Client Server News articles from October 2006

Client Server News archives from October 2006

The HP Way.
October 2, 2006... The HP fiasco continues to stun. According to testimony given to Congress Thursday, the tactics that HP used in its now notorious leak investigation are standard operating procedures at HP, have been for years, have been deployed "dozens"...

SCO accuses IBM of destroying evidence.(International Business Machines Corp.)
October 2, 2006... SCO Monday filed a motion for relief with the Utah federal court hearing its multibillion-dollar suit against IBM accusing IBM of intentionally destroying evidence shortly after SCO filed suit three years ago. The new motion and its many...

Verizon sues HP pretexters.
October 2, 2006... While HP was on Capitol Hill explaining itself to a House committee, Verizon Wireless Thursday was busy filing suit against 20 John and Jane Doe pretexters that HP hired to obtain the cell phone records of members of its board, members of the...

HP's game.(Hewlett-Packard Co. merges with Voodoo Computers)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Dell has one so HP had to have one. HP Thursday said it's buying 15- year-old Canadian PC maker, VoodooPC, whose pricey high-end boxes are popular with gamers. No price was mentioned. HP intends to build a gaming division around it with...

AMD loses half of its great case against Intel.
October 2, 2006... The Delaware District Court where AMD filed its US monopoly maintenance antitrust suit against Intel last year threw out 50%-60% of AMD's allegations on Tuesday. The decision was in response to a long-shot motion that Intel filed this past...

AMD nails China biggie.
October 2, 2006... It was the week of IDF so AMD trotted out an Intel-tweaking strategic alliance with Founder Technology, the second-largest Chinese PC supplier, which has signed up for a range of AMD64 chips and will launch AMD desktops in the next few weeks....

Another Sony recall.(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Sony's sparky little batteries have provoked another recall though it swore there wouldn't be any more. This time it's IBM and Lenovo, which are asking ThinkPad notebook customers to return 526,000 lithium-ion batteries for fear they'll...

Microsoft releases broad beta SDK for .NET Micro Framework.(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Microsoft Tuesday released a beta developer kit for the .NET Micro Framework, a new development platform for devices that are typically constrained by cost, memory, processor and/or power consumption. So now the smallest devices can use .NET...

Intel quads on tap.
October 2, 2006... Adesktop version of Intel's new quad-core chip meant for gamers and content creators, will, as expected, start selling in November under the name Core 2 Extreme Quad. At IDF this week Intel also promised to ship a server version of the...

Gee, Intel must be drinking apple juice.(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... No more big beige boxes. Interior decorators don't like them and Intel wants machines that can go in any room of the house. It suddenly wants PC designers and manufacturers thinking sexy, small and stylish when they design home PCs for...

Symantic claims Vista lockout.(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Playing to the card the European Commission has dealt it Symantec has been accusing Microsoft to the press--without suing or filing a formal complaint but within hearing of the regulators--of abusing its monopoly by locking it out of Vista and...

Red Hat earnings nose dive; stock trashed.(Linux Watch)
October 2, 2006... Red Hat earnings dove 34% year-over-year to $11 million or five cents a share in its second fiscal quarter reported Tuesday, down from $16.7 million or nine cents a share. In after-hours trading the stock took close to a 15% hit. The next...

Teradata moves its data warehouse to Linux.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Teradata has shipped an enhanced version of its Teradata database on Novell's 64-bit SUSE Linux Enterprise. It's available globally for enterprise-class data warehouses. It has the same functionality as Teradata on Windows or NCR's own Unix...

Mandriva releases Corporate Server 4.0.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Mandriva, the other Linux distribution, has launched Corporate Server 4.0 and in an effort to appeal to everybody is offering it with three virtualization technologies: Xen, VMware and SWSoft's OpenVZ. It's the first to do that. OpenVZ is...

Voltaire invents GridVision Enterprise.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Voltaire, the Infiniband house, is bulking up its software side with what it calls a first-of-a-kind package called GridVision Enterprise, meant for managing and automating grids. It's an extension of the software Voltaire already supplies. ...

Oracle updates Berkeley DB.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Oracle Wednesday trotted out Berkeley DB Release 4.5, its updated version of the open source widgetry it got when it acquired Sleepycat Software a while back, just about the time that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison started threatening to move into...

Eric Raymond lends support to Freespire.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Linspire says Eric Raymond has joined its Freespire leadership board. Raymond is the guy who basically invented open source by casting it as different from the Free Software movement and giving commercial outfits a reason to play, and somebody...

