Linux Gram articles from August 2008

Linux Gram archives from August 2008

Alfresco Looks To Oust SharePoint.
August 4, 2008... Alfresco pounced on that SharePoint protocol that the European Commission forced Microsoft to disgorge and turned up Thursday with what it claims is the first fully compatible open source alternative to Microsoft SharePoint, one of the...

Microsoft's Appeasement Party Strikes Again.
August 4, 2008... Like Google and Yahoo, Microsoft is now suddenly a platinum sponsor of that open source touchstone, the Apache Software Foundation, and has pledged its $100,000 check. The move was announced Friday at the Open Source Convention in a speech...

Microsoft To Sic Red Dog on the Cloud.
August 4, 2008... One of Microsoft's confidants says that the Red Dog project that broke cover in a want ad a few months ago is indeed the Kiplingesque pet name for Microsoft's impending cloud infrastructure - well, at least part of it anyway. It was...

Microsoft Contemplates a Post-Windows World.
August 4, 2008... Starting with a clean piece of paper, Microsoft is having a go at building a non-Windows operating system. Code named Midori, it may never be released but if Midori isn't heir to Windows Microsoft better have something else like it up its...

Yahoo, HP & Intel Embark on Joint Cloud Research.
August 4, 2008... Yahoo, HP and Intel are going to do cloud research together using a global, multi-data center, open source Cloud Computing Test Bed bigger than anything put together for such a purpose before, they said. The whole testbed could potentially...

Google's Money Cries Out To Be Invested: WSJ.
August 4, 2008... Some little birds whispered in the Wall Street Journal's ear and got it to report that Google, which usually just buys start-ups, now wants to set up a venture arm a la Intel Capital, leaving the reader to imagine where the money would go, what...

Portugal To Resell 500k Intel Classmate Laptops.
August 4, 2008... Under what it's calling the Magellan Initiative, this school year Portugal is supposed to resell for some unknown price 500,000 low-cost Intel-based Classmate PCs to the country's grade school kids. It is Intel's biggest Classmate sale...

JavaFX Preview Out.(Brief article)
August 4, 2008... Sun has released a JavaFX preview to create sexy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on PCs, mobile, TV and other consumer devices on the Java platform. It's not ready for commercial applications yet; Sun is looking for feedback. The...

Will Yahoo Be Wearing Two Black Eyes Come Saturday Morning?(Brief article)
August 4, 2008... After telling the San Francisco Chronicle's editorial board that Yahoo's management was "pathetic," oilman T. Boone Pickens dumped his 10 million shares of Yahoo stock the other day for a ~$50 million loss. He acquired the position in May out...

BI Cloud Start-up Gets Seeded.(Good Data Corporation)(Brief article)
August 4, 2008... An emerging SaaS player called Good Data Corporation, with interests in collaboration business intelligence solutions, has gotten $2 million in seed money from analysts and sometimes investors Esther Dyson and Tim O'Reilly, Good Data founder...

Rackable To Resell IBM BladeCenters in Shipping Containers.
August 4, 2008... Rackable Systems is going to include IBM's BladeCenter servers in its ICE Cube modular data center offering, its idea of what you can do with a shipping container. Under its deal with IBM, BladeCenter T or HT systems will be the only blade...

VMware Sets its Hypervisor Free.
August 4, 2008... Attempting to put space between itself and Microsoft - and as a talisman against a weakening economy - VMware the other day made good on its promise to cut the price of its standalone ESXi hypervisor to free. The ESXi 3.5 update 2 widgetry,...

One of Google's Own Goes into Competition with It.(Cuil )(Brief article)
August 4, 2008... The two-year-old counter-Google search start-up, Cuil (say cool), Irish for knowledge and notable for its ex-Google founders, finally hit the radar screen Sunday and got a lot of ink because of its DNA, a lot of the comments cruelly negative....

YouTube Gets Sued Again.
August 4, 2008... Google and its little pal YouTube have attracted another lawsuit for copyright infringement. Rome-based Mediaset, controlled by Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, is demanding 500 million euros ($779.3 million) in damages. Mediaset...

Parallels Aims at Internal, Channel Clouds.
August 4, 2008... Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov figures Google could dominate the cloud - the question is how much - with Microsoft at least a close second and maybe Apple can wrestle the rest of the wannabes like IBM, HP, Facebook, Adobe and EMC for third...

