Client Server News articles from December 2008

Client Server News archives from December 2008

SCO Gets Its Hall Pass To Appeal.
December 1, 2008... SCO filed a notice of appeal with the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver Tuesday. Yes, miracle of miracles it finally got a final judgment out of Utah District Court Judge Dale Kimball. That's the hall pass...

Dell Offers 0% Financing.
December 1, 2008... With its Q3 sales down 3% and demand fearfully thin, Dell is tearing a page out of Microsoft's book and is going to offer US businesses 0% financing. It's focusing on large corporations and institutions but some smaller shops should also...

IBM Wants Its Initials on All Clouds Everywhere.
December 1, 2008... In a fascinating move to co-op the cloud, IBM is proposing to rate other people's clouds, people like Amazon, GoGrid, Mosso and FlexiScale. Hopefully it will do better than Moody's and Standard & Poor's did with the bonds created out of...

Why Mark Papermaster Can't Work at Apple.
December 1, 2008... The reason why ex-IBM executive Mark Papermaster can't work for Apple is because Apple and IBM compete in microprocessors for iPod and iPhones. Who'd have thunk it? But that's what the judge deciding where Mr. Papermaster can work -...

Start-up Sells Troll Insurance.
December 1, 2008... There's been Open Invention Network and Allied Security Trust, and now there's RPX Corporation promising protection against the so-called patent troll. RPX, amusingly enough, was started by two refugees from what is widely perceived to be...

Court Orders Ballmer Deposed.
December 1, 2008... The federal court hearing the disclosure-rich "Vista Capable" class-action suit claiming consumers were misled by the logo has ordered Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to submit to a three-hour deposition. Microsoft, which tried to block the...

Cost Cutting, Laptops & EDS Do It for HP.
December 1, 2008... HP, which lifted its skirt and showed everybody its panties last week, officially released its better-than-expected fiscal Q4 results Monday and repeated its relatively aggressive guidance for the current quarter. As it said it would, it...

Apple Sued for How iPhone Navigates the Web.
December 1, 2008... EMG Technology LLC, reportedly a one-man show, is suing Apple and its iPhone for patent infringement in the so-called pro-plaintiff "Rocket Docket" in Texas. Its founder holds five US patents for navigating the web from a mobile device and...

iSuppli Cuts PC Forecast.
December 1, 2008... iSuppli has taken the auspices again and now says that PCs won't grow next year by 11.9% like it thought before the sky started falling. Sales will only be up 4.3%, up being better than down let's remember. And it's not quite as...

Microsoft's Sky Filled with Clouds.
December 1, 2008... Microsoft plans to build about 20 "super-size" cloud data centers, each with a price tag of around a billion dollars apiece, according to BusinessWeek. The magazine got it from an unnamed source. All Microsoft's VP of global foundation...

Nathan Myhrvold Part of Transmeta Sale.
December 1, 2008... Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures (IV), the great patent vacuum, has a piece of Novafora's deal to buy Transmeta, according to a filing dropped off with the SEC. IV was apparently there at the bargaining table with Novafora, which...

Google Shrinking.
December 1, 2008... Google is significantly reducing the number of contract workers it uses but says it won't cut its staff of 21,123 people, according to the Wall Street Journal. It remains unclear how many of its 10,000 contractors Google will be cut. Apparently...

Netbooks Get Another Taker.
December 1, 2008... Add Fujitsu's name to the list of Atom-based netbook hawkers.

Cisco To Close over the Holidays.(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... With some exceptions like support and orders, Cisco is going to shut down from December 29 to January 2 in the US and Canada to hold down costs. Remember it's trying to cut 2009 expenses by a billion dollars because of the economy. Although...

Two Engineers Sentenced under Economic Espionage Act.
December 1, 2008... Remember those two Chinese-born engineers who were picked up at the San Francisco Airport a few years back right before they got on a plane to China? And they were carrying suitcases full of stolen chip designs from Sun, Transmeta, NEC and...

Fedora 10 Out.
December 1, 2008... Fedora 10 is out and about. Fedora of course is Red Hat's freebie community OS and testbed for coming attractions in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The new rev is supposed to have substantial virtualization improvements for remotely...

rPath Broadens its Pitch.(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... Besides SUSE and its own brand of Linux, rPath is now supporting the Ubuntu and CentOS Linux operating systems as part of its rBuilder and rPath Lifecycle Management Platform. The move broadens the start-up's options for deploying and...

