Client Server News articles from August 2004

Client Server News archives from August 2004

Intel To Launch Lindenhurst Despite Glitch.
August 2, 2004... Lindenhurst, the two-way chipset that will empower Intel to field 64-bit x86 servers up against AMD Opterons, launches Monday, August 2 despite the fact that it's got a little problem with PCI-Express, one of its most vaunted features. In...

Rackable Slams Traditional Blades as Wrong-Headed; Shows 'em How To Do It.
August 2, 2004... Rackable Systems Inc, the little company getting big in large-scale data center deployments, claims that the blade merchants have been doing it all wrong all this time and that its latest development, a thing called the Scale Out Server, is the...

Sun To Move its Software Stack to Windows & HP-UX.(Java Enterprise System to be ported to other platforms)
August 2, 2004... Sun, which used to be famous for its unwavering focus on Solaris and its Sparc chip, says it's going to port its Java Enterprise System (JES), its all-important software stack to rival Windows and HP-UX operating systems, by the calendar first...

Intel Adjusts Expectations.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Remember all those bold promises Intel made about having a 4GHz Pentium for the desktop out by the end of the year? Well, forget it. Intel's not going to make its self-imposed timetable. The widget has slipped to Q1, Intel has confirmed....

Food Fight! Food Fight!! RealNetworks Bites into Apple; Apple Promises To Bite Back.
August 2, 2004... RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser, the guy Steve Jobs wouldn't let buy him lunch, has poisoned Stevie's water glass in revenge. In effect - or maybe in reality - he's hacked into Apple's precious iPod, wormed through its copy-protected defenses...

Google's IPO: PT Barnum Would Have Loved It.(initial public offerings)(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... The way things are looking, Google's top management, which obviously strolls around humming snatches of "I Did It My Way," may come to find out that its way is young and nave, not street smart and wily like Frank Sinatra. So far, it seems,...

Sun Delivers Four-Way Opteron Server.
August 2, 2004... On cue, Sun on Monday wheeled out its expected new four-way Opteron server, the V40z, priced at $8,495 and claiming to best IBM, HP and Dell on price/performance since the industry-standard widgetry runs Solaris and the Java Enterprise System....

Microsoft Debuts Newsbot Pilot.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then Google should be pleased that Microsoft has taken another page from its book. On Tuesday, Microsoft's MSNBC operation rolled out a beta of a news aggregation service powered by the...

Court Date Set on Stay in EC Antitrust Case against Microsoft.(European Commission)(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... The Court of First Instance, Europe's court of appeals, is going to hear Microsoft's motion for a stay of all the remedies demanded by the European antitrust regulators at a two-day hearing in Luxembourg on September 30 and October 1. ...

CA Recruits Ex-SEC Commish for its Board.(Computer Associates International Inc., Securities and Exchange Commision)(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Rarely, if ever, has the announcement that somebody has been tapped for a board seat made us laugh out loud - until this one. This one's a pip. Computer Associates, which is up to its ass in alligators with the SEC and the Justice...

Office 2003 SP1 Out.(service pack)(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Microsoft has put Service Pack 1 for Office 2003 out on its web site. Besides the usual bug fixes and reliability enhancements, SP1 includes new features for the OneNote 2003 note-taking program and the InfoPath 2003 electronic forms...

IBM Rotates Managers.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... You know how IBM likes to move people around. Well, by dint of the last rotation, it's now got iSeries boss Al Zollar running Tivoli, Tivoli chief Robert LeBlanc running WebSphere, WebSphere head John Swainson running software sales, worldwide...

IBM To Buy App Management ISV.(independent software vendors)(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... IBM is acquiring Cyanea, a privately held ISV that has software to manage web-based business applications, on undisclosed terms. The software from the Oakland, California company is designed to let business programs written in Java for CICS...

India's 'Sleeping' Software Giant IPOs.(initial oublic offerings)(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... India's biggest software exporter, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the software arm of the huge $12-billion-a-year Tata conglomerate, one of the country's two biggest, is going public. The process, the biggest IPO India has ever seen,...

AMD Semprons Start Moving.(Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. )(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... AMD has begun shipping its new value chip, a line of widgets called Sempron, a successor to the old Duron and Athlon XP, meant for cheap, under $600 desktops and notebooks. Vendors using the thing include HP, Lenovo (aka Chinese giant...

PeopleSoft Quarter Sucks.
August 2, 2004... It said things had turned bad and it wasn't kidding. PeopleSoft profits dropped nearly 70% in the second quarter, worse than the revised guidance it issued a few weeks ago. It says it's all Oracle's fault because of the heavy press...

