Client Server News articles from November 2003

Client Server News archives from November 2003

W3C Asks PTO To Invalidate the Eolas Patent.
November 3, 2003... In a fairly unprecedented move, a spooked World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the Web's self-proclaimed standards-setting body, asked the US Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) the other day to squelch the so-called Eolas patent based on new...

Why the W3C's Eolas Gambit Probably Won't Work.(Column)
November 3, 2003... Browser plug-ins probably don't infringe the Eolas patent much as Eolas claims they do and thanks to the impassioned plea registered the other day with the government by World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee, the Patent and Trademark Office...

FTC Poses PTO Reforms.(Patent and Trademark Office )(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Following hearings, the Federal Trade Commission has disgorged a 350-page study on patent law and made 10 practical recommendations to the Patent and Trademark Office without any guarantee of adoption. The FTC says some modifications to the...

Microsoft To Restructure MSN To Exploit Search & Music.
November 3, 2003... To mine the lucrative opportunities presented by search and music, Microsoft said Wednesday that it's going to split its historically money-losing MSN online service into two parts at the end of the year, creating a Communications Division and...

IBM Bolsters Mid-Market Push.
November 3, 2003... IBM is on the verge of reinforcing its four-month-old Express mid- market thrust with 10 new solutions focused on integration and information management including what is described as the first version of DB2 really gauged to the mid-market....

EC Opens New Microsoft Probe.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... With a Microsoft-requested hearing on the docket for mid-November and a decision expected to go against Microsoft pending next year, European antitrust regulators have opened a new front and are asking 20 hardware vendors for details of their...

Court Wants To Know How Come M'soft Is Short Licensees.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... The attorneys general of the states that however grudgingly signed Microsoft's antitrust settlement with the US government told the compliance judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, last Friday that they weren't sure whether the terms on which...

Microsoft Settles More Class Actions.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Microsoft has settled a half-dozen more of those nagging class- action suits claiming it charged too much for Windows. The value of these latest settlements is a nominal $200 million, nominal 'cause it's all done with vouchers and, like the...

Mass. Appeal Set for Tuesday.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... On Tuesday, November 4, Microsoft and the diehard Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the last remaining holdout state to refuse to sign the antitrust settlement, are going to duke it out in oral argument before the US Court of Appeals for the DC...

Microsoft, Vodafone Jump-Start Mobile Web Services.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Microsoft and Vodafone have outlined a technical roadmap for adding mobile web services to applications. The roadmap adopts the existing web services architecture to simplify the development of applications that integrate mobile network...

Dell Hits New Note.(7.6-oz Digital Jukebox)(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Dell started pushing a 7.6-oz Digital Jukebox on Monday. It's a portable MP3 player that also plays Windows Media Audio files and can manage digital voice recordings and data backups. Its built-in Hitachi drive holds 16 hours of music. The...

Lenel To Resell NEC Box.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... NEC Solutions America has gotten privately owned Lenel Systems International Inc, a security house with a string of prestige clients, to resell its high-availability Five9s Windows-based Express5800/320Lb fault-tolerant servers with its...

Oracle Pours More Resource into China.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Oracle Japan and Oracle China have opened a business development unit in Shanghai in support of the growing number of Japanese-owned companies (JOCs) that Oracle says are entering China. The company has also opened an R&D center in Beijing,...

Panasas Debuts NAS System; CEO Schrock To Step Down.(ActiveScale Storage Cluster)
November 3, 2003... After a lengthy delay, storage start-up Panasas Inc has rolled out its object-based NAS system to a bunch of marquee customers. Dubbed ActiveScale Storage Cluster, it's aimed at Linux clusters. Panasas executives say the NAS was designed to...

IBM To Profit from Compliance.
November 3, 2003... IBM has unleashed a barrage of products and services to enable companies to address regulatory compliance requirements. Legislation such as HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley, SEC 17a4, Sarbanes- Oxley and Basel II are making it imperative for...

Hitachi Tackles E-Mail Archiving & Compliance.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Hitachi Data Systems has launched a bunch of products for storing and managing e-mail and other unstructured content. Powered by e-ConServer software from the German ISV Ixos, the products include Message Archive for Compliance and Message...

SGI Debuts New SATA Storage Systems.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... SGI has launched two disk systems based on lower-cost Serial ATA drives for secondary storage. Developed by LSI Logic Storage Systems, the new SATA systems are being marketed under SGI's InfiniteStorage brand. They include the TP9500S and...

