Client Server News articles from July 2006

Client Server News archives from July 2006

Red Hat & JBoss sued for patent infringement.(Linux Watch)
July 3, 2006... Red Hat bought itself a patent suit when it bought the yet-to-turn-a-profit JBoss a few weeks ago for $350 million. Red Hat and JBoss, its new wholly owned subsidiary, were sued late Monday in the District Court for the Eastern District of...

WinFS becomes Gates' spruce goose.(product discontinuation of Windows file system)(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... If the Microsoft entrail readers are interpreting the signs correctly WinFS, the famed Windows File System, sometimes known as Cairo 2 and forever known as Bill Gates' pet project, is dead. The thing has increasingly become a stone in the...

EMC buys RSA.
July 3, 2006... In what is definitely not an obvious move, EMC Thursday confirmed that it was buying RSA Security Inc, the public key encryption house and manager of identities and digital assets, for close to $2.1 billion cash. The price is net of RSA's...

Oh, Cripe, Office 2007 is delayed again.(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... It appears that Office 2007 won't make the January consumer launch date that Microsoft set for it three months ago. The date is now some vague time in early 2007. It's because of performance discoveries made in the new beta 2 that's...

Intel plays catch-up.
July 3, 2006... Woodcrest, aka the Xeon 5100, the 65nm dual-core DP chip based on Intel's new Core microarchitecture that's supposed to save the company's ass, is finally launched. HP and Dell were immediately ready to ship on Monday when the chip was...

Intel dumps its handheld chips.(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... Under Intel's new "leave the dead and wounded behind" resizing policy put into effect by CEO Paul Otellini, it's going to sell its loss-making, low-margin communications and application processor business--the parts used in smart phones and...

CA continues to twist in the wind.
July 3, 2006... CA has shot through an extended June 29 deadline and still doesn't have its 8-K numbers together for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2006, or its 10-K for that matter. And it's got a new set of reasons for the fact that it probably won't have...

EC reportedly wants to fine Microsoft for non-compliance.(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... It's going to come as absolutely no surprise to anybody if, as the Financial Times reported Tuesday, the European Commission finds that Microsoft didn't meet its 2004 antitrust order because it didn't fully document those communications...

Court Winnows SCO's case down with a grim reaper.(Linux Watch)
July 3, 2006... SCO has been virtually skinned alive, stripped of 182 of the copying charges it has made against IBM and Linux in the $5 billion federal suit that has been wending its way through the system since 2003. In a scathing, not to say highly...

Sun comes under new Intel pressure.(Linux Watch)
July 3, 2006... Transitive, the outfit whose QuickTransit hardware virtualization technology smoothed Apple's great leap from IBM's chips to Intel's, is going into the Sparc business on Intel's nickel. Apple calls QuickTransit Rosetta, and Rosetta has let...

JBoss & earnings shortfall cost Red Hat.(Linux Watch)
July 3, 2006... While Novell flounders, its tattered sails in the water and now its captain flung overboard, Red Hat appears to have the wind at its back. It can be a mean wind, however, and Red Hat did run into a patch of bad weather that sheered a buck off...

Novell tries USB teaser.(Linux Watch)
July 3, 2006... Novell has put a SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 training course on a portable USB drive as an introduction to both its server and desktop. It runs on Windows and Linux. There's a beta of SLES 10 on the thing too. It cost 200 bucks.

Sun joins open source groups.(Linux Watch)(OpenAJAX Alliance)(Dojo Foundation)(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... Sun has joined both the OpenAJAX Alliance and the JavaScript-minded Dojo Foundation. It says that it plans to collaborate with the rest of the OpenAJAX Alliance to reach a consensus on programming models around a reference implementation for...

SCO in bank play.(Linux Watch)
July 3, 2006... SCO says it's working with India-based DataVision Software Solutions Pvt Ltd, an affiliate of NextStep Infotech Pvt Ltd, the makers of CheqMate branch banking software, to provide an integrated core banking solution to everybody's favorite...

Microsoft buys UK digital assets manager.(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... Microsoft has bought London-based iView Multimedia, which does digital asset management (DAM) on both Apple--which is where it got started--and Windows. Terms were not disclosed. iView said the Mac OS X version of its flagship $199 MediaPro...

EMC signs on for Lightspeed.(AT and T Knowledge Ventures)(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... EMC has signed a licensing deal with AT&T Knowledge Ventures, AT&T's IP unit so it can market what it calls the EMC Smarts software developed specifically for AT&T's Project Lightspeed, AT&T's fiberoptics network initiative, the underpinnings...

