Client Server News articles from May 2008

Client Server News archives from May 2008

Gluecode Creator Thinks He Can Take Google's App Engine.
May 5, 2008... A Philippines-based Web 2.0 start-up called Morph Labs Inc thinks its cloud can rain on Google's newfangled App Engine. Morph Labs was founded by Winston Damarillo, the guy who did Gluecode, the only open source company IBM ever bought, a...

SAP Flubs SaaS.
May 5, 2008... SAP has run into a nasty little rollout problem with its new on-demand Business ByDesign widgetry, the stuff that's critical to its future growth and competes with, oh, say, Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Microsoft. Seems ByDesign isn't...

Yahoo & Google Think They Can Pull Off Ad Deal: WSJ.
May 5, 2008... At press time the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Yahoo and Google think they've come up with a way around the Justice Department's anticipated objections to them climbing into bed together - one of Yahoo's alternatives to being acquired...

No Decision Yet: Ballmer; Report Says Microsoft May Go Hostile.
May 5, 2008... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is on the horns of dilemma about what to do about Yahoo since Yahoo ignored his Saturday deadline to deal or be acquired by force at a lower price. And a meeting of Microsoft's board to debate the issue...

PTO Decisions May Be, Well, Unconstitutional.(Patent and Trademarks Office )(Brief article)
May 5, 2008... If patents expert John Duffy, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, is right then the Patent and Trademarks Office unconstitutionally appointed nearly two-thirds of the patent appeals judges currently sitting, and close to...

Adobe Makes Flash & AIR Free for Mobile Widgets.
May 5, 2008... A bunch of the boys have joined Adobe in forming the Open Screen Project to drive a consistent rich Internet experience across TVs, PCs, mobile devices and consumer electronics regardless of operating system. They've been persuaded that the...

Sun's Quarter Sucked; Layoffs Planned.
May 5, 2008... Sun's back in the red again after five profitable quarters and five years in the red following the dot.com bust. The March quarter turned sour on it, starting, it said, with the first week in March when the channel stared reporting a drop...

Vendors Keep On Selling XP.
May 5, 2008... Microsoft claims to have sold 140 million copies of Vista. Ah, but, in an effort to scratch the widespread "Save XP" itch, Dell, HP, Sony and Lenovo all say they are going to supply XP past June 30 when large OEMs are supposed to stop...

AMD Loses its Lock on Cray.
May 5, 2008... Intel and Cray, which when last seen was exclusively an AMD house and a feather in AMD's cap, are now going to work together on HPC and Cray's going to use the multi-core Xeon and fancy interconnect developments in future Cray servers,...

DataCore Gets $30m in Funding.
May 5, 2008... DataCore Software, the Florida-based hardware-independent storage virtualization folks have gotten $30 million in funding from Insight Venture Partner and Updata Partners. Insight has previously invested in PlateSpin, Parallels and...

Microsoft Takes Management Cross-Platform.
May 5, 2008... Microsoft is making System Center, its central management scheme, natively manage Linux, Unix and VMware virtual servers. The widgetry has always been a Windows-only affair, but now there are betas available showing off Microsoft's...

Next Stage of the Computer Revolution Waits on Atom.
May 5, 2008... Atom, the new chip that Intel built for so-called netbooks and phones in hopes of touching off the Internet-in-you-pocket phase of the computer revolution and widening its earnings, is in short supply. Asustek, which is supposed to launch...

Another Start-up, Another Desktop Virtualization Scheme.
May 5, 2008... MokaFive, another me-too desktop virtualization company, this one started in 2005 by three Stanford PhDs and their professor, Moka chief scientist Monica Lam, is in the process of pushing out its widgetry, which works on Windows, Mac and Linux....

AMD Unveils Business Class PCs.
May 5, 2008... AMD, which hasn't penetrated the commercial space, is gonna try to pick up some share with a Business Class line of energy-efficient commercial desktops and notebooks targeted at SMBs, government and education. The desktops are based on...

Sun Buys Montalvo Assets.
May 5, 2008... Apple picked up PA Semi, the low-power PowerPC start-up, last week to do who knows what with and Sun picked up the assets of Montalvo Systems, the laconic, heading-for-the-crapper start-up that was supposed to be doing an Intel-competitive...

EFF Faults Microsoft.
May 5, 2008... The Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) has put an open letter to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on its site complaining the Microsoft has "betrayed MSN music customers" and urging him to fix the problems Microsoft will cause when it turns off its...

