Linux Gram articles from December 2007

Linux Gram archives from December 2007

SCO Ordered Back to a Defanged Utah Court.
December 3, 2007... The bankruptcy court in Delaware the other day lifted its stay and sent SCO back to the Utah court that clearly doesn't like it so the Utah federal court there can decide whether or not SCO owes Novell all or part of a possible $35 million...

Red Hat-Amazon Beta Starts.(Brief article)
December 3, 2007... Red Hat said Monday that the public beta of its operating system on the newfangled Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) was available. Amazon has taken to peddling resizable time, utility-style, on its own data center to other people and Red...

Microsoft Invests in PSI, That Thorn in IBM's Side.
December 3, 2007... Microsoft has kicked into the $37 million third round just raised by Platform Solution Inc. (PSI), the Goldman Sachs/Intel-backed start-up threatening IBM's precious mainframe monopoly with its Itanium-based servers that run z/OS, Windows,...

Street Turns Thumbs Down on Dell.
December 3, 2007... Dell Thursday came in with third-quarter revenues up 9% to a record $15.6 billion and earnings of 34 cents a share, up 26%. Operating income was up 13% to $829 million. Its stock slumped over 10% during and after the company's first...

T3 Sues IBM To Break its Mainframe Monopoly.
December 3, 2007... T3 Technologies Inc., once the world's second-largest mainframe systems integrator, has sued IBM for destroying its business, charging it, for starters, with tying, monopoly maintenance and leveraging, denying access to an essential facility...

HotMail Creator's New Start-up Claims To Webify Office.
December 3, 2007... A Bangalore start-up named InstaColl, co-founded, chaired and underwritten by Sabeer Bhatia, who did HotMail, which Microsoft bought in 1997 for a reported $400 million, has launched into the Office business sorta like Google, Zoho, Adobe et al...

Dell To Sell Google Search Widgets.
December 3, 2007... Dell is gonna sell Google's search widgets, the $30,000-to-start Google Search Appliance and the $2,000-to-start Google Mini to American companies, large and small. It already sells PCs with Google's desktop search. And now it'll have 2950...

Servers Cautiously Up Worldwide.
December 3, 2007... IDC says the worldwide server market grew 0.5% year-over-year to $13.1 billion in Q3. It's the highest Q3 server revenue since 2000 but the slowest growth rate since 1Q06. Unit shipments grew 6.3%, a slight decrease over the 7.8%...

Dell Signs Deal with Carrefour.
December 3, 2007... Dell has signed up the French department store chain Carrefour to resell its PCs. The company, Europe's version of Wal-Mart, is supposed to stock the widgets in 365 stores in France, Belgium and Spain starting in January. Other stores in...

Google Brings New Meaning to the Word Grid.
December 3, 2007... Google is supposed to pour hundreds of millions of dollars into producing cheap electricity from renewable energy sources such as the wind and sun. The object is to lower the cost of solar power by 25%-50%, servicing its hundreds of...

One Laptop Per Child Sued for Patent Infringement.
December 3, 2007... Among its other problems - like failing to get orders from third-world governments, competing against Intel and Microsoft, and the seeing the price of its Holy Grail rise from $100 to $200 - One Laptop Per Child and its do-gooder-in-chief...

State of California May Go SaaS.
December 3, 2007... California has formed a working group to figure out whether roughly 250,000 of its workers should move their e-mail, messaging and calendaring system to a hosted service and it's a toss up as to whether Google or Microsoft would get the...

SUSE Real Time 10 Out.
December 3, 2007... Novell says it SUSE Linux Enterprise Real Time 10 OS upgrade is available. As you might suspect it's for high-performance, time-sensitive, mission-critical applications like in financial institutions. An annual subscription goes for $2,500.

AMD May Be Late to the Party.
December 3, 2007... Motherboard makers in Taiwan have been telling DigiTimes that it looks like AMD's supposed launch of a 2.4GHz Phenom 9700 in mid-December ain't gonna happen and that it will be pushed back into early '08. The thermal design power of 9700...

