Linux Gram articles from December 25 2006

Linux Gram archives from December 25 2006

Amazon Countersues IBM, Citing WebSphere; Calls Big Blue a Patent Troll That Wants To Tax the Internet.
December 25, 2006... In response to the whopping great suit that IBM filed against Amazon.com in October, the one that lays claim to God knows how many hundreds of millions in damages for alleged infringing a handful of utterly fundamental e-commerce business...

SCO May Be Warming Up To Get the Judge Recused.
December 25, 2006... SCO has gone back for a second time trying to get its decimated suit against IBM restored. In papers filed last Wednesday that surfaced the other day, it asked presiding Judge Dale Kimball to reconsider his order of November 29 upholding...

FSF Sets Up Mudslinging Anti-Vista Site.
December 25, 2006... Go check out http://BadVista.org. The Linux-loving Free Software Foundation (FSF) launched a Groklaw-inspired site over the weekend to expose "the harms inflicted on computer users" by Microsoft's new operating system and to promote free...

Red Hat Foils Oracle, Microsoft So Far.
December 25, 2006... Red Hat managed to increase its fiscal Q3 revenues a hefty 45% compared to last year but its earnings took a 37% dive. The company, which is under fire from Oracle and Microsoft, did $14.6 million, or seven cents a share, on revenues of...

Samba Leader Quits Novell in Protest over Patent Clause in Microsoft Deal.
December 25, 2006... Lead Samba developer Jeremy Allison is the new open source folk hero. He has quit Novell because of the patent clause in the company's controversial seven-week-old alliance with Microsoft under which Novell pays Microsoft royalties and in...

Microsoft Moves its First Linux Subscriptions.
December 25, 2006... Novell claims Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse and AIG Technologies, part of the big insurance company, are taking advantage of the infamous Microsoft-Novell interoperability pact. Microsoft is supposed to provide them with SUSE subscription...

First Dispatch from the Anti-Red Hat Front.
December 25, 2006... In its first indication of how its six-week old frontal assault on Red Hat has been going, Oracle said Monday during its Q2 conference call that people downloaded 9,000 copies of its freebie indemnified Unbreakable Linux Red Hat replacement in...

Google Reported Interested in ThinkFree.
December 25, 2006... Rumor has it that Google is interested in ThinkFree, the HaanSoft-owned, ad-supported, Java-based, very Microsoft-like, Microsoft-compatible online office suite. It sent its YouTube acquisition folks in to talk to the Korean concern...

Amid Government Probe, Dell Replaces CFO.
December 25, 2006... Dear, dear, dear, now this doesn't look good. Dell, which is waist-deep in investigations into how it did its bookkeeping, paralyzing its ability to get its numbers out, has suddenly lost its long-standing CFO Jim Schneider days before...

IBM & US Universities Embark on Open Source Research.
December 25, 2006... American universities - well, some of them anyway - make a lot of money off IP thanks in part to laws that let them hold patents on federally funded research and license the widgetry. Whether it's liberal guilt or not, seven of them, nudged...

Symantec, McAfee Get Draft Vista APIs.
December 25, 2006... Microsoft Tuesday gave security vendors like Symantec and McAfee, who two months ago very publicly complained of being locked out of Vista because of Microsoft's new "you-can't get-to-the-64-bit kernel" PatchGuard widgetry, draft APIs that are...

Linux-on-Mainframe Apps Up 100%: IBM.
December 25, 2006... IBM counted noses and says there are now nearly 1,000 Linux applications that run on its mainframes, a 100% jump over this time last year, a fact it attributes to virtualization and basic mainframe performance. IBM recently reported a 390%...

Hey, These IPO Things Actually Work.
December 25, 2006... Somebody's gonna have a very merry Christmas - once they sober up. Clustered storage start-up Isilon Systems Inc went public last Friday nominally pricing its shares at $13 although the broad market never saw that price - it opened $25...

