Client Server News articles from June 2008

Client Server News archives from June 2008

South Africa Throws a Monkey Wrench into Microsoft's OOXML Plans.
June 2, 2008... South Africa has formally objected to the fast track used to get OOXML to the brink of ISO standardization. South Africa, which has given the world Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu, is one of the so-called "P" members of JTC 1 - meaning it's...

MySpace & Opera Adopt Gears.
June 2, 2008... In the largest third-party win yet for the year-old Google Gears, as well as a win for the browser-as-a-platform, they say, News Corp's MySpace social networking site has used the Google widgetry to upgrade its mail so users can search and sort...

Atom, Part II.
June 2, 2008... Intel is supposed to unveil its second Atom chip, the one for low-cost PCs and so-called netbooks - along with the Atom-optimized Diamondville chipset that'll make the thing a netbook platform - at Computex Taipei, which starts Tuesday June 3....

Norway's SEC Sics Cops on New Microsoft Subsidiary.
June 2, 2008... When Microsoft bought Fast Search & Transfer ASA and its vaunted enterprise search widgetry last month for $1.23 billion cash to compete against Google it bought itself police investigation. When Microsoft agreed to buy it in mid-January,...

Windows 7 Sighted.
June 2, 2008... Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer previewed Windows 7 at the Wall Street Journal's D6 conference in California Tuesday. The next-generation operating system is due in late 2009, Ballmer said, confirming what we reported weeks ago, which probably...

Hey, Dell Still Works Despite US Slowdown.
June 2, 2008... The closing bell in New York had barely sounded when Dell's results moved across the wire, it was that excited to let everybody know that it had done better than anybody expected. Dell increased its revenues and earnings, lowered its...

Google Puts a Price on Its Cloud.
June 2, 2008... Google has opened up App Engine to one and all. The cloud-sharing gambit meant to entice developers to build their web applications on the same infrastructure that powers Google's own applications - and in the process locks them into Google...

Dell Guilty of Fraud.
June 2, 2008... Some of Dell's wayward service chickens have come home to roost. A New York State Supreme Court judge Tuesday found Dell and Dell Financial Services (DFS) guilty of fraud, false advertising, deceptive business practices and abusive debt...

NetSuite Hires Ex-Salesforce VP.
June 2, 2008... NetSuite, Larry Ellison's other company, the SaaS one, and rival of CRM SaaS pioneer salesforce.com, which of course was started by former Ellison lieutenant Marc Benioff - ah, incest - has named Per Brondum Jakobsen, the former head of product...

VIA Pushes To Join the Herd.
June 2, 2008... VIA is making a move up the outside rail trying to join the other two ponies in the mainstream PC market with a new x86 Nano processor while it counters the dust from Intel's sexy new Atom chip. VIA says the 65nm dingus, based on its Isaiah...

Citrix Buys German Software Product.
June 2, 2008... Citrix has bought sepago GmbH's sepagoProfile software so user profiles in XenDesktop, XenApp and Provisioning Server are integrated. Terms were not disclosed but as part of the deal the Cologne-based sepago will continue developing the product...

VMware Buys B-hive.
June 2, 2008... VMware is buying B-hive Networks Inc, a three-year-old privately held application performance management software company, on undisclosed terms. It says it will use the Israeli start-up and its flagship product, B-hive Conductor, to offer...

EC Denies Finding Intel Guilty of Antitrust Violations.
June 2, 2008... The European Commission's spokesman Jonathan Todd called a story by the Financial Times Deutschland claiming that the EC had reached a provisional antitrust decision against Intel "irresponsible journalism." Todd said "no provisional or...

HP Wants To Be a Cloud Builder.
June 2, 2008... HP's latest answer to scale-out, which it interprets as clouds, grids, compute farms, Web 2.0 and HPC, is the BL2x220c G5, which it says is the world's first two-in-one server, offering the highest compute density in the industry or more than...

Adobe Betas Three Pieces of CS4.
June 2, 2008... Adobe has put out three free public betas: Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Soundbooth, all of which will be part of the next-generation Creative Suite when it arrives. Its delivery date is still a big secret. The betas are only good for 48 hours...

Viacom Threatens the Internet: Google.
June 2, 2008... According to Google's lawyers Viacom's billion-dollar copyright infringement suit against YouTube and its implicit demand that carriers and hosting providers be liable for what's posted on their sites "threatens the way hundreds of millions of...

Microsoft Contributes WS-Scan Protocol.
June 2, 2008... The new interoperable Microsoft has contributed its Web Services protocol specification for consumer scanning peripherals, Scan Service Definition Version 1.0 (WS-Scan), to the Printer Working Group (PWG) of the IEEE Industry Standards and...