Microsoft & Novell Still Together Two Years Later.
December 1, 2008... The two-year anniversary of the Novell-Microsoft alliance that scandalized the open source community passed quietly enough earlier this month. The pair waited a couple of weeks to mark the occasion and then said that in the second year of...

Microsoft Picks Yahoo Geek To Run Google Counter-Offensive.
December 8, 2008... The job of running Microsoft's flagging Google counter-offensive - which has lain like a fallow field since Kevin Johnson left the company in July to become CEO of Juniper Networks, having been foiled in buying Yahoo - has been filled. As...

It's Official. We're in a Recession.
December 8, 2008... The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private non-profit research organization that determines such things based on broad and more precise measurements than most, said Monday that the US is in a...

MPUs Down Practically Any Way You Look at Them.(Microprocessor Units)(Brief article)
December 8, 2008... Barclays Capital analyst Tim Luke says microprocessor revenue was down 53.6% in October compared to September and 40.1% less than the industry average in October for the last 10 years. They were down 23% year-over-year and up 2.1%...

Googling the Cabinet?(Brief article)
December 8, 2008... Newsweek - which apparently sees the Obama cabinet amounting to a lot of big names with little experience - is floating the idea that the president-elect might make Dan Reicher, Google's director of climate change and energy initiatives, energy...

Intel To Build Mobos in Egypt.
December 8, 2008... Intel is going to start producing motherboards in Egypt. According Reuters, it's a three-way deal signed by Intel, a small Egyptian manufacturer called Boraq for Electronic Industries and the state-run Information Technology Industry...

IBM Asia-Pac Layoffs Reported.
December 8, 2008... Australian IT says IBM Asia-Pacific is going to cut 2,600 jobs, hitting the company's software unit and Japan the most. Japan, which has been offering voluntary retirement, is reportedly supposed to lose 1,000 people. Some headquarters...

IDC Predicts Fluffy Clouds.(Brief article)
December 8, 2008... IDC figures that clouds services - that's the consumer and business products, services and solutions delivered via the cloud - is "crossing the chasm" and "entering a period of widespread adoption." It reckons that over the next five years...

Sherwin-Williams Stores To Standardize on SUSE.
December 8, 2008... Sherwin-Williams, the big multibillion-dollar paint company, is standardizing on SUSE Linux Enterprise POS for the multi-function desktop/registers and servers in its 3,000 retail stores.

Ex-Oracle Guys Goes to Informatica Board.
December 8, 2008... Informatica has put Dr Gerald Held, a long-time Tandem exec who then ran Oracle's Server Products unit, on its board. A database expert, he now runs Held Consulting.

Google & the Razor's Edge.
December 8, 2008... Google is more like Microsoft than it would admit. Not only is it regarded as a monopoly by the US government, it likes dangling its toes over the crevasse. Sandy Litvack, the guy that the Justice Department hired to build an antitrust case...

A Hobbled Sun Limps to the RIA Starting Gate.
December 8, 2008... It's a wonder it has the entry fee, but Sun Thursday showed up for the RIA race against Adobe's Flex, Flash and AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight - and for that matter the open source AJAX - riding JavaFX 1.0. According to Sun it's one of...

Zoho Builds Data Bridges in the Cloud.
December 8, 2008... Zoho, the prolific Microsoft wannabe that has already proven it can knock off a web app at the drop of a buzzword, is branching out into middleware. It's come up with some widgetry - aimed at developers this time, not end users - called...

Amazon SimpleDB Hits Public Beta.
December 8, 2008... After spending a year in private beta, Amazon's SimpleDB has been pushed into what the company calls "unlimited public beta." Any developer or business can now sign up and start using the web service. As a come-on, for the next six months...

AMD's Quarter Sours Like Curdled Milk.
December 8, 2008... AMD sent out a short sharp message Thursday morning saying that the way things are going it expects revenues from continuing operations this quarter to be ~25% lower than they were last quarter and that was only $1.585 billion. It had...

Adobe Comes Up Short, Cans 600.(Brief article)
December 8, 2008... As fate would have it, Adobe picked the worst possible quarter to roll out the great update to its flagship Creative Suite widgetry. Because the economy tanking, it hasn't been selling the way it was supposed to. As a result, revenues came...

IBM Takes New Tack To Push Microsoft Off the Desktop.
December 8, 2008... IBM is taking another shot at blowing Microsoft off the desktop and this time it's got the foul economic winds at its back. In the name of cost cutting, IBM is proposing that companies virtualize their desktops and turn them into thin...

