Linux Gram articles from April 2008

Linux Gram archives from April 2008

Google Plays the Platform Game; Makes Netscape Look Like Kid's Stuff.
April 14, 2008... So Google has gone into the developer collection business. It's a move akin to grinding up glass and stirring it into Microsoft's supper. At least Google hopes it is. Making Netscape look like kid's stuff, it's making the web the...

Google Cultivates an Ecosystem.(Brief article)
April 14, 2008... Google has ripped a page out of Salesforce.com's handbook and has started up an AppExchange-like Solutions Marketplace site to cultivate third-party programs that complement its own widgetry, initially stuff like Google Apps and enterprise...

Capital World Smell Money in Those Yahoos.(Brief article)
April 14, 2008... Well, at least somebody in the Yahoo spectacle is keeping their head. Capital World Investors, Yahoo's biggest institutional investor, has doubled its position to 10.1% figuring there must be some money to be made out of the fact that...

ISO Becomes OOXML's Steward.
April 14, 2008... Against the backdrop of a noisy protest march through downtown Oslo Wednesday by 60 Norwegian software experts - including Opera CTO Haakon Wium Lie - objecting to Norway's Yes vote for Open XML standardization by the International Standards...

Red Hat Wants Court To Limit Software Patents.
April 14, 2008... Red Hat has filed a friend of the court brief with the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals complaining that the patent system is hindrance to open source and asking it to bar software patents - or at least put a leash on them. The court is...

Microsoft Posts More Protocol Documentation.
April 14, 2008... Microsoft Tuesday posted 14,000 pages of what it called "preliminary versions" of technical documentation covering the protocols in Office 2007, SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007. The move is Microsoft's latest step since...

Samba Suffers Embarrassment of Riches.
April 14, 2008... Samba leader Jeremy Allison says be careful what you wish for. Now that Samba has everything that it wants from Microsoft, it doesn't have enough hands to do the coding. Meanwhile, the Linux Foundation says that in the last three years...

3Leaf Promises To Show You Real Virtualization.
April 14, 2008... 3Leaf Systems, the four-year-old start-up that has raised $32.5 million in funding - some of it from Intel - is promising - once it gets all its ducks in a row - to virtualize the whole x86 data center infrastructure - memory, CPU and I/O. ...

Dell Goes to the Well, So To Speak.
April 14, 2008... Dell is talking with Tecom Investments, an investment arm of the Dubai government, about a joint venture that could raise Dell's sales profile in the Middle East. Michael Dell mentioned it at a press conference in Dubai but offered no...

Sun Fields Sexy Niagara Boxes with x86 Warning Labels.
April 14, 2008... Sun and Fujitsu have unwrapped their first Solaris-based dual-socket UltraSparc T2 Plus servers described as packing the power of 5,000 systems into a single rack and delivering up to three time IBM's Power6 performance in half the space. Oh,...

AMD To Cut 10%.
April 14, 2008... AMD says it's going to lay off 10% of its workforce by the end of September and take the charge this quarter. It is still trying to figure out how much that'll be. The company, which reports on April 17, also pre-announced its Q1 results...

Adobe Reorgs.
April 14, 2008... Told ya Adobe was gonna reorganize and put its mobile/devices operation in with its platform operation in the name of moving to a single technology platform and runtime for PCs, handsets and consumer devices. Adobe's new CTO Kevin Lynch,...

Jury Tells Microsoft To Pay Alcatel $367m.
April 14, 2008... Remember that swat of 15 infringement complaints that Lucent made in 2003 against Dell and Gateway? A couple of which, concerning MP3 audio technology in the Windows Media Player, resulted in a record $1.5 billion decision against Microsoft...

HP's 'Netbook' Breaks Ranks with Intel.
April 14, 2008... HP has ignored Intel's newfangled netbook design - as evinced by the Classmate 2s Intel's rushing to get on the American and European markets - in favor of its own concoction, a Via C7-M-based mini-notebook that, like the Classmate, is...

VirtualLogix Boosts Intel's MIDs Initiative.
April 14, 2008... VirtualLogix, the real-time virtualization outfit that some might better remember as Jaluna and that used to belong to Sun, has come out with VLX Developer 2.0 with enhanced support for performance-critical Intel systems, a first for Intel...