Well, Qualcomm Likes Flash.
June 2, 2008... Steve Jobs may not think much of Flash but Qualcomm apparently feels differently and has been collaborating with Adobe on a mobile platform that integrates Flash with its Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW) client software and,...

Google Tests Web Toolkit.(Brief article)
June 2, 2008... Google's Web Toolkit Release Candidate 1.5 is out. That's the stuff programmers can use to develop and debug web applications in Java and then deploy them as highly optimized JavaScript. That way they're supposed to be able to sidestep...

HP's PIs Pay the Piper.
June 2, 2008... The private investigators involved in the great HP pretexting fiasco were ordered to cough up $600,000 to get the FTC off their backs. Two of the culprits, the father and son team that ran the now defunct Action Research Group out of...

Clamshell Open Sourced.(Brief article)
June 2, 2008... VIA's got a so-called OpenBook Mini-Note Reference Design and has open sourced the CAD files for the 2.2lb clamshell case design to push adoption of its 1GHz-1.6GHz C7 x86 chips and companion chipsets by reducing development costs and speeding...

Facebook To Open Source Platform.
June 2, 2008... Facebook, the social networking site that Microsoft owns a pricey sliver of, says it's going to open source its year-old Facebook Platform so it's easier for developers to build applications on it. It's reportedly calling the effort fbOpen...

Novell Ain't No Red Hat, Even with Microsoft.
June 2, 2008... Novell made $5.87 million, or two cents a share, in its second fiscal quarter ended April 30 on flat revenues of $235.7 million, up only ~$3 million. A year ago it lost $2.9 million, down a penny. Legal and R&D cost it $4.5 million. On...

Cisco Reportedly Creates SOAP-Slipping RPC Protocol.(Brief article)
June 2, 2008... According to CIO.com, Cisco has a new SOAP-replacing messaging protocol called Etch, born out of its Unified Application Environment (UAE), to integrate client/server applications. Cisco reportedly intends to beta the thing this summer as...

Yahoo Watch.(Brief article)
June 2, 2008... "We are not rebidding for the company. We reserve the right to do so. That's not on the docket." - Steve Ballmer, this past Tuesday at the D6 conference in California. The current talks, he said, are aimed at a "partnership." That was after...

More Yahoo Watch.(Brief article)
June 2, 2008... Yahoo, whose CEO contends it's not "under siege" while pleading for more time to turn it around, is telling shareholders to ignore any proxy cards sent to them by activist stockholder Carl Icahn, hoping to derail any attempt to unseat the Yahoo...

Still More Yahoo Watch.
June 2, 2008... "I like Google." - Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang when asked about a possible outsourcing deal with his rival.

Android Near Complete.(Brief article)
June 2, 2008... Google demonstrated an almost complete Android operating system for smartphones at the company's I/O developer conference in San Francisco Wednesday. Like Apple's iPhone, the Android demo used a touchscreen that replaces a password with a...

Belgian Papers Seek Damages from Google.
June 2, 2008... The Belgian newspapers that objected last year to Google News reproducing their headlines and running extracts of their stories while archiving the complete stories without permission and got a Belgian court to back them up are demanding...

Infineon CEO Quits.
June 2, 2008... Infineon Technologies CEO Wolfgang Ziebart has quit in what the company called a difference of opinion over strategy. No replacement was named. Credit Suisse and some of the German press think his leaving could signal a merger with another...

EU Sued Over Tariffs.
June 2, 2008... The United States and Japan have complained to the World Trade Organization about the 14% tariffs Europe imposes on goods like cable set-top boxes and flat-screen monitors and its 6% duties on multi-function fax-printers claiming the taxes...

IBM Joins Barcelona Parade.
June 2, 2008... With Dell and HP out ahead of it with Barcelona machines, this week it was IBM's turn to throw its support to the AMD quad-core by way of three updated System x servers. A new System x3755 will scale from the standard two sockets to three- and...

Dell's Got a 'Hybrid' PC.
June 2, 2008... Dell is promising a desktop that's 80% smaller and 71% more energy efficient than a traditional PC. Michael Dell referred to it as a "hybrid PC."

Microsoft To Get 20% of Gates.
June 2, 2008... After he "retires" on July 1, Bill Gates, who will remain Microsoft's chairman, intends to spend 20% of his time on Microsoft issues like the next Microsoft Office, natural interfaces (voice and handwriting) and search, according to what he...

Sun Claims Virtual Success.
June 2, 2008... Sun says that the cross-platform VirtualBox desktop virtualization widgetry that it bought to give away especially to developers has hit five million downloads in 18 months. It claims its transforming software development, untethering...

