Linux Gram articles from August 2007

Linux Gram archives from August 2007

Intel Accuses AMD of Defamation.
August 6, 2007... After AMD's latest Intel-targeted broadside Thursday morning, Intel's corporate spokesman, the supremely tactful Chuck Mulloy, took off his pearl-gray diplomat's gloves and accused AMD of defamation. He said that a lot of the brickbats...

Microsoft To Test Ad-based Software.
August 6, 2007... Seems we're waiting for Microsoft to make a defensive chess move against Google's freebie, ad-supported Docs & Spreadsheets software play and test a free hybrid version of the next release of its low-end productivity kit, Works, whose word...

EC Takes Sides in the Mascara-Smearing Bitch Fight Between Intel & AMD.
August 6, 2007... One wonders whether it matters what Intel says in its defense now that the European Commission has finally gone ahead and accused it of the taint of antitrust. Intel has 10 weeks, until October 8, to present its defense. Then there could...

AMD's Market Share Widened in Q2.
August 6, 2007... In the June quarter AMD won back 4% of the overall market share that it lost in Q1, according to Mercury Research, which gives the company 22.9% of the x86 market versus the 18.7% it was supposed to have in Q1. The share came directly out...

Wikipedia Creator Advances Quest To Develop Open Source Counter-Google.
August 6, 2007... Despite Google's $159 billion market cap - or rather, one suspects, because of it - Jimmy Wales, the guy who created - for better or worse - Wikipedia, figures Internet search is broken - because it's proprietary - and needs to be reinvented,...

Microsoft Wants its Licenses Declared Open Source Licenses.
August 6, 2007... Microsoft, evidently off its meds and exhibiting an increasing tendency toward bipolar behavior, says it's going to submit two one-page shared source licenses to the Open Source Initiative (OSI), the arbiter of all open source licenses that has...

SpikeSource To Certify Open Source Apps on Windows.
August 6, 2007... In another trip down the rabbit hole to where things are odd indeed, SpikeSource, Kim Polese's open source stack operation, is going to certify all of its SpikeIgnited open source applications on Windows. In concert with Microsoft, it...

Point to Microsoft.
August 6, 2007... In a decision that will distress OpenDocument Format (ODF) fans, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, ODF's biggest booster, has gone ahead and approved Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) document format as an acceptable format for state records...

Movidia & Its Really Green Machine.
August 6, 2007... Movidis, the start-up using unconventional Mips chips in its Linux appliances, has discovered that the 500MHz Cavium-made network processors produce a way more energy-efficient and faster web server than x86 chips. According to CEO Ken...

Software Freedom Law Center Absolves OpenHAL of Infringement Taint.
August 6, 2007... After comparing the code, the Software Freedom Law Center has absolved the OpenHAL project of allegations of infringing on Atheros Communications' IP. The project provides an open source interface to Atheros wireless cards, replacing...

Eolas & Microsoft Talk Settlement.
August 6, 2007... Eolas and Microsoft are off talking settlement. The retrial of the patent infringement case that resulted in a $521 million award to Eolas and the University of California was supposed to have started Monday, but it's been put off a month...

SP1 Watch.
August 6, 2007... Microsoft seems to be chewing on a "Vista Performance and Reliability Pack" and "Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack" that leaked out from outside Windows Server 2008 beta testers then - poof - disappeared that may or may be part of - or...

Sony & the Cell Chip Sued for Infringement.
August 6, 2007... Sony and the Cell chip, used in its bedeviled PlayStation 3, have been charged with patent infringement in the patent-savvy prosecution-leaning Texas federal courts by an entity nobody ever heard of that can't be found on the Internet - or for...

Like Intel, Cisco Buys into VMware Ahead of IPO.
August 6, 2007... My. My. They're sure priming the VMware IPO, which is supposed to go out at $23-$25, (yeah, right), provided there's something left of the 10% slice EMC has said it would float - on Tuesday August 14, according the buzz. After Intel bought...

Dell's Buying ASAP Software for $340m.
August 6, 2007... Dell, which is not much given to buying other companies but figures it has to to survive, is buying ASAP Software, an Illinois-based subsidiary of Corporate Express, the publicly owned Amsterdam office supply company, for about $340 million....

Sun's Quarter Rates a Minor Star.
August 6, 2007... When was the last time Sun's $5 stock was up 10% after it reported its earnings. Yeah, it's a hazy memory here too. But that's exactly what happened in after-hours trading on Monday when optimistic investors evidently decided a turnaround was...

