Linux Gram articles from February 2007

Linux Gram archives from February 2007

Microsoft Seeks Patent on Build-It-Yourself 'Lego' Operating System.
February 5, 2007... Imagine a completely deconstructed operating system that the user, or service provider, glues together out of just the pieces he needs and pays for it a la carte. Okay, now imagine Microsoft - which has repeatedly told antitrust...

Dell Dumps Rollins.
February 5, 2007... Michael Dell has come back to clean up the mess left by CEO Kevin Rollins, whose immediate resignation was accepted late Wednesday after the market closed. Rollins is gone from the Dell board as well as its executive suite. His...

Google Threatens To Move Against Office.(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... Google's threat to Office is supposed to be unleashed "soon" according to a story in Monday's Boston Globe. Google VP and general manager of the enterprise David Girouard in town giving a speech to the Massachusetts Technology Leadership...

IPO-Bound MySQL Targets Oracle.
February 5, 2007... MySQL has introduced what it calls an all-you-can-eat one-year "Enterprise Unlimited" subscription to its database for $40,000. The "unprecedented low price" looks like it's meant to dislodge existing site licenses for Microsoft SQL...

Dual-License db4objects Adds a Third.(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... db4objects, one of those dual-license companies - commercial or GPL - has come up with still a third license to accommodate people whose main work is covered by the Apache, BSD, Lesser GPL or Eclipse license, not the GPL. It's a way for...

Solid Sketches Out Its MySQL Roadmap.(solidDB dbms software)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... Having turned out an up-market storage engine for MySQL capable of heavy transaction loads supporting a lot of concurrent users, Solid Information Technology has sketched out its plans to add new features to solidDB for MySQL. It says that...

Liberty Alliance Courts Open Source.
February 5, 2007... The Liberty Alliance, the heavyweight consortium put together years ago by Sun to void Microsoft's Passport, has put together a thing called the openLiberty Project meant to supply resources and support to open source developers building...

Centeris Move into Cross-Platform Identity Management.
February 5, 2007... Centeris, which manages Linux servers in a Windows network, has introduced Likewise Identity 3.0, a cross-platform identity management system created in response to user demand for greater breath around Active Directory integration, a core...

Novell Open Sources Build Service.
February 5, 2007... Novell has open sourced its openSUSE Build Service, a framework that will let developers create and compile packages for multiple Linux distributions including Fedora, Debian and Ubuntu. The widgetry includes KIWI, a system imagining tool...

Red Hat To Subcontract Service.(Certified Service Provider Program )(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... Red Hat now has an invitation-only Certified Service Provider (CSP) Program in North America, on its way to making the affair global. Partners are supposed to use Red Hat methodologies for core builds and deployments, health checks and...

Linspire To Open Click 'N Run to Other Linux Desktops.
February 5, 2007... Linspire says it's going to standardize software installation across Linux distributions by expanding its CNR, a k a Click 'N Run, download and software management service to support the more popular Linux desktop distributions beginning with...

Novell Scores a Desktop Win.
February 5, 2007... France's PSA Peugeot Citroen, the second-largest carmaker in Europe, is going to be taking up to 20,000 copies of its Linux desktop off of Novell as well as 2,500 Linux servers.

HP Tattletale Gagged.
February 5, 2007... The ex-HP VP that countersued HP claiming it paid the former president of Dell Japan to gather and turn over Dell's printer plans to HP, the ones Dell was using to enter the printer market, has been told to pull his suit by the Texas federal...

Intel & IBM Claim To Have Hit on a Modern Day Philosopher's Stone.
February 5, 2007... Intel has figured out a way to make its 45nm chips more threatening to AMD - at least this year and adding to its current momentum - while at the same time reinforcing Moore's Law, which says transistor counts double every two years. It...

Adobe To Have PDF Standardized.
February 5, 2007... Adobe said Monday that it's going to send PDF to ISO for de iure standardization via AIIM, the Association for Information and Image Management International. PDF is pretty much a de facto standard thanks to the fact that Adobe has...

HP's Hail Mary Play.
February 5, 2007... HP is going to drop a few million on an advertising spot on the Super Bowl broadcast this weekend. It'll be its first Super Bowl ad. Reportedly the commercial is one that uses the tagline "The computer is personal again," part of the campaign...

Symantec Diversifies Again, Buys Altiris.
February 5, 2007... Although Symantec anticipates having to cut $200 million of its own costs, can 5% of its staff and buy back a billion-dollar worth of its stock to keep the price up, it's going to buy Altiris, the $200 million-a-year provisioning and management...

Anti-Microsoft League Complains to EC about Vista.
February 5, 2007... Hours before Vista appeared on store shelves Tuesday, IBM, Oracle, Sun, Red Hat, Linspire, Adobe, Nokia and RealNetworks, banded together as the European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), were reminding the European Commission of...