Window on H-1B Visas Slammed Shut.(Brief article)
April 14, 2008... The US Citizenship and Immigration Service closed the windows on this year's crop of temporary H-1B visa Tuesday, a week after it opened. It's refused to say for the moment how many applications it got but you can safely assume it's a lot....

Rich Creek: Intel's Equalizer.
April 14, 2008... There is now something called the Rich Creek 2 platform at Intel that will offer systems builders like New York-based Seneca Data, reportedly its first taker, an Intel mobile motherboard and more flexibility in notebook components, sort of like...

Intel Sells Off More Assets.
April 14, 2008... Intel is still thinning the herd after its AMD-induced near-death experience and has sold its enterprise and storage optical assets and Connects Cable business for stock to New Mexico-based Emcore Corporation. Emcore previously took over...

Jury To Get Reiser Murder Case Soon.
April 14, 2008... The circumstantial evidence case against Linux programmer Hans Reiser, accused of murdering his estranged wife although her body has never been found, looks like it could go to the jury in the next few days after a trial that started November 6...

Cookies May Crumble.
April 14, 2008... The European Commission may crack down on Google, Yahoo, Microsoft et al and tell them they can't keep personal search data longer than six months - and even that may be pushing it. The EC's international advisory body, the Article 29 Data...

Cloud Pumping.
April 14, 2008... Rumor has it that Salesforce.com, that CRM paean to cloud computing, is going to start selling Gmail and Google Docs integrated into its system. The pair cut a deal nine months ago for Saleforce to include Adwords in its applications.

Albany Better Be Better for Microsoft than for Eliot Spitzer.
April 14, 2008... Microsoft has a project code named Albany that IDG News Service thinks is its answer to Google Docs and Google Apps and describes as a combination of some version of Office, Office Live Workspaces hosted services, Windows Live OneCare and...

Dell To Go Cheap.
April 14, 2008... Dell has been telling people that it's going into the very cheap, very small laptop business like Asustek's Eee and HP's new Mini-Note. The Dell widget should reportedly have a 8.9-inch display and start at $399. Compal Electronics, the Taiwan...

Judge Throws Out HP Hush Money Suit.
April 14, 2008... A district court judge has thrown out a case against HP brought by several pension plans because it paid ousted CEO Carly Fiorina $40 million in severance. The plaintiffs alleged that HP needed shareholder approval and that the king's ransom...

Internet Crime Up.(Brief article)
April 14, 2008... The Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) says that nearly $240 million was lost last year to cyber crime - and that's just the ones it knows about and investigated. The number is up $40 million from 2006. IC3 is a joint operation between the...

Now There's a Couple.
April 14, 2008... Google is using Frank Quattrone, the ex-Credit Suit superstar investment banker and veteran of the federal court system, as an adviser on the Microsoft-Yahoo machinations, according to Reuters and the New York Times. Quattrone just started...

Start-up Tickles MySQL into Making a Quantum Leap.
April 21, 2008... A two-year-old start-up came out of the woodwork this week claiming to have turned MySQL - which, let's face it, has its limits - into the best darn data warehouse in the world bar none and to have the price/performance benchmarks to prove it....

Those Heady Days of Sex, Drugs & Linux Are Over.
April 21, 2008... Well, it looks like Richard Stallman, the father of FOSS, is going to have to cut his hair and get a suit because the warmed-over hippie movement he's been leading is no longer the radical anti-software establishment counter-culture his rag-tag...

Red Hat Begs To Clarify its Desktop Position.
April 21, 2008... In the last 36 hours - thanks to a posting on one of its blogs - Red Hat has gotten itself in a pretty mess over whether it's in or out of the desktop market, with the influential Wall Street Journal, among others, reporting that "Red Hat...

Open Source Census Starts.
April 21, 2008... OpenLogic and friends are going to try to plum the depths of open source adoption in the enterprise by asking the enterprise to take part in a voluntary self-administered Open Source Census. The global multi-year exercise kicked off on...

Yahoo Reported Getting Closer to Google Deal.
April 21, 2008... Yahoo is reportedly getting closer to that controversial deal that would outsource its search advertising to Google. Sources told the Wall Street Journal that the limited test of Google that Yahoo set up went well. The Google strategy,...

Google Shares Gallop Thru $500.(Brief article)
April 21, 2008... It looks like Google is back on track to be that $1,000 stock. Having been in the $400 doldrums since February 22, it crashed through $500 and clear into the $520s, up over 75 bucks in after-hours trading Thursday on the strength of its...