Google Up.
June 2, 2008... ComScore says the search giant's paid clicks were up 20% year-over-year in the US in April. The tabulator caused a stir - and a drop in the stock - a few weeks ago when it said Google's paid clicks in the US only grew 1.8% when overall they...

Now That's Penetration.
June 2, 2008... There were 3.3 billion cell phone users in the world at the end of last year according to the International Telecommunications Union. That's 49% of the world's population. The global annual growth rate was 22%.

Ah, Yahoo.
June 9, 2008... In case you've been held incommunicado for the last few days, Yahoo's twice-delayed stockholders meeting, which it pushed off until the end of July after legendary corporate raider Carl Icahn threatened a proxy fight for control of the board,...

South Korea Fines Intel; AMD Pops a Few Corks.
June 9, 2008... Intel has been fined $25.4 million by South Korean regulators for abusing its dominant position and discounting its microprocessors, thereby freezing AMD out of the market. The charges relate specifically to $37 million in rebates awarded...

Moto May Poach HP's PC Boss: WSJ.
June 9, 2008... HP may lose the head of its Personal Systems Group (PSG), Todd Bradley, to Motorola. He's on Moto's list of two candidates to run its cell phone operation, according to the Wall Street Journal. Everybody's still in denial because...

Billionaire Broadcom Co-founder Indicted for Drugs & Backdating.
June 9, 2008... Broadcom's six-foot six-inch co-founder and ex-CEO Henry Nicholas, 48, whose last reported whereabouts was in rehab for alcoholism, was busted Thursday after two grand jury indictments were unsealed. One accuses him of a raft of titillating...

Microsoft Keeps XP Around.
June 9, 2008... Microsoft says it's going to ride the nettop wave and push XP, which is supposed to die this month, onto the ultra low-cost devices meant to put e-mail, web browsing and instant messages in your pocket. It says it's working with 20 OEMs....

IBM Takes New Anti-Office Tack.
June 9, 2008... IBM is starting to monetize Lotus Symphony, its freebie collection of Office-displacing ODF-based software for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations - but not for the money. It's offering unlimited...

The Great MID Rollout Begins.
June 9, 2008... Intel hit Computex Tuesday with enough design-wins in hand to put its newfangled netbook-, nettop- and MID-bound Atom chips in short supply at least for the next six-eight weeks, it said. The manufacturing giant confessed last week to...

Microsoft Does Search Deal with HP; Pushes Yahoo Out.
June 9, 2008... HP, which has previously given the space to Yahoo, is going pre-install a Silverlight-based Live Search-enabled toolbar on all consumer PCs it ships in the US and Canada starting in January. That's when the HP-Yahoo deal expires. The...

Sun Jumps the Gun on Flash.
June 9, 2008... Sun is rushing in where other server vendor have so far feared to tread and says that starting in the second half it will offer servers and storage based on Flash, the pricey kind of widgetry found in cell phones and MP3 players. It claims...

Puma Uncaged.
June 9, 2008... AMD has announced its next-generation Centrino-chasing notebook platform Puma, touting it as delivering the "ultimate HD visual performance" as well as increased energy efficiency. It's depending on the widgetry to fix some of its $4.3...

And Next We Have the All-Singing, All-Dancing PDF Plus an Adobe Cloud.(Portable Document Format )(Brief article)
June 9, 2008... Adobe says Acrobat 9.0, a major upgrade, will be available in July and in three different versions: Standard, Pro and Pro Extended. It will be sold standalone and Pro will be integrated into Adobe's Creative Suite 3.3 Design Premium and...

Nvidia Joins the MIDs Race.
June 9, 2008... Nvidia - which Intel might say discounts the processor - has gone into competition against Intel and its tiny Atom MPU with a non-x86 family of processors called Tegra described as the first single-chip computer capable of accessing rich...

Sun's Sales Boss Jumps to HP; Sun Reorgs Sales.
June 9, 2008... HP Tuesday named Don Grantham, Sun's global sales and service boss, and an ex-IBMer, its chief sales officer responsible for enterprise accounts and public sector sales as well as sales to the communications, media and entertainment, financial...

Clouds Mating.(NetSuite Inc. buys OpenAir)(Brief article)
June 9, 2008... NetSuite, the Larry Ellison SaaS company, is buying OpenAir, the 56-man shop that is supposed to be the leader in on-demand professional services automation, for $26 million cash, net of the cash on the acquisition's balance sheet. ...