Intel Blamed for Tying a Can to One Laptop Per Child Box.
February 5, 2007... At Davos this past weekend, Nicholas Negroponte blamed Intel for the poor take-up of his AMD/Linux-based One Laptop Per Child machine, suggesting that Intel has discouraged third-world leaders from buying the thing. Non-Intel critics of...

VMware Converter 3 Out.
February 5, 2007... VMware has gone gold with its wizard-driven Converter 3 migration toolkit, which is supposed to automate the physical-to-virtual (P2V) and virtual-to-virtual (V2V) conversion process for creating VMware virtual machines. There is a free...

Body Count from the Price War.
February 5, 2007... AMD may be bleeding all over the rug but it can salve its wounds with the balm of market share. According to Mercury Research, AMD bought itself a record 25.3% of the market for server chips in Q4 at the expense of its ASPs, which melted an...

Invasion of the Virtual Servers.
February 5, 2007... IDC estimates that 2.3 million virtual servers were deployed last year compared to 7.7 million physical ones. It also figures that 76% of the enterprise will adopt or is planning to adopt x86 virtualization in the next 12 months. Forrester,...

Negotiated Settlement?(Apple Inc. and Cisco Systems Inc. negotiating over trademark violations)(Brief article)
February 5, 2007... We may be deprived of the spectacle of Cisco and Apple litigating over the name iPhone. The AP reported Thursday night that the pair was going to talk again to see with they can come to terms. They're serious enough that Apple won't have to...

Microsoft's Got the Best Rep.
February 5, 2007... This is gonna come a shock to its many critics, but the American company with the best reputation is Microsoft, according to annual poll by Harris Interactive and the Wall Street Journal. Microsoft beat Johnson & Johnson, whose baby products...

Backdating Watch.
February 5, 2007... The SEC is reportedly stuck over what to do about backdaters. Meanwhile, Novell has gotten a second notice from the Nasdaq telling it it's non-compliant because it hasn't filed its financials with the SEC since last April. Novell is supposed to...

Database Great Missing, Feared Lost at Sea.
February 5, 2007... Jim Gray, 63, the famed database researcher and head of Microsoft Research's eScience Group bent on making the Internet a world wide telescope, took his sailboat out of San Francisco Bay on Sunday to scatter his mother's ashes near the Farallon...

It Works!! It Works!!!
February 12, 2007... Start-up semiconductor house P.A. Semi Inc has confounded the doubters and naysayers who claimed it could never develop a freaking complicated 2GHz Power chip - with every feature currently known to man - that typically consumes just 5W-13W -...

First Returns In; Vista Sales Promising.
February 12, 2007... US retail PC sales jumped 67% year-over-year the first week Vista was out, according to Current Analysis. They were up 173% compared to the week before. Seventy percent of consumers opted for the pricey Premium Edition of Vista. Retail revenue...

EMC To Monetize VMware.
February 12, 2007... EMC is going to IPO 10% of VMware this summer. It'll give VMware a recruiting and retention incentive and money that's not EMC's to grow on. It's also supposed to increase the visibility into VMware's performance and signal that the...

Microsoft and Sun Offer Competing ODF Translators.
February 12, 2007... Sun said Wednesday to stand by because the first part of its OpenDocument Format (ODF) plug-in for Microsoft Office 2003 should be available - God willing and creek don't rise - in the next few days. The thing is called the StarOffice 8...

FSF Rattles GPL 3 Under Novell's Nose To Spook It.
February 12, 2007... Ticked off over the patent codicil in the controversial rapprochement between Novell and Microsoft, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has been making noises to Reuters about slamming its rewrite of the GPL down on Novell's fingers and...

Red Hat Claims Microsoft Victory.
February 12, 2007... Red Hat says the Swedish Armed Forces, which hasn't taken the field since the early eighteenth century, is going to join the Red Hat-Microsoft skirmish and migrate its servers from NT to Red Hat Linux for security reasons. Red Hat has so far...

Linspire To Move to Ubuntu.
February 12, 2007... Linspire, nee Lindows, the desktop Linux house that we gather has been struggling, says it's going to transition off its version of Debian and replace it with Ubuntu, another Debian derivative, under a technology pact with Canonical, the South...

VMware Monetizes its Freeware.(VMware Server)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... VMware has brought out a $1,500 SMB bundle meant to monetize the free VMware Server. The new package includes VirtualCenter with VMware Server and enterprise-class support. VirtualCenter offers centralized management and rapid server...

IBM Throws a Security Blanket around Virtualization.
February 12, 2007... IBM's Research Labs say they've figured out a way to embed what they call "Fort Knox-like" mainframe-like security directly into virtualization and management software that are already deployed inside data centers. They call the stuff...