Jaluna rebrands to exploit virtualization.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Jaluna is now on its third incarnation. Once upon a time it was called ChorusOS. Then Sun Microsystems bought it and then sold it. It changed its name to Jaluna. Now it's changed its name again to VirtualLogix (VLX) to exploit its position...

Just what Red Hat needs--Novell support.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Hoping to exploit the fact that it's got Xen virtualization in its Linux and Red Hat doesn't, Novell is proposing to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 running on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 so Red Hat customers can migrate to Novell...

IBM & Intel write Geneseo proposal.(International Business Machines Corp.)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... IBM and Intel have developed a proposal to enhance PCI Express to address the performance requirements of new widgetry like visualization and XML. The proposal is codenamed Geneseo and the authors say it outlines enhancements that will...

HP opens three more SOA competency centers.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(service oriented architecture)(International Business Machines Corp.)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... HP has opened competency centers in Cupertino, California, Singapore and Bangalore, India, part, it says, of a $500 million investment in SOA, a key component of HP's Adaptive Enterprise strategy and a way to deliver IT as a service. HP...

IBM modifies its patent policy.
October 2, 2006... IBM says it's going to make about 100 of its business method patents, about half of the business method patents it owns, available to the public and acknowledge its direct ownership of all the patents it holds and patent applications it's made...

Gateway revs its server ambitions.(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Gateway, which hasn't exactly been a runaway success at selling servers, in fact the company's second-biggest shareholder claims they're subsidized at the expense of its retail business, is going to try again, hoping to compete against both...

Sun buys Neogent.
October 2, 2006... Sun is going to buy Neogent Inc, the identity management services automation company in Austin, Texas. No price was mentioned. The acquisition should close in calendar Q4. Sun figures Neogent's deployment automation toolset paired with its...

Microsoft buys Gteko.(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Microsoft is buying Gteko Ltd, an Israeli-based company started in 1992 that specializes in self-help and remote support. Terms were not disclosed. Gteko's Windows-based software lets users solve problems themselves using its self-help...

Intel developing another non-x86 chip.
October 2, 2006... Aside from the pricey ill-fated Itanium, Intel is developing another non-x86 chip according to what it said at its Developer Forum this week. Seems the world is going to need silicon capable of one trillion floating-point...

FB-DIMMs reportedly on their way out.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Despite the pretty picture that Intel paints of fully buffered DIMMs being used in low to mid-sized servers as far out as the horizon, the message that the DRAM makers are getting is reportedly quite different. Intel is supposedly thinking of...

AMD good for 40%: Merrill.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Merrill Lynch thinks Intel and its Woodcrest/ Blackford widgets will have "only minimal competitive impact" and that AMD could own 40% of the server market by the end of next year. Merrill analyst Joe Osha says he's sticking by his prediction...

Intel licenses bus.(BILLY GRAMS)
October 2, 2006... Intel, in a move reminiscent of AMD's Torrenza scheme, has taken to licensing its front-side bus. Initial licensees include Xilinx and Altera, who will adorn the thing with FPGAs so the chip is good for specialty applications.

Trouble in GPL land.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Linux creator Linux Torvalds, who doesn't much care for the proposed GPL 3 rewrite, particularly its position on DRM, organized a poll in which 28 out of 29 of the more prolific Linux kernel contributors came out against the update, indicating...

Hey, has Dell discovered engineering?(BILLY GRAMS)
October 2, 2006... Dell, a company not much given to R&D, is going to hire itself 500 engineers in Austin as part of its revitalization plans.

The Phish are leaping.(BILLY GRAMS)
October 2, 2006... There were 157,000 unique increasing sophisticated phishing messages unleashed worldwide in the first half of this year, up 81% year-over-year, according to Symantec. God knows how many desktops they landed on. Symantec blames organized crime.

Musical chairs.(appointments and resignations at CA Inc.)(Kevin Kern, Dave Hansen, John Carrow)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... CA has tapped one of its own to replace departed CIO Kevin Kern, who left the company in August and has just joined Unisys as CIO. CA has named Dave Hansen, who has been its senior VP of worldwide presales since last year. He joined CA in 2002...

Backdating watch.(cases)(Comverse Technologies' renegade ex-CEO Kobi Alexander)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Comverse Technologies' renegade ex-CEO Kobi Alexander, a fugitive from criminal fraud charges related to backdating and supposedly in Sri Lanka, has been tracked down in Namibia in Africa, where he is being held pending extradition back to the...