Dell's Peddling a Low-End Appliance to OEMs.(Brief article)
May 5, 2008... Dell builds appliances that it sells to OEMs like Google's search box. Its latest effort is the OEM CR100 server, a simple, stripped-down, entry-level platform, built with PowerEdge R200 technology. The short-depth 1U is good for a...

Intel Sets Up SMB Web Store.
May 5, 2008... Intel has set up a community-enabled web store portal for SMBs called the Intel Business Exchange or Intel BX to push bundled software and hardware, standalone business applications and services. It includes product descriptions,...

Democrats Pick Microsoft.
May 5, 2008... Microsoft is gonna run the Democratic Convention this summer. Well, it's been selected as the "official software and HD web content provider," doing stuff like tracking delegate, managing credentials and the all-important tally of votes....

Siebel Gets Judge To Apologize.
May 5, 2008... Goodness me. Tom Siebel, founder of Siebel Systems, now part of Oracle, has wrung an apology and $100,000 in guilt money from a sitting judge, who as a lawyer 12 years ago when Siebel was going public sued him and Siebel for wrongfully...

Tibco Picks Silverlight.
May 5, 2008... Tibco is going with Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in widgetry, as opposed to, say, Flash, for RIA development in future products when AJAX isn't enough. It's also going to try positioning its Enterprise Messaging Service as an...

Red Hat Reupholsters the Chairs.(Brief article)
May 5, 2008... Red Hat has been tinkering with senior management. Paul Cormier, executive VP of engineering, is now executive VP and president, product and technologies, responsible for product market, QA and support as well as engineering. CFO Charlie Peters...

Likewise Adds Oracle Linux & Mainframes.
May 5, 2008... Likewise, pretty much the de facto standard in cross-platform authentication these days, has added Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, Oracle's version of Red Hat, to the list of some 110 Linux, Unix and Mac platforms that it supports on a...

VIA Tries Open Source.
May 5, 2008... VIA is setting up a Linux Portal, still in beta, to get open source driver developed. It will initially focus on graphics drivers for its CN896 digital media IGP chipset for the latest Ubuntu distribution. Canonical, the company behind...

Reiser Found Guilty of First-Degree Murder.
May 5, 2008... Linux programmer Hans Reiser, 44, has been found guilty of the first-degree murder of his estranged Russian-born wife Nina, who went missing after dropping off their two small children with their father on Labor Day weekend 2006. Reiser,...

SCO & Novell in Court.
May 5, 2008... SCO and Novell have been in court this week trying to figure out how much SCO is supposed to owe Novell in royalties for its attempt to tax Linux. This is the money that SCO claims it doesn't owe Novell at all because Novell signed away...

HP Labs Finds Way To Make Computers Like Elephants.
May 5, 2008... HP Labs says it's found the missing link that would create computers that don't forget, don't need to boot up, consume less power and associate information like the human brain does. It says it's proven the existence of a previously only...

XP & Vista Service Packs On Hold.
May 5, 2008... Pleading a newly found incompatibility with its Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS), Microsoft Tuesday postponed the web release of both XP Service Pack 3 and Vista Service Pack 1 - even if nobody knows anybody who uses RMS. It's unclear...

Asustek Reportedly Plans Eee Brand.
May 5, 2008... Asustek may make Eee an independent brand that includes not only the original cheap Eee laptop but an Eee TV, an Eee desktop and an Eee monitor, all of which should be introduced by October, according to DigiTimes.

Nexsan Files IPO Papers.
May 5, 2008... Nexsan, the disk-based storage maker, wants to IPO, using a figure of $80.5 million to calculate the registration fee. It said the money would be used for working capital and maybe acquisitions. The company lost $3 million on revenues of $49.8...

Microsoft Closes Fast Deal.
May 5, 2008... Microsoft's tender for Fast Search & Transfer ASA is over and done and the Norwegian company is now a Microsoft subsidiary. Its CEO John Markus Lervik is Microsoft's corporate VP of enterprise search, reporting to Jeff Teper, corporate VP for...

HomeGrid Forum Formed.
May 5, 2008... Intel, Infineon Technologies, Panasonic and TI have created a HomeGrid Forum, a companion to the ITU-T G.hn working group, to promote a single worldwide next-generation protocol standard for networking digital content such as movies, music and...

Stanford Sets Up Parallel Lab.
May 5, 2008... Stanford has started a new Pervasive Parallelism Lab to "allow software engineers to harness the parallelism of the multiple processors that are already available in virtually every new computer." AMD, HP, Sun, IBM and Nvidia are kicking in.