StorageTek StreamLines Enterprise Tape Library.(StreamLine SL8500)
November 3, 2003... StorageTek is talking up plans to bring out a successor to its high- end PowderHorn 9310 enterprise tape library system, a new thing called StreamLine SL8500. StorageTek VP of engineering for automated tape solutions Jon Benson said the...

EMC, Nortel Team Up on Data Protection.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... EMC and Nortel Networks have joined together to provide enterprises with a new service to help them remotely mirror their data over optical WANs and metropolitan area networks. Dubbed Business Continuity over Optical Networks, the new...

CA, Network Engines To Debut Mobile Backup Appliance.(MBA-30 and MBA-10)(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Computer Associates and Network Engines plan to introduce a mobile backup appliance for SMEs to simplify laptop backup. It will be available in two configurations - MBA-30 and MBA-10 - for groups of 30 and 10 users respectively. Both...

Arsenal Debuts Managed Data Protection Service.(ViaRemote service)(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Storage services provider Arsenal Digital has rolled out a new IP network-based backup and recovery service called ViaRemote to provide data protection to remote locations and devices. Arsenal is packaging ViaRemote as a turnkey utility...

Seagate Inquiry Focuses on Expense Allocation.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Seagate said Wednesday that its believes the SEC's request for all analyst reports on the company from January 1, 2000 through August 30, 2003 pertains to allegations by a former employee that the company incorrectly allocated expenses. ...

SCO Rebuts IBM's Latest Charges, Lights Out after GPL.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... The SCO Group's lawyers answered IBM's amended counterclaims last Friday and repeatedly denied the enforceability and applicability of the General Public License (GPL) on which the Linux model, such as it is, hinges. They say the GPL is trumped...

2.6 Kernel Out for Enterprise Testing.(from Open Source Development Lab)(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... The long-promised 2.6 kernel was released for enterprise testing Monday. The Open Source Develop Lab (OSDL), where Linux creator Linus Torvalds and 2.6 kernel maintainer Andrew Morton now work because OSDL wants to be the center of the Linux...

Define Mass Market.(Cray Inc.'s plans for supercomputer)(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Cray Inc says it's going to productize the $90 million Opteron-based HPC supercomputer it sold to Sandia National Lab or at least sell systems based on the massively parallel processing single-image Red Storm technology. The Red Storm system,...

SuSE Mimics Red Hat, Joins ObjectWeb.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... SuSE, in an effort to keep up with Red Hat, the Linux leader, has joined ObjectWeb, the object source middleware consortium that Red Hat already belongs to. Red Hat joined as part of a SuSE-snubbing deepening of its relationship with Bull,...

Xandros Gets Professional CEO.(Andreas Typaldos)(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... There's been a change of guard at shy, reclusive Linux desktop hopeful Xandros Inc, the two-year-old Canadian outfit that acquired Corel's Debian-based Linux OS. Andreas Typaldos, one of its early investors and founder of Computron, the...

Microsoft Alms for Needy Linux Efforts.
November 3, 2003... Microsoft gadfly Michael Robertson, the CEO of Lindows.com and the guy who greeted the letter from Microsoft lawyers telling him to take down his MSfreePC web site with a raised middle finger, now says that 10% of each claim against Microsoft's...

Veritas Ports to SuSE.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Storage software vendor Veritas is porting some of its key applications to SuSE's Enterprise Server platform like its core File System, Volume Manager and Cluster Server software by Q1. Veritas said it is currently piloting its SuSE-based...

Will Google Get a Little Dipsie?(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Ah, well, it seems that Google is going to have more to contend with than Microsoft's threatened search engine. A privately funded downtown Chicago-based start-up by the name of Dipsie Inc that revved up this summer is promising to be out next...

Adobe & the Infrastructure Stack.
November 3, 2003... Credit Suisse fresh from an Adobe analyst day says that Adobe is trying to position its Acrobat technology as a "component of the infrastructure stack," which apparently explains the rationale behind its recent arrangements with big ISVs like...

Zander & Szulik on Proofpoint Board.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Former Sun president and COO Ed Zander, now a managing director with VC house Silver Lake Partners, and Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik have joined the executive advisory board of Proofpoint Inc, a start-up founded by Netscape refuge Eric Hahn. It's...

See Bill Die.
November 3, 2003... A few days ago, "Nothing So Strange," the fictional documentary about the assassination of Bill Gates, became the first American feature film to have its worldwide commercial debut on the Internet. The e-premiere involved media production house...