Oracle cans IBM pact.(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... Remember that five-year OnDemand deal that Siebel cut with IBM before it was sucked up by Oracle? The one that had everyone wondering what would happen to it when Oracle took over? Well, wonder no more. The inevitable has happened. ...

Like a courtesan picking lovers.(db4objects)(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... db4objects, the embedded database start-up that already has Veritas founder Mark Leslie and Sun co-founder Vinod Khosla funding it, has added new investor Jerry Fiddler, the first CEO of embedded software house Wind River, to its board. Other B...

Salesforce.com spreads into partners.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... Salesforce.com has got a little number it expects to trot out on July 12 called Partnerforce, Salesforce Partner Edition, a new application to connect businesses with partners using an on-demand portal. Both sides are supposed to be able to...

Bell gets behind Red Hat.(BILLY GRAMS)
July 3, 2006... Bell Microproducts is going to distribute Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Bell is also supposed to develop solutions based on the OS.

Merrill think Microsoft should buy Yahoo.(BILLY GRAMS)
July 3, 2006... Merrill Lynch thinks Microsoft should buy Yahoo. Because of Google. And the advertising revenues. And if not Yahoo then at least eBay. A Microsoft-Yahoo combine would represent 41% of all US web searches to Google's 44%. Merrill said this last...

CA hires another ex-IBMer.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... CA, which has been going through senior management like tissues, has created the new post of chief administration officer and put James Bryant in it. He will be responsible for IT, facilities and administration, reporting to CEO John Swainson....

Java gets new support.(BILLY GRAMS)(Founder Technology Group )(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... Sun's got new agreements with Founder Technology Group and Lenovo to ship the Java Runtime Environment on their gear. Sun is also moving the skinny 2MB Java DB, the Sun supported distribution of the open source Apache Derby Project, as well as...

Google's into wallets in a new way.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... Google, as anticipated, has launched its online payment scheme, which everyone was calling GBuy. Officially it's called Google Checkout. It's an electronic wallet that's supposed to give eBay and its PayPal unit the willies though PayPal...

Larry reneges on Harvard pledge; won't be auditing Bill & Melinda.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... In an counterpoint to some other billionaires giving their fortunes away this week, Harvard ain't gonna get that mere $115 million that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison promised the school over a year ago. Harvard reportedly had to read about it in the...

Neoware creamed.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... Neoware's stock dropped almost 42% Thursday after it said that that sales for the June quarter would be around $23 million-$24 million and not the $29 million it thought it could do and certainly not the $30.7 million Wall Street was looking...

Apple finds irregularities.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... Add Apple to the widening list of companies in Dutch because of their stock option grants. Reuters counts 20 companies in the last three months. Apple said Thursday that an international investigation had turned up "irregularities" in the years...

There goes another one.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
July 3, 2006... Google has poached another Microsoft executive. This time it's Vic Gundotra, who's been at Microsoft 15 years and has been general manager for platform evangelism working with software developers. According-to the AP he probably won't be able...

Microsoft fined.
July 17, 2006... An apparently exasperated European Commission, sensitive of its authority and impatient with Microsoft's perceived foot-dragging over the documentation for the server protocols it was told to share with rivals like the open source Samba Project...

Otellini takes up sword lops off 1,000 managers.(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... Under market share pressure from scrappy little AMD of all people, Intel is cutting 1,000 managers worldwide, reportedly at all levels including frontline managers and senior managers, as part of the ongoing makeover of its business ordered in...

Microsoft negotiating with EC over Vista.
July 17, 2006... Since at least March, the European Commission has been threatening to open a new antitrust investigation of Microsoft if Vista arrives bundled in with features that are already available separately, stuff like its rival to Adobe's PDF format,...

Sun moves Opteron up the food chain.
July 17, 2006... After a comparatively subdued launch on Tuesday, subdued perhaps because it's reportedly been selling the stuff for the last quarter, Sun is up three Opteron machines: a blade server to replace the failed model it quietly withdrew from the...

Dell works on customer relations; cuts promos.
July 17, 2006... In a move to help redeem its sullied reputation with the buying public and win it back some lost sales and market share, Dell Thursday said that in the next 12-18 months it was going to cut back sharply on those horrible mail-in rebates that...

Sun's got competition in the x86 SMP space.(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... Sun this week entered the x86 SMP space, telling people it was virtually uninhabited only to find Fabric7 already there and glad, in a way, of the Tier 1 company. Having spotted Sun's sails on the horizon, Fabric7 started tidying up the...

SAP pre-announces; loses share.
July 17, 2006... Oracle CEO Larry Ellison is going to have a very good weekend. SAP, his bete noire, pre-announced Thursday. It's lost 1%-2% market share, it said. It had disappointing license sales in the last quarter. Its stock teetered and dropped and...