Oracle Sucks Up BEA.
May 5, 2008... Oracle took over BEA Tuesday after getting the European Commission's blessing for the $8.5 billion merger. Layoffs are expected to follow. BEA has 4,100 people. Like Yahoo's Jerry Yang BEA's founder-cum-CEO didn't want to sell either. A $1.8...

IBM Raises Dividend.
May 5, 2008... In the face of a dicey economy IBM raised its dividend by 25% Tuesday to 50 cents a share. Two weeks ago it reported a 16% jump in profits and raised its earnings forecast for the year.

Adobe Optimistic.
May 5, 2008... A month ahead of the close of its quarter and Adobe, which was worried a month ago that it might have to change its full-year revenue guidance if the US economy continued to tank, is saying it'll come in at the high-end of its $855 million-$885...

Lenovo China To See VMware.
May 5, 2008... Lenovo has started selling and supporting VMware Infrastructure 3 pre-installed on its servers in China.

Backdating Watch.
May 5, 2008... The SEC's Los Angeles office wants to press civil charges for backdating against former Pixar CFO Ann Mather. The news came from Google where Mather sits on the board. The backdating occurred before Steve Jobs sold Pixar to Disney. Meanwhile,...

Dell Signs Ozzie Retailer.
May 5, 2008... Dell's retail push, now bordering on 12,000 stores worldwide, is pushing into Australia with its signing up Officeworks' 104 stores. Shoppers can buy one of the 10 standard Windows-only laptop and desktop configurations the store will sell or...

OpenJDK Bound for Ubuntu & Fedora.
May 5, 2008... Canonical and Red Hat are going to put OpenJDK-based implementations in Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9. The NetBeans 6.0 IDE will also be part of the latest Ubuntu.

Happy Birthday, WWW.
May 5, 2008... The World Wide Web turned 15 on April 30, the anniversary of the day that CERN announced it could be used by anybody for free. There are now something like 165 million web sites, according to the BBC.

Mark Hurd's Teflon Coating Chips.(Company overview)
May 19, 2008... HP CEO Mark Hurd finally did something that Wall Street didn't like - he's buying EDS, the IT infrastructure outsourcing outfit founded in 1962 by one-time presidential hopeful and outsourcing pioneer Ross Perot, for around $13.9 billion cash -...

HP Signs Up for DaaS.
May 19, 2008... Desktone, the start-up with the desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) vision, has signed up Hewlett-Packard to deliver virtual desktops as a service. Desktone is already supposed to have Verizon, IBM, Softbank and Deutsche Telekon interested - and...

Yahoo Responds; Hangs Tough.
May 19, 2008... Late Thursday Yahoo released the text of the letter it sent to Carl Icahn telling him he's misguided and that the current Yahoo board knows better what good for the company. It repeats what Yahoo has said before - that it is willing to sell for...

Yahoo Watch.
May 19, 2008... Between the time corporate raider Carl Icahn notified Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock Thursday morning to expect a proxy fight for control of the company if Yahoo didn't crawl on its belly to get Microsoft to buy it and Yahoo sent a non-answer back,...

Flash Player 10 Goes to Broad Beta.
May 19, 2008... Adobe Thursday turned its little piece of Disneyland for developers loose. The pre-release of Flash Player 10, a k a "Astro," which promises richer, more immersive Web 2.0 experiences, has gone to public beta ahead of general availability...

AMD Whistles Up New Champions To Slay its Dragons.
May 19, 2008... AMD has kissed Mario Rivas good-bye and turned processor development over to Randy Allan, the head of its star-crossed server and workstation business, reporting to president and COO Dirk Meyer. Allan is now the new head of AMD's Computing...

Microsoft Appeals EC Fine.
May 19, 2008... Microsoft last Friday filed the papers appealing the record $1.39 billion (899 million euros) fine that the European Commission slapped it with in February claiming the prices it had been charging for its interoperability protocols were so high...

Sun Finally Gets its Barcelona Boxes Out.
May 19, 2008... Sun, which lost some traction selling x86 servers when AMD flubbed the Barcelona - and had to run hurry up and pull some Intel quad-based machines together last year - finally got to announce its first AMD quad machines this week in the shadow...

PTO Files Notice of Appeal in Rules Case.( Patent and Trademark Office )(Brief article)
May 19, 2008... Just making the window as it was closing - which is supposed to suggest that it was only taking the step after much soul-searching - the US Patent and Trademark Office filed a Notice of Appeal with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit....

