporates the latest BitDefender...

JavaOne Scheduled.(Brief Article)
April 5, 2004... JavaOne has been set for June28-July 1 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. See http://java.sun.com/javaone to register.

Secret Longhorn Schedule Outed.
April 12, 2004... That Longhorn Alpha or updated preview that Microsoft promised this year is supposed to make its appearance early next month at WinHEC so attendees feel they got their money's worth what with the price of admission being a thousand bucks and...

Oh My Sainted Aunt! Microsoft Open Sources Code - No, Really.
April 12, 2004... To absolutely no fanfare, Microsoft - well, five developers at Microsoft at any rate - quietly took their internally developed Windows Installer XML (WiX), the toolkit that builds Windows installation packages from XML, and on Monday plunked...

You Ready for a Kinder, Gentler Microsoft?(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Five Microsoft developers calling themselves a "change agent" and seeking to open a dialogue with the outside world have started an outreach site called Channel 9 complete with video interviews, blogs, discussion forums, links to other sites,...

Ex-CA CFO & Reports Face Prison Time; General Counsel Fired.(Computer Associates, Ira Zar)
April 12, 2004... Three more ex-Computer Associates executives, including the company's former chief financial officer Ira Zar, pleaded guilty to charges of securities fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice in a Brooklyn...

Bad Boy, Bad Boy, Watcha Gonna Do When They Come for You.(Japanese antitrust regulators raid Intel)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Japanese antitrust regulators are certainly a lot more colorful than antitrust regulators in other countries. They get to make dramatic raids on suspect offices. They did it to Microsoft Japan a few weeks ago and it was Intel's turn on...

IBM Begs To Be Pelted with Rotten Eggs.(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... In what can only fuel this controversial outsourcing jobs business, IBM is buying India's third-biggest call center firms, privately held $60-million-a-year Daksh services Ltd. The three-year-old company employs 6,000 people doing technical...

Intel Reverse Engineered AMD64: Microprocessor Report.(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Intel and AMD's 64-bit x86 extensions are practically identical, according to an analysis done by the Microprocessor Report, which is exactly what we've said already although Intel discouraged that point-of-view. The Microprocessor Report...

Neoware Claims To Reinvent Desktop Computing.(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Neoware has started pushing new Capio and Eon thin clients, priced to start at $199 and saying that they're a quarter of the price of a PC and half the price of other people's thin clients. The widgets, along with being immune to viruses,...

W3C Finishes Spinning the Web.(World Wide Web Consortium)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... The World Wide Web Consortium Wednesday standardized DOM Level 3, which means that all the APIs for HTML and XML documents have now been standardized. Illuminata said, "Combined with hundreds of other signs that web technologies have...

Loiacono Replaces Schwartz; Green Goes.(John Loiacono, Jonathan Schwartz, Rich Green)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Sun has tapped John Loiacono, who used to be Ed Zander's boy, to replace Jonathan Schwartz as head of software. Schwartz was elevated last Friday to be president and COO of Sun, the job last held by Zander, who is now CEO of Motorola. ...

Unisys Boss To Step Down.(Larry Weinbach)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Unisys chairman, president and CEO Larry Weinbach, 64, is planning to step down as CEO in January, but will stay on as chairman for another year creating and implementing the company's long-term strategic direction. While Weinbach does the...

Dell Raises Guidance.(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Dell has raised its guidance for Q1. It now expects revenues to hit $11.4 billion, $200 million more than it thought it could do in mid-February and 20% better than the same quarter last year. The company still expects earnings of 28 cents,...

Oracle & Dell Create Turnkey SME Systems.(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Oracle and Dell have cut themselves a new global deal that makes Dell the "exclusive" distributor - now there's a stretch - of Oracle's new 10g database, or rather Oracle Standard Edition One, pre-installed on Dell's Intel boxes and targeted at...

Sun Lays Runway for Solaris 10 Takeoff.(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Sun has reached the sixth update to Solaris 9, which, it says, supports the company's new Opteron systems as well as doubling the performance of scientific workloads on x86 machines and fully supporting Intel's Hyper-Threaded Xeons. That...

Motorola To Resell Stratus Boxes.(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Motorola's Commercial, Government and Industrial Solutions Sector (CGISS) is going to peddle Stratus Technologies' Windows-based fault-tolerant ftServers as a global VAR. The Stratus boxes will be offered as an optional platform for Moto's...