More Restructuring Ahead for AMD.
April 21, 2008... AMD, in distress with none of its units profitable, losses over the last six quarters topping $4 billion, heavy in debt from its ATI acquisition and facing a resurgent Intel, is going to take stock of all operations, core and non-core, and...

AMD Dumps its CTO.
April 21, 2008... Last Friday AMD said its CTO Phil Hester was resigning to "pursue other opportunities," claiming it had nothing to do with the 10% reduction in force it intends making to cut costs in the face of its sales shortfall. It also said it won't...

Google & Salesforce Clouds Converge over Redmond.
April 21, 2008... The widely rumored mating of Salesforce.com and Google Apps has taken place. There is now something called Salesforce for Google Apps; Google's productivity programs have been integrated into Salesforce's CRM suite - so data in one can be...

Zoho Claims Google Was Salesforce's Second Choice.
April 21, 2008... There might have been no industry-tingling Google-Salesforce alliance the other day if Zoho had accepted any of Marc Benioff's "repeated" offers to buy Zoho outright a few months ago. Zoho's resident blogger and CEO of its parent company...

Seagate Lashes Out at SSD by Suing STEC.
April 21, 2008... Seagate Technology, the disk drive biggie, sued STEC, the solid-state memory comer, on Monday charging it with infringing four of its patents and raising fears in some corners that solid-state innovation could suffer. The suit is first...

Citrix Puts Date on XenDesktop Release.
April 21, 2008... Citrix says its XenDesktop, now in beta, will start shipping May 20 priced to start at $75 per concurrent user for small firms with 50-100 users. XenDesktop's the stuff that Microsoft is supposed to co-market. It will run under Hyper-V....

Intel Pulls It Out; North America Rebounds.
April 21, 2008... Despite the "sky-is-falling" weather forecasts and slowdown-induced panic that the bottom is falling out of PC demand, Intel managed to pull out a solid first quarter with record revenues of $9.7 billion, up 9% year-over-year, and income of...

Patent Reform Bill Stuck in Committee.
April 21, 2008... The patent reform legislation that companies like Microsoft, Intel, Oracle and Cisco were hoping would reduce litigation and improve patent quality hit a wall in the US Senate just days before it was to go to the floor for debate and a vote...

Dell Has B3 Boxes.
April 21, 2008... Dell's off-again on-again relationship with AMD has resulted in five PowerEdge servers that can be had with the now fixed and shipping B3 Barcelona quad, giving AMD 13 global OEM platforms using the part. Dell's contribution includes the...

Novell Cuts Down SUSE for Appliances.
April 21, 2008... Novell wants ISVs to create appliances that marry their applications to the SUSE and to underpin the idea has trotted out a beta of SLES JeOS, a "Just enough Operating System," so it'll all make sense. Red Hat also has an Appliance...

Dell Has Best PC Quarter in Two Years.
April 21, 2008... Worldwide PC shipments were up 14.6% in the first quarter to 69.5 million unit, better than the 13.2% IDC thought it would be, but the US was up only 3.5% year-over-year as the states struggles through whatever economic bug it's caught. ...

MySQL 5.1 Delayed for Bug Spray.(Brief article)
April 21, 2008... At the first MySQL user conference since it spent a billion dollars acquiring the open source database, Sun said this week that a near-final release candidate of MySQL 5.1 could be downloaded at http://dev.mysql.com/downloads. It's...

Novell Chops Tags on SLES for IBM Mainframes.
April 21, 2008... Novell says it's going to "simplify" pricing and discounts on SLES for mainframes for the rest of the year. That means it's going to cut prices by 33%-47% by offering a three-year subscription for the price of a two-year subscription or a...

Caveats on App Engine.
April 21, 2008... Gartner thinks Google's App Engine, its new cloud formation, which currently lets developers only write web apps in Python, a language Google has relied on for its internal offline processing, may eventually add Java but not .NET, which would...

HP Backs Citrix.
April 21, 2008... HP says it's going to support Citrix' XenDesktop on its industry-standard ProLiant serevers and Compaq thin client come May. HP hopes to sell management software on top

HP Imports New PC Sales Boss.
April 21, 2008... HP has tapped Enrique Lores, the head of its Inkjet Commercial Division, responsible for its large-format printing business for the last five years, to head up worldwide PC sales and run its Solution Partner Organization, reporting to PC boss...