Kickfire Get $20m in Funding.
August 4, 2008... Kickfire, the outfit with the MySQL appliance based on a proprietary SQL chip and focused on the data warehouse market, has gotten that second round it was looking, pulling in $20 million from Pinnacle Ventures and A round investors Accel...

Facebook Raids Mozilla.
August 4, 2008... Mozilla VP of engineering and Firefox lead Mike Schroepfer is jumping to Facebook as one of four engineering directors. His turf will be front-end product and platform engineering and he will report to Facebook's kid CEO Mark Zuckerberg....

Mozilla Deploys Pentaho, Vertica.
August 4, 2008... Having outgrown its homemade log analysis scripts, Mozilla has deployed Pentaho's commercial open source business intelligence (BI) Data Integration widgetry and Vertica Systems' high-performance analytic database to analyze large volumes of...

Purple Flowers.
August 4, 2008... Following last month's $32 million acquisition of Openwave's browser business, Purple Labs is buying the mobile applications suite and software engineering team of Sagem Mobiles, a French maker of mobile phones branded by Sony Ericsson, Orange,...

Jobs Tells the Times the Cancer Hasn't Come Back.
August 4, 2008... Out of the blue Steve Jobs called up New York Times reporter Joe Nocera - who's been pestering Apple about the state of Steve's health - and told him - off the record - what's been ailing him. Jobs appears to have confirmed the Times and...

Cisco Eying EMC?
August 4, 2008... Apparently Wall Street thinks there's something big going on at EMC - given the recent call and put action - and so speculation turns - as it inevitably does - to whether the company will finally spin off VMware or - and at least this one is...

Sun Shines on Channel.
August 4, 2008... In its latest attempt to get things right, Sun said Monday it's gonna turn all its US accounts except the top 300 over exclusively to its channel.

Mozy Claims 100% Growth in Six Month.
August 4, 2008... Mozy, EMC's online backup property, says it doubled the size of its enterprise and SMB customer base in the first half and now has more than 750,000 users and 20,000 business customers backing up 7.6 billion files to its 10-petabyte storage...

Sun Chases Cloud.
August 4, 2008... Sun is turning its Network.com utility computing operation into a separate cloud business under its chief sustainability officer Dave Douglas, reporting to CEO Jonathan Schwartz, according to The Register. Network.com, which sells access to...

Oracle Puts Ex-Adobe CEO on its Board.
August 4, 2008... Oracle has named former Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen to its board. He will be Oracle's 13th director.

TechCrunch Recants Digg Piece.
August 4, 2008... TechCrunch has taken back its story saying Google is going to buy Digg.com for $200 million. It claims something insurmountable came up during Google's due diligence

VIA Hires Open Source Advocate.
August 4, 2008... VIA, the other x86 company, has hired Harald Welte, the Linux kernel hacker and GPL enforcer, to run interference for it with the open source community and help it refine its open source strategy for optimizing Linux on its widgets. He's also...

Forrester Buys JupiterResearch.
August 4, 2008... Forrester Research has acquired JupiterResearch for $23 million, roughly 1.5 times revenues. It will become Forrester's marketing and strategy group. Forrester is estimating 2008 revenue of $246 million-$252 million with Jupiter in tow.

Google Throws More Money at Open Source.
August 4, 2008... Google has given Oregon State University another $300,000 to expand the capacity of its Open Source Lab to support open source projects. That brings its total donation to $750,000.The lab has hosted Firefox browser, which Google singelhandedly...

IBM Claims To Catch Bugs as They're Written.
August 4, 2008... IBM claims Rational Software Analyzer, a plug-in to Eclipse 3.3, catches bugs while code is being written rather than right before it goes into production reducing the number of defects hitting the marketplace 15%-20%. The widgetry, which IBM...

IBM & Linux Distros Try Ganging Up on the Microsoft Desktop.
August 11, 2008... IBM, Canonical, Novell, Red Hat and the distributions' hardware partners are ganging up on Microsoft, intending to push a Microsoft-free desktop alternative involving Linux, Lotus Notes and the freebie OpenOffice-based Lotus Symphony. They...

Dell's Cloud Trademark Stymied.
August 11, 2008... A person or persons unknown has upset Dell's plans to trademark the nebulous buzzword "Cloud Computing." On Tuesday the US Patent and Trademark Office suddenly yanked the so-called "notice of allowance" that gave Dell the mark but didn't...

Amazon Backs a Cloud Server Start-up.
August 11, 2008... Elastra, a 40-customer SMB-directed start-up that provides a legacy-embracing configuration management service for Amazon Web Services (AWS) - your basic in-a-click virtual deployment, monitoring and accounting beginning with RDBMSes like...