One Laptop Technology Could Drift to Intel.
August 6, 2007... Fortune caught up with One Laptop Per Child mastermind Nicholas Negroponte at an airport after his detente with Intel last week and he told the magazine, "We're giving them all our technology." It seems that the unique technology developed...

Microsoft Photo Format on Path to Standardization.
August 6, 2007... The Joint Photographic Expert Group (JPEG) is going to vote on whether to standardized Microsoft's HD Photo file format, shipping with Vista and renamed for the occasion JPEG XR, XR for Extended Range. It would replace the current format...

Microsoft Claims Analysts Wrong.
August 6, 2007... Microsoft is denying Forrester Research and Gartner findings of discontent and defection among some of its Software Assurance customers who pay a fee equal to 29% of their total license for automatic upgrades. According to a web site Q&A...

MySQL & BlueLithium Buddy Up.(MySQL AB)(Brief article)
August 6, 2007... MySQL says that BlueLithium, described as one of the top five US online advertising networks, is using its database in a mission-critical data warehouse application along with the BrightHouse database engine from Infobright and that MySQL and...

Will VMware Kill the Server Business?
August 6, 2007... Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi has been ruminating on the impact of virtualization and reasons that it's bound to depress x86 server demand if, as he figures, virtualization reduces the need for physical servers by a factor or five...

Ubuntu Clicking for Dell: Canonical Boss.
August 6, 2007... Dell is going to add to the slim number of PCs that it's currently willing to put factory-installed Ubuntu Linux on, according to what Canonical CEO Mark Shuttlesworth, inventor of Ubuntu, told Reuters. Without talking real numbers,...

Egenera's Patent Comes Through.(Brief article)
August 6, 2007... Egenera's foundational Processing Area Network (PAN) architecture, the SAN-like stuff that virtualizes network, storage and compute resources so applications and data services can be provisioned, managed, moved and scaled, has been patented....

Qlusters Raises Third Round.
August 6, 2007... Qlusters, the Linux-based clustering operating systems start-up, has raised $10.36 million in Series C funding from NetApp, Benchmark Capital, Charles River Ventures, DAG Ventures and Israel Seed Partners. That makes $23 million. NetApp is a...

Dell Starts Manufacturing in India.
August 6, 2007... The first India-made Dell desktop PCs, bound for the rapidly expanding Indian market, have started rolling off the assembly line. Dell set up the plant in southern India to make its boxes more affordable than imported jobs. The line is expected...

Reiser Still Bound for Murder Trial.
August 6, 2007... A second judge has found that the state has enough circumstantial evidence to try star Linux programmer Hans Reiser for the murder of his missing wife. He remains in jail, where he's been since last fall. Jury selection is due to start in...

Bull Denies HP Rumor.
August 6, 2007... Bull has confirmed that it isn't in takeover talks with HP and there isn't an HP check drawn in its favor sitting on the table. Not that it doesn't wish there was.

Ex-Dell CEO Lands on his Feet.
August 6, 2007... Ousted Dell CEO Kevin Rollins has turned up at private equity firm TPG Capital as senior advisor looking at high-tech and consumer investments. TPG currently has a $14 billion fund. It has money in Lenovo, Freescale, SunGard and Seagate.

Lenovo's Been Eating its Wheaties.(Lenovo Group Ltd.)(Financial report)(Brief article)
August 6, 2007... Lenovo's Q1 earnings were up 13-fold to $66.8 million on revenues up 13% to $3.9 billion. PC shipments were up 22.3% to 4.9 million units on strong sales in China, up 30%, and the Americas, up 15%. India was up 22%, Western Europe in the...

SCO Mobile Moving.
August 6, 2007... SCO has gotten a handful of deals for its mobile widgetry including one that puts it on the iPhone. They make it harder for Novell to put SCO's money in escrow.

Dell Imagines Itself as Precursor to a New Virtual Empire.
August 13, 2007... Dell - of all people - may have found the key to unlocking Microsoft's desktop monopoly. In a keynote Tuesday at LinuxWorld in San Francisco, Dell CTO Kevin Kettler disclosed that the company is developing PCs that will run Windows and...

IBM To Push SUSE Against JBoss.
August 13, 2007... Novell is going to push and support the freebie version of IBM's WebSphere Application Server, derived from IBM's acquisition of GlueCode in 2005, as part of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server under a new deal between the pair. They're targeting...

Google Seeks Sanctuary.
August 13, 2007... Now suppose, just suppose, that SCO manages to prove in court that it actually does own Unix. Well, the likelihood is that it will resuscitate those royalties-seeking SCOsource negotiations it was having with folks like, well, Google on...