Screws tighten on AMD.(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... AMD, which went into the second quarter saying sales would be flat to down seasonally, is now estimating that they'll come to $1.215 billion, down 9% sequentially and up 52% year-over-year. Wall Street was figuring on $1.31 billion. AMD...

Microsoft shows ODF the White Flag.(Linux Watch)(OpenDocument Format )
July 17, 2006... Microsoft has up and made a 180-degree turn and is now saying it's going to halfheartedly support the Oasis-blessed OpenDocument Format (ODF) foist on it by Sun and the sovereign state of Massachusetts, whose adoption of the anti-Microsoft...

Ingres hires heavyweight as president.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... Ingres' new masters Garnett & Helrich Capital, the private equity house, have hired the CTO of the New York Stock Exchange, Roger Burkhardt, as president and chief operating officer of the open source database company. He will report to Ingres...

Anti-patent crowd has something else to worry about.(Linux Watch)
July 17, 2006... The forces backing and opposing software patents in Europe have a new football to kick around. It's called the European Patent Litigation Agreement or EPLA, a proposal for an international treaty that would establish a new European patent...

Free VMware server exits beta.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... After five months of beta testing consisting of a reported 700,000 downloads, VMware Wednesday graduated its pro-mised free VMware Server for Linux and Windows, the successor to its less-than-core GSX Server, to general availability. It will...

Firefox 2.0 beta released.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... Mozilla released the first beta of Firefox 2.0 on Wednesday after Ars Technica and Slashdot were fooled into thinking that one of several release candidates that were circulating was the real thing. The widgetry adds phishing protection and...

HyperOffice seeks to dislodge exchange.(HyperOffice Inc)(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... HyperOffice Inc, another one of the outfits gunning for a piece of the Microsoft desktop, has introduced HyperShare for Outlook, saying small business users won't need Exchange. It's made it part of its HyperOffice kit, its browser-based...

AMD starts moving chartered-made chips.(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... Since last month AMD has been selling 90nm chips made by its contract manufacturer Singapore-based Chartered Semiconductor, it said Wednesday. It preened about hitting volume production on target. The deal between the two companies...

Ex-SAP America CEO named Neoware prexy.(Neoware Systems Inc. appointed Klaus Besier)(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... Thin client house Neoware Thursday said it had taken one of its directors, who just happens to be the former CEO of SAP America Klaus Besier, and made him president. The job's former occupant Michael Kantrowitz will continue on as CEO and...

CA buys XOsoft.(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... CA has acquired XOsoft Inc to extend its storage management portfolio with the privately held company's continuous application availability software, stuff that minimizes application downtime and accelerates recovery. Terms were not...

EMC stumbles on Symmetrix transition.
July 17, 2006... EMC warned Monday that its second-quarter results, due out today Friday July 14, won't hit its revenue forecast of at least $2.66 billion. The number will be closer to $2.575 billion, up approximately 10% year-over-year. Earnings per share are...

GO v Microsoft suit kicked out of court.
July 17, 2006... For the moment, Microsoft is down to just one private federal antitrust suit against it--that one being Novell's, which is now in appeal. Novell hopes to make a killing on its WordPerfect claims. Anyway, the other suit that was pending was...

Yahoo & Microsoft are talking.(in beta testing their instant mesengers)(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... Microsoft and Yahoo started a limited beta test of the interoperability of their instant messengers Wednesday night. It's taking them longer to get a system in place than originally anticipated last fall when they announced their intentions...

AOL's new tack.(America Online Inc. agreement with Time Warner Inc.)(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... Time Warner is supposed to unveil its new strategy for AOL on Wednesday August 2. And when it said that it warned against believing a Wall Street Journal story on Tuesday claiming that Time Warner's unconfirmed-but-undenied notion of making...

SCO to appeal.(accused International Business Machines Corp. for copyright infringement)(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... SCO is reportedly going to appeal Magistrate Judge Brooke Wells' harsh two-week-old decision to strip 182 of the 294 copying charges that it's made against IBM and Linux out of its suit against IBM. Wells basically found that SCO wasn't...

Boot camp expected to tickle Mac sales.(BILLY GRAMS)(Survey)(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... Piper Jaffray took a headcount and found that 8.3% of the PC shoppers it surveyed would choose a Mac over a PC because of Boot Camp, Apple's beta software for running Windows XP on its new Intel machines. The brokerage says its sample was small...

Montecito on tap.(BILLY GRAMS)
July 17, 2006... The belated, dumbed-down Montecito version of the Itanium chip, the first of the species to be dual-core, is due to be launched in a few days. The 1.6GHz chip has been stripped on the Foxton technology that was supposed to accelerate it and...