Borland turnstile.(BILLY GRAMS)
October 2, 2006... Borland has now parted company with the guy who on July 5 temporarily replaced its departing CFO Kenneth Hahn. Effective September 18, Boland's Michael Sullivan, the former CFO of Segue Software, a Borland acquisition, was out, replaced by...

Are Patti, Jay & Tom gonna rumble?(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... We heard ousted HP chairman Patricia Dunn's lawyer James Bosnahan say on television that she would not "go gentle into that good night" and then we heard the commentator remark a bit later that there was some mumble about her maybe suing her...

Itanium groupies make room for transitive.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Transitive Corporation, the outfit working with Intel to get Sparc/Solaris apps up and running on Linux/Itanium without porting or otherwise breaking a sweat, has joined the year-old Itanium Solutions Alliance to stir up business. The Itanium...

Carly's smiling.(Carly Fiorina )(Brief article)
October 2, 2006... Betcha ousted HP CEO Carly Fiorina is smiling like Alice-in-Wonderland's Cheshire Cat into her make-up mirror these days. Her enemies on the HP board are scattered or confounded, the suit of armor her replacement's been wearing isn't quite as...

Salesforce wants to be a platform like Microsoft & Oracle.
October 16, 2006... Software-as-a-service pioneer Salesforce. com will be introducing a Java-like on-demand programming language and all-purpose platform that's supposed to make it possible for users and partners to share the company's multi-tenant development...

Google bundles Writely with Spreadsheets.(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... Well, the inevitable has happened. Google barely had time to give Microsoft the finger between it's chomping down on YouTube and spitting out an Office-wannabe version of its Writely web-based collaborative word processor bundled with its...

OneCare made Vista-compatible.(Microsoft releases Windows Live OneCare )(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... Microsoft on Monday released a free 90-day Vista-compatible 1.5 beta of its Windows Live OneCare security software, saying it had been internationalized, featured unified antivirus and anti-spyware filtering and had been outfitted with more...

Vista RC2 lifts off.(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... Microsoft released a Vista Release Candidate 2 last Friday, saying it would be the last test version before final release. Meanwhile, Microsoft has been handing out "Certified for Windows Vista" and "Works with Windows Vista" logos to...

How nouveau riche. Google buys YouTube for $1.65b.
October 16, 2006... Google is buying YouTube Inc, the unprofitable, 19-month-old, social networking-style, homemade video-featuring start-up site with $11.5 million in financing in its jeans from Sequoia Capital. And it's paying an incredibly frothy $1.65 billion...

McAfee, CNET & Monster all lose their CEOs to backdating.
October 16, 2006... McAfee chairman and CEO George Samenuk stepped down and president Kevin Weiss was fired as soon as the McAfee board got the results of the company's backdating probe this week. Specifics are sparse pending a filing with the SEC that the company...

HP sound bites.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)
October 16, 2006... "None of the normal business reasons apply. I know that. There were no improprieties. There were no ethics issues. So I can only conclude that it was personal in some way. Certainly, the way it was done was personal."--Ousted HP CEO Carly...

Transmeta sues Intel for patent infringement.
October 16, 2006... Negotiations reportedly having failed, Transmeta, the spoiled software-based x86 designer where Linux creator Linus Torvalds used to work, filed suit against Intel Wednesday charging patent infringement. The suit, filed in federal court in...

ClearCube seeks faster ramp.(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... Having just refitted its line with a product that will give it price parity with garden- variety PCs for the first time ever, ClearCube, the PC blade house, dumped its CEO in favor of a guy who, it says, can take it into the channel and sew up...

Pickings too slim to justify investing: Sevin Rosen.(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... Sevin Rosen, the early stage Ur-venture capital operation that in its heyday backed Compaq, Lotus and SGI, has pulled the plug on its tenth and latest fund drive and is sending back the money because the investment environment stinks. In a...

Colorado firm to build supercomputers out of playStations.(Linux Watch)
October 16, 2006... Terra Soft Solutions, the little outfit that ported Yellow Dog Linux to Apple's old PowerPC machines, a market that has subsequently disappeared, is going to build two giant supercomputer clusters out of retread Sony PlayStation 3 game boxes--a...

Start-up claims to eliminate the AJAX learning curve.(Linux Watch)
October 16, 2006... Open source start-up Helmi Technologies Inc figures it's got a way to leap the key hurdles barring the way to the widespread development of enterprise-class AJAXbased rich Internet applications (RIAs), the hurdles being, in its mind, browser...