Microsoft Taps EMEA Missionary.(Simon Brown)(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Microsoft has tapped Simon Brown, former head of Microsoft Sweden, to be its chief evangelist to EMEA developers charged with bringing them into the .NET/web services fold. Microsoft has in mind all of the 1.5 million developers in the region -...

Citrix Brags.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Citrix claims 97% of the Fortune Global 100 use its software, which is supposed to have 50 million users altogether. It says it's in with the top 10 federal agencies, top 10 banks and the crme de la crme of US car makers, healthcare,...

Red Hat Still Won't Run on One in Five Boxes: Pru.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Prudential Financial just started following Red Hat, launching into it with a 64-page research tome that notices that the new Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (RHEL 3) distribution, which Pru describes as a "watershed release," "will work with 80% of...

Ah, Yes, And Now the .NET Framework for Itanium.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... The Microsoft .NET Framework for Intel's 64-bit Itanium 2 chips has been pre-released. Intel figures the tools will be used for web services applications. It says that 500 applications are currently available for the Itanium, often called the...

Tectura Picks Up $12 mil.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... Tectura Corporation, a two-year-old Microsoft CRM house and successor to Scitor Enterprises Inc, has picked up a $12 million private equity round from Pequot Ventures. Tectura, formed through a management buy-out whose revenues are expected to...

Spend Mend Slow: Merrill.(Brief Article)(Industry Overview)
November 3, 2003... After surveying 75 US CIOs and 25 Europeans, Merrill Lynch says depressingly that it expects "only a modest pickup in enterprise spending in 2004." Its latest crop of respondents said they've underspent their budgets, but few expect stronger...

Ex-Rockwell CFO Joins AMD Board.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... AMD has named retired Rockwell International CFO W Michael Barnes, 61, to its board.

IBM Dances on HP 3000's Grave.(Brief Article)
November 3, 2003... As the last elegies sound and the last toasts are offered to the venerable HP 3000 server line that won't be sold anymore after Halloween, IBM is gleefully dancing on its grave. It boasts that customers such as Strauss Discount Auto and Lady...

Exactly What Kind of a Deal Does SCO Have with Microsoft?
November 10, 2003... The infamous SCO Group is being provocative again. It wrote the SEC to tell the agency about the $50 million investment it just got and in the short little filing it made the tantalizing statement that "In the coming months, SCO intends to...

Novell Buys SuSE in Three-sided Deal with IBM.
November 10, 2003... Novell, a down-on-its-luck has-been that hasn't made any money in three years, is buying SuSE, a Linux second stringer that hasn't ever made any money. It's paying $210 million in cash, something like seven times SuSE's run-rate, when the norm...

Suddenly the odds are a lot more evenly matched.
November 10, 2003... Prudential, which just started covering Red Hat and has made it a pet, thinks that Red Hat will continue to be the leading Linux distribution and that Novell is going to have problems replicating the "success of the Red Hat operating model."...

Intel Claims It's Saved Moore's Law.
November 10, 2003... Intel claimed Wednesday that its researchers have developed the transistors and gates that will keep Moore's Law, the single greatest commandment of the computer era, from hitting its limit and being fatally zapped off its pedestal by...

IDC Declares a Recovery.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... IDC says the recovery - even if it's skimpy - is here. After two years of record declines and recession, the IT and telcom industries returned to positive growth this year even if Europe, Canada and Japan haven't contributed. Next year, IDC...

Sun Tweaks its Prices.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Sun has put a cap on the price that large organizations will have to pay for its erstwhile Mad Hatter project, the restyled, newfangled, still undelivered SuSE/StarOffice-based Java Desktop System, its so- called Microsoft alternative. The...

HP Fields New Itanium Boxes.
November 10, 2003... HP has announced new Itanium and Xeon boxes including the first of a new dumbed-down Intel series. The Itanium Integrity machines - and HP of course is Itanium's biggest backer - include a four-way rx4640, a more compact rack- mount than...

Cobol Gets a Facelift, Looks Years Younger.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... This might be 2003 going on 2004 and all that, but the biggest collection of software code in all the world, some 200 billion lines, rising on average by five billion lines a year, remains in Cobol, that unchic very-last-century programming...

Microsoft Waits To See if Settlement Is Rubber Stamped.
November 10, 2003... Having made what it obviously hopes is its last court appearance in defense of its antitrust settlement with the United States government the other day, Microsoft must now sit and wait out the weeks or months it will take the six-judge Court of...

