Client Server News articles from January 2006

Client Server News archives from January 2006

Gates pitches Vista into the living room.(Bill Gates)(Microsoft Windows Vista)
January 9, 2006... Bill Gates kicked off the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas Wednesday night with a keynote peddling Microsoft's all-important upcoming Vista operating system, focusing on its search, security and digital entertainment possibilities. It...

Okay, how many copies of SuSE is Novell really selling to Switzerland?(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... Remember right before Christmas when Novell waved around a contract from the Swiss government and said the Swiss were going to convert upwards of 3,000 servers to SuSE Linux--and left the distinct impression the Swiss were going to standardize...

Ex-CA CEO seeks to avoid prison pin stripes.(Computer Associates)(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... Lawyers for Computer Associates' ousted CEO Sanjay Kumar and former executive VP of sales Stephen Richards have been in court lately arguing that federal prosecutors are misinterpreting a criminal statute in prosecuting their clients, exposing...

Intel remakes its logo.
January 9, 2006... Told ya so. Told ya so. Told ya weeks ago that Intel was tinkering with its logo. The company, which now wants to be associated with platforms and not just microprocessors, is weaning itself of its "Intel Inside" tagline. The word Intel...

AMD responds to ViiV.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s AMD Live)(www.amd.com
January 9, 2006... In response to Intel's imminent rollout of its ViiV digital home platform, AMD Wednesday unveiled a pronounceable, if ho-hum, repost called AMD Live, saying that it plans a full-featured Athlon 64 X2 dual-core-based consumer multimedia desktop...

FSF tries again to get GPL antitrust suit dismissed.(Linux Watch)
January 9, 2006... The Free Software Foundation is back asking the district court in Indianapolis to dismiss Daniel Wallace's pro se antitrust suit against it and the GPL on the ground that it still fails to state a claim on which relief can be granted. And...

Microsoft reportedly pressuring CIOs on Linux' legal risks.(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... Merrill Lynch Tuesday trotted out its latest CIO survey and reported that 11 of the hundred guys they interviewed said that "they have been pressured about the purported legal risk of Linux, mostly by Microsoft." Merrill said just eight of...

Wikipedia caught out again.(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... Following quick on the now-famous Seigenthaler flap, which brought to the fore the shortcomings of using the open source model to assemble an encyclopedia that just anyone can edit, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, was caught altering his...

Massachusetts CIO quits amid format hubbub.
January 9, 2006... Peter Quinn, the Massachusetts CIO who pushed the state to bar Microsoft and adopt the Sun-IBM-backed Open-Document format instead, quit his job on Christmas Eve, citing the personal publicity generated by the controversial initiative,...

Microsoft fails to nail AOL deal.(America Online Inc.)
January 9, 2006... Microsoft Fails to Nail AOL Deal--Microsoft failed in its primary mission of 2005, which was to tie up with AOL and give the vaunted Google search engine a run for its money. Everybody thought Microsoft would make Time Warner an offer it...

EC threatens M'soft--again.( Microsoft Corp. )(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... EC Threatens M'soft--Again--The European Commission stuck coal in Microsoft's stocking at Christmas for not adequately disclosing its server/client protocols like it was ordered to do and threatened to start fining the company the equivalent of...

Lenovo scraps IBM-supplied CEO.(Lenovo Group Ltd.)(Steve Ward)(Bill Amelio)(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... Lenovo Scraps IBM-Supplied CEO--For Christmas Lenovo Group CEO Steve Ward, who ran IBM's PC operation and transferred over to the Chinese company when Lenovo acquired it, lost his job. Lenovo has brought in the head of Dell's Asia-Pacific...

Google-Microsoft secret santa.(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... Google-Microsoft Secret Santa--For Christmas Microsoft settled with Google and the new president of Google China, former Microsoft VP Kai-fu Lee. It was the corporate version of a secret Santa though 'cause nobody will say what the settlement...