Documentum Gets ILM-ized.(Information Lifecycle Management)
August 2, 2004... Furthering its Information Lifecycle Management strategy, EMC has rolled out an add-on product to its Documentum software that will let organizations set storage policies that automate the placement and movement of content across a tiered...

McData Sets up New Technology Office.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Storage switch vendor McData has set up a new Technology Office with a mandate to focus on defining and developing innovative technologies. McData said the new office would identify and develop a technology framework that leverages common...

Veritas Insists Macro Factors Hit Q2 Results.
August 2, 2004... Veritas reported second-quarter earnings Tuesday that were a penny higher than its lowered forecast of three weeks earlier. It earned $86 million, or 20 cents a share, on revenues of $485 million, up 19% year-over-year but flat...

SGI To Peddle YottaYotta Gear.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... SGI plans to resell and support YottaYotta's NetStorager System. The two companies will offer a single shared file system - SGI's CXFS - that will give multiple users, who can be geographically distributed, with transparent and secure...

Start-up Uses Open Source Project To Nudge Microsoft Off.(Symbio Technologies Inc.'s Java-based Workplace 2 scheme )
August 2, 2004... the Desktop Symbio Technologies Inc, a New Rochelle, New York start-up, wants to tear the guts out of your PC, turn it into a diskless thin client and move the compute power to a server, sort of along the lines of that ClearCube is doing...

Malcontent VC Threatens To Sue SCO for Modest Success of.(venture capitalist, The SCO Group Inc.)
August 2, 2004... its IP Licensing We're going to take a flying leap here and guess that BayStar Capital, SCO's disgruntled former VC, is unhappy with the deal it cut with SCO after it demanded its money back, that it figures it could have done better and...

Black Duck Gets Backing.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Black Duck, the start-up with the timely, open source-conscious, new protexIP widgetry to manage software IP, has raised $5 million in Series A financing from Flagship Ventures and General Catalyst Partners. At Flagship, Black Duck founder...

Linux Infections Rare.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Evan Data polled a bunch of Linux developers and says 92% report never being infected by a virus. And 78 percent of them said they had had never been hacked. Presumably Google, with its gargantuan Linux server farm, wishes it could say...

MySQL Debuts Hosted Offering.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... MySQL AB has launched a hosted offering for users of its eponymous open source database. MySQL Hosting, which is being offered in partnership with hosting provider Rackspace, is aimed at web sites and other MySQL database applications. It...

Quick, Darl, Duck. Rotten Tomatoes at 12 O'clock.(Darl McBride, CEO, The SCO Group Inc.)(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... SCO CEO Darl McBride claims that the discovery that IBM has turned over so far - the stuff that nobody outside the two companies has seen yet - is proving out SCO's contention that IBM played fast and loose with SCO code, which makes him wonder...

Goldman Sachs Pushes Out Longhorn Timetable.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Goldman Sachs, Microsoft's closest friend on Wall Street, is more convinced than ever that Longhorn, Microsoft's fabled next- generation desktop operating system, won't show up before the first half of 2007, a conclusion the broker shares with...

Mozilla To Pay for Reports of Security Holes.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... The year-old Mozilla Foundation, home to the AOL-dispossessed mozilla.org and the next-generation Firefox alternate browser, is going to start paying cash bounties to people who identify and report security issues in its software. The AOL/Mitch...

Lindows Abandons IPO Auction Scheme.(initial public offerings)(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Lindows has dumped its plans to IPO by auction a la Google. It was supposed to go out using the auction process pioneered by West Coast VC WR Hambrecht and we assumed that that was still the plan when we wrote last week that Lindows had priced...

Egenera Building Its First Itanium Blade.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Egenera, the first out with four-way Xeon blades, says it's building a two-way blade using the Itanium 2, its first spin of the high-end Intel part. The company thinks it'll be attractive to customers with critical databases and...

Troop Movements.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Google has poached BEA's chief architect Adam Bosworth, a curmudgeony Microsoft superstar who left Redmond to start Crossgain Corporation whose initial charter before BEA bought it was basically to do .NET without Windows, which was after...

Microsoft Accused of Hiding Indian Work.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... WashTech, the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, a AFL-CIO- connected Seattle labor group, claims that Microsoft is hiding how many people it's got working for it in India behind the veil of contract workers, which Microsoft never...

Martha Stewart's New Chairman Wears Jockey Shorts.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Tom Siekman, one-time general counsel for both DEC and then for Compaq after it acquired DEC, has been named chairman of the abominably named Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc (MSO). Siekman has been on the board since last August shortly...