Microsoft Puts Bounty on Worms' Head.
November 10, 2003... Frustrated by the repeated attacks on computer systems running its software, Microsoft Wednesday established a global Anti-Virus Reward Program initially funded with a mere $5 million to help law enforcement agencies arrest and convict the...

Borland Gets Itself a COO.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Borland has named Scott Arnold, a well-placed McKinsey honcho, COO, making him responsible for the company's strategy, product development, sales and marketing. Arnold's been with McKinsey for 15 years and is credited with helping to found and...

Java Leaves C# in the Dust: Evans Data.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Developers say Java is the best language for web services, according to a new Evans Data survey. The only place Microsoft's C# language is better is in tight integration with SOAP. Otherwise Java leads in flow control, syntax, object/memory...

Wind River Finds its New CEO.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Wind River has named the COO of $500 million-a-year ISV Mercury Interactive Corporation Ken Klein, a guy who joined Wind River's board in July, president, CEO and chairman effective the beginning of January. He will replace interim CEO and...

Quovadx To Buy Rogue Wave.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Platform and vertical software player Quovadx is acquiring Rogue Wave, the tools maker, in a stock and cash transaction valued at $38 million. Quovadx expects the acquisition to position the combined company as a player in web services and...

Microsoft Launches New Tech Center in Beijing.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Microsoft is setting up a new Advanced Technology Center at its five-year-old Beijing research lab to create products for Asian users that will improve human-computer interaction. It will also try to accelerate technology transfers between...

StorageTek Dumps Legato for Ixos.
November 10, 2003... StorageTek is dropping EMC's new Legato unit from its Email Xcelerator software suite in favor of German ISV Ixos and it's suspected that's because EMC now owns Legato although everybody claims it's not. Both StorageTek and EMC executives...

NetApp To Buy Spinnaker for 300 Megabucks.
November 10, 2003... Network Appliance is acquiring NAS start-up Spinnaker Networks for $300 million in a stock exchange. 'NetApp described the deal as primarily a software technology acquisition and claimed it would accelerate the delivery of its storage grid...

EMC Pushes McData into 14% Revenue Shortfall.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... McData said Tuesday that it would not meet the revenue projections for its fiscal third quarter ended October 31 and blamed it on EMC, its biggest customer, worth over 60% of its turnover. The storage switch vendor expects to post revenues...

RAIDCore Snags $5m from VCs.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Storage start-up RAIDCore Inc announced a $5 million funding round as it launched its first products - eight- and four-channel Serial ATA RAID controllers. The money, which is coming from Egan Managed Capital and Longworth Venture...

Veritas Rolls Out New Apps.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Veritas has fielded a bunch of new products and updated its NetBackup software. The new products include CommandCentral Service 3.5 and Data Lifecycle Manager 5.0. CommandCentral is designed to let IT organizations move to a currently...

Free Red Hats Replaced by Fedora.
November 10, 2003... In a fit of exquisitely bad timing, Red Hat pulled the plug on its free distributions just as Novell and SuSE were waxing eloquent about the wonders of open source and Novell, now suddenly Red Hat's most immediate worry since it's buying rival...

Amazon To Sell El Cheapo Linare PC.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Well, now Amazon is going to try its hand at selling a cheap $200 Linux PC in competition with Walmart.com. The Amazon win is a feather in the cap of quiet little Linare Corporation, the desktop Linux start-up located in Microsoft's backyard....

Government Watch.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Vietnam's Ministry of Science and Technology has thrown its weight behind open source. Its mandarins are pushing a plan to require state-owned companies and government ministries to use open source products by '05. They want all computers...

SCO Taps Director No. 9.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... The SCO Group has named Dan Campbell, the former CFO of WordPerfect, the once-great Utah house Novell wound up buying and then dumped on Corel, to its board and the board's audit committee. Campbell has been a managing general partner of EsNet...

Red Hat Has Made Me an Orphan.
November 10, 2003... To the Editor: In 1999, I wanted a 'standard' Linux distro for these reasons: 1. lots of driver support 2. as many pre-built app ports as possible 3. lots of users banging on software make it better (fixes the bugs) 4. I...

IBM Stretches Itanium to 16.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... On Monday November 10, IBM is supposed to go against the grain of some of its own Xeon-loving server people and wheel out another Summit chipset-bearing Itanium system, this one a top-of-the-line 16-way - made out of four-way building blocks -...