IBM buys Micromuse & Bowstreet.(International Business Machines Corp.)(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... IBM Buys Micromuse & Bow-street--IBM Software is buying Micromuse, whose software manages data, video and voice traffic on computer networks, for roughly $865 million in cash. The acquisition, which should close this quarter, will be added...

M'soft eases out of MSNBC.(Microsoft Corp.)(National Broadcasting Company Inc.)(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... M'soft Eases Out of MSNBC--Microsoft is getting out from under a 10-year-old deal that it's come to regret--the pricey cable TV end of its relationship with NBC. It'll stick with the 50-50 MSNBC.com web site, which has become the most...

CA buys Wily.(Wily Technology Inc.)(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... CA, which as you'll recall wants to be called CA, not Computer Associates, is buying five-year-old privately held Wily Technology for $375 million in cash for its application management software. The company is only expected to become...

Oracle drops multi-core pricing.(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... Well, it looks like Oracle has gone through some attitude adjustment and dropped its multi-core prices--at least on mainstream Intel and AMD chips. It's now counting each of their cores as a half a CPU, down from the three-quarters stance it...

AMD takes Rambus license.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... AMD has taken a five-year license from Rambus that covers patents used in the design of DDR2, DDR3, FB-DIMM, PCI Express and XDR controllers, Rambus said, as well as other current and future high-speed memory and logic controller interfaces....

McAfee gets its hand slapped.(McAfee.com Corp.)(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... As a result of a formal SEC investigation of its financials that started in March of 2002, McAfee said Wednesday that it would pay a $50 million fine. McAfee won't have to admit any wrongdoing or restate its results again. It will however...

Rumor of the week.(Larry Page at Consumer Electronics Show )(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... Google co-founder Larry Page is supposed to deliver a keynote at the Consumer Electronics Show today, his first such showing--and not a particularly natural Google venue--a fact that set off speculation and news reports that he might announce a...

AMD lays down another BRIC.(BILLY GRAMS)
January 9, 2006... AMD has struck a relationship with Tsinghua Tongfang, China's third-largest computer maker and second-largest home PC brand, to offer AMD 64 X2-, Athlon 64- and Sempron-based boxes.

Siebel to vote.(BILLY GRAMS)
January 9, 2006... Siebel's grateful shareholders are supposed to vote on Oracle's acquisition of the company on Tuesday, January 31.

UK reviews IP policies.(BILLY GRAMS)
January 9, 2006... The UK government has kicked off a review of the country's IP protection, handing the job to the former editor of the Financial Times Andrew Gowers, who will report back to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Secretary of State for Trade and...

Siemens move creates problems for Juniper.(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... According to China Business News, Siemens is going into the router business armed with three lines it's buying from Chinese networking house Harbour Networks for $110 million that undercut competing Cisco and Juniper products roughly 30%....

HP and CSC?(Computer Sciences Corp.)(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief article)
January 9, 2006... HP CEO Mark Hurd must have had his fingers crossed behind his back when he told Wall Street that HP wasn't thinking of making a big acquisition. Thursday the world woke up to the news that HP and the Blackstone Group might buy Computer Sciences...

Friends of Google boost stock.
January 9, 2006... On the first trading day of the New Year Piper Jaffray analyst Safa Rashtchy raised the broker's price target price on Google's stock from $445 to $600 because of Google's dominance of "an already large yet still rapidly growing market, its...

SEC probe of IBM turns formal.
January 16, 2006... Uh-oh. Late Thursday IBM said that it had gotten a notice of a formal investigation by the SEC into "disclosures related to its first-quarter 2005 earnings and expensing of equity compensation." The SEC has had an informal probe going...

EMC to cut a thousand jobs.
January 16, 2006... In the name of rebalancing for greater market share, EMC is going to cut 1,000 jobs this year and invest the savings in sales and R&D. It will take a Q4 charge of about $80 million to cover the terminations. The announcement came as...