Opera puts Raduchel on board.(BILLY GRAMS)
July 17, 2006... Bill Raduchel, the erstwhile Harvard professor who was once Sun's chief strategist and then AOL's CTO--not to mention Scott McNealy's best man--has joined the Opera board.

Google: the verb.(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... The Eleventh Edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, due out this fall, has accepted "google" (with a lower case "g") as a transitive verb. So has the quirky historically minded Oxford English Dictionary (OED) but with a capital...

Um, about this motion for $22m in damages.(The SCO Group Inc.'s Al Petrofsky was accused by Jeff Merkey )(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... The federal court in Utah may wind up boxing the ears of Al Petrofsky, the self-described SCO short seller, who runs SCOfacts.org, an anti-SCO Groklaw wannabe site. Petrofsky is the last man standing from among the raft of folk that ex-Novell...

And you thought Steven King was scary.(survey on identity theft)(Survey)(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... CA says a new survey by the Strategic Counsel indicates that 84% of large billion-dollar North American enterprises experienced a security breach in the last 12 months and that the number of incidents is on the rise. It found 38% were internal....

Microsoft is almost kinda sure Vista will ship in January.(Microsoft Windows Vista)(Brief article)
July 17, 2006... Bill Gates said from South Africa Tuesday that he was only 80% sure Vista will ship to consumers in January, raising the stress level over the darn thing slipping again. Since Office's surprise slip two weeks ago, the smart money on Wall...

AMD buys ATI: the move is either seminal, possibly visionary, or self-destructive, possibly suicidal.(ATI Technologies Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)
July 31, 2006... The rumors were right. AMD will be paying a hefty $5.4 billion for Canadian chipmaker ATI Technologies in a strategic bid to look more like Intel unless, of course, Intel decides to upset the promised merger with a bid of its own. ATI...

Microsoft Swears, 'we will outgrow Linux'.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
July 31, 2006... Microsoft says it's finally figured out how to stop Linux from eating out its franchise and it's ever so simple: Be better than Linux. Microsoft senior VP, servers & tools Bob Muglia told the company's Gates-less financial analysts'...

Intel rolls out Core 2 Duo expecting to scatter AMD's forces.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)
July 31, 2006... Intel Thursday launched the Core 2 Duo, its first new premium microprocessor in 13 years, both in its desktop and notebook avatars, namely Conroe and Merom. Intel CEO Paul Otellini said that the Extreme edition of the 65nm chip was already...

HP buys Mercury & its troubles for $4.5b.
July 31, 2006... Hewlett-Packard is buying Mercury Interactive for $4.5 billion, proving that you can still fetch a 33% premium even when the SEC has you on its "Most Wanted" list. The deal is the first big acquisition of the Hurd administration at HP and...

Microsoft takes detour into healthcare.(Brief article)
July 31, 2006... Microsoft is buying Azyxxi, an electronic medical records system that brings together patient data from hundreds of incompatible sources and makes them available at the point of care. It was created by three doctors using the .NET Framework and...

IBM virtualization EAL-certified.(International Business Machines Corp.)(Evaluation Assurance Level )(Brief article)
July 31, 2006... IBM's mainframe and Power-based virtualization technologies have passed Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) security certification. Its mainframe got a Level 5 rating; its Power machines (think BladeCenter, System I and System p) a...

Innobase alternative for MySQL betas.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
July 31, 2006... Solid Information Technology, the proprietary database house that stepped forward three months ago to offer its own mission-critical technology as a replacement for the Innobase storage engine that Oracle poached from MySQL, went into beta with...

Ingres buys reseller.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
July 31, 2006... Ingres, the recently resurgent database house, has bought Thinking Instruments AG, an Ingres services provider and reseller headquartered in Ilmenau, Germany to broaden its reach in Germany and the Middle East and expand its revenue base....

Qlusters Ffields openQRM plug-ins.(Linux Watch)
July 31, 2006... Qlusters Tuesday trotted out some proprietary openQRM plug-in support for VMware and Xen, the Fabrice Bellard-written VMware Workstation-like free software QEMU, and the open source partitioning project Linux-VServer. OpenQRM is the...

Sun uses PostgreSQL in Thumper-based Data Warehouse Appliance.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
July 31, 2006... Sun is using Thumper, its long-expected, recently introduced, seven-inch-tall hybrid combination of dual-core Opteron-based Galaxy servers and storage, as a novel turnkey Data Warehouse Appliance running Solaris 10 and little Greenplum's...