Microsoft Would Like To Write Off Slate.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Microsoft is looking for somebody to take Slate, the online magazine, off its hands. It's supposed to be talking to a few potential buyers. Reuters, which broke the story, says any buyer would have to keep the book affiliated with MSN....

One Thing's For Sure, Spanking's Too Good for Him.(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... Sven Jaschan, the 18-year-old German brat arrested in May for unleashing the destructive Sasser and Netsky worms after a tip to Microsoft from one of his friends identified him, was responsible for 70% of all virus activity in the first half,...

SCO Applies for USL Trademark.(The SCO Group Inc., Unix System Laboratories)(Brief Article)
August 2, 2004... For reasons it's not sharing at this point, on June 21 SCO applied for a trademark on the name Unix System Laboratories, which of course was the name of the AT&T unit that commercialized Unix and ultimately sold the OS to Novell. SCO mumbled...

Top Analyst Implies IBM's an IP Cheat.(SCO Forum)
August 9, 2004... SCO CEO Darl McBride, the second most hated man in America after George Bush, says life since suing IBM has been "untenable suffering," but, comparing himself to Wesley, the pure-hearted, wrongs-righting hero in the movie "Princess Bride," said...

Gee, Did Munich Spit in the Wind?
August 9, 2004... The city of Munich's vaunted LiMux project to move its 14,000 workers from Windows to Linux - a spit in the eye of Microsoft, whose CEO flew to Germany last year to try to save the account and couldn't, even though he came bearing handsome...

Windows XP SP2 Slips.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Microsoft has delayed the release of Windows XP Service Pack 2 again but still expects to RTM the thing by the end of this month. It says it had quality issues. God knows it should be sensitive to quality issues by now and has repeated used...

Microsoft Tiptoes Around New Antitrust Hazard.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Microsoft apparently danced around the issue of its anticipated entry into the anti-virus market at its annual meeting last week with financial analysts. Goldman Sachs got the impression it will offer some anti-virus capabilities over the...

Kumar Begins To Know What Poor Is.(Inestigation on Sanjay Kumar)(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Computer Associates' ousted CEO Sanjay Kumar, expected to be indicted by the government for cooking the company's books, has been forced to return $7.56 million in restricted stock, roughly half his position in company, according to papers CA...

Google Activates its IPO Site.(Initial public offerings)(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Google switched on the web site for people to register to bid in its imminent IPO auction the day after Microsoft showed financial analysts the search engine it will field to compete with Google. Microsoft also demonstrated its ability to...

Dim Sun Tries Cut-Rate Financing.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Sun, which thinks its sizeable bank account could give it a real future in financing, is aping the latest deluge of junk mail and offering 3.9% financing with no payments and no interest for the rest of the year to move its hardware, software...

DES Too Laughably Wimpy To Protect Anything.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... NIST, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, says the Data Encryption Standard, aka single DES, the original government- approved 56-bit key for encrypting sensitive data, has been overpowered by the code-cracking abilities of...

Troop Movements.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... BEA's CTO Scott Dietzen has left, following the company's chief architect Adam Bosworth out the door, an announcement made on the day BEA pre-announced and said Q2 will come in below Wall Street estimates. Meanwhile, Siebel has lost the...

W3C Teams with OMA.(Open Mobile Alliance)(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... The World Wide Web Consortium and the Open Mobile Alliance, a group of 350 global concerns, have allied. They intend to collaborate on specifications for mobile access to the web, according to a memorandum of understanding that they signed....

Microsoft Settles New Mexico Class Action.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Microsoft has settled another one of those class actions that claimed it charged too much for Windows and Office. This time it made peace with New Mexico, agreeing to make up to $31.5 million in the vouchers available. As with the...

Engenio IPO Postponed.(initial public offering)(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Engenio Information Technologies, LSI Logic's storage spin-off, has postponed its IPO citing market conditions. It said it would wait for more favorable auspices. Engenio hoped to raise $102.4 million by selling 12.5 million shares for...

Sanrad Snags $8m.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Sanrad, the Israeli IP storage start-up, has gotten $8 million in a new funding. Sequoia Capital is the principal investor. The latest round takes Sanrad's total bankroll to $20 million. In 2000 the company got $7 million from the RAD Group...

Nexsan Gets New CEO.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Storage start-up Nexsan Technologies has named Philip Black its new CEO. He joins the company from fabric extension products provider LightSand Communications, where he was also CEO. Nexsan's product line includes the ATAboy ATA disk-based...

