Linux Gram articles from December 2008

Linux Gram archives from December 2008

SCO Gets Its Hall Pass To Appeal.
December 1, 2008... SCO filed a notice of appeal with the United States Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit in Denver Tuesday. Yes, miracle of miracles it finally got a final judgment out of Utah District Court Judge Dale Kimball. That's the hall pass...

Fedora 10 Out.
December 1, 2008... Fedora 10 is out and about. Fedora of course is Red Hat's freebie community OS and testbed for coming attractions in Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The new rev is supposed to have substantial virtualization improvements for remotely...

rPath Broadens its Pitch.(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... Besides SUSE and its own brand of Linux, rPath is now supporting the Ubuntu and CentOS Linux operating systems as part of its rBuilder and rPath Lifecycle Management Platform. The move broadens the start-up's options for deploying and...

Microsoft & Novell Still Together Two Years Later.
December 1, 2008... The two-year anniversary of the Novell-Microsoft alliance that scandalized the open source community passed quietly enough earlier this month. The pair waited a couple of weeks to mark the occasion and then said that in the second year of...

Dell Offers 0% Financing.
December 1, 2008... With its Q3 sales down 3% and demand fearfully thin, Dell is tearing a page out of Microsoft's book and is going to offer US businesses 0% financing. It's focusing on large corporations and institutions but some smaller shops should also...

IBM Wants Its Initials on All Clouds Everywhere.
December 1, 2008... In a fascinating move to co-op the cloud, IBM is proposing to rate other people's clouds, people like Amazon, GoGrid, Mosso and FlexiScale. Hopefully it will do better than Moody's and Standard & Poor's did with the bonds created out of...

Why Mark Papermaster Can't Work at Apple.
December 1, 2008... The reason why ex-IBM executive Mark Papermaster can't work for Apple is because Apple and IBM compete in microprocessors for iPod and iPhones. Who'd have thunk it? But that's what the judge deciding where Mr. Papermaster can work -...

Start-up Sells Troll Insurance.
December 1, 2008... There's been Open Invention Network and Allied Security Trust, and now there's RPX Corporation promising protection against the so-called patent troll. RPX, amusingly enough, was started by two refugees from what is widely perceived to be...

Court Orders Ballmer Deposed.
December 1, 2008... The federal court hearing the disclosure-rich "Vista Capable" class-action suit claiming consumers were misled by the logo has ordered Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to submit to a three-hour deposition. Microsoft, which tried to block the...

Cost Cutting, Laptops & EDS Do It for HP.
December 1, 2008... HP, which lifted its skirt and showed everybody its panties last week, officially released its better-than-expected fiscal Q4 results Monday and repeated its relatively aggressive guidance for the current quarter. As it said it would, it...

Apple Sued for How iPhone Navigates the Web.
December 1, 2008... EMG Technology LLC, reportedly a one-man show, is suing Apple and its iPhone for patent infringement in the so-called pro-plaintiff "Rocket Docket" in Texas. Its founder holds five US patents for navigating the web from a mobile device and...

iSuppli Cuts PC Forecast.
December 1, 2008... iSuppli has taken the auspices again and now says that PCs won't grow next year by 11.9% like it thought before the sky started falling. Sales will only be up 4.3%, up being better than down let's remember. And it's not quite as...

Microsoft's Sky Filled with Clouds.
December 1, 2008... Microsoft plans to build about 20 "super-size" cloud data centers, each with a price tag of around a billion dollars apiece, according to BusinessWeek. The magazine got it from an unnamed source. All Microsoft's VP of global foundation...

Nathan Myhrvold Part of Transmeta Sale.
December 1, 2008... Nathan Myhrvold's Intellectual Ventures (IV), the great patent vacuum, has a piece of Novafora's deal to buy Transmeta, according to a filing dropped off with the SEC. IV was apparently there at the bargaining table with Novafora, which...

Google Shrinking.
December 1, 2008... Google is significantly reducing the number of contract workers it uses but says it won't cut its staff of 21,123 people, according to the Wall Street Journal. It remains unclear how many of its 10,000 contractors Google will be cut. Apparently...

Netbooks Get Another Taker.
December 1, 2008... Add Fujitsu's name to the list of Atom-based netbook hawkers.

Cisco To Close over the Holidays.(Brief article)
December 1, 2008... With some exceptions like support and orders, Cisco is going to shut down from December 29 to January 2 in the US and Canada to hold down costs. Remember it's trying to cut 2009 expenses by a billion dollars because of the economy. Although...