Citrix' Virtualization Touted as Solution to Desktop TCO Crisis.
December 3, 2007... Credit Suisse is pushing Citrix and its XenSource acquisition as the natural solution to the "corporate-desktop-as-serial-cost-offender" problem. It says Wall Street is fixated on server virtualization and is overlooking the nascent desktop...

Patent Watch.
December 3, 2007... The US Patent and Trademark Office examined 362,227 patents in its 2007 fiscal year, the highest number in history, and only granted 51% of them, down from 72% in fiscal 2000. The numbers come from its FY 2007 Performance and Accountability...

Goldman Frets over Software.
December 3, 2007... Goldman Sachs says that "macro indicators suggest a softening in capital spending in 2008, particularly in the US" and expects software to feel it first if it happens especially since software is a "typically back-end loaded sale." It cut...

AMD Opens New Facility in India.
December 3, 2007... AMD, with an eye on local design-wins, has opened a new 52,000-square-foot silicon design and platform R&D facility in Bangalore to house current and future staff. Engineers there are supposed to be playing a lead role in Shanghai, AMD first...

GDrive Revisited.(Brief article)
December 3, 2007... The Wall Street Journal made a big noise the other day with a story saying that Google is going into the storage business - free and paid - reprising those reports of a so-called GDrive or virtual hard drive that would essentially replace the...

Race for Third Place.
December 3, 2007... iSuppli gives HP 19.1% of the worldwide PC market in Q3, up 2.8% from last year, to Dell's 14.6%, down from 1.7%. Acer now has 7.9%, up 2.5%, and Lenovo has 8.1%. The researcher is betting Acer with Gateway in tow will pass Lenovo and claim...

Jobs Tops Power List.(Steve Jobs)(Brief article)(List)
December 3, 2007... According to Fortune's "Power 25" list, Steve Jobs is the most powerful businessman in the world. More than Rupert Murdoch, the Google guys, Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, Jeff Immelt, John Chambers, Mark Hurd and Carlos Slim. It's because he's...

Novell Postpones its Earnings Release.
December 10, 2007... Novell Wednesday morning suddenly pulled filing its financial results for its fourth quarter and full year hours before a scheduled conference call with Wall Street, needless to say an uncommon move. Well, it seems that the SEC has...

Hell, If They Won't Come Willingly Then Buy 'em: Sun.
December 10, 2007... Sun, which has not exactly rallied the open source community around it - for all its belated overtures - is now proposing to pay developers prize money to work on OpenSolaris, GlassFish, OpenJDK, OpenSparc, NetBeans and OpenOffice. ...

Sun Close with First Virtualization Code.
December 10, 2007... Sun says it's got the first piece of its proposed xVM virtualization platform, the thing it says it's going to put $2 billion in R&D into and open source. It's the xVM Ops Center, described as a highly scalable data center automation tool...

Red Hat Betas MRG.
December 10, 2007... Red Hat has swept up its messaging, real-time and grid mojo into a little beta pile it's calling Red Hat Enterprise MRG, a distributed computing platform that's optimized to run on top of RHEL, of course, but can work on other platforms as...

Likewise Cross-Platform Authentication Open Sourced; Red Hat & Canonical Sign On.
December 10, 2007... Centeris, the company that integrates Linux, Unix and Mac into Microsoft's Active Directory, often a lifesaver for mixed environments, has changed its name to Likewise Software after its flagship product and, while it was at it, announced its...

Alfresco Gets Terribly, Terribly Social.
December 10, 2007... Alfresco Software, the open source ECM play, is now Alfresco, the trendy open source Social Computing Platform for the enterprise. The content-searching REST-enabled apotheosis has been made possible by Alfresco integrating its ECM software...