IBM Contributes Open-Source Code for Linux Supercomputers.
August 11, 2008... IBM has released its first certified package of open source software for supercomputers based on Linux. The IBM HPC Open Software Stack is supposed to make clusters more productive and easier to manage and HPC, which has jumped the...

Google Won't Call LiMo.(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... The LiMo Foundation has wracked up 11 more members, bringing its total to 50 companies. But Google has indicated that it feels no compunction to add Android to LiMo's successes, proclaiming "unification for the sake of unification is not...

Platform Computing Buys Scali MPI Business.(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... Platform Computing, the HPC management ISV, has acquired the Scali MPI business from Norway's Scali AS on undisclosed terms. MPI is an industry standard API specification for building high-performance parallel applications and Scali MPI...

VMware Joins the Linux Foundation.
August 11, 2008... VMware, which seems to be as far from open source as you can get these days, has joined the Linux Foundation, promising to make more contributions to the Linux community. It's cultivating the Linux crowd as adoption of Linux expands as a...

Canonical Teams with Yahoo's Zimbra.(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... Canonical is going to offer Yahoo's freebie open source Zimbra Desktop Beta 3 through its Ubuntu partner repository. Zimbra Desktop provides a centralized hub to manage multiple e-mail accounts and calendars online and offline. Users can...

gOS Revved.
August 11, 2008... gOS, the Linux OS whose credits include the $199 Wal-Mart gPC, trotted out a new beta rev called gOS 3 Gadgets at LinuxWorld this week on some newfangled netbooks and nettops. It's supposed to instantly launch Google Gadgets for Linux at...

Canonical To Resell Unison's Unified Communications.(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... Canonical is going to sell Unison Technologies' unified communications in its store. The stuff, which goes for $50 per user per year, or $36,000 for a perpetual one-server license with unlimited users, combines telephony, e-mail, instant...

Novell Channel Chief Leaves To Pursue Other Interests.
August 11, 2008... Novell's VP of global channel sales Pat Bernard has left the building - permanently. She's off "pursuing other interests" and will be replaced for the moment by Tim Wolfe, the head of Novell Americas. She only had the job since November. She...

SCO: What Now?
August 11, 2008... SCO and Novell are currently arguing over whether the July 16 decision handed down by Utah District Court Judge Dale Kimball that SCO owes Novell $2.5 million because it overreached on a $9.1 million IP licensing deal it cut with Sun...

AT&T Takes to the Cloud.
August 11, 2008... AT&T broke into the cloud business Tuesday with the "global launch" of what it calls AT&T Synaptic Hosting and describes as a next-generation utility computing service with managed networking, security and storage for businesses. It's...

Steve Jobs Eats Humble Pie.(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... In an internal e-mail leaked to Ars Technica, Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted that MobileMe, Apple's panned flirtation with the cloud, was launched prematurely and was "not up to Apple's standards." Remember? Even the Apple-loving Walt...

Intel Hikes Up Its Skirt; Flaunts Larrabee, the Next Great Thing.
August 11, 2008... Ahead of Siggraph next week Intel decided to lift its skirt and pass around the paper it'll read there describing Larrabee, its new hydra-headed x86 graphics accelerator architecture meant to take on Nvidia and AMD's graphics arm ATI in late...

IBM Building its 8th & 9th Clouds.
August 11, 2008... IBM said Friday that it is going to build a $360 million state-of-the-art commercial cloud on its campus at Research Triangle Park in North Carolina, intending that the thing be the first built with IBM's New Enterprise Data Center design...

It's Official. Icahn's on the Yahoo Board.
August 11, 2008... Microsoft hugger Carl Icahn is now officially on the Yahoo board. Under the deal that ended his proxy fight, two more directors from Icahn's original "oust-the-incumbents" proxy slate are supposed to be elected by mid-month. The list was...

Yahoo Stockholders Don't Like Jerry Yang THAT Much.
August 11, 2008... Turns out the vote that overwhelmingly returned Yahoo's board to office last Friday by a surprise three-to-one margin was seriously miscounted. The official tabulation claimed that CEO Jerry Yang got 85.4% of the vote (14.6% withheld) and...

Sun Eclipsed by Economy.
August 11, 2008... If Sun hadn't done that one-for-four reverse stock split in November and turned its $5 stock into a $20 stock, it would now be a $2 stock. Instead, it's a $9-$10 stock, down 50%. And things don't look like they're gonna get much better. So...