Two Engineers Sentenced under Economic Espionage Act.
December 1, 2008... Remember those two Chinese-born engineers who were picked up at the San Francisco Airport a few years back right before they got on a plane to China? And they were carrying suitcases full of stolen chip designs from Sun, Transmeta, NEC and...

A Hobbled Sun Limps to the RIA Starting Gate.
December 8, 2008... It's a wonder it has the entry fee, but Sun Thursday showed up for the RIA race against Adobe's Flex, Flash and AIR and Microsoft's Silverlight - and for that matter the open source AJAX - riding JavaFX 1.0. According to Sun it's one of...

Zoho Builds Data Bridges in the Cloud.
December 8, 2008... Zoho, the prolific Microsoft wannabe that has already proven it can knock off a web app at the drop of a buzzword, is branching out into middleware. It's come up with some widgetry - aimed at developers this time, not end users - called...

Amazon SimpleDB Hits Public Beta.
December 8, 2008... After spending a year in private beta, Amazon's SimpleDB has been pushed into what the company calls "unlimited public beta." Any developer or business can now sign up and start using the web service. As a come-on, for the next six months...

AMD's Quarter Sours Like Curdled Milk.
December 8, 2008... AMD sent out a short sharp message Thursday morning saying that the way things are going it expects revenues from continuing operations this quarter to be ~25% lower than they were last quarter and that was only $1.585 billion. It had...

Adobe Comes Up Short, Cans 600.(Brief article)
December 8, 2008... As fate would have it, Adobe picked the worst possible quarter to roll out the great update to its flagship Creative Suite widgetry. Because the economy tanking, it hasn't been selling the way it was supposed to. As a result, revenues came...

IBM Takes New Tack To Push Microsoft Off the Desktop.
December 8, 2008... IBM is taking another shot at blowing Microsoft off the desktop and this time it's got the foul economic winds at its back. In the name of cost cutting, IBM is proposing that companies virtualize their desktops and turn them into thin...

PC Growth To Drop to Turtle Speed: IDC.
December 8, 2008... IDC took another look at its 2009 PC forecast Wednesday and in view of economic realities dropped its worldwide unit growth rate prediction from 13.7% (which is what it said in Q2) to 3.8% and said the value of the PCs that do ship will decline...

Don't Look Back! The Server Landscape's Ugly.
December 8, 2008... Worldwide server shipments might have been up 4.4% to 2.3 million units in the September quarter but revenues were down 5.4% to $12.7 billion according to Gartner. IDC's numbers aren't all that different. It hasn't been this bad since 2002...

VMware Revamps its Virtual Desktop Widgetry.
December 8, 2008... VMware, the struggling virtualization leader, has, as expected, put View 3 on the market to do battle with Citrix' XenApp and XenDesktop widgetry. It's supposed to be a big advance in virtual desktop computing, described by the company as...

Linux Gets a Stocking Stuffer from Oracle.
December 8, 2008... Oracle threw some data integrity protection code over the wall and it's been accepted into the 2.6.27 Linux kernel. It reportedly lets the Linux kernel utilize key data protection information for the first time in its life. It's also...

Moonlight Beta Out.
December 8, 2008... The promised beta release of Moonlight 1.0, the Linux implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight widgetry, has finally wended its way out. Moonlight is of course the open source implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight and should give...

OSA Taps Unisys Exec as President.
December 8, 2008... The Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), the two-year-old consortium dedicated to interoperability and the adoption of open software, has picked Anthony Gold, who runs Unisys' open source business, to be its president. He replaces SpikeSource exec...

Concurrent Revs RedHawk Linux.
December 8, 2008... Concurrent has a new version of its RedHawk Linux. RedHawk 5.2 was developed to address particular needs in real-time application development. New features include an enhanced industry standard Linux kernel (2.6.26); multi-platform...

Novell Narrows Loss.
December 8, 2008... To no one's particular surprise, Novell missed its quarter. Wall Street thought it could turn six cents a share on $249.78 million. Instead it lost $16.3 million, five cents a share, on flat year-over-year revenues of $245 million in its...

Versant Buys db4objects Database Business.
December 8, 2008... db4objects has sold its open source object database business, native to Java and .NET, to Versant to focus on Servo, a newfangled user data management service. Price was not disclosed. The company will now be known as Servo Software Inc....