Linux Foundation Picks Up Ts'o.
December 10, 2007... The Linux Foundation, currently home to Linus Torvalds, has named Ted Ts'o, the Linux filesystem maintainer and very first Linux kernel developer in North America, a Fellow and chief platform strategist. Shifting over from IBM where he led...

Penguin Peace Reportedly Settles over the Two Koreas.(Brief article)
December 10, 2007... How Christmas-y! Nudged, it would appear, by China - well, at least it's doing something - the English-language Korean trade press reports that North and South Korea agreed last week at a conference in China to develop a single version of Linux...

Sourceforge Launches Open Source Marketplace.
December 10, 2007... Sourceforge, the famous open source project site that's driving its owners to the poor house, has set up a fee-less commission-based online marketplace where service and support for open source software can be bought and sold. Called...

SCO Watch.
December 10, 2007... Looks like SCO may be cooling its heels in Judge Dale Kimball's antechamber for a few months waiting for that trial about how much it owes Novell over with so it can go and appeal Kimball's summary judgment that Novell owns the Unix copyright....

Microsoft Tries Squeezing into Cinderella's Glass Slipper.
December 10, 2007... Microsoft, which is often cast as the evil stepsister, has advanced its rival-limiting designs on One Laptop Per Child's novel XO machine to the point that its so-called "Unlimited Potential" people are openly talking about running "limited...

Life after Oracle; Whatever Happened to Workday?
December 10, 2007... For a company born out of a headline-grabbing clash of wills between two industry titans - one practically beloved by his users, the other, well, not so much - a company set up to pioneer the latest disruptive distribution scheme, a model...

Barcelona Bewitched; AMD Confirms It.
December 10, 2007... AMD has confirmed mounting speculation that its "save the company" Barcelona chip is pixilated. It can't get the thing out the door in volume until next year because of errata, it says, and is only shipping to specific customers like big...

IBM Wants Asustek Imports Barred.
December 10, 2007... IBM has gone to the International Trade Commission to complain that Taiwan-based Asustek Computer and its North American subsidiary Asus Computer International are infringing three of its PC patents. It wants the ITC to bar the infringing...

Is a De Facto Standard Already Forming for Embedded Virtualization?(Brief article)
December 10, 2007... The brave new world of gadgets with limitless and irritation-limiting potential depends on virtualization. It's going to be impossible to exploit 3G and WiMAX and VoIP and Android, for starters, without virtualization, not to mention the...

Windows Server 2008 RC1 Out.
December 10, 2007... Microsoft put out its second Windows Server 2008 release candidate (RC1) Wednesday for anyone, it appears, to download and poke around ahead of the thing's long-awaited launch at the end of February at an event now dubbed "Heroes happen here."...

IPO by Auction Returns.
December 10, 2007... Larry Ellison's other company, the still unprofitable nine-year-old on-demand software house, NetSuite, rival of such as Salesforce.com, is going to IPO using the kind of cockamamie auction process that Google used. The company, which put...

Motorola CTO Out; Surfaces at Cisco.
December 10, 2007... Motorola CEO Ed Zander's chair wasn't even cold yet when the company's CTO Padmasree Warrior, with the company for 23 years, suddenly decided to "pursue other opportunities" and was out the door. Twenty-four hours later she turned up at...

CommVault Offers Date Protection-as-a-Service.(CommVault Systems Inc.)(Brief article)
December 10, 2007... CommVault is out beating the ground for a new set of SaaS partners, offering them the engine for moving data back and forward into a protected environment. It's thinking it could pick up incremental business if managed service providers or...

'The End of Software'.
December 10, 2007... Salesforce.com, which is already convinced it'll do a billion dollars in revenue next year, said Wednesday it'll pass a million on-demand paying subscriptions this month, a combination of its own CRM software and its multi-tenant Force.com...