SAP lookin' good.(Q4 results )(Brief article)
January 16, 2006... SAP pre-announced its Q4 results Wednesday since software revenue and total revenue were ahead of guidance and its operating margin and EPS were at the high end of predictions. The news convinced Wall Street that SAP is taking share from such...

Real Basic positioned for Apple migration.(RealBasic 2006 1.0 rolled out )(Brief article)
January 16, 2006... Real Software has just started shipping RealBasic 2006 1.0 for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, figuring to take advantage of Apple's migration to Intel. The upgrade features enhanced compatibility with Visual Basic, simplified localization...

Apple begins the great Intel trek.
January 16, 2006... So now we're gonna get to see how Microsoft and Apple fare competing in the same ring. Will Intel make Apple mainstream? Can Mac OS get the better of Windows and the Apple-trailing Windows Vista? And will Mac OS on Intel doom Linux' chances on...

Court shoots down suit to declare source code uncopyrightable.
January 16, 2006... Gregory Aharonian, the self-proclaimed "champion of the American public's interests" and editor and publisher of the Internet Patent News Services, has lost his pro se suit to have source code declared uncopyrightable. The suit, originally...

PTO upholds Microsoft's FAT patents.(Linux Watch)
January 16, 2006... The Linux community can start to worry whether Microsoft will seek revenge now that Linux familiars at the Public Patent Foundation (PubPat) have failed to get Microsoft's File Allocation Table a k a FAT patents invalidated. Re-examiners...

The cat wants to tattle on the canaries.(Linux Watch)
January 16, 2006... IBM, which for the thirteenth time in a row got more patents last year than anybody else, has hatched a plan to turn the open source community loose on patent applications at the overburdened US Patent and Trademark Office, which is reportedly...

SCO sues Novell for copyright infringement.(Linux Watch)
January 16, 2006... SCO has charged Novell with copyright infringement because Novell sells a Linux distribution. SCO made the charge in a second amended complaint in its two-year-old "slander of title" suit against Novell that it filed on December 30 in Utah...

Mainsoft & IBM team on Linux migration.
January 16, 2006... Mainsoft, the cross-platform development house and friend of Microsoft, announced a partnership with IBM Wednesday to help Windows customers cross over to Linux. The program is designed to expand the Linux ecosystem by offering Windows...

Novell turns AppArmor into open source project.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
January 16, 2006... Novell Tuesday announced the creation of a new GPL-based open source project called AppArmor that's based on its AppArmour code and is meant to advance the state-of-the-art of Linux application security against external or internal attacks,...

Zimbra makes its beta available.(Zimbra Collaboration Suite)
January 16, 2006... Zimbra, an open source start-up backed by $16 million from two rounds of VC funding, has unveiled its beta next-generation cross-platform messaging server and client, the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, claiming it will fundamentally change the way...

Scalix gets $6m.(Linux Watch)
January 16, 2006... According to a regulatory filing, Scalix, the Linux-based enterprise messaging house, has nailed $6 million of a $6.8 million Series B round. Existing investors Mayfield, Mohr, Davidow Ventures and New Enterprise Associates participated.

Dell & AMD?(Dell Inc. to make AMD based computers )(Brief article)
January 16, 2006... Piper Jaffray figures Intel-pure Dell is going to break down and start selling AMD-based boxes, predicting such an about-face could start in the second half. Among other signs, there have been press reports of Asian designers working on...

The great GPL update debate set to start.(general public license)(Brief article)
January 16, 2006... We're on the threshold of the great GPL debate. The Free Software Foundation is supposed to release the first public draft of GPL 3 on Monday January 16 at the First International on GPLv3 at the Massachusetts Institute of Technol-ogy, an event...

McAfee president leaves.(Gene Hodges joins Websense Inc. )(Brief article)
January 16, 2006... McAfee president Gene Hodges has jumped ship to go be CEO of Websense. Hodges has been responsible for McAfee's technology development, strategy and execution, as well as sales and marketing worldwide. His team, which will have to face...