HP Expects To Save MegaBucks on IT.
December 8, 2008... The other day, HP, the industry's resident smarty pants, let drop that starting this fiscal year - which is now, oh, five or six weeks old - it will save a billion dollars a year on IT compared to 2005 - although it's added upwards of $25...

Novell Reminds Folks It Bought PlateSpin.
December 8, 2008... Novell is repositioning the virtualization widgetry that it bought for $205 million this spring when it bought PlateSpin and now claims to be the only kid on the block who can support 32- and 64-bit Windows and Linux servers, as well as all the...

Intel to EC: 'We Left Our Kid Gloves Home'.
December 8, 2008... Thanks to a sketchy notice in the Official Journal of the European Union we now know a tad more about why Intel has taken the European Commission to court. Seems Intel is accusing the EC of making it the butt of a "discriminatory and...

Good OS Builds Browser OS Called Cloud.
December 8, 2008... Good OS, who's tight with Google and whose gOS Linux powered a $199 Everex PC that Wal-Mart sold last year, is wheeling out Cloud, a new browser operating system that reportedly boots up the Internet in seconds and can be used to toggle between...

Alleged Software Pirate Accuses Microsoft of Antitrust.
December 8, 2008... A dealer in Holland that Microsoft sued in May for copyright infringement has complained to the European Commission that Microsoft charges anywhere from 30%-50% more for its software in Europe than in does in the US - except Vista which is only...

Journal Calls Report of Yahoo-Microsoft Deal Baloney.
December 8, 2008... According to the Times of London Microsoft is in talks to acquire Yahoo's search business. The Wall Street Journal says the story is utter hokum. The British paper puts the price at $20 billion - although all of Yahoo was only worth $15.96...

Ex-AOL CEO Looking To Buy Yahoo: WSJ.
December 8, 2008... For months now the former CEO of AOL Jonathan Miller has been looking for the money to buy Yahoo, according to the Wall Street Journal. The paper was apparently inspired by the Times of London, which claimed over the weekend - in a story...

Intel & Hitachi Cut SSD Joint Venture.
December 8, 2008... Intel has cut a joint venture with Hitachi to make solid state drives (SSDs) for servers, high-end workstations and storage - not the consumer goods where such pricey widgetry is usually found these days. Their first products, branded and...

Microsoft Picks Yahoo Geek To Run Google Counter-Offensive.
December 8, 2008... The job of running Microsoft's flagging Google counter-offensive - which has lain like a fallow field since Kevin Johnson left the company in July to become CEO of Juniper Networks, having been foiled in buying Yahoo - has been filled. As...

It's Official. We're in a Recession.
December 8, 2008... The Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private non-profit research organization that determines such things based on broad and more precise measurements than most, said Monday that the US is in a...

MPUs Down Practically Any Way You Look at Them.(microprocessor unit)(Brief article)
December 8, 2008... Barclays Capital analyst Tim Luke says microprocessor revenue was down 53.6% in October compared to September and 40.1% less than the industry average in October for the last 10 years. They were down 23% year-over-year and up 2.1%...

Googling the Cabinet?(Brief article)
December 8, 2008... Newsweek - which apparently sees the Obama cabinet amounting to a lot of big names with little experience - is floating the idea that the president-elect might make Dan Reicher, Google's director of climate change and energy initiatives, energy...

Intel To Build Mobos in Egypt.
December 8, 2008... Intel is going to start producing motherboards in Egypt. According Reuters, it's a three-way deal signed by Intel, a small Egyptian manufacturer called Boraq for Electronic Industries and the state-run Information Technology Industry...

IBM Asia-Pac Layoffs Reported.
December 8, 2008... Australian IT says IBM Asia-Pacific is going to cut 2,600 jobs, hitting the company's software unit and Japan the most. Japan, which has been offering voluntary retirement, is reportedly supposed to lose 1,000 people. Some headquarters...

IDC Predicts Fluffy Clouds.(Brief article)
December 8, 2008... IDC figures that clouds services - that's the consumer and business products, services and solutions delivered via the cloud - is "crossing the chasm" and "entering a period of widespread adoption." It reckons that over the next five years...

Sherwin-Williams Stores To Standardize on SUSE.
December 8, 2008... Sherwin-Williams, the big multibillion-dollar paint company, is standardizing on SUSE Linux Enterprise POS for the multi-function desktop/registers and servers in its 3,000 retail stores.