More patents pledged.(Linux Watch)
July 31, 2006... IBM, Nokia, Samsung, Gatespace Telematics and ProSyst along with the OSGi Alliance, the open standards organization, have pledged royalty-free access to certain of their patents to anyone--not just OSGi Alliance members--in the name of...

Altiris releases SVS API.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
July 31, 2006... Altiris is opening its Software Virtualization Solution (SVS) for development, releasing the SVS API in a new SDK. Altiris want SVS to be the most widely used software virtualization technology. See, the company had a survey done that found...

Microsoft to pour millions into iPod clone.
July 31, 2006... In an interview with Billboard magazine a few days ago, a growth-hungry Microsoft confirmed that it's going to compete with Apple and its iPod starting later this year, presumably in time for the Christmas rush. In a better-than-usual bit...

Kazaa to pay dear for copyright trespass.
July 31, 2006... Kazaa, that festering P2P file-sharing thorn in the side of Hollywood and the music business created by the boys who went on to create Skype, has paid its harriers over $115 million in damages and promised to go legit--immediately. To...

IBM puts games chip in its Unix boxes, beats out Itanium.(International Business Machines Corp.)
July 31, 2006... IBM has put its "Dual Stress" Power5+ chip, the one created last year for ultra-fast video games, into two of its high-end Unix boxes, creating the p5 595, described as a 64-core "speed demon" capable of four million transactions a minute...

California vouchers to hit the mail.(Brief article)
July 31, 2006... The lawyers who sued Microsoft in California over the cost of its software and got a nominal $1.1 billion settlement is going to start mailing the vouchers they won to California businesses and consumers who filled out the claims. The...

Sun warmed by Q4 results.
July 31, 2006... One quarter is not a turnaround, and in Sun's case may be short-lived, but the results of its June quarter--its first quarter under new management--hint that a turnaround could actually be possible. True, the company lost $301 million, nine...

More Intel layoffs on tap.(BILLY GRAMS)
July 31, 2006... Intel CEO Paul Otellini told CNBC Thursday that it was right in thinking that Intel would thin its rank and file in its three-month-old effort to right-size the business and cut out a billion dollars in costs. He was very pleased with himself...

Dell runs into another buzz saw.(BILLY GRAMS)
July 31, 2006... You have of course heard that Dell, complaining of "aggressive pricing in a slowing commercial market worldwide," lowered its earnings expectations for its second quarter, fore- casting it'll do 21 cents-23 cents on revenues of $14 billion....

Intel claims it's making a comeback in China.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
July 31, 2006... After two years of losses to AMD, Intel told Reuters on Monday that it is winning back market share in China, the world's second-largest PC market, thanks to its new dual-core chips and its cutthroat prices. Intel claims it was up 1.5 points...

HP China to bundle Baidu.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Baidu.com Inc.)(Brief article)
July 31, 2006... HP is going to package Baidu.com, the Chinese search engine that competes with Google, enough for Google to have once wanted to buy Baidu, with the PCs it sells in Mainland China. The deal starts in October for some reason or another. Baidu's...

Neoware adds Thin Consoles.(International Business Machines Corp.)(Neoware Systems Inc.)
July 31, 2006... Neoware has expanded its relationship with IBM and will provide so-called Thin Consoles that manage IBM's System i hardware and applications. The box was developed by Neoware and IBM using Neoware's thin client technology--a lot of which used...

Okay, boys, let's take it from the top.(Time Warner Inc.)(Brief article)
July 31, 2006... On Wednesday Time Warner, party to one of the world's worst mergers ever, is scheduled to trot out its fourth plan in five years to make sense of a fading AOL. It's expected--since that's what all the rumors have been saying--to try giving away...

Gateway stripped.(BILLY GRAMS)
July 31, 2006... Gateway is going to lose its cachet as one of the fabled S&P 500. It's being removed because of the wretched state of its stock price.

Microsoft Betas Exchange & Forefront.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
July 31, 2006... Microsoft has gone into public beta with Exchange 2007 and Exchange's new Forefront Security, a k a Antigen, Microsoft's first use of the Forefront brand. It's supposed to ward off viruses and spam. See www.microsoft.com/exchange/beta 2 and...

EC looks at DVD formats.(BILLY GRAMS)
July 31, 2006... The European Commission is poking around the licensing terms of the rival DVD formats, Blu-ray and HD DVD. It has not graduated to a formal investigation.

Click-Fraud count.(Google Inc.)(Brief article)
July 31, 2006... Google, which doesn't like to reveal anything to anybody, has started disclosing to advertisers how deep the click fraud runs. Pay-per-click AdWords advertisers should be able to see the number of invalid clicks on their ads and what percentage...