Lenovo To Factory-Install SUSE on ThinkPads.
August 13, 2007... Dell has Ubuntu and now Lenovo has gone with Novell. The world's third-largest PC maker, at least this week it's number three, IBM's hand-me-down to the Chinese, is going to factory-install SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on some of its...

Linspire's Microsoft-Appeasing CEO Gone.
August 13, 2007... Linspire president and CEO Kevin Carmony, the guy who cut one of those patent protection deals with Microsoft, has - poof! - disappeared replaced by the company's sales chief Larry Kettler. Linspire has said nothing about the transition to...

EnterpriseDB Moves into Data Warehousing.
August 13, 2007... EnterpriseDB, the open source Oracle wannabe that can run Oracle programs, has launched into data warehousing and business intelligence on the cheap with an add-on called GridSQL for its EnterpriseDB Advanced Server. It lets OLAP applications...

Sun Liberalizes Java Compatibility Testing.
August 13, 2007... Sun, which has always been persnickety and hysterically protectionist about its Java compatibility tests, said Thursday that it was putting "write one, run anywhere" certification in the hands of the community with the release of an OpenJDK...

Packard Bell Jilts Acer for Lenovo.
August 13, 2007... Lenovo, the Chinese company looking for a world stage, said Tuesday that it's negotiating to buy Packard Bell, the privately owned Dutch-based PC maker that's been so manhandled over the years it practically qualifies for an episode on "Law and...

SP1 Watch.
August 13, 2007... Microsoft says it's got an early pre-beta Vista SP1, content unknown, out with trusted testers and released those two updates that leaked last week to its download center ahead of its Windows Update site. One, KB938979, tickles performance...

Now Sun Wants To Be a Merchant Chip House.
August 13, 2007... So Sun has in hand its latest Sparc chip, the 1.4GHz Niagara 2, officially the UltraSparc T2, and expects it to be available in production quantities this quarter. It'll go into Sun 1U and 2U boxes and blades in Q4, but Sun is also gonna...

Sun To Let More People Go.
August 13, 2007... Goldman Sachs predicted another restructuring at Sun last week amid the euphoria that a first look at Sun's June numbers engendered with investors and, lo and behold, Sun Tuesday confided to the SEC that it's anticipating throwing a...

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid.(Brief article)
August 13, 2007... Ousted Brocade CEO Gregory Reyes was convicted Tuesday on all 10 counts of the criminal backdating charges that the government lodged against him, a verdict that's supposed to embolden the government to press forward with charges against the...

Mammoth $1.5b Jury Award Against Microsoft Thrown Out.
August 13, 2007... A San Diego judge Monday struck down the precedent-setting $1.538 billion award that Microsoft had been ordered to pay Alcatel-Lucent for supposedly infringing on two of its MP3 patents. Unless Alcatel appeals the decision to the Federal...

Dell To Pay Ousted CEO $48.5m for Options.
August 13, 2007... Dell is going to pay its ousted ex-CEO Kevin Rollins, now a senior advisor at private equity house TPG Capital, $48,462,495 cash for his unexercised vested options when it gets around to filing its delinquent 2007 10-K. It's also going to...

Facebook Drawn into Web Application Fray.
August 13, 2007... ThinkFree, the US arm of Haansoft, the Korean ISV that Office used to regularly take out in the alley and pummel around the kidneys until it finally called up the antitrust police, has integrated an online beta application called Docs that it...

Apple's Ready To Go Back to School.
August 13, 2007... Apple has got itself a couple of pretty, sexily anorexic, redesigned aluminum and glass 20- and 24-inch all-in-one iMac desktops available with a wireless keyboard. They're easier to recycle and priced competitively at $1,199 and $1,799 to...

Microsoft Muffs its Office-for-Mac Deadline.
August 13, 2007... Microsoft's latest Office for the Mac, which hasn't seen an upgrade since Office 2004, has been pushed out until Macworld in mid-January so bugs can be fixed, losing Microsoft the Christmas shoppers. Last year Office on Apple represented...

Nokia Siemens Joins Linux Foundation.
August 13, 2007... Nokia Siemens Networks has joined the Linux Foundation to partake of Carrier-Grade Linux, working specifically on Linux technologies for User Plane and Control Plane Network Elements as well as embedded applications. This is supposed to lead to...

Wyse & Novell Team.
August 13, 2007... HP is picking up thin client house Neoware for its Linux charms and now Wyse, Neoware's major competitor, says it's working with Novell to bring a new generation of Linux thin clients to market and get customers off traditional desktops....

OpenSUSE 10.3 Hits First Beta.
August 13, 2007... To celebrate the second birthday of its openSUSE community project the other day, Novell released the first beta of openSUSE 10.3, which is supposed to install in one click directly from the web. Novell also released the first version of a user...