Ex-Oracle Guys Goes to Informatica Board.
December 8, 2008... Informatica has put Dr Gerald Held, a long-time Tandem exec who then ran Oracle's Server Products unit, on its board. A database expert, he now runs Held Consulting.

Google & the Razor's Edge.
December 8, 2008... Google is more like Microsoft than it would admit. Not only is it regarded as a monopoly by the US government, it likes dangling its toes over the crevasse. Sandy Litvack, the guy that the Justice Department hired to build an antitrust...

Google Seeks To Overcome the Browser's Limitations.
December 15, 2008... Oh, look. Google's found another way to annoy the...to annoy Microsoft. This one's called Native Client, a shiny new open source R&D project aimed at running fast x86 native code in web applications. It's another way of going for the...

Google Chrome Leaves Beta.
December 15, 2008... Google just did a very un-Googley thing. It pushed Chrome out of the beta nest. Chrome's only been in beta since September 2, something like a hundred days. And Google is famous for keeping widgetry in beta until the beta label turns...

HP Strays from the Microsoft Track.
December 15, 2008... HP's giving Novell a little Christmas present. It's going to offer North American schools K-12 a $519 box bearing SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop through its resellers. Novell has collected a repository of 40-odd open source packages on...

Red Hat Takes a Piece of Jaspersoft.(Brief article)
December 15, 2008... Red Hat has put money into Jaspersoft. The open source business intelligence (BI) ISV has gotten $12.5 million in financing in a round led by private equity house Adams Street Partners with Red Hat and Jaspersoft's five existing investors...

Android Gets More Converts.
December 15, 2008... The Android-loving Open Handset Alliance says it's added 14 more members, bringing its total to 47 companies. Of course it's only produced one phone so far, the iPhone's leagues ahead and the crummy economy is expected to hurt even cell...

Sun Launches New Version of OpenSolaris.
December 15, 2008... There's a new release of OpenSolaris out - OpenSolaris 2008.11, out a whole three weeks before the end of 2008. There was a 2008.05 release, a k a Project Indiana, in May but that wasn't as commercial or production-oriented as this one. ...

OIN Gets a New Anti-Patent Charter.
December 15, 2008... Open Invention Network (OIN), the three-year-old IP league started by IBM to buy up patents to deter Microsoft from asserting its patents against Linux, apparently got bored waiting for Microsoft to make a hostile move. So to fill its idle...

JBoss To Support Google Web Toolkit.
December 15, 2008... Red Hat is on its way to supporting Google Web Toolkit (GWT) as part of its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform subscription. GWT is the open source project that helps Java developers built AJAX web applications for any browser, something...

Microsoft Dabbles in Open Source.
December 15, 2008... Microsoft has started an open source blogging engine dubbed Oxite, targeted initially at developers who want to learn ASP.NET MVC. Microsoft allows that the community could push it out for consumers. The Oxite FAQ asks why we need another...

Amazon's Cloud Covers Europe.
December 15, 2008... Betcha IBM is worried that Amazon is gonna wind up owning the cloud. Betcha other companies are worried about that too. Amazon said Wednesday that it has extended EC2, its Elastic Compute Cloud, to Europe. European developers and...

Sun Pulls Plug on Proto-Cloud.
December 15, 2008... It appears that Sun is killing off its Sun Grid proto-cloud, the almost four-year-old Solaris 10-based utility computing platform offering grid compute time by the hour, only to replace it with some other form of cloud. Exactly what...

Salesforce.com & Google Clouds Get Cozier.
December 15, 2008... Salesforce.com, which used to be just a chi-chi SaaS house until it realized that identifying itself with cloud computing would make it even more fashionable, has expanded its alliance with Google. It's come up with Force.com for Google App...

HP Changes its Plans for EDS.
December 15, 2008... As HP chows down on EDS and digests it, EDS CEO Ron Rittenmeyer said he's had enough and is going to bail at the end of the year. Originally EDS was supposed to be a free-standing HP subsidiary with Rittenmeyer reporting to HP CEO Mark...

Yahoo Stockholder Has Visions of Sugarplums.
December 15, 2008... As Yahoo went around handing out ~1,500 pink slips and culling products and services Wednesday, California hedge fund Ivory Investment Management LP, which owns ~1.5% of Yahoo and probably wishes it didn't, started pushing the company to do a...