Whither Fujitsu Siemens?(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... Disappointed with its performance, Siemens wants out of its nine-year-old Fujitsu Siemens Computers joint venture, according to the Wall Street Journal, throwing the ball into Fujitsu's lap since Fujitsu's got dibs on buying out Siemens' 50%....

Zoho Claims One Million Users.(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... Zoho claims it's just gotten its millionth user three years after offering its first online application, Zoho Writer. Its portfolio has widened considerably since then. It says it took a year to hit 100,000 users, six months to get the second...

Rackspace To IPO.
August 11, 2008... The IPO-starved will be thrown a morsel today when Rackspace, the profitable Texas hosting company, goes public for something like $12-$16 a share in a Dutch auction. Backed by Sequoia and Norwest Venture Partners, the 10-year-old concern made...

Red Hat Eyes Clouds.
August 11, 2008... "The clouds will all run Linux." - Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst in an interview with Cnet.

Google Tweaks Search Appliance.(Brief article)
August 11, 2008... Google has tweaked the architecture of its corporate, inside-the-firewall, Search Appliance so that one - not five - of the yellow boxes can index 10 million documents, up from oh, maybe, three million. It's also supposed to be two-five times...

Sun's xVM Server Inches To Release.
August 11, 2008... Sun says it's started the first part of its early access program for its xVM Server 1.0 virtualization widgetry, reportedly beginning with representatives of financial services, manufacturing, high tech and government. Sun says it'll be sending...

RHEL 5.2 Certified.
August 11, 2008... Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 has gotten Department of Defense IPv6 Special Interoperability Certification from the Defense Information System Agency (DISA), giving it a government checkbox.

FTC Antitrust Chief Quits.
August 11, 2008... Jeffret Schmidt, the head of the Federal Trade Commission antitrust unit that's investigating Intel, is leaving the agency for private practice ahead of any change in administration come November. He's been replaced for the moment by...

Where Are They Now?
August 11, 2008... Novell's ousted vice-chairman Chris Stone, instrumental in getting it in the Linux business, is now president and CEO of Massachusetts-based Linux-run HPC computer maker SiCortex Inc where Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe sits on the board....

Appeals Court Overturns Injunction-Denying Open Source Ruling.
August 18, 2008... The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Wednesday overturned a year-old San Francisco district court decision that deprived the aggrieved plaintiff in a dispute over open source software governed by the Artistic License of...

Stupid Ass Mistake Cripples VMware Servers.
August 18, 2008... A time bomb reportedly left over from the beta of VMware's two-week-old update to ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 (Update 2) caused product licenses to expire Tuesday. It also happened with a patch to ESX 3.5 or ESXi 3.5 Update 2. The experience...

The Cloud Needs Some Duct Tape.(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... Google's Gmail fell over and died Monday, serving up only a temporary 502 error message to both free and paid accounts and bringing life as they know it to a grinding halt for millions of people - including Google corporate. There were...

E7 Is Born.
August 18, 2008... At least 16 or 17 months ahead of the appearance of Windows 7, the next generation of the operating system, Microsoft has set up a blog hosted by senior engineering managers Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky to discuss the project and ostensibly...

Google's Now in the Encryption Business.(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... Google has waded into the encryption business with an open source cross-platform toolkit called Keyczar that's supposed to make it easier for ISVs to put cryptography in their applications. It says Keyczar supports both encryption and...

LinMin API Adds Bare Metal Provisioning All Around.
August 18, 2008... A new API is supposed to integrate LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning 5.2 into environments that haven't been able to do bare metal provisioning of Windows, Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora or Asianux on physical systems or virtual machines...

Nvidia Hits the Wall.(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... Nvidia's fiscal Q2 revenues were down and that's why it lost $120.9 million, 22 cents a share, in the second quarter. Well, that and the $198 million one-time charge it took to cover costs stemming from those previously admitted defective...

Lenovo To Field Netbook.(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... Lenovo has gone into the netbook business with a one-inch-deep 2lb XP-based Atom IdeaPad S10 with a 10.2-inch screen. The company says it intends to add other models that target students. The widget can be had in black, white or glossy...

Intel Brands Nehalem.
August 18, 2008... Intel Corporation says its upcoming Nehalem desktop chips, due to start rolling out in Q4, will be branded Intel Core processors. The first members of the new architecture family, including an Extreme Edition, will have a telltale "i7' handle...