AppSense Makes XenDesktop More Sensible.(Brief article)
May 19, 2008... Citrix is supposed to trot out XenDesktop - its virtual Windows desktop trick - any minute now and when it does the UK firm AppSense is supposed to be there to make the Xen widgetry useful. See, the way it works every time you restart...

IBM & Microsoft Follow SAP to the Blackberry.
May 19, 2008... IBM is following SAP down the BlackBerry path. It's putting Cognos' BI software on the widget. It says the $300-a-user Cognos 8 Go! Mobile software is the industry's first business intelligence solution designed specifically for the...

VMware Close To Popping More Software.
May 19, 2008... Next week you'll be able to order that disaster recovery pack that VMware has been promising since last September, Site Recovery Manager, but it'll take them another month to deliver it. It's supposed to let you set up, test and automate...

Microsoft Moves on Cougar & Centro.
May 19, 2008... Windows Server 2008 has given birth to Windows Small Business Server 2008, a reprise of Windows Small Business Server 2003, and the newfangled mid-sized enterprise-directed Windows Essential Business Server 2008 that used to be code named...

RIM & Friends Hunt Mobile Apps.
May 19, 2008... With the announcement - but not the release - Monday of the first 3G Blackberry, the iPhone-offensive 9000 Bold, there is now a BlackBerry Partners Fund, a $150 million venture capital fund - the money's in US greenbacks - set up by Research In...

Littler & Littler.(Brief article)
May 19, 2008... VIA, the other x86 player, has produced a 10cm-by-7.2cm board fitted with one its one-watt 500MHz Eden ULV chips, its contribution to the MIDs race. The fan-less widget includes both LVDS/DVI and VGA support, integrated 5.1 channel audio, fast...

Verizon Becomes a Counter-Android Linux Convert.
May 19, 2008... Verizon Wireless is snubbing Google's Linux-based Android initiative to go with the LiMo Foundation's mobile Linux spec for its next wave of mobile phones expected next year. Along with Verizon, Mozilla signed up - giving the consortium its...

Brits Bitch to EC about Microsoft.
May 19, 2008... Becta, the British Educational and Communications and Technology Agency, has taken its gripes against Microsoft's allegedly "anti-competitive" licensing policies for schools and the "interoperability impediments" in Office 2007 to the European...

Fedora 9 Out.
May 19, 2008... Fedora 9 is out. Red Hat says its community-driven operating system features the first non-destructive live USB with persistence - which Red Hat thinks is a first of a kind anywhere - and marks the first major KDE 4-based distribution. ...

Zoho Designs Unified Google-Yahoo-Zoho Login.(Brief article)
May 19, 2008... Zoho is gonna trying rustling some of Google's prized Apps users. It's designed a unified login to encourage Google and Yahoo visitors to try Zoho applications using the user names and passwords they use with their Google and Yahoo...

NYSE Runs on Red Hat.(Brief article)
May 19, 2008... Red Hat is sporting a feather in its chapeau. It's got the mighty NYSE Euronext using its operating system for its mission-critical trading platform and purring compliments like "Red Hat is almost like water, it's pervasive within our...

Skype Drops GPL Appeal.
May 19, 2008... Skype has thrown in the towel on its appeal of the German court conviction last year that it violated the GPL by not furnishing GPL2-covered source code with a Linux-based SMC Networks VoIP phone. The case was brought by Harald Welte of the...

Duffield Start-up Signs Big SaaS Deal.(software as a service contract for Dave Duffield's Workday)(Brief article)
May 19, 2008... Workday, PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield's new start-up, has in hand what is believed to be the one of the largest SaaS deals to date, a 200,000-seat contract from contract manufacturer Flextronics to replace a reported 80 different legacy HR...

Google Passes Yahoo Traffic.
May 19, 2008... Among Yahoo's other problems, Google has just shot past it to become the most trafficked web site in the US, according to comScore. Still Google is only ahead by a nose - 466,000 unique monthly visitors. In April Google's traffic was up 18% to...

Another Dell Exec Goes.
May 19, 2008... Martin Garvin, the head of procurement at Dell - on which much of the company's earlier success rested - has retired. Dell of course is cutting jobs and Garvin hasn't been a top dog since Michael Dell brought in Michael Cannon last year as...

More Barcelonas Out.
May 19, 2008... AMD Monday started selling five low-power 55W versions of its quad-core Barcelona chips. They are for two-, four- and eight-way rack and blade servers, especially ones with virtualization in mind.