Microsoft Forbids Virtualization of Junior Editions of Vista.
February 12, 2007... Hmmm. It seems that Microsoft has put the entry-level versions of Vista, namely the Home Basic and Home Premium editions, out of bounds to VMware or the Windows-on-Mac-running Parallels. Microsoft's End User License Agreements (EULAs)...

In the Footsteps of Y2K.(daylight saving time regulations)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Oh, great, now Daylight Savings Time has become a problem. It seems that since the United States government, in its infinite wisdom, has moved the start of Daylight Saving Time to March rather than April, there could be a problem with...

GroundWork Clears Third Round.
February 12, 2007... GroundWork Open Source, the network monitoring and management ISV, an open source competitor to, oh, HP OpenView, has raised a $12.5 million third round that it describes as being oversubscribed. It hooked JAFCO Ventures, which led, and SAP...

Norway Goes with Sun for e-Government.
February 12, 2007... Norway is deploying open source Solaris 10-run x86 and T1-based Sun Fire servers as the basis of a nation-wide eNorway 2009 initiative that's meant to provide Norwegians with web-based portal access to government services including voting. ...

Gigaspaces Gets Round.
February 12, 2007... Gigaspaces, the transaction-intensive middleware house, as raised a C round worth $5 million led by BRM Capital and joined by Intel and newcomer FTVentures. So far the company has raised $13 million. It wants to expand and enter Asia Pacific,...

Greenplum Gets Money, New CEO.(Bill Cook)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Greenplum, the start-up with the Postgres database for business intelligence and data warehousing, has closed on $15 million in funding, a $4 million line of credit and a new CEO, Bill Cook, imported from Penguin. Before Penguin he was senior...

Red Hat Updates its Security.
February 12, 2007... Red Hat is touting its new Certificate System 7.2, a complete public key infrastructure (PKI) that's supposed to guarantee the identity of users and insure private communications in heterogeneous environments. The new release - Red Hay...

FTC Orders Rambus To Slash its Royalties.
February 12, 2007... As payback for its "unlawful monopoly" and in the name of "restoring competition," the Federal Trade Commission Monday ordered Rambus to cap the patent royalties it charges for its SDRAM and DDR SDRAM licenses. The cap, which does not cover...

Michael Dell Climbs Back in the Saddle.
February 12, 2007... Boomerang CEO Michael Dell's immediate solution to his company's deepening crisis is to scrub all bonuses for 2006, but he promised people above-market raises. For an incentive, he's offering a shortened vesting period of three years for future...

Intel Flat in Graphics.
February 12, 2007... Roughly 83.5 million PC graphics devices shipped from major suppliers last quarter, up a mere 0.9% sequentially and up 5.1% year-over-year, according to Jon Peddie Research, which counts such things. Intel was first but flat sequentially...

HP Gets Itself a New Lawyer.
February 12, 2007... HP has replaced its general counsel Ann Baskins, the one who oversaw the so-called Kona pretexting exercises and resigned minutes before she was supposed to testify before Congress about the company's boardroom spy caper. Poetically, it's...

Microsoft To License Three More Protocols.
February 12, 2007... Microsoft, evidently looking over its shoulder at the European antitrust authorities, who are now debating the legality of Vista, is going to open up its instant messaging, e-mail and collaboration protocols to competitors in the name of...

AMD Adds New Energy-Efficient Opterons.
February 12, 2007... AMD Wednesday added new low-power Opterons to its portfolio. The entry-level 1000 Series 1218 HE, 2218 HE and 8218 HE are spec'd at 68W maximum and use the company PowerNow technology to reduce energy consumption during idle times. It also said...

Oracle Sends IGF to the Liberty Alliance.
February 12, 2007... Oracle has sent its open standards-based Identity Governance Framework (IGF) over to the Liberty Alliance royalty-free. IGF establishes a standard way of defining policies for sharing identity-related employee, customer and partner information...

Gateway Still a Mess.(forecasting its sales)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... But for the grace of an $11.8 million tax credit, Gateway would have been unprofitable again in the fourth quarter. However, as it is, the company managed to return an $8.8 profit, or two cents a share, on revenues down 9% year-over-year,...

Jobs Comes Out Against DRM-Protected Music To Take Heat Off iTunes-iPod Lock-in.
February 12, 2007... Steve Jobs, his music monopoly under pressure, wants the Big Four record companies that control 70% of music publishing, namely Universal, Sony BMG, Warner and EMI, to release their music without digital rights management so "any player can...