Jaspersoft Cuddles with Sun.(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... Jaspersoft, the open source business intelligence operation, has announced the full production availability of its iReport for NetBeans Integrated Development Environment (IDE), which has been certified for NetBeans 6.0, 6.1 and the brand new...

Rackspace IPO Wracks Up.
August 18, 2008... Rackspace Hosting, the rare high-tech IPO these days and a chi-chi cloud purveyor at that, failed to hold up its end after it debuted Friday in a Dutch auction and dropped 20% to $10.01 from its offering price of $12.50, the low end of its...

Google's Position in AOL Turns Rancid.
August 18, 2008... Google has told the SEC that its billion-dollar acquisition of 5% of AOL, made in 2005 to prevent Microsoft from doing it and giving AOL a $20 billion over-the-top valuation, "may be impaired," accounting-speak for it ain't worth what it was...

Sun Nabs OEM for its VirtualBox Desktop Virtualization.
August 18, 2008... Sun has got multi-year OEM deals with Avanquest Software, Q-layer and Zenith InfoTech to move its bought-in cross-platform xVM VirtualBox widgetry. The stuff is free from Sun and runs multiple operating systems on the same desktop at the same...

Microsoft Schedules Virtualization Party To Spoil VMware's.
August 18, 2008... Microsoft is inviting its nearest and dearest - (and probably VMware's nearest and dearest too) to a great one-day virtualization launch event on Monday September 8 in Bellevue, Washington. It's the beginning of a six-month drumbeat. What...

New Release of VMware Lab Manager Announced.(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... VMware has announced the pending availability of VMware Lab Manager 3, which is supposed to provide greater automation and control for IT lab environments. Software developers and QA engineers use VMware Lab to provision multi-VM...

Yahoo Raises Geo-Awareness.(Brief article)
August 18, 2008... Yahoo has opened up its Fire Eagle platform - in private beta since March - to all and sundry. It gives users a place to store and manage information about their location, and offers developers protocols for updating or accessing that...

Schmidt Speaks.
August 18, 2008... Jim Cramer's been doing a stint on CNBC in the middle of the trading day and, being a Google booster, managed to entice Google's usually standoffish CEO Eric Schmidt on the air the other day. Schmidt said Google's stock wouldn't split and...

Dell Rejigs its Commercial Laptops.
August 18, 2008... While everybody is really waiting for Dell to push into the small and cheap market and go mano a mano with the Asus Eee, Dell unveiled the strategic redesign of its Latitude and Precision business laptops, a move that has to prove Dell's back...

Reiser's Sentencing Delayed.
August 18, 2008... There's been a delay in sentencing Linux programmer Hans Reiser for the murder of his wife. It was supposed to happen Wednesday but apparently plea negotiations over reducing his sentence to second-decree murder - put into play when he led the...

Microsoft Licensing in Flux.
August 18, 2008... Microsoft is expected to change its licensing policies on August 19 and drop a restriction that requires that software running on virtual machines stay on physical servers for three months.

Rumors of Two AMDs Return.
August 18, 2008... Speculation is making the rounds again that AMD's long-promised asset lite strategy will see the company split in two: a chip development operation under AMD's new CEO Dirk Meyer and a manufacturing entity.

US Web Hosting Good for $10.6b: Gartner.
August 18, 2008... Gartner reckons the US market for web hosting, expected to be good for $10.6 billion this year, will grow at annual compound rate of 19% through 2012.

Shrike Watch.
August 18, 2008... AMD's Shrike processor, its first go at a combination CPU + GPU, its reason for going deep into debt to buy ATI, is now supposed to pair a dual-core Phenom with a DirectX 10.1-compliant ATI RV8000 GPU core, according to tgdaily.com, which...

The Cost of Not Getting Bought by Microsoft.
August 18, 2008... Yahoo has redone its sums and now says it cost $36 million, not $22 million, to keep Microsoft at bay. The other price was letting Carl Icahn and his henchman on the board. The other two seats Icahn wrested were filled Thursday by former Viacom...

iPhone Apps May Be a Billion-Dollar Business: Jobs.
August 18, 2008... Apple CEO Steve Jobs told the Wall Street Journal that the iPhone App Store averaged a million dollars a day in sales its first month out. He said he'd "never seen anything like this in my career for software." He's toying with the...

Rackable Puts its Storage Unit on the Block.
August 18, 2008... Fresh from another quarterly loss, Rackable Systems says it intends to divest its RapidScale storage line, throwing in patents, hardware assets, development team and on-going business relationships. It's retained Strategic Advisory Service...