Siebel Happy Enough.(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Siebel says it's coming in near the high end of its Q1 projections. It'll do revenues of about $329 million and earnings of five-six cents a share, $27 million-$30 million, up 500% year-over-year. It initially told the market that it would do...

RealNetworks Tries To Exploit EC Ruling.(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser, whose company benefits directly from the European Commission's position on Microsoft, told Reuters that he's negotiating with hardware house like Dell and HP to "better position our product in the market in the wake...

RLX Hires New Marketing Veep.(Tejas Vakil)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... RLX has hired Tejas Vakil as its VP of worldwide marketing and corporate communications, reporting to CEO Doug Erwin. Vakil replaces Paul Barker who left in November to start a strategic marketing consultancy called the AfterBurner Group....

Appro Sticks 100 Opterons, Xeons or Itaniums in Rack.(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Appro, which has already announced a 1U quad Opteron, also has a HyperBlade Mid-Cluster box that sticks 50 dual-processor blades in an industry-standard rack. The blades can be dual Opterons, dual Xeons, dual Itaniums or uniprocessor...

Sun Entry-level Bioinformatics Cluster Debuts.(Sun Fire Starter Cluster for Bioinformatics)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Sun has launched an entry-level pre-integrated cluster for bioinformatics, a popular activity these days. Apple's doing it among others. The out-of-the-box starter system, which Sun and its iForce resellers are delivering, is designed to...

SAP Buys into SteelEye.(SAP Ventures, SteelEye Technology Inc)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... SAP Ventures, the investment arm of the big German software house, has put money into SteelEye Technology Inc. No one has deigned to say how much money we're talking about here, but the company's current backers all kicked in and they include...

Microsoft Joins DAB.(digital audio broadcasting)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Microsoft has joined the World DAB Forum, an international group of 80 organizations focused on developing digital audio broadcasting technology. Apparently using Microsoft's Windows Media Audio 9 Professional (WMA 9 Pro), the DAB standard can...

Microsoft & Sun Rush To Sign.(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... The Wall Street Journal did one of those post mortem stories that it's famous for on the Microsoft-Sun rapprochement tracing how they - of all people - managed conciliation, even a $2 billion one. According to the story the paper tells,...

Sound Bites.
April 12, 2004... "Peace in our time. The long-running turf war between Sun Microsystems and Microsoft has reached an armistice." - Forbes.com.

Sun Talks Up Midnight Special but Commitment Doubted.
April 12, 2004... Sun has been talking up a new integrated storage system lately that goes by the sexy code name Midnight Special but there are doubts about how committed senior management is to the project. Sun said the new system would be targeted...

Softek Spins Out of Fujitsu; Has IPO in Mind.(Softek Storage Solutions Inc)
April 12, 2004... The management of Softek, the storage software house, has bought the joint from Fujitsu. The new company has been incorporated in Delaware as Softek Storage Solutions Inc. It's headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. A financial...

Microsoft Debuts Storage Enhancements.(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... At Storage Networking World, Microsoft disclosed plans to make a bunch of storage enhancements including a feature pack for Windows Storage Server 2003 that would consolidate Exchange Server 2003 data on Windows Storage Server 2003-based NAS...

EMC Launches New Clariion Disk Library.
April 12, 2004... EMC has launched a new ATA disk-based Clariion appliance as an alternative to tape for backup and recovery. The company claims the thing will enable high-speed backup and recovery without users changing their existing backup processes and...

HP To Put Out New Fibre Channel Drives.(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Hewlett-Packard introduced a bunch of new storage products at the Storage Networking World show this week including a new class of Fibre Channel disk drives for SANs. The new drives, which HP termed Fibre Attached Technology Adapted, was...

Isilon Expands IQ Line.(Isilon Systems)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... Storage start-up Isilon Systems has added two new products to its IQ family of clustered storage systems for storing digital content. The new systems reportedly double the throughput of Isilon's previous-generation products to 20 Gbps by...

IBM Launches Smaller Shark.(IBM ESS 750)(Brief Article)
April 12, 2004... IBM has introduced a new Shark into its Enterprise Storage Server line for customers that don't require the higher capacity and performance of an ESS 800. The new ESS 750 provides 1.1TB-4.6TB of physical capacity and is based on two...