Wind River on Niagara.
April 21, 2008... Wind River is going to port its carrier-grade Linux and Workbench development suite to Sun's eight-core multithreaded UltraSparc T2 Niagara chip, which doesn't have a carrier-grade Linux yet.

Back in the Chips.
April 21, 2008... It's been a happy week for beaten-down tech sector what with Intel and Google resurgent and IBM stock rising to its highest price in six years after its earnings.

Hardy Heron Takes Flight.
April 28, 2008... Ubuntu's first "Long Term Support (LTS)" rev in almost 23 months was pushed out the door this week along with the promise that another LTS rev would follow every two years from now on out and in between there would be point releases first at...

Microsoft &Novell Go to China in Search of Converts.
April 28, 2008... Microsoft and Novell have taken it into their collective head to push their peculiar axis into China - and elsewhere - to convert unsupported Linux users to SUSE. They say they've had demand "to build a bridge between open source and...

OLPC's Founder Ready To Climb in Bed with Microsoft.
April 28, 2008... One Laptop Per Child, the effort to put technology in the hands of third-world kids, has lost its number two guy Walter Bender, who was president, software and content until last month when he was shifted to head of deployment although not many...

SnapLogic Data Integration Project Goes Commercial.
April 28, 2008... SnapLogic, the open source start-up that been fostering the eponymous data integration project for the past year, is going commercial with the widgetry, claiming that the stuff can do what proprietary software from Tibco and Infomatica can't...

Whoops.
April 28, 2008... Word documents generated by the current version of Office 2007 don't conform to ISO/IEC 29500, the OOXML file format draft standard Microsoft moved heaven and earth to get ISO to accept. At least that's what Alex Brown, the guy in change of...

Microsoft's 'Big Sync' Goes 'Live'.
April 28, 2008... Remember that Mesh stuff that Microsoft chief architect Ray Ozzie was hinting around about a few weeks ago? Well, Microsoft's new contribution to the cloud, what we called "the Big Sync," is now Live Mesh, a preview Web Service that, as...

EC Asks Questions about IBM's Mainframe Business.
April 28, 2008... IBM may be starring down the barrel of an EC investigation of its precious mainframe business, significant to its bottom line. According to both Bloomberg and Dow Jones, the commission has sent Big Blue a questionnaire asking for details...

Microsoft Threatens To Walk Out on Yahoo.
April 28, 2008... Time is running out on Microsoft's deal-or-else ultimatum to Yahoo. Yahoo has to move off the dime by Saturday or else Microsoft could try taking the place by force, lowering its rejected $31-a-share bid in the process - or scarier still...

Microsoft Disappoints; Windows Sales Off.
April 28, 2008... After three strong quarters and against a backdrop of heady expectations, Microsoft came in with lighter-than-expected fiscal Q3 revenues of $14.45 billion Thursday, earnings of $4.38 billion, or 47 cents a share, and operating income of $4.41...

IBM Creates Cloud Box.
April 28, 2008... IBM claims to have created new species of custom-built, industry-standard, Linux-based rack server for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing companies with massive data centers and tens of thousands of servers, like online gaming, social networks, search...

Sun Pushes To Make Solaris Apps SaaSy.(Brief article)
April 28, 2008... Sun is now offering a new virtualization service that will let ISVs run their Solaris apps in a multi-tenant on-demand environment without having to rewrite any code. The trick is in Solaris' Containers virtualization and its xVM widgetry....

Microsoft Experiments with Subscription-Based Office.
April 28, 2008... Microsoft is going to experiment with subscription-based software that as near as we can figure out won't be on-demand or web-based - or even available as a download - so it's hardly a retort to Google Apps and its ilk like people thought. ...

NetSuite, SugarCRM Get BT Reselling Their 'Cloudware'.
April 28, 2008... BT is going to distribute and support both SugarCRM, the commercial open source CRM people, and its rival NetSuite, Larry Ellison's other company. Both companies are competing against salesforce.com, the brainchild of former Ellison lieutenant...

Microsoft Goes After Salesforce.com.
April 28, 2008... Microsoft pushed its Dynamics CRM Online out into general availability in North America Tuesday and into competition with Salesforce.com. Microsoft is doing the hosting with accessibility through a browser or Office and Outlook and claims to...