Troop Movements at Ingres.
August 13, 2007... Ingres president Roger Burkhardt, there a year after a stint as CTO of the New York Stock Exchange, has been named CEO too. He takes over the role from private equity investor Terry Garnett, who got the company from CA in November 2005. ...

Linux Foundation Reinforcing its Legal Defenses.
August 13, 2007... There's been a change in legal style and personnel over at the Linux Foundation. General counsel Dian Peters is gone - reportedly to Mozilla - and her job has been essentially outsourced to former Black Duck counsel Karen Copenhaver, an...

HP Open Sources Visualization Widgetry.
August 13, 2007... HP is open sourcing its Parallel Compositing Library, which lets users leverage unused compute power in an HPC cluster to visualize complex data sets. It's using the LGPL 2 license, making it suitable for both open source and proprietary use....

VMware IPO Gets Richer.
August 13, 2007... VMware has boosted the price of its IPO from $23-$25 to $27-$29 and we doubt it'll stop there. Bet there's a further adjustment before this puppy hits the Street next Tuesday. VMware is selling 33 million shares.

AMD's Shopping for Graphics Capacity.
August 13, 2007... On the bright side of the acquisition Wall Street didn't like, AMD is reportedly negotiating for more capacity to meet demand for ATI graphics chips.

Novell's Legal Defense Team Whistles Up a Substitute.
August 13, 2007... Novell has whistled up a legal reinforcement, adding another Morrison & Foerster partner, Eric Acker, a practiced IP litigator and former federal prosecutor, to its defense team ahead of the SCO trial over who owns Unix. One of Novell's...

Bait & Switch Suit against Microsoft To Proceed.
August 13, 2007... A Seattle federal judge has turned down Microsoft's motion to dismiss a class action accusing it of misleading the public with its "Vista Capable" holding action because the boxes so designated couldn't run the high-end premium cut of Vista...

Nvidia Splits.
August 13, 2007... Nvidia stock is going to split three-for-two on August 20. On Thursday it reportedly earnings nearly double at $172.7 million, 43 cents a share, on revenues up 36% to $935.3 million, claiming market share gains with PC makers. Notebook use was...

Barcelona Compilers in Process.
August 13, 2007... The Portland Group, a subsidiary of STMicroelectronics, is gotten its C/C++ and Fortran compilers and development tools to generate code for AMD's imminently available quad chip, Barcelona. They should be out in the fall.

AMD Raises Money.
August 13, 2007... Debt-ridden AMD is going to offer $1.5 billion in 5.75% convertible notes due in 2012 to institutions and use the money to pay off a term loan from Morgan Stanley. In the spring it sold $2.2 billion in notes for general corporate purposes. This...

Nokia Licenses Microsoft DRM.
August 13, 2007... Nokia, the biggest of the cell phone makers, is going to license Microsoft's PlayReady DRM software and embed it in its Symbian-based S60 software for mobile entertainment to protect sharing videos and music between cell phones and PCs.

Back to the Drawing Board.
August 13, 2007... The Federal Trade Commission's Office of Engineering and Technology told the so-called White Space Coalition consisting Google, Microsoft, HP, Intel, Philips and Dell to take the prototype gismo it's been pushing to beam high-speed Internet...

Dell's Books Were Cooked.
August 20, 2007... Dell, the world's second-largest PC maker, said late Thursday that its books were cooked by unidentified "senior executives" to hit financial targets and that its financial reports for fiscal 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and the first quarter of...

IBM To OEM Solaris.
August 20, 2007... Years from now when you gather your grandchildren around your knee and they ask you what you did in the great computer wars you can tell them you were there the day the world turned topsy-turvy. IBM, Sun's hereditary enemy, is going to sell...

PSI Thumbs its Nose at IBM.
August 20, 2007... Remember Platform Solutions Inc (PSI), the other company besides SCO in litigation with IBM worth billions of dollars? It's the company that's threatening to break IBM's stranglehold monopoly on mainframes so IBM sued it last year for...

Citrix Buys VMware's Open Source Rival for $500m.
August 20, 2007... The day after the great VMware IPO Tuesday, supposedly the hottest thing since Google went public, Citrix, a Microsoft camp follower with the scars to prove it, said it's acquiring VMware's open source commercial competitor, XenSource Inc, the...

VMware Flies.(Brief article)
August 20, 2007... We lost a nickel bet that VMware's IPO Tuesday would ultimately be priced at $32. Instead it went for the high side of the $27-$29 range VMware boosted it to last week, never touched ground when left the gate and opened at $51 or $52 or...