PC Growth To Drop to Turtle Speed: IDC.(Industry overview)
December 8, 2008... IDC took another look at its 2009 PC forecast Wednesday and in view of economic realities dropped its worldwide unit growth rate prediction from 13.7% (which is what it said in Q2) to 3.8% and said the value of the PCs that do ship will decline...

Don't Look Back! The Server Landscape's Ugly.
December 8, 2008... Worldwide server shipments might have been up 4.4% to 2.3 million units in the September quarter but revenues were down 5.4% to $12.7 billion according to Gartner. IDC's numbers aren't all that different. It hasn't been this bad since 2002...

VMware Revamps its Virtual Desktop Widgetry.
December 8, 2008... VMware, the struggling virtualization leader, has, as expected, put View 3 on the market to do battle with Citrix' XenApp and XenDesktop widgetry. It's supposed to be a big advance in virtual desktop computing, described by the company as...

HP Expects To Save MegaBucks on IT.
December 8, 2008... The other day, HP, the industry's resident smarty pants, let drop that starting this fiscal year - which is now, oh, five or six weeks old - it will save a billion dollars a year on IT compared to 2005 - although it's added upwards of $25...

Novell Reminds Folks It Bought PlateSpin.
December 8, 2008... Novell is repositioning the virtualization widgetry that it bought for $205 million this spring when it bought PlateSpin and now claims to be the only kid on the block who can support 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux servers, as well as all the...

Intel to EC: 'We Left Our Kid Gloves Home'.
December 8, 2008... Thanks to a sketchy notice in the Official Journal of the European Union we now know a tad more about why Intel has taken the European Commission to court. Seems Intel is accusing the EC of making it the butt of a "discriminatory and...

Good OS Builds Browser OS Called Cloud.
December 8, 2008... Good OS, who's tight with Google and whose gOS Linux powered a $199 Everex PC that Wal-Mart sold last year, is wheeling out Cloud, a new browser operating system that reportedly boots up the Internet in seconds and can be used to toggle between...

Alleged Software Pirate Accuses Microsoft of Antitrust.
December 8, 2008... A dealer in Holland that Microsoft sued in May for copyright infringement has complained to the European Commission that Microsoft charges anywhere from 30%-50% more for its software in Europe than in does in the US - except Vista which is only...

Journal Calls Report of Yahoo-Microsoft Deal Baloney.
December 8, 2008... According to the Times of London Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo's search business. The Wall Street Journal says the story is utter hokum. The British paper puts the price at $20 billion - although all of Yahoo was only worth $15.96...

Ex-AOL CEO Looking To Buy Yahoo: WSJ.
December 8, 2008... For months now the former CEO of AOL Jonathan Miller has been looking for the money to buy Yahoo, according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper was apparently inspired by the Times of London, which claimed over the weekend - in a story...

FTC Appeals to the Supreme Court about Rambus.
December 8, 2008... The Federal Trade Commission wants the Supreme Court to overturn an April 22 decision by the US Court of Appeals basically absolving Rambus of antitrust. The D.C. Circuit reversed an FTC administrative decision that Rambus deceived the...

Intel & Hitachi Cut SSD Joint Venture.
December 8, 2008... Intel has cut a joint venture with Hitachi to make solid state drives (SSDs) for servers, high-end workstations and storage - not the consumer goods where such pricey widgetry is usually found these days. Their first products, branded and...

Linux Gets a Stocking Stuffer from Oracle.
December 8, 2008... Oracle threw some data integrity protection code over the wall and it's been accepted into the 2.6.27 Linux kernel. It reportedly lets the Linux kernel utilize key data protection information for the first time in its life. It's also...

Moonlight Beta Out.
December 8, 2008... The promised beta release of Moonlight 1.0, the Linux implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight widgetry, has finally wended its way out. Moonlight is of course the open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight and should give...

OSA Taps Unisys Exec as President.
December 8, 2008... The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), the two-year-old consortium dedicated to interoperability and the adoption of open software, has picked Anthony Gold, who runs Unisys' open source business, to be its president. He replaces SpikeSource exec...

Concurrent Revs RedHawk Linux.
December 8, 2008... Concurrent has a new version of its RedHawk Linux. RedHawk 5.2 was developed to address particular needs in real-time application development. New features include an enhanced industry standard Linux kernel (2.6.26); multi-platform...

Novell Narrows Loss.
December 8, 2008... To no one's particular surprise, Novell missed its quarter. Wall Street thought it could turn six cents a share on $249.78 million. Instead it lost $16.3 million, five cents a share, on flat year-over-year revenues of $245 million in its...