Cell trio mush on.(International Business Machines Corp., Toshiba Corp. and Sony Corp. in partnership)(Brief article)
January 16, 2006... IBM, Sony and Toshiba, the threesome that developed the still-speculative, hard-to-program, visually oriented $400 million Cell chip and its underlying 95nm and 60nm silicon-on-insulator (SOI) widgetry for Sony PlayStations, Toshiba TVs and...

Contraband.(BILLY GRAMS)
January 16, 2006... Reports have Wikipedia, the online encyclopaedia, outlawed in China. Its web site has been blocked for the last 10 weeks and it's the third blackout in the last two year.

3Com CEO to retire.(BILLY GRAMS)
January 16, 2006... 3Com president and CEO Bruce Claflin, who did a turn as head of DEC's PC operation and didn't go to Compaq, is going to retire and will help the board pick his successor.

Sun supports MSN.(Sun Microsoft's loan to thePlatform Inc)(Brief article)
January 16, 2006... thePlatform Inc, the start-up with the rich digital content management, publishing and reporting solutions, has gotten $8 million in B round funding from Sun Microsoft, Spark Capital and Generation. Its software is supposed to publish digital...

Sun & Oracle back to air kissing.(Sun Microsystems Inc.'s marketing)(Brief article)
January 16, 2006... Sun intends to start giving away a free year of using Oracle's Enterprise Edition database on its new UltraSparc IV machines if customers take a year of support from Oracle. Sun is already bundling and supporting MySQL and PostgreSQL and it...

He could be mugged for the title.(BILLY GRAMS)
January 16, 2006... BusinessWeek says John Wookey has the hardest job in Silicon Valley. He's Oracle's senior VP of applications in charge of integrating all the piece of its many acquisitions into Project Fusion and turn up with sensible software.

Ethernet Alliance started.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
January 16, 2006... There is now an Ethernet Alliance to increase the acceptance and reduce the time-to-market of Ethernet products. Sun is a founder. So are 3Com, Broadcom, Force10 Networks, Intel, Lawrence Berkley Labs, Pioneer, Samsung, Tyco, the University of...

PTO has its own reforms in mind.(Patent and Trademark Office)
January 16, 2006... The US Patent and Trademark Office is proposing changes to reduce the amount of what it calls "rework" that it has to do and the time it takes for a patent review process. It wants to prioritize the claims reviewed during the examination...

Egenera takes new approach to the great watts crisis.(Blade-Frame EX and CoolFrame for release)
January 23, 2006... Egenera is about to introduce its third-generation BladeFrame, a widget dubbed Blade-Frame EX that promises to double the I/O performance and Ethernet connectivity of the company's existing hardware infrastructure--and along with it a new...

Intel cans IA-32 EL replacement.(IA-32 Execution Layer)(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... It looks like the IA-32 Execution Layer (IA-32 EL), the pokey Intel-created emulation widgetry, is as good as it's gonna get for running x86 software on Itanium--if anyone still wants to run x86 code on Itanium--the idea of running x86 software...

Halfway to Fusion.(Oracle Corp.'s Project Fusion)(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... Oracle's web-based Project Fusion, wherein all of the software that it acquired in its $19 billion buying spree is supposed to be integrated together, is on track to appear in 2008 according to what Oracle told customers Wednesday. Oracle...

AMD beats Intel's pants off.( Advanced Micro Devices Inc. )
January 23, 2006... Absent its recent Spansion flash spin-off and focusing just on its core MPU business, AMD said Wednesday that it had sales of $1.35 billion in the last quarter, a 78% increase year-over-year and a 34% increase sequentially. Intel the day before...

Intel blows the quarter.
January 23, 2006... Intel's fourth quarter came up short of its own and Wall Street expectations Tuesday having come apart at the end of December. Its shares took an immediate 9% hit in after-hours trading that worsened on Wednesday and only added a few cents...

Microsoft hangs go live licenses on WinFX technologies.(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... Microsoft said Wednesday that it had given early adopters of WinFX, the Vista programming model and superset of the .NET Framework, the "green light" to deploy applications ahead of WinFX' final release. They can now get what Microsoft...