Adobe & Spring Tie Up To Advance Java RIAs.
December 15, 2008... Adobe and SpringSource say they're working on integrating Adobe Flash and the SpringSource platform to simplify the development and deployment of rich Internet Java apps. They're supposed to make it easy for Java developers to create...

RightScale Bags a Quick Second Round.(Brief article)
December 15, 2008... RightScale, the multi-cloud manager, has bagged a $13 million second round - led by a new investor - without having to go door-to-door with a begging bowl. Nope. They sought out RightScale. The money is coming from Index Ventures, the...

Cash Registers in the Cloud.
December 15, 2008... According to the rules of the New Austerity, companies get points these days just for raising financing. And like double coupons, they get double points for persuading chic hard-nosed investors to part with their money. Aria Systems just...

VMWare & HP Plan Integration.
December 15, 2008... VMware wants to tie up with all the major software managers and has started with HP. The pair already has a relationship but now the two are going to integrate HP's Business Technology Optimization (BTO) software with VMware vCenter Lab...

AMD's Life Preserver Just Got Smaller.
December 15, 2008... Since it signed its long-in-making "asset lite" deal with the sheikdom of Abu Dhabi on October 6, AMD has cut its Q4 revenue expectations from flat to down 25%, next year's prospects ain't looking particularly great, and its stock is now worth...

Sun's Biggest Shareholder To Get Two Board Seats.
December 15, 2008... Southeastern Asset Management Inc, now Sun's largest stockholder, wants on to Sun's board, which has so far failed to stop the company from imploding. Sun has agreed to give it two seats but both companies have to agree on who sits in...

HP Fortifies its VDI Position.
December 15, 2008... What with all this talk about virtual desktops and rich user experiences, HP figured it had better bolster its thin client protocols. It's gussied up the Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) so HP thin clients will have out-of-the-box...

AMD Adopts New OpenCL 1.0 Standard.
December 15, 2008... AMD says it's going to adopt the shiny new OpenCL 1.0 standard just ratified the other day by the Khronos Group standards body and integrate an OpenCL-compliant compiler and runtime into its free ATI Stream SDK next year. And just to prove...

IBM Pushes into Cloud Conferencing.
December 15, 2008... IBM is pushing its upgraded Lotus Sametime Unyte 8.2 as a global cloud service for web conferencing up against Cisco's WebEx and Microsoft's Office Live Meeting. It's tied up with InterCall, the conference call biggie, for distribution,...

It's Dell & EMC for Another Five Years.
December 15, 2008... Dell and EMC have extended their alliance through 2013. And Dell's gonna pick up EMC's four-month-old Celerra NX4 storage system. That's the unified storage solution that consolidates NAS, iSCSI and Fibre Channel technologies on one platform....

Intel Takes More Regulators to Court.
December 15, 2008... Having just sued the European Commission's antitrust regulators for not admitting what it considers exculpatory evidence in its case, Intel has now sued to overturn the Korea Fair Trade Commission's June antitrust decision against it. Intel...

Toshiba To Peddle an OpenSolaris Notebook.
December 15, 2008... Toshiba is striking a counter-culture pose and, starting next year, will offer developers a notebook pre-installed with OpenSolaris 2008.11, the latest rev of the Sun operating system. It'll start in the US and see if there's global demand....

US Spending Forecast Cut Again.
December 15, 2008... Forrester Research has cut its US IT spending forecast again from 6.1% to a measly 1.6%.

Microsoft's Privacy Concession Has Strings.
December 15, 2008... Microsoft told the Article 29 Working Group, the European Commission advisory body on privacy, the other day that it would cut the time it keeps web search records to six months if Google and Yahoo would agree to do the same thing but Google...

Lenovo's Feeling Acquisitive Again.
December 15, 2008... Lenovo told the Hong Kong stock exchange that it's had "certain preliminary discussions with independent third parties regarding potential investment opportunities" No targets were identified but there have been reports it's interested in...

BMC Lays Off 6%.
December 15, 2008... BMC is cutting roughly 350 employees, approximately 6% of its global workforce, expecting the layoffs to be complete by the end of December. It's a pre-emptive move. The company claims its business hasn't slowed down yet. It's figuring an...

Windows 7 Beta Due in January.
December 15, 2008... Microsoft will be handing out DVDs of its Vista-righting Windows 7 beta at its MSDN Developer Conference in January. Meanwhile, a trial version of Vista SP2 is downloadable off of its TechNet web site. It includes security and performance...