Versant Buys db4objects Database Business.
December 8, 2008... db4objects has sold its open source object database business, native to Java and .NET, to Versant to focus on Servo, a newfangled user data management service. Price was not disclosed. The company will now be known as Servo Software Inc....

GNU Sues Cisco.
December 22, 2008... The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has sued Cisco for copyright infringement. It says Cisco's Linksys division uses GNU code and won't honor the GPL 2 and LGPL 2 and 2.1 licenses that the GNU software's distributed under and give customers...

Currency Plays Havoc with Oracle's Numbers.
December 22, 2008... The strengthening dollar played havoc with Oracle's fiscal second quarter, which spanned the ugly months of September through November when the recession took hold. The company, which gets over half its business from overseas, earned close...

Gartner's Crystal Ball Turns Nasty.
December 22, 2008... Only a month ago Gartner predicted that chip sales would be up 0.2% this year and drop 2.2% next year. Now it's looked in its crystal ball again and foresees two years of back-to-back revenue decline, something that's never happened before...

Lenovo-Positivo Deal Off.
December 22, 2008... The possibility of Lenovo acquiring Brazil's biggest PC maker Positivo Informatica SA has come naught. Lenovo told Reuters that the companies "agree that given the current economic turmoil and uncertainties, it is not feasible to reach an...

Zoho Claims To Crush Google's Python Hug.(Brief article)
December 22, 2008... Zoho says that web apps created using its Creator widgetry can be automatically turned into programs that will run on Google's Python-constricted App Engine. App Engine, remember, only supports code written in Python and a particular...

Dell/PAN System Goes Live.
December 22, 2008... Three quarters after cutting the OEM deal, Dell has started delivering PAN, Egenera's data center virtualization and management software, in North America. The Egenera widgetry has been parlayed into a factory-integrated, turnkey solution...

Well, Isn't Yahoo the Goody Two-Shoes.(Brief article)
December 22, 2008... Yahoo up and said the other day that starting next month it will anonymize any personal user data stemming from searches, page views, ad views, page clicks and ad clicks in 90 days - a broader policy than anybody else's got although how...

Radio Shack Selling $99.99 Acer Netbook.
December 22, 2008... On Sunday Radio Shack started dangling a $99.99 Atom-based Aspire netbook from Acer in front of the American consumer, becoming the first major US retailer to cut that deep. It usually sells for $500. To qualify for the $99.99 price,...

Google Pack Sidelines Firefox.
December 22, 2008... Google, which made Mozilla rich supporting Firefox because Google was its default search engine, has dropped the browser as the default in its so-called Google Pack software collection in favor of its own shiny new out-of-beta Chrome browser....

Sun Upgrades VirtualBox.
December 22, 2008... Sun Wednesday updated its free desktop virtualization software, xVM VirtualBox, to rev 2.1. The new cut is supposed to significantly improve graphics and network performance, configuration is supposed to be easier, and it supports the...

SAP Loses Bid To Limit Oracle Suit.
December 22, 2008... SAP has lost a bid to get out from under some of the charges Oracle made against it in that shrill billion-dollar suit Oracle filed when it discovered SAP support subsidiary TomorrowNow had downloaded a host of Oracle software and other...

EMC Names Old Maritz Crony To Run its Cloud Biz.
December 22, 2008... EMC Tuesday tapped Harel Kodesh to be president of its cloud infrastructure and services business, reporting to EMC capo Joe Tucci. Kodesh will also serve as the CEO of Decho, the subsidiary EMC recently created to focus on personal...

Microsoft & NTT To Talk Clouds.
December 22, 2008... Teams from Microsoft and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone are going to sit down and talk about collaborating on services that integrate networks with applications. They want to integrate Microsoft applications with NTT's information and...

NComputing Bags Another Trophy Exec.
December 22, 2008... NComputing has scored another trophy exec. It's hired Mark Beckford, the architect and original driver of Intel's "World Ahead" program that championed the Classmate PC laptop, as VP, global business development. Beckford contends that...

Sun Services Packages Up Solutions.
December 22, 2008... Sun's unsung Services unit, while not an EDS or IBM Global Services, is a $5.2 billion-a-year business and profitable, a word that rarely appears in the same sentence with Sun. Anyway, it's packaged up a trio of so-called go-to-market...