Facebook Takes On Debt.
May 19, 2008... Facebook, the social networking site that fancies it's worth $15 billion, the one Microsoft may or may not be interested in to console itself for Yahoo, has taken on $100 million in debt rather than dilute its shares. It needs servers. It's got...

CBS To Buy CNet.
May 19, 2008... CBS is buying CNet Networks for $1.8 billion, or $11.50 a share, a 45% premium and a number CNet's never seen before. The deal gets CNet out of a proxy fight for its board with the Jana Partners hedge fund, which owns, oh, upwards of 10% of its...

Novell To Repurchase Stock.
May 19, 2008... Novell, whose stock price remains in the proverbial commode, says its board has authorized it to repurchase up to $100 million shares.

Microsoft Inks Another Patent Cross-License.
May 19, 2008... Microsoft has signed another one of those patent cross-licenses that so annoy some people. This one's with Hoya's Pentax Imaging Systems Division and covers its digital cameras and a "broad range" of each other's consumer products but...

Backdating Watch.
May 19, 2008... The SEC Wednesday accused Broadcom founders Henry Nicholas and Henry Samueli of five years worth of fraud connected with options backdating causing Samueli to step down as chairman and CTO of Broadcom. According to the Los Angeles Times,...

Oracle Buys AdminServer.
May 19, 2008... Oracle, the great consolidator is still munching down little treats. It's buying AdminServer, a developer of insurance policy administration software, on undisclosed terms and will make AdminServer CEO Rick Connors general manager of its...

Novell gets New Chairman.
May 19, 2008... Novell has switched chairmen. VC Rick Crandell, the founding managing director of Arbor Partners, will now ramrod its board instead of ex-Pan Am CEO Thomas Plaskett, who remains a director. Crandall started Comshare way back when.

XP SP3 Bewitched.
May 19, 2008... Apparently installing the new XP SP3 sends some PCs - AMD ones, it looks like - into an endless reboot loop. The delayed service pack was just released the other day after being held up by a late-appearing incompatibility with Microsoft's...

Ex-Office Boss To Run Gates Foundation.(Jeff Raikes)(Brief article)
May 19, 2008... Former Microsoft Office boss Jeff Raikes, 49, who stepped down in January ahead of his retirement from the company in September, will become CEO of the $37.3 billion Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation when he finally goes. He'll replace that other...

French Start Their Own Wikipedia.
May 19, 2008... Larousse, the great French encyclopedia and dictionary house, has launched a French online encyclopedia and is inviting people to contribute on the facing page, separate and not commingled. Unlike Wikipedia contributions have to be signed and...

First Sight of Moonlight.
May 19, 2008... Novell has released the source code for Moonlight, the Linux implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight RIA widgetry for developers to try out.

I'm Greener. No, I'm Greener.(Brief article)
May 19, 2008... Dell is going to try to cut the energy consumption of its laptops and desktops by up to 25% between now and 2010 to avoid millions of tons of CO2 emissions, comparing its pledge to HP's, which is supposed to cut relative its 2005 levels. It...

Google Buys into Solar Power Start-up.
May 19, 2008... Google.org is one of a clutch of new and existing investors including BP and Chevron putting a $115 million C round into solar power start-up BrightSource, which uses heat from the sun to create steam for generating electricity. The new round...

Tour the Universe.
May 19, 2008... It's Friday. Go to http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/. Microsoft Research has tapped into several orbiting and land-based telescopes to show us what's out there. It's really something.

Cloud Formation.
May 26, 2008... Microsoft figures that in five years time half the Exchange mailboxes in the world - perhaps 160 million mailboxes - will be running on its servers in its cloud infrastructure on Exchange Online. At least that's Microsoft senior...

Cloud Spotting.
May 26, 2008... Since Microsoft's forecast - and its margin implications - is nothing to sneeze at, we asked industry analyst and cloud spotter Amy Wohl what she has been seeing. "The first thing to keep in mind is that we have some semantic confusion, as...

Microsoft To Support ODF.
May 26, 2008... Office will support the Microsoft-hostile OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.1 when Office 2007 Service Pack 2 arrives in the first half of 2009. Microsoft said users will be able to open, edit and save documents in ODF directly from inside Office...

Yahoo Director Quits; Company Postpones Annual Meeting.
May 26, 2008... The Yahoo board is one short. Edward Kozel, a former Cisco CTO, now a VC, and a Yahoo board member since October of 2000, tendered his resignation Thursday saying he meant to leave in February but stayed on because of Microsoft's...