Feds to be big outsourcers, study claims.
January 23, 2006... Input, the Virginia-based market researcher, says that federal outsourcing is going to grow at nearly 8% a year between now and 2010 when it should be worth nearly $18 billion, up some $5 billion give or take. The post office is going to be...

Apple's mixed messages.
January 23, 2006... Apple CEO Steve Jobs is dreaming of doubling his market share but chip follower Nathan Brookwood says, "Barring a major disaster with the upcoming Windows Vista launch, we would be greatly surprised if Apple's shift to x86 resulted in a...

Well, GPL 3 won't make any friends in Hollywood.(general public license)
January 23, 2006... Not that the Free Software Foundation is worried about Daniel Wallace's little pro se antitrust suit against it or anything, but it looks like the draft rewrite of the GPL that started circulating Monday drops the famous words "at no charge"...

Software patents back percolating in Europe.(Linux Watch)
January 23, 2006... It looks like key power brokers are going to take another swing at legislating US-style software patents for the European Union despite the resounding thrashing they took last summer. Charlie McCreevy, the EU's internal market commissioner...

HP Latin America picks up Mandriva.(Hewlett-Packard Co.'s Preferred Linux Partner for Latin America)(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... Mandriva, which wants to make the Red Hat-Novell race into a triad, says HP is pre-loading machines with Mandriva Linux 2006 bound for 37 Latin American countries. Mandriva, remember, merged with Brazil-based Connectiva. Mandriva says that...

Likewise arrives.(Centeris' Management Suite 1.0 to manage Linux servers in a Windows network)(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... Centeris' promised cross-platform Likewise Management Suite 1.0, the stuff that manages Linux servers in a Windows network, wended its way to general availability on Tuesday after 800 companies reportedly downloaded the beta in the last six...

MySQL gets on GSA schedule.(Carahsoft Technology)(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... MySQL AB has started sporting a five-year GSA government hunting license. The company attributed its inclusion on the GSA schedule to an agreement with Carahsoft Technology, a government IT solutions provider based in Reston, Virginia that...

OpenSUSE watch.(Novell Inc.'s users)(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... Novell is claiming 13 million page views, 750,000 verified installations and 19,000 registered project members worldwide for openSUSE, which got started in August. It says SUSE Linux is installed 7,000 times a day, an average of one...

Linagora raises round.(from Cita Gestion and Chevrillon and Associes)(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... Paris-base Linagora, whose name is a mix of Linux and the Greek word for marketplace, has raised 1.8 million euros in funding, roughly $2.2 million, the bulk of from new investor Cita Gestion with existing investor Chevrillon & Associes, which...

HP hugs JBoss.(Hewlett-Packard Co. will support JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite)(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... HP is going to push JBoss harder. Under an expanded deal it'll now support the whole JBoss Enterprise Middleware Suite (JEMS) on Linux, Windows and HP-UX 11i worldwide and certify JBoss Application Server on the HP-UX 11i Open Source...

Wallace watch.(Daniel Wallace's case)(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... On Wednesday, the Indian-apolis district court hearing Daniel Wallace's pro se suit to get the GPL declared illegal tossed out the motion to dismiss it filed by IBM, Red Hat and Novell as moot because the court has accepted Wallace's more...

Superstitious? Who Us?(WordPerfect)(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... The new rev of WordPerfect oughta be version 13, but its owner Corel Corporation, the now-private wannabe Office competitor--knock on wood--is calling it WordPerfect Office X3 to dispel any jinx and it's using the X3 designation on its other...

Google strikes out in new direction.(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... Google is buying privately held dMarc Broadcasting Inc, which has automated radio ad placement, for its AdWords arm at a cost of $102 million in cash to start plus additional payments that could soar to $1.136 billion over the next three years...

EMC adds Google Desktop to Documentum federated search.(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... EMC is adding the Google Desktop for Enterprise as an information source available through a single query in its Documentum Enterprise Content Integration (ECI) Services, rounding out the completion of ECI Services access across all Google...