Opteron Watch.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... There's a hint in the air that Sun might bring out a line of Opteron servers at Comdex.

Sun Mulls Job Cuts: Merrill.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Merrill Lynch ace analyst Steve Milunovich thinks that Sun "is considering a headcount reduction" since he wrote that open letter a month ago telling Sun king Scott McNealy and the Sun board they need to bounce another 5,000-7,000 to boost...

SCO Goes Evangelizing.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... The SCO Group's CEO Darl McBride, who's been stigmatized with a virtual mark of Cain for threatening the open source model, is going to keynote the Computer Digital Expo (CDXPO) in Vegas on November 16 and his speech is called, predictably...

There She Goes Again.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Mary McDowell has finally - and apparently irrevocably - left HP. Actually she's been gone since May when she lost her job as head of Intel servers, the Compaq operation that with the merger was first denied any commerce with HP's all-important...

The Journal Begs To Differ.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... The New York Times story last week about Microsoft and Google talking acquisition or partnership and Google snubbing Microsoft's takeover overtures raised the competitive hackles of the Wall Street Journal, which in sloppy-seconds follow-on...

IBM Reportedly Buys Xbox Business.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Intel, which unseated AMD in the Xbox at the last minute as the Xbox was on its way to market, has been unseated in turn. Microsoft announced Monday that the prospective Xbox 2, reportedly called Xbox Next internally, or maybe the code name is...

Avnet Distributes Athlon 64s.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Avnet Computing Components has started selling Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX desktop processors and configurable white boxes.

Yamhill Claims Another Convert.(Brief Article)
November 10, 2003... Merrill Lynch semi ace Joe Osha thinks there really is a Yamhill and, like we've heard, the Opteron-aping circuitry supporting 64-bit instructions, in development for several years, is already in the Prescott Pentium 4, it's just not turned on....

OSDL Picks Up Desktop Linux Charter.
November 17, 2003... The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL), which has so far limited itself to high-end carrier-grade and data center Linux server initiatives, is preparing for a desktop jihad the scope of which is difficult to gauge at this point. OSDL's new...

Novell Goes Fishing.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... Novell is paying $210 million for SuSE and is going to treat the operating system as a commodity once the acquisition is completed, according to what Nathan Friedman, Ximian co-founder and now VP of R&D in Novell's Ximian Services business...

PTO To Re-examine Eolas Patent.
November 17, 2003... The US Patent and Trademark Office has bowed to the wishes of the World Wide Web Consortium and is re-examining the validity of the Eolas patent in the light of alleged prior art. W3C director and World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee...

Half the Vendors Will Be Annihilated by '05: Gartner.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... When have you ever seen the Peter and Paul of market research, IDC and Gartner, seriously disagree? Well, then, it should come as no surprise that Gartner is chasing after IDC to ring the bell in celebration of the industry hitting bottom...

Ex-Gateway Brass Charged with Fraud.(Brief Article)
November 17, 2003... The SEC charged three former top executives of Gateway with fraud in a San Diego court Thursday. The agency alleges that in Q2 and Q3 of 2000 former Gateway CEO Jeffrey Weitzen, former CFO John Todd and former controller Robert Manza, the...

Microsoft Virtual Server Delayed; Virtual PC 2004 RTMs.
November 17, 2003... Microsoft has acknowledged a delay in delivering the Virtual Server code that it bought and says the software won't ship by the end of the year as scheduled. Microsoft said Virtual Server would enter beta this quarter and ship sometime in...

Europe Searching Warehouses for Guillotine for Microsoft.
November 17, 2003... What odds will you lay that it doesn't matter a hoot what Microsoft said or how fancy its footwork was during the closed-door hearing held in Brussels this week in the matter of the European antitrust charges against it and that the EC has...

Oracle Says It May Have To Abandon Hostile PeopleSoft Tender.
November 17, 2003... Oracle has to get PeopleSoft's acquisition-activated refund program aka its Customer Assurance Program enjoined tout suite or else it may have to drop its $7.3 billion hostile bid for the company as economically unreasonable, according to what...

Yamhill Speculation Punctuates Assessment of AMD's Chances.
November 17, 2003... AMD has added a swat of new x86-64 chips to its roadmap. When last seen the thing included a high-end eight-way Opteron, a 90nm chip code named Athens, a desktop 90nm chip code named San Diego and a mobile 90nm chip called Odessa, all of which...