Microsoft Suffers Setback in Avistar Patent Challenge.
June 9, 2008... In the name of its unified communications interests and having failed to come to licensing terms, Microsoft a few months ago asked the Patent and Trademark Office to re-examine all 29 of Avistar Communications' patents, which cover stuff like...

Microsoft Adds to IP It's Willing To License.
June 9, 2008... Microsoft is offering three new technologies to hardware makers to license under its IP licensing scheme. The technologies are: Instant Viewer, a one-click software navigation solution for mice or keyboards; Magnetic Recharging Cable, which...

Credit Suisse Enters the Virtualization Management Biz.
June 9, 2008... Is there anyone out there who's not in the virtualization game? Credit Suisse, the big broker and investment banker, has launched an independent company called DynamicOps LLC, quietly formed in January, to market a virtual machine...

VMware Leverages ODMs.(Brief article)
June 9, 2008... VMware has cozied up with Asus, Gigabyte, Inventec and Tyan to get more customers for its brand of virtualization by certifying the ODMs' one-, two- and four-socket servers as well as their blade servers. It's already got a deal with...

Venture Money Going Overseas.(Brief article)
June 9, 2008... It used to be that a VC wouldn't put his money any further than the distance it took to drive, put his feet up on the investee's desk and tell him how to run the business. Now according to the 2008 Global Venture Capital Survey, 57% of US...

Tripwire Fields Free VMware Utility.
June 9, 2008... Tripwire has a free VMware-blessed utility that's supposed to check configurations and improve the security of VMware ESX hypervisor deployments. ConfigCheck automatically assesses ESX configuration settings, comparing them against VMware...

Brazil, India & Venezuela Join South Africa in Objecting to OOXML Standardization.
June 9, 2008... At the eleventh hour Brazil, India and Venezuela joined South Africa in appealing ISO's highly politicized standardization of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) file format. Meanwhile, the Danish Open Source Business Association has...

EnterpriseDB Recruits New CEO from Red Hat.(chief executive officer Ed Boyajian)(Brief article)
June 9, 2008... EnterpriseDB co-founder and CEO Andy Astor has stepped aside so Ed Boyajian, brought in from Red Hat, can take the four-year-old company to the proverbial next level, they said. Boyajian has been running Red Hat's North American sales under...

Barracuda Wants To Buy Sourcefire.
June 9, 2008... SNORT creator Sourcefire Inc, one of the few publicly owned open source companies, has rejected an unsolicited $7.50-a-share offer, a total of roughly $187.4 million cash, from privately held Barracuda Networks Inc, claiming it undervalues the...

Zmanda's Paling Around with NetApp.
June 9, 2008... Zmanda, the open source backup and recovery folks, says it's integrated NetApp's Snapshot technology with its own Recovery Manager for MySQL. It's supposed to translate into continuous data protection for mission-critical MySQL databases. With...

Wind River Plans Linux Platform for MIDs.
June 9, 2008... Wind River says it's collaborating with Intel and will develop an open, extensible Moblin-based Linux platform for Atom-bearing MIDs. Both open source and commercial versions should be available next year. The commercial Wind River...

Google Moves Desktop Gadgets to Linux.
June 9, 2008... Google has put out the beginnings of Desktop Gadgets for Linux and is distributing the source code under the Apache 2.0 license. Gadgets are mini-applets that form part of the Google Desktop. They've only been available until now for Windows...

Uncle Walt Lauds Firefox 3.0.(Walt Mossberg)(Brief article)
June 9, 2008... Release Candidate 2 of Firefox 3 is out. The final ship date is still mid-June. Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal's Petronius Arbiter, said Thursday that it is "the best web browser out there right now, and that tops the current versions...

Ever See a Two-Headed Turtle?
June 9, 2008... Themis has built a 1.2GHz uniprocessor UltraSparc T2 blade (the Sparc chip with eight cores) that runs Solaris 10 intending to use it in an IBM BladeCenter chassis along with blades of other species running other operating systems. The thing is...

AMD Expands on Barcelona.
June 9, 2008... AMD is out with three new one-socket quad-core Barcelona chips for servers and workstations branded the 1300 Series. It said HP and Dell intend to use them in upcoming models; Cray's already shipping the gismos in its XT4 systems and upgrading...

EC Finally OKs EMC-Iomega Deal.(European Commission )(Brief article)
June 9, 2008... The European Commission cleared EMC's $213 million acquisition of Iomega Tuesday. EMC has had to extend its tender offer for the place twice waiting for approval. The tender offer is now supposed to expire today, June 6. Once it's clinched it,...