32-bit SUSE beats 64-bit.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... Neal Nelson & Associates, the computer performance consultancy, says it has results in hand that show that the 32-bit version of Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 has a possible 37% throughput advantage over the 64-bit version of the...

Sun collaborates with Laszlo systems.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... Sun says it's going to collaborate with Laszlo Systems, the original developer of OpenLaszlo, an AJAXstyle open source rich Internet development platform, so that Open-Laszlo applications run on Java ME devices. OpenLaszlo is supposed to...

Key to Linux desktop apps may be in Portland.(Linux Watch)
October 16, 2006... The so-called Portland Project that the Open Source Development Labs and freedesktop.org have been working to give Linux desktops a unified Gnome-KDE graphical interface has been released. OSDL says the common interfaces will make it easier...

Gadhafi reportedly bellies up for MIT laptop.(Linux Watch)(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... Libya is going to buy enough laptops to supply its 1.2 million schoolchildren by June of 2008 from One Desktop Per Child (ODPC), according to the New York Times. The $250 million deal will put a server in every school and provide...

Ray Noorda dead at 82.(Obituary)
October 16, 2006... Ray Noorda, who salvaged Novell back in the early '80s and made it a touchstone of PC networking, the way to share files and printers, died Monday of Alzheimer's disease. He was 82 and had been out of touch for some time. He is credited...

HP PIs plead not guilty.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... The three private investigators charged in the HP mess pleaded not guilty at their arraignment Tuesday to the same four felony counts that HP's ousted chairman Patricia Dunn and ethics officer Kevin Hunsaker face. The three were let go on...

EMC & Microsoft expand alliance.(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... EMC and Microsoft have struck a new ECM alliance to push Microsoft tools and applications in the EMC infrastructure. ECM is supposed to introduce new content and archiving products that enable tighter integration between EMC's Documentum ECM...

Forefront beta released.
October 16, 2006... Microsoft has released a public beta of its Forefront Security for SharePoint, stuff it acquired with its acquisition of Sybari Software designed to use technologies from five different security vendors. The gold version is expected by early...

Oracle buys Sunopsis.
October 16, 2006... Oracle is buying Sunopsis, a Frenchbased hereogeneous data integration house, on undisclosed terms for its Fusion middleware and its SOA, BI and data management solutions. It said it would strengthen its commitment to supporting both Oracle and...

Ping gets C round.
October 16, 2006... Four-year-old Ping Identity Corporation and its single sign-on authentication platform for web apps and web services has picked up a $13 million C round from Appian Ventures as well as existing investors Draper Fisher, General Catalyst,...

WS-notification 1.3 standardized.(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... OASIS has standardized WS-Notification 1.3, a pattern-based approach for disseminating information among Web Services. It's supposed to standardize the way Web Services interact using notifications or events, meaning the Web Service doesn't...

Microsoft buys Colloquis.(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... Microsoft has bought privately held Colloquis Inc, on undisclosed terms, saying it will offer hosted Windows Live services to businesses with online operations based on the company's conversational language processing technology and add the...

ESX finally goes 64-bit.(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... VMware's high-end ESX Server finally supports 64-bit operating systems, specifically Windows, Red Hat, SUSE and Solaris. The update is designated ESX 3.0.1, which is also available in German and Japanese. ESX hasn't been able to support 64-bit...

Kumar sentencing delayed again.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... Ousted CA CEO Sanjay Kumar was supposed to be sentenced Thursday for his role in the $2.2 billion CA stock-rigging scandal, but it was postponed again for the second time. This time the date has been moved to October 30 reportedly at Kumar's...

Sun & FalconStor cozy.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... Sun wants enhanced virtual tape solutions and is cuddling up with FalconStor to get exclusive features for an enterprise virtual tape library. Their relationship, which produced the VTL Plus, has apparently deepened into a joint development...

Symantec's ambitions.(BILLY GRAMS)
October 16, 2006... Symantec CEO John Thompson told Etre that he wants to double revenues to $10 billion by 2010 and, having bought the still undigested Veritas for $10.3 billion last year, wants to make midsized acquisitions.

Starter edition at 1m copies.(BILLY GRAMS)
October 16, 2006... Microsoft says a million copies of its XP Starter Edition have been supplied to the Third World. There are now 35 language versions of the thing and it's being sold in 139 countries.