Dell Signs with Best Buy.
December 10, 2007... Dell's retail partner-of-the-week is Best Buy, which is going to sell an expanding mix of XPS and Inspiron notebooks and desktops in 900 US stores starting in the next few weeks, which presumably means not in time for Xmas. Dell already signed...

SAP Targets iPhone.
December 10, 2007... SAP, in a Salesforce-beware move, has Web 2.0'd its next-generation CRM 2007 kit so it'll work on Apple iPhones and load business contacts, info on prospects and account data. It told Reuters, which was in Boston for the unveiling, that it was...

Dell's Safety Net Has Holes.
December 10, 2007... Dell said Tuesday morning that it would start buying back a gargantuan $10 billion worth of its stock. To no avail. Its price dropped to below where it was in January before Michael Dell returned as CEO, recouping only a little since then. Dell...

Exchange SP1 Out.
December 10, 2007... Microsoft has put out a Service Pack 1 for Windows Exchange Server 2007 that fiddles with its console, Outlook access and disaster recovery, adding standby continuous replication and more support for mobile devices. Microsoft claims 3,000...

From the Society Page.
December 10, 2007... Google co-founder Larry Page weds Lucy Southworth this weekend on Richard Branson's personal Caribbean island with Branson as best man and 600 guests in attendance.

Opera Reopens Browser War; Charges Microsoft with Antitrust.
December 17, 2007... Norwegian browser maker Opera Software ASA has complained to the European Commission that Microsoft is abusing its dominant position by tying its Internet Explorer browser to the Windows operating system and hindering interoperability by not...

Microsoft Plays Grinch, Tries Stealing VMware's Xmas.
December 17, 2007... Microsoft stuck a shiny piece of coal in VMware's Christmas stocking Thursday morning when it sent its competitive - hithertofore repeatedly delayed - hypervisor-based server virtualization technology Hyper-V out for a surprise public beta. ...

Verizon Sued for Violating the GPL.
December 17, 2007... The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), legal guardian of the sanctity of the GPL, has sued the mighty Verizon Communications Inc on behalf of the two open source developers who wrote the Busybox utility, charging the phone company with patent...

Novell Lost Money in Q4.
December 17, 2007... Novell is back losing money when this time last year it made money. After suddenly canceling its earnings release last week because - come to find out - the SEC has been poring over last year's 10-K and this year's Q2 10-Q since this...

ATI Assets Rotting on the Vine, AMD Says.
December 17, 2007... So things can get worse for AMD, which lost $1.6 billion in the first nine months of this year, is down 40% on Wall Street just in the last two months and now can't deliver its life-saving Barcelona chip because of bugs. It's told the SEC...

SWsoft Gathers its Force for New Virtualization Sally.(Brief article)
December 17, 2007... Come 2008 SWsoft, the sometimes forgotten 900-man Russian virtualization company, is going to change its name to Parallels after its flagship product, which lets Mac users run Windows. It's also getting itself a new logo. See, it's going...

IBM Licenses its Cooling Patents.
December 17, 2007... IBM has licensed its Rear Door Heat exchanger water-cooling technology to Vette Corporation, a venture-backed thermal specialist, so Vette can make it turnkey and commercialize it on industry-standard 42U racks. Vette is also supposed to...

SAP Gets Behind VMware.
December 17, 2007... SAP is going to support VMware ESX Server in 64-bit Windows and Linux production environments. The German software maker, many of whose customers have been using VMware for a while now anyway, said Wednesday that it had certified hardware...

Microsoft Betas Answer to Google Apps.
December 17, 2007... Microsoft is opening up its ad-supported "software-plus-services" Office Live Workspace answer to Google Apps to public beta for feedback, it says, starting with those who pre-registered for the thing. The way it works Office users can...

Microsoft Trots Out Office 2007 SP1.
December 17, 2007... Microsoft has delivered up its first service pack for Office 2007, earlier than expected by some weeks, hoping to eradicate any proclivities the thing might have to crash. Microsoft Office product manager Reed Shaffner said, "We're...