Itty-Bitty Water System Cools Chips.
June 9, 2008... IBM is thinking that the way to deal with the mounting heat crisis is to pump water through the MPU. Its researchers in Zurich are doing just that on stacked chips using hair-like on-board 50 micron pipes. It makes stacking chips for...

Sony & VIA?
June 9, 2008... A PC World report out of WiMax Expo in Taiwan says Sony may be using VIA's brand new open source OpenBook reference design and its 1.6GHz C7-M chip for a low-cost laptop that Quanta is making and could ship in Q3 with Vista Home Basic. A...

Time Warner Meters the Internet.
June 9, 2008... Time Warner Cable is going to try charging for Internet access like it was a cell phone. It's running a trial in Texas and will dun customers who upload or download more than the pre-set amount, which ranges from $30 a month for 5GB on a 768...

Power Chip Comes Up Short.
June 9, 2008... Sounding a bit like Apple, Tundra Semiconductor, the Canadian company that makes system interconnects, has terminated a nine-month-old product acquisition deal with IBM because IBM can't deliver a 90nm Power core with the performance promised....

Microsoft Takes Steps To Avoid Windows 7 Foul-Ups.
June 9, 2008... Microsoft has told hardware vendors of all stripes that they have to start testing their widgetry with the next-generation Windows 7 as soon as the first beta arrives - or else they won't be Windows Logo-certified. It's to avoid Vista-style...

HP Infringed Cornell Patents.
June 9, 2008... A federal jury has told HP to write Cornell University a check for $184 million for infringing patents that dramatically increased supercomputer speed. The school wanted $900 million, claiming HP made $36 billion using its professor's...

VMware Security Rated.
June 9, 2008... VMware Infrastructure 3, ESX Server 3.0.2 and VirtualCenter 2.0.2 have been certified as Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance 4 (EAL4+). It says it's the only x86 virtualization vendor to be certified.

Silverlight 2 Beta 2 Should Be Here.
June 9, 2008... Silverlight 2 Beta 2, Microsoft's Flash-aimed cross-platform browser plug-in for rich Internet applications, should be out by now unless Bill Gates is a liar. Apparently it adds support for .Net Framework, which could give it wider appeal.

Backdating Watch.
June 9, 2008... Brocade Communications, whose ex-CEO Gregory Reyes is looking at doing 21 months in prison, is going to pay $160 million to make a stockholder class-action over its backdating go away. It alleged losses in the market. Meanwhile, IBM is paying...

iPhones & Snow Leopards.
June 9, 2008... Apple is supposed to unveil its next-generation 3G iPhone Monday, June 9 at its Worldwide Developers Conference. An iPhone Apps Store, peddling Apple-approved third-party applications for a 30% cut of the proceeds, is also expected to debut....

Verizon Wireless Bulks Up.
June 9, 2008... Verizon Wireless is buying Alltel for $28.1 billion and should wind up the largest cell phone outfit in America with 80 million subscribers, aggravating AT&T, which has about 71.4 million customers and the iPhone franchise. Two-thirds of AT&T's...

FTC Dreams of Free Universal Wireless Internet Access.
June 9, 2008... The Federal Trade Commission may make in incumbent on the winner of the airwaves that the government is auctioning off to provide free high-speed wireless Internet access across most of the US. It would have to reach 50% of the population four...

No Deal! Microsoft-Yahoo Talks Collapse Again.
June 16, 2008... Microsoft Leaves the Door Ajar - Is It Over? Is It Really Over? Hmmm Talks between Yahoo and Microsoft have failed for the second time. Yahoo said Thursday afternoon that Microsoft has refused to buy Yahoo for $33 a share, the price...

Yahoo Cuts Deal with the Devil.
June 16, 2008... After failing to come to terms with Microsoft, and with antitrust regulators hovering in the background, Yahoo has gone and cut that death-defying deal on search advertising with arch-rival Google saying the agreement could clear $800 million...

Apple Hits the Pause Button.
June 16, 2008... Apple is in features-lockout mode as far Snow Leopard, the next edition of its operating system, goes. There aren't going to be many of new ones. Apple calls it "hitting the pause button." Instead it's concentrating on supporting...

ServePath Claims To Have the First Windows Cloud.
June 16, 2008... ServePath, a six-year-old managed hoster out of San Francisco that Deloitte figures is one of the fastest-growing companies in America, has what it thinks is the very first Windows cloud in creation, and is positioning it as "the first real...

Supremes Say No to Royalty Double-Dipping.
June 16, 2008... In a unanimous decision Monday the Supreme Court restricted patent holders from collecting multiple royalties by charging the supply chain for IP that's already been sold upstream. Their Honors found for Quanta and against LG Electronics in...