EMC goes retail.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... In a move not particularly characteristic of it, EMC is selling a backup drive it calls the Retrospect Express HD 2.0 for a single PC. Earlier versions of the thing were only available bundled with third-party hard drives and now it's going...

Oracle's PeopleSoft acquisition gets a tad more expensive.(BILLY GRAMS)
October 16, 2006... Oracle is going to have to pay a $98.5 million fine to settle charges that its $10.3 billion PeopleSoft acquisition overcharged the federal government between 1997 and 2005 by submitting false pricing information. The fine is the largest ever...

IBM moves global procurement to China.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... IBM is moving global procurement from bucolic Somers in upstate New York to Shenzhen, China in the name of efficiency and to capitalize on emerging market opportunities. It notes that this is the first time one of its corporate- wide...

MySQL converted to RSS feeds.(BILLY GRAMS)
October 16, 2006... NotePage, a Massachusetts communications software house, says its new PHP script, SQL2RSS, will convert MySQL databases to RSS feeds. It says the publisher has complete control over the content syndicated.

HP to expand Indian production.(BILLY GRAMS)
October 16, 2006... HP is planning on putting close to $22 million in a second computer plant in India. It should be up and working next March and be capable of turning out 300,000 desktops, workstations, notebooks and servers a month. Output is meant for local...

Accelerated cluster makes Top500.(BILLY GRAMS)(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... ClearSpeed Technology, the floating point coprocessor acceleration house, has produced the first accelerated cluster to make the Top500, number five actually, a beast built out of 655 Sun X4600 server, each fitted with eight dual-core Opterons....

Pajama sales likely to spike.(BILLY GRAMS)
October 16, 2006... IDC says that 70% of the US workforce will be telecommuting by 2009.

Cisco who?
October 16, 2006... Cisco is going to spend $100 million on advertising turning itself into a household name.

NBC buddies with Intel on Viiv.(BILLY GRAMS)
October 16, 2006... NBC Universal is going to supply consumers with Intel's Viiv-based PCs and Centrino laptops with 20 free online TV shows under what it calls its VIP Access service.

Microsoft opens Vista plant.(BILLY GRAMS)
October 16, 2006... Microsoft has opened a $66 million plant in Puerto Rico where it intends to manufacture Vista and Office 2007, particularly the stuff on DVD-9.

Concurrent to sell PERC VMs.(BILLY GRAMS)
October 16, 2006... Concurrent is going to sell PERC Ultra, the popular real-time embedded Java virtual machine from Aonix along with its real-time SUSE- and Red Hat-based operating systems.

Backdating watch.(BILLY GRAMS)(Sanmina-SCI subpoenaed on it's granted stock options)(Brief article)
October 16, 2006... Gee, maybe Sanmina-SCI should get some kind of prize or something. Well, maybe the grand jury that's subpoenaed its files can think of something appropriate. The contract manufacturer admitted Thursday that practically all of the stock options...

EC gets Microsoft to blink--at least with one eye.(European Commission)
October 23, 2006... Microsoft said last Friday that it has made changes in Vista intended to keep it out of the antitrust courts in either Europe or South Korea, both of which claim its bundling is anticompetitive. At the same time, Microsoft reiterated its...

Quad watch.(Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6700, multiple core processors)(Brief article)
October 23, 2006... Intel's first quad chips--and Intel's already quietly selling quads--are supposed to be officially announced in mid-November. The two due are the Conroe-based 2.66GHz desktop Kentsfield, to be called the Core 2 Extreme QX6700, and the...

Massive battery recall burns Sony.
October 23, 2006... Because of what it will cost to replace what Sony now estimates will be 9.6 million laptop batteries coupled with the losses in its PlayStation unit, which has been plagued by product delays and price cuts, Sony lowered its fiscal year earnings...

Browser war 2.0 can now officially start.(Brief article)
October 23, 2006... Very late on Wednesday Microsoft said it had released Internet Explorer 7 for XP, its first browser update in five years, hoping it bitch slaps Firefox back into line. The two-year-old open source descendent of Netscape now claims 11.5%-12.5%...

eMachines co-founder back in the game.(John Hui bought NEC's consumer PC business)(Brief article)
October 23, 2006... eMachines co-founder John Hui, who sold eMachines to Gateway, is back in the game. When last spotted some weeks ago, Hui was trying to buy Gateway's retail business for $450 million and got the back of Gateway's hand. Now he's gone and...