Dell Looses Notebook Share to Recombinant Acer.
December 17, 2007... Dell, whose Q3 notebook shipments were up 12% year-over-year, was outsold unit-wise by HP (+72%) and Acer (+54%), according to DisplaySearch's numbers, which give HP a worldwide market share of 21.4%, Dell 13.8% and Acer 12.8%. But if you...

Advertising Hits PDF Files.
December 17, 2007... Adobe and Yahoo have launched a beta Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! so online publishers can stick context-based ads in a panel next to PDF content for incremental revenue from Yahoo. The context ads are dynamically matched to the content...

Microsoft Buys Multimap.
December 17, 2007... In a Google-y move Microsoft has bought UK online mapper Multimap for some undisclosed amount of money - the London Times puts the figure at around $50 million - for its Virtual Earth, Live Search, Windows Live services and aQuantive interests...

T2 Chip Open Sourced.(Sun technology provides microchip to universities)(Brief article)
December 17, 2007... Sun said Tuesday that it had delivered on the promise it made in August to open source its OpenSparc T2 RTL (register transfer level) processor design under the GPL hoping to stir up some interest in the thing and expand the market for Sun...

Red Hat Delivers Eclipse-based IDE.(Red Hat Software Inc.'s JBoss Developer Studio )(Brief article)
December 17, 2007... After 100,000 downloads of the test builds Red Hat's got JBoss Developer Studio (JBDS) in the can. Red Hat preens that it's the only 100% open source Eclipse-based IDE around, combining Eclipse tooling with a runtime. Derived from the...

JBoss Bad Boy Surfaces.(appointment of Marc Fleury at Appcelerator Inc.)(Brief article)
December 17, 2007... JBoss founder and former CEO Marc Fleury, the guy who couldn't get on with Red Hat after it acquired JBoss for $350 million, has joined the advisory board of Appcelerator Inc, an Atlanta start-up doing open source software for cross-platform...

Red Hat Desktop Delayed Again.
December 17, 2007... Reuters looked in its tickler file the other day, wondered why Red Hat hadn't announced its expected Linux Desktop at the end of November and rang up the company only to be told that the thing had been delayed for a second time. Something...

OpenLogic Organizes Open Source Census.
December 17, 2007... OpenLogic wants to do an Open Source Census to quantify the global use of open source in the enterprise, an ironically timely initiative considering that it was supposedly a census 2,000 years ago that thrust a backwater town in a backwater...

Ruby on Rails Hits 2.0.(information about the product )(Brief article)
December 17, 2007... Ruby on Rails, the Web 2.0 open source web application framework written in Ruby, the programming language challenging Java, has progressed to a 2.0 version and in the doing has thrown the message-passing SOAP out with the bathwater, so to...

Doubts about AMD Remain.
December 17, 2007... Lehman Brothers thinks Q1 could be stronger than usual - well, at least for Intel and its friends - some of which may be a contribution by AMD and its volume-delayed Barcelona. The broker doesn't believe AMD will be able to muster a 2.5GHz...

Intel Has its Problems Too.
December 17, 2007... Insight 64 chip groupie Nathan Brookwood warns that Intel's path this year - while not the pothole-rutted road AMD is on - may not exactly be smooth as silk. The great gorge it has to pass through is 45nm Nahalem, where it transitions to a new...

Virtualization Cannibalization Starts with Red Hat: Wall Street.
December 17, 2007... Red Hat is losing market share to VMware according to Wall Street analyst Katherine Egbert of Jefferies & Co, who downgraded Red Hat's stock Monday. She says Linux isn't needed to replace Unix, that Windows and VMware are more prevalent, and...

Ask Takes Privacy's High Moral Ground.
December 17, 2007... Ask.com has thrown down a gauntlet to an all-seeing, all-storing Google by creating an "AskEraser" privacy button that searchers can use cover their tracks relatively instantly though not when Google comes into the picture. And it doesn't work...