Why Should Sun Stop at Novell? Why Shouldn't It Buy SCO.
August 9, 2004... While It's At It? So Sun president Jonathan Schwartz, apropos of nothing, up and tells the Wall Street Journal - in time to make the edition that hits the newsstands the morning LinuxWorld opens - that Sun has been thinking about buying...

OSRM Claims Linux Infringes 283 Patents.(Open Source Risk Management)
August 9, 2004... Open Source Risk Management (OSRM), the wannabe insurance start-up, pulled the pin on a hand grenade and lobbed it at Linux users a few hours before LinuxWorld opened its doors Monday morning. It claimed the Linux kernel treads on 283 patents....

Red Hat's Potentially Dangerous App Server Bows.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Red Hat has expanded, as expected, beyond the Linux operating system and burrowed into the territory of IBM, BEA and Oracle when it launched its Java Application Server at LinuxWorld. The suspicion of course is that the move will do nothing...

Microsoft Loyalist Crumbles; Pushes Linux on Windows.
August 9, 2004... Mainframe Unisys, the Windows loyalist, started pushing Linux on its so-called Windows Mainframe Monday. It's been inching towards the move for a while. Early last year Unisys was fooling around with Linux in the lab, saying the...

SuSE Enterprise Linux Server 9 Debuts.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Novell made its presence known at LinuxWorld by launching SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 Tuesday. Although the current Red Hat cut does use some elements of the 2.6 kernel, the new SuSe 9 is really the first commercial Linux to support the...

CA Figures Even Open Source Developers Gotta Eat.
August 9, 2004... At LinuxWorld the other day Computer Associates promised open source developers a million dollars to get them to built migration kits for CA's newly open sourced late-great Ingres database. Considering Ingres' current position in the...

Microsoft Open Source Projects Evidently Succeeding.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Sourceforge, which claims to host some 80,000 open source projects, many of which barely have a pulse, says that both the projects Microsoft open sourced in April are among the top 5% of active projects on the site. Of the two, the Windows...

HP Debuts Linux Laptop.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Hewlett-Packard has started selling SuSE Linux pre-installed on a Centrino-based notebook, making it the first major vendor to do that. HP already sells cheap Mandrake Linux desktops built on Centrino chips. HP thinks of the laptop as a...

IBM Throws Cloudscape into the Open Source Stew.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... IBM has open sourced the little Cloudscape embedded database it got when it bought Informix. IBM valued its contribution at $85 million, which was the price Informix paid when it acquired Cloudscape in September 1999. IBM is giving...

Well, That's One Down.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Facing resistance from the Linux community to its C++ Compiler 8.0 for Linux - the community's preference has been for the open source compiler gcc - Intel got Red Flag Software, the Chinese outfit, to use the thing and brag that - thanks to...

Red Hat Figures Better a Black Duck than a Dead Duck.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Red Hat has tied up with Black Duck Software, the new IP problem spotter, and evidently not a moment too soon what with all the new patent-infringement concerns raised about Linux - not to mention Microsoft's patent chest hanging over Linux...

Veritas & Wyse Join OSDL.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Veritas and Wyse are the latest recruits signed up by the evidently thriving Open Source Development Lab (OSDL). Veritas wants in on OSDL's Data Center Workgroup in the name of making Linux enterprise- ready and Wyse, with its thin client...

MySQL Cozies Up to IBM.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... MySQL AB is now supporting Linux on IBM's Power processors, and Linux-on-Power is currently an IBM hot button. The Swedish open source vendor said its database would support Linux-on-Power across all IBM eServers including the p5, i5 and...

Microsoft's Hit List.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer named his biggest current competitors at the company's meeting with financial analysts last week, an annual exercise that in days gone by included the late-great Netscape, Novell and AOL. This year it singled out...

VC as Leech.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... SCO attributes the odd behavior of BayStar Capital, the VC that keeps publicly threatening to sue it for one unspoken reason or another, to a stock shorting strategy and claims the SEC is looking into BayStar's shorting practices with respect...

Longhorn Slip Can Make Microsoft Linux Fodder: CSFB.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Credit Suisse First Boston figures the most newsworthy thing about Microsoft's financial analysts meeting last week was the thing they didn't talk about: Longhorn. The broker suspects Microsoft's reticence about Longhorn suggests that...

Microsoft Stands Up Linux.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Microsoft was a no-show at LinuxWorld. While other companies were setting up their booths, it was turning its space into rest area. The move set off lots of speculation about why, but nothing concrete. We frankly didn't get a chance to ask them...