Google To Distribute Free StarOffice.
August 20, 2007... We may all yet live to see Google drop the pretense and try taking on Microsoft Office head-on. In its latest poke in Redmond's eye, Google has added Sun's StarOffice 8 to its Google Pack of free software - a motley collection of...

Microsoft Looks for the Big Guns in OOXML In-Fighting.
August 20, 2007... Bill Gates has reportedly been making phone calls to the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Commerce to push the American National Standards Institute to ignore the votes of its advisory committees and vote "yes" on ISO standardizing...

SCO Decision Raises Other Worries.
August 20, 2007... The court declaring that Novell owns the Unix copyrights caused Barron's to fret about it putting rival Red Hat behind the competitive eight ball. InformationWeek fretted over that big bump that the decision left under the rug - to wit...

Xandros Snuggles Deeper under the Covers with Microsoft.
August 20, 2007... Xandros, the Linux distribution that climbed into bed with Microsoft a couple of months ago and got a patent coverlet out it, has now licensed Microsoft protocols for Scalix, the Linux e-mail and calendaring house it bought last month. ...

Neoware Racks Up Losses.(Neoware Systems Inc.)(Financial report)(Brief article)
August 20, 2007... Neoware is collapsing into HP not a moment too soon. With its Q4 losses just reported, it's run up a net loss of $2.4 million, or 12 cents a share, on declining revenues of $90.4 million. The year before it earned $7.1 million, 39 cents a...

Microsoft's Protection Sells.
August 20, 2007... Novell says Casio, the electronics biggie, is using SUSE with its integrated Xen virtualization for Linux and Windows server consolidation. Norihito Kuniyoshi, the head of Casio Information Service Company, the subsidiary responsible for...

LF To Track Linux Development.
August 20, 2007... The Linux Foundation (LF), very sensibly, is going to start keeping track of where exactly Linux development's at. It's going to be using the so-called Linux Weather Forecast assembled by LWN.net editor and kernel community member Jonathan...

AIR Time.
August 20, 2007... There is a rumor going round - apparently started by Adobe's own platform evangelist Mike Downey - suggesting that Adobe could use its Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), a virtual machine kind of thing like Java and .NET, to launch into the Office...

Intel to AMD: 'Na Na Na Na Na'.
August 20, 2007... AMD is now three quarters behind its original delivery schedule for its still-unlaunched Barcelona quad core - yup, it's true go ask Hector if it isn't - seems the gadget was more complicated than AMD thought. AMD's problem is probably a...

HP Breezes Through Q3.
August 20, 2007... While Dell struggles with the kind of crisis of conscience that HP faced last year - only much worse - HP was busy busting through Wall Street's estimates of what its business could do in Q3. Earnings were $1.78 billion, or 66 cents a...

Novell Buys Senforce.
August 20, 2007... Novell has bought Senforce Technologies and endpoint security management widgetry on undisclosed terms to expand its policy-based management, promising to protect users' assets from data theft, wireless exploits, software attacks, malware and...

Google Sells Storage.
August 20, 2007... Google has started selling expanded online storage aiming at folks with pictures, music and videos they want to store. It's charging $20 for 6GB, $75 for 25GB, $250 for 100GB and $500 for 250GB. It's eventually supposed to work with its Docs &...

Reporters Sue HP.
August 20, 2007... CNET and AP reporters and their families pretexted by HP last year in the company's hunt for press leaks from its boardroom have lodged five suits against the company and some of its officers after what HP called "substantial" settlement talks...

aQuantive Deal Done.
August 20, 2007... Microsoft closed on its mammoth $6 billion aQuantive acquisition Monday and simultaneously opened a new Advertiser and Publisher Solutions business group, to be run by former aQuantive CEO Brian McAndrews, in hopes of stopping everybody's...

Barcelona: Chi-chi Pricing.
August 20, 2007... AMD's Barcelona chip is supposed to launch on September 10 and according to what DigiTimes has been hearing go for more than its Intel speed equivalents, anywhere from a difference of 20 to 100 bucks, apparently because of their on-board memory...

AMD Raises Cash.
August 20, 2007... AMD got off those notes it wanted to sell to raise money and retire ATI-connected Morgan Stanley debt. It raised $1.48 billion. American Technology Research thinks the company has enough cash to make it through next year without being...

Prison Door Clangs Shut Behind Kumar.(Sanjay Kumar)(Brief article)
August 20, 2007... Former CA CEO Sanjay Kumar, 45, started his 12-year prison sentence Tuesday at a minimum-security federal pen in Fairton, New Jersey. Sentenced in November he's been out this long selling off personal possessions to pay a $52 million...