Icahn's AOL vision.(Carl Icahn)(America Online Inc.)(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... TimeWarner's unhappy-enough-to-threaten-aproxy-fight stockholder Carl Icahn and his investor group want the company to merge AOL and its entertainment interests with a smaller Internet portal, according to the Wall Street Journal. That would...

Egenera gets utility computing patent.(BILLY GRAMS)
January 23, 2006... Egenera has gotten a US patent on virtualized server failover technology that the company says has been key to its value proposition since 2001. It has something to do with enabling primary to failover ratios as high as 23:1 rather than the...

Piper hangs tough.(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... Piper is sticking by its guns in predicting that Dell is going to go with AMD and start shipping the widgets in the second half no matter what Dell might say, pegging its belief on Dell's share losses to other people's AMD systems. Apparently...

MySQL claims things are ducky.( Q4 results)(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... Without using any numbers or anything, privately held MySQL said Tuesday that it had had its second straight profitable quarter in Q4, closing its best year so far. It claims it added 2,000 new customers last year such as Caterpillar, the...

Oracle strikes again.(BILLY GRAMS)
January 23, 2006... Oracle has bought--my those words are getting hackneyed--a Texas outfit called 360Commerce Inc on undisclosed terms to add to its collection of retail software--the business that now includes recent acquisitions Retek and ProfitLogic.

PC shipments up 17.1% in Q4: IDC.(BILLY GRAMS)
January 23, 2006... PC shipments were up 17.1% in Q4 to 61.1 million units, according to IDC, off slightly in the US with overseas, particularly China, South Korea and India, picking up the slack and laptops leading the way. IDC only expected 15.1% growth. Dell...

Blue's priorities.(Business Transformation Outsourcing)(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... IBM watchers say Blue's themes for the new year are SOA, software as a service and probable business performance transformation, which IBM calls a "multibillion-dollar opportunity." IBM has just created a Business Transformation Outsourcing...

Last laughs department.(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... After a 12% advance in its stock price, Apple's market cap passed Dell's last Friday: $72.13 billion to $71.97 billion. When Steve Jobs came back to Apple and Michael Dell was asked what he would do with Apple if he were Jobs, he said, "I'd...

Bartz to improve her golf swing.(BILLY GRAMS)
January 23, 2006... Carol Bartz, the ex-Sun marketer who's run Autodesk since 1992, will be moving to executive chairman, letting Auto-desk's COO Carl Bass be president and CEO effective May 1. In her new job, she's supposed to focus on business in China, India...

Is Steve jobs the new Walt Disney?(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... In case you haven't caught up with this bit of news, according to the Wall Street Journal, now that that nasty Michael Eisner isn't running Disney anymore, Disney may take over Pixar, Steve Jobs' other company, a deal that would make Steve, who...

Restrictions work both ways.(running one another's technologies)(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... Apple's new Intel-based iMacs can't run Microsoft's Virtual PC, the software that lets Macs run Windows software, and the Virtual PC rewrite that will reportedly work won't be ready until next year. Oh, and, Walt Mossberg, the PC critic at the...

XP SP3 pushed out.(Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3)(Brief article)
January 23, 2006... Microsoft is now anticipating delivering XP Service Pack 3 way out in the second half of 2007, a year later than most people thought considering Steve Ballmer had suggested it could be out before Long Horn. Microsoft apparently used a...

Microsoft plays the source code card.
January 30, 2006... Microsoft has brought a new deck of cards into the game with the European Commission. Wednesday morning it up and announced that--since it couldn't produce any documentation that would satisfy the EC--it would make the source code behind...

HP remedies the heat crisis.(using Modular Cooling System)(Hewlett-Packard Co.)
January 30, 2006... HP has come up with what it somewhat reluctantly calls a "universal" solution to the heat crisis. Reluctantly because it would like to see it applied to its servers, but as kind of an afterthought it tells you that it can be used with...