Oracle's Retro-Rockets Sputter.
December 25, 2006... Twenty billion-odd dollars later and Oracle's fiscal Q2 numbers Monday were up 26% on the revenues side to $4.2 billion and up 21% on the earnings side to $967 million, or 18 cents a share, but a little light on new database and applications...

db4objects Releases Rev 6.0.(db4o 6.0 dbms software)(Brief article)
December 25, 2006... db4object has got a production-ready release of db4o 6.0 that it says is 10 times faster and 90% leaner on memory consumption than version 5. The new open source object database rev also supports a new server-side cursor technology for...

Solid Picks Up $5.3m Check.
December 25, 2006... Solid Information Technology, the originally Finish database house that jumped in to promise a high-end enterprise storage engine for MySQL when Oracle bought Innobase, has gotten $5.3 million in B round funding from existing investors Apax...

SpikeSource Brings in New Blood.(appointed Mike Backlund, Dennis Elkins and Prem Kumar)(Brief article)
December 25, 2006... SpikeSource has brought in a trio of new managers in part because of its recent switch to the channel. Mike Backlund, the former CEO of Emagia, is now running sales as VP, worldwide sales, a global bent the open source stack house didn't...

Gang of Two Pleas Guilty to Rare Economic Espionage Charge.
December 25, 2006... Remember back in, oh, 2001, when a couple of engineers were nabbed at San Francisco Airport just before boarding a plane to China and had their grips searched and out poured all these confidential trade secrets from Sun Microsystems, Transmeta,...

Apple Delays 10-K.(submission of auditing report to Securities and Exchange Commission)(Brief article)
December 25, 2006... Apple is going to be late handing in its an annual report to the SEC because of its backdating investigation, which has so far resulted in its ex-CFO Fred Anderson leaving the board and casting its ex-general counsel in a bad light. Apple's...

Intel Takes Discovery Hit in AMD Antitrust Suit.
December 25, 2006... Well, it looks like AMD may get the foreign discovery it wants in its US antitrust suit against Intel. The special master assigned by the presiding judge to look into the issue says it should. Whether Intel decides to buck the decision...

Panasonic Promises Better Battery.
December 25, 2006... Matsushita Electric, also known as Panasonic, claims to have come up with a better rechargeable lithium-ion battery that unlike Sony's infamous lithium-ion batteries, which sparked the largest recall in computer history, won't start fires. ...

Valley Boy: The Education of Tom Perkins.(Brief article)
December 25, 2006... HP is going to have to sit by and suffer more boardroom revelations - or at least rehashings - in silence. Tom Perkins, the ex-board member who ratted out HP to the feds and exposed its spying escapades to very public scrutiny, is going to...

Intel Blesses e-Quran.
December 25, 2006... Intel, in its newfound mission to bring low-cost computing to the third world - and compete with One Laptop Per Child - is going to develop an electronic version of the Quran in partnership with two Saudi Arabian ISVs and a training computer...

HP Buys Bitfone.
December 25, 2006... HP is buying six-year-old Bitfone, a privately held ISV specialized in mobile device management for wireless devices. It does over-the-air repairs and upgrades. Terms were not disclosed. The company, which will be folded into HP's Handheld...

AMD Opens Futuristic Lab.
December 25, 2006... Sounding infinitely hopeful, AMD has just opened a new Advanced Architecture and Technology Lab in Redmond that's supposed to look beyond the five-year time horizon. It's put it under the direction of AMD Fellow and chief architectural officer...

Opteron & Athlon64 'Aging': Wall Street.
December 25, 2006... Opteron and the Athlon64 are "aging" architectures according to Nollenberger Capital analyst Hans Mosesmann and Intel's Core 2 Duo eats its lunch in 95% of all PC applications. AMD is also, as everyone knows, late in moving to 65nm. He...

AMD Claims an Edge in Distant 45nm.
December 25, 2006... AMD has only started making 65nm chips and Intel has already started making 45nm ones so AMD said that it and its buddy IBM would have 45nm parts in mid-'08 using newfangled ultra-low-K interconnect technology and immersion lithography, which...

YouTube Rebuttal Reportedly in Works.
December 25, 2006... News Corp, Viacom, CBS and NBC Universal parent General Electric are reportedly trying to gang up on YouTube with a video-sharing YouTube-like site of their own, according to Monday's Wall Street Journal, even if - illegally poached videos to...