Microsoft & Alcatel Come to Terms.
December 22, 2008... Microsoft and Alcatel-Lucent have settled most of the six-year-old patent rumpus that flooded the courts in at least three states with lawsuits and appeals and saw Microsoft dinged for $1.5 billion, the largest US patent award ever, until a...

Google Wants Special Treatment: WSJ.(Brief article)
December 22, 2008... Google has denied it but the Wall Street Journal hasn't retracted a reportedly documented story it ran Monday saying that Google has been chatting up cable and phone companies trying to get "a fast lane for its own content," a tactic that puts...

Adobe Gives Linux AIR Time.
December 22, 2008... Adobe's AIR for Linux, the runtime engine that supports rich Internet apps (RIAs), has caught up with its Windows and Mac siblings. The company has released AIR 1.5 for Linux, the first time the Linux desktop variant has made it as a...

Novell Moves the Furniture Around Again.
December 22, 2008... Novell has made Roger Levy, the head of its Open Platform Solutions (OPS) unit, SVP of strategic development and told him to focus on a cross-business strategy and the data center, end-user computing, and identity and security management...

Microsoft Documents its ODF Support.
December 22, 2008... Ah, the Christmas spirit of "peace on earth, goodwill to men" must be wafting over Redmond, Washington. Microsoft said Tuesday that to - wait, lemme quote - "help foster interoperability among office productivity applications," it's gone...

Novell Cancels BrainShare.
December 22, 2008... Novell has pulled the plug on BrainShare - for 20 years its trademark user conference - which was scheduled for March in Salt Lake City. Novell chief marketing officer John Dragoon says on the company's web site that people wouldn't commit to...

Red Hat Devises New Maintenance Service.(Brief article)
December 22, 2008... Red Hat has started a new software maintenance service called Extended Update Support (EUS) that's supposed to save bigger customers money if they standardize on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment, like, say, RHEL 5.2, for up to 18 months,...

openSUSE Revved.
December 22, 2008... The openSUSE Project has hit release 11.1, the latest version of its free open source Linux distribution and the widgetry that the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 will be based on. This time through there's a new license that...

Red Hat Thumbs its Nose at Novell.
December 22, 2008... The Indian Express Group, one of subcontinent's better known media firms, says it's migrated from Novell Netware 3.12 operating system to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to scale while keeping costs in line. With Netware, the company reportedly...

Sun Delivers T2 RDK.
December 22, 2008... Sun has put out its promised UltraSparc T2 Reference Design Kit (RDK), meant to accelerate the design, development and testing of T2 processor-based embedded systems designs. T2 has eight cores and eight threads per core, and boasts one of the...

Linux Foundation Names New CTO.
December 22, 2008... The Linux Foundation has named Linux kernel developer Theodore Ts'o CTO, replacing Markus Rex, who's gone back home to Novell. Ts'o is currently a Linux Foundation fellow, a position he's had for the last year. He was the first North American...

Cross Sarin's Name Off the List.
December 22, 2008... Last week the name of Arun Sarin, the former head of Vodafone, was being bandied about as a possible replacement for Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. However, according to the Financial Times, Sarin has decided he doesn't want the job. The paper said, "It...

Apple Has Folks Back Taking Its Pulse.(Brief article)
December 22, 2008... After the curtain closes in January, Apple will be pulling out of the annual IDG-own Macworld that's been a touchstone for the Apple-fancying press and the company's fans. CEO Steve Jobs is not going to show up this time, leading to speculation...

Sun To Close Scottish Plant.
December 22, 2008... Sun is going to shut its plant in Linlithgow, Scotland, its only factory outside the US, throwing about 140 people on the street. The move is part of its plan to cut 6,000 jobs, roughly 18% of its workforce.

Live Search GM Moves On.
December 22, 2008... The general manager of Microsoft's Live Search unit Brad Goldberg has traded in his union card for the parking space reserved for the CEO of online business at Peak6 Investments, which according to Hoover's competes with Madoff Securities....

Yahoo Loses IP Chief.(Joseph Siino)(Brief article)
December 22, 2008... The latest in a long line of Yahoo execs to hit the trail is Joseph Siino, the guy who built its IP department. He's decided to try his hand monetizing patents, but hasn't said where yet. In his farewell e-mail to the troops, he claimed Yahoo's...

Google Losing Trust.
December 22, 2008... Google has disappeared from the Top 20 list of companies trusted with privacy in TRUSTe's fifth annual survey. American Express came in first followed by eBay (2), IBM (3), HP (6), Apple (8), Intuit (12), Yahoo (14) and Facebook (15).