AMD's Latest 'He'd-Better-Walk-on-Water' Hire.
December 17, 2007... AMD has hired Mike Uhler, the former CTO of Mips, as its VP, accelerated computing, a brand new job created to get AMD's money's worth out of its huge $5.2 billion ATI acquisition and tap ATI for the co-processors on which to off-load CPU...

Acer Optimistic.
December 17, 2007... Acer thinks its sales will be up at least 50% over the next four years.

HP: Better & Better.
December 17, 2007... HP told Wall Street Tuesday that it expects its revenues to be up 5%-6% to $118.2 billion in fiscal '09 with an operating margin up fractionally to 10.4% and profits of $3.74-$3.84 a share. The year it's talking about doesn't start until...

Ad Watch.
December 17, 2007... Monday Microsoft started delivering text and banner ads to MSN Mobile users. It's got contracts with Paramount and Jaguar. Meanwhile, it's going to be doing the ad placement for CNBC's financial news site. It gets 2.6 million unique visitors a...

So Much for Restrictions.
December 17, 2007... Iran says it's built a supercomputer out of 216 Opteron MPUs despite the export bans.

Red Hat CEO Steps Down.
December 24, 2007... In a surprise move Thursday Red Hat named the former COO of Delta Airlines Jim Whitehurst president and CEO, replacing Matthew Szulik who remains chairman. Szulik said he was stepping down after almost 10 years with the company because of...

OpenOffice Enveloped by the Cloud.
December 24, 2007... The newfangled Holy Grail of software-as-a-service has come to OpenOffice, the freebie challenger of Microsoft Office sent into the wild years ago by Sun Microsystems to wreak what havoc it could. Ulteo, the outfit started by Mandrakesoft,...

Samba Gets Microsoft's Protocol Docs.
December 24, 2007... With the European Commission basically holding a gun to its head, Microsoft has signed a five-year accord with the Samba Team that will give the open source project access to the documentation for the Microsoft protocols that should make Samba...

Xterasys Settles GPL Suit.
December 24, 2007... The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC), defender of the GPL's honor, said Monday that Xterasys Corporation, one of the companies it sued in November for not providing users with the source code to the GPL 2-protected Busybox Unix utilities as...

Dutch Government Mandates ODF.
December 24, 2007... Over Microsoft's objections, the Dutch government has mandated the use of open standards, to wit, the OpenDocument Format, and open source - if there's a viable open source program - at the national level by May. Agencies that can't meet the...

FTC OKs Google-DoubleClick Merger.
December 24, 2007... The Federal Trade Commission this morning gave Google a Christmas present and approved its controversial $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick over the objections of competitors like Microsoft, Yahoo and AT&T - and the massed privacy front....

Canonical Offers Version Control System.
December 24, 2007... Canonical, the Ubuntu people, has pushed out a version control system called Bazaar 1.0 so hundreds of globally dispersed developers can kick in to software projects independently without utter chaos ensuing. Canonical says the traditional...

Virtual Iron 4.2 Near.(launches new virtualization software)(Brief article)
December 24, 2007... Virtual Iron figures when its 4.2 release pops out this month it'll be the first Xen-based virtualization solution to offer such niceties as LiveSnapshots of virtual servers for hot backup and patch management; the ability to dynamically...

Adobe Open Sources BlazeDS.
December 24, 2007... Adobe is open sourcing the remoting and messaging technologies in its commercial LiveCycle Data Services ES - Adobe's route to the Internet - as a new product called BlazeDS. The widgetry, along with the Action Message Format (AMF) protocol...

PSI Complains to EC about IBM.
December 24, 2007... Well, it appears that Platform Solutions Inc, the IBM-thwarted mainframe wannabe, has taken its list of grievances against Big Blue to the European Commission, as we've suggested it would, and lodged a formal antitrust complaint against the...