Apple Buys PowerPC Chip House, Confusing Everybody.
April 28, 2008... Apple has finally bought PA Semi, the fab-less low-power PowerPC start-up that supposedly swooned when Apple switched from the PowerPC Intel. What Apple's going to do with it now become fodder for the speculators. The iPhone uses an 32-bit...

Corel CEO To Bolt on Chance Company May Go Private Again.
April 28, 2008... Corel, the owner of Office rival WordPerfect, is looking for a new CEO now that the incumbent David Dobson, there since 2005, is leaving before the end of June for a senior position at some unidentified Fortune 500. Dobson's move follows...

XP SP3 Nigh.
April 28, 2008... Microsoft has finally released the Vista-delayed XP SP3 to manufacturing and will be sending the code to PC makers. It supports the Network Access protection and Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PNRP) used in Vista so XP apps can communicate...

VMware Revenues Up 69%.(Financial report)
April 28, 2008... VMware Tuesday reported first-quarter revenues, up 69% year-over-year to $438 million, better than the $422.4 million Wall Street expected. The market has been down on the company out of fear it will be trumped by the increasing...

Why the EPA Pulled the Trigger on IBM.
April 28, 2008... The Legal Times has been poking around IBM's misadventure with the Environment Protection Agency (EPA) and how it was briefly barred from doing any new business with the United States government a few weeks ago, and it says, paraphrasing Robert...

Motorola Invests in VirtualLogix.
April 28, 2008... Motorola, which needs all the help it can get, has invested some undisclosed amount of money in VirtualLogix, the company that can put multiple operating systems concurrently in embedded devices like cell phones and infrastructure equipment...

Amazon Offers Cloud Support.(Brief article)
April 28, 2008... Amazon is now offering two premium support levels for application developers using its cloud computing services, to wit its S3 storage service, its EC2 computing service and SQS application messaging service. It's got Silver support,...

SCO To Appear on a Blackberry Near You.
April 28, 2008... While SCO is only days away from a court appearance in Utah that's supposed to determine how much money it owes to Novell, a necessary step before it tries to get all legal decisions related to Novell overturned, it's cut a revenue-sharing deal...

Carly a Heartbeat from the White House?(Carly Fiorina)(Brief article)
April 28, 2008... An on-the-beach IT executive who's been watching a lot political coverage lately called to ask what cabinet post Carly Fiorina was likely to get if John McCain is elected because Carly, now the so-called "victory chairman" of Republican...

AMD Likely To Jettison Consumer Electronics Unit.
April 28, 2008... In its efforts to keep the boat afloat, it's generally assumed that AMD will throw its consumer electronics business overboard. Its revenues last quarter were a measly $81 million, down 26% sequentially, and its operating margin was -10%,...

Dell in Laptop Push in India.
April 28, 2008... Dell is going to start making laptops in India, its fastest-growing market. It already makes desktops there and is going to up capacity above the current 400,000 units a year.

Parallels at 1m and Counting.
April 28, 2008... Parallels said Wednesday that its Desktop virtualization widgetry for the Mac, which lets Intel-based Apples run Windows or Linux along with Mac OS X, has sold more than a million copies, a nice chunk of the Macs out there. It is the...

Dell Gets Creative with Support.
April 28, 2008... Dell has dreamed up a new fee-paying premium support service that will give North American consumers with issues with any of their in-warranty Dell products access to the same technical support team.

Lehman Suggests HP Tidy Up.
April 28, 2008... Lehman Brothers figures HP could do with some more cost cutting and shift to higher-margin enterprise products.

Ballmer on Vista.
April 28, 2008... "Windows Vista - a work in progress." - Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at a conference last week with 1,700 Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals. Microsoft is being pressured and petitioned to keep selling XP past its June 30 termination date.

DOJ Keeps its Eye on Yahoo & Google.
April 28, 2008... The Justice Department has reportedly been asking antitrust kinds of questions of Yahoo and Google stemming from Yahoo's experiment outsourcing some ad placement to Google.

Reiser Murder Case Goes to the Jury.
April 28, 2008... The fate of Hans Reiser, the Linux file system programmer charged with murdering his estranged wife and hiding her undiscovered body in 2006 has gone to the jury after a five-and-a-half month trial. The seven-man, five-woman panel got the case...