Pocket PC Virus Jumps Petrie Dish.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... First there was an innocent-enough proof-of-concept Pocket PC virus, but now there's a real one out in the wild. Anti-virus firms Symantec and Kaspersky Labs are warning of a new Trojan called Brador that can control Microsoft Pocket PC-based...

Xbox 2 Watch.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Goldman Sachs, a keen observer of the Xbox, thinks Microsoft will release Xbox 2 in time for the Christmas rush in 2005. All Microsoft has indicated so far is that it wants the widget to beat the next- generation Sony and Nintendo consoles to...

CeBit America Follows Comdex Down the Rabbit Hole.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... CeBit America 2005 has been canceled for lack of interest. The organizers couldn't get enough pre-paid commitments from the exhibitors. It would have been the transplant's third attempt to take root in New York. This year's Comdex has also been...

Where Should We Send the Bill?(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Spammers sent out 2.981 billion e-mails between January 1 and July 30, according to London-based digital risk assessor mi2g, and are obviously galloping to better last year's total of 1.6 trillion spam messages. Mi2g says these vermin have done...

Jobs Beats the Big C.(Brief Article)
August 9, 2004... Steve Jobs, 49, is recovering from just-in-time surgery for a rare kind of cancer of the panaceas. He had an islet cell neuroendocrine tumor removed and won't need any chemotherapy. His being sidelined set off a rift of concern over the...

Is Carly Toast Yet?(Carly Fiorina, CEO - Hewlett Packard)
August 16, 2004... So here we are three weeks shy of the third anniversary of that fateful day when HP said it was going to buy Compaq, and Cleo, the muse of history, who gets spiteful when people ignore her, is sitting there saying, "I told you so." HP's...

'We Ain't Scared of No Stinkin' Patents - Well, Not Much'.(patent issues with Linux usage)
August 16, 2004... Undaunted by the Munich scare that briefly had that city put its high-profile Linux rollout on hold for fear that its Linux desktop will run into patent claims, Vienna has decided to offer 7,500 of its 16,000 bureaucrats the choice of switching...

Microsoft Experiments with Regional Pricing.
August 16, 2004... Microsoft has launched a 12-month pilot program to offer a special, lightweight, low-cost, Linux-fighting version of Windows XP in five developing countries, the first time it has ever deviated from its policy of a single, globally imposed...

Microsoft Hits Stay Hurdle.(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... The judge who's going to decide whether Microsoft rates a stay on the antitrust penalties imposed on the company by the European Commission in March has previously hinted that he might prove hard to convince. The other day at a hearing he...

Google's Faith-Based IPO Set To Start.
August 16, 2004... Despite the fact that Google doesn't seem to have done one single thing right in bringing its mammoth IPO to Wall Street, and despite the market's lukewarm reception, and despite a published report that some of Google's myriad secondary...

Google To Report Q3 Loss Due to Yahoo Settlement.
August 16, 2004... On the threshold of its rocky IPO, Google told the SEC Monday that it will show a third-quarter loss because of a settlement it just cut with Yahoo - and that's after it didn't do that great in Q2 comparatively speaking. In an amended S1...

XP SP2 RTMs.
August 16, 2004... Microsoft's latest delay in getting its important security-enhancing XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) to market proved transitory. It patted the thing on its fat little 80MB rump and sent it along to manufacturing last Friday. It's also set up for...

Roxio Suits Up for Match with M'soft, Apple, Real & Virgin.
August 16, 2004... Roxio, the ISV that bought Napster out of bankruptcy last year, is going to sell its software business to Sonic Solutions for $80 million in cash and stock, change its name to Napster and give itself completely to the online music business. Its...

HP Falls, Dell Shines.
August 16, 2004... Dell on Thursday came in with solid numbers for its second quarter ended July 30 casting a long dark shadow over Hewlett-Packard's pre- announcement earlier in the day and underscoring the fact that HP's problems are of its own making, not an...

HP To Buy UK IT Services Firm.(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... Hewlett-Packard is paying $300 million cash for UK IT services house Synstar. The deal is in line with HP's re-thought strategy of making smaller services acquisitions. In March, it bought German IT services provider Triaton GmbH for an...

WS-Addressing Spec Sent to W3C.(web services)(World Wide Web Consortium)(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... That sometime threesome - IBM, Microsoft and BEA - who wrote the WS- Addressing web services specification are sending the thing to W3C for standardization and Sun and SAP are backing the submission. WS-Addressing creates an interoperable...

Help with Your Opterons, Lady?(Brief Article)
August 16, 2004... AMD has set up a subscription-based Professional Design Support Service Program at its Boston Design Center to help people with their AMD64 designs, everything from embedded systems through clients to HPC servers. It's supposed to give...