Google Dreams of Microsoft's Armageddon - Presently.
February 12, 2007... The TechCrunch blog thinks it stumbled over and captured evidence of Google working on a PowerPoint knockoff dubbed Presently before it was purged from Google's Docs & Spreadsheets programming code. You'll remember that the web-based...

Mellanox IPOs.
February 12, 2007... Mellanox Technologies (MLNX), the Infiniband house, went public Thursday ultimately pricing the float at $17, five bucks more than expected, and raising $102 million on the six million shares. It added three bucks during the day to close up...

Now That's What I Call an Add-on.(Force10 Networks)(Brief article)
February 12, 2007... Force10 Networks, which makes gigE and 10Gb Ethernet routers and switches, the natural-born rivals of Infiniband, got a $54 million add-on to its Series F round this week, pushing its Series F investment to $104 million so far. The company...

We Might Know the Results of Microsoft's European Antitrust Appeal by September.
February 12, 2007... Bo Vesterdorf, the president of Europe's Court of First Instance, which heard Microsoft's appeal of the European Commission's 2004 antitrust decision against the company, says he's hoping to have a verdict before he leaves office in September....

HP Quits Nasdaq.
February 12, 2007... HP is going to pull out of the Nasdaq and remain listed on the New York Stock Exchange. It says it's to reduce the cost of exchange listing fees and the "administrative burdens associated with a dual listing." It doesn't think it will affect...

AMD Gets IBM Guy To Run Manufacturing.
February 12, 2007... AMD has named Douglas Grose senior VP of technology development, manufacturing and supply chain, succeeding the retiring Daryl Ostrander and responsible for all manufacturing - AMD's own and its contractors' - and for its process technology....

IBM Pushes Off Response to PSI Suit.
February 12, 2007... IBM has begged more time to answer Platform Solution's mainframe antitrust tying suit. Its response isn't due now until March 8. Meanwhile, feisty little PSI is taking itself to the Share user group do this week to peddle its Itanium-based...

HP Takes Up with Transitive To Harry Sun.
February 12, 2007... HP, as you might expect, is going to use Transitive-transcribed Solaris/Sparc-to-Linux/x86 programs to shift Sun users to its ProLiant platforms. It is also certifying the 64-bit x86 version of Solaris 10 on seven of its servers: BL20p G4,...

IBM x86 Boss Gone.
February 12, 2007... Susan Whitney, the head of IBM's x86 servers, has retired.

iPhone, Meet Anti-iPhone.
February 19, 2007... First International Computer (FIC), the multibillion-dollar Taiwanese OEM/ODM that makes desktops, notebooks and motherboards for HP, Dell, Gateway and Fujitsu, among sundry others, and is in bed with Intel, AMD, ATI, Nvidia and Microsoft, is...

Pam on the Lam?
February 19, 2007... Pamela Jones, a k a PJ, the shy but celebrated, immensely influential, apparently agoraphobic, "won't come out in public," "nobody knows who she is" creator of Groklaw who dropped out of the heavens three-plus years ago armed with a fully...

Microsoft Rails Against IBM's Anti-OOXML Politicking.
February 19, 2007... In an open letter posted Wednesday on its web site, Microsoft accused IBM of undermining its attempt to get its Office Open XML (OOXML) document format standardized by ISO and subverting Redmond's push toward user-pleasing interoperability. ...

IBM To Try Again To Shoo Microsoft Off the Desktop.
February 19, 2007... IBM is going to give the slow move to Linux-on-the-desktop a shove and make it easier for businesses to run Linux- and Mac OS X-based desktops, hoping they'll ultimately snub Microsoft. It's pulled together some of its own Lotus widgetry,...

Novell Crisis Delays GPL 3.
February 19, 2007... The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has delayed publishing the final draft of the new General Public License, otherwise known as GPL v3, the one FSF has been threatening to punish Novell with and prevent it from distributing future versions of...

Red Hat Joins Microsoft Alliance.
February 19, 2007... Red Hat has joined Microsoft's Interop Alliance, saying it'll build on the interoperability work started by its JBoss unit 18 months ago to optimize JBoss' middleware on Windows. It wants to deepen JBoss' interoperability beyond standards to...

Microsoft & Novell Sketch Out a Roadmap of Their Controversial Collaboration.
February 19, 2007... Microsoft and Novell have started laying out a technical roadmap of where their new five-year relationship is going - provided the Free Software Foundation doesn't try to stop Novell from distributing Linux. The Microsoft-Novell detente really...

ISVs Unite To Push Open Source Software into the Enterprise.
February 19, 2007... Ten open source ISVs Wednesday formed the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA) to address the interoperability of business-class open source software so they can compete against proprietary software. The founders include EnterpriseDB, CollabNet,...

Windows Can Run Unmodified on SUSE in a Xen Environment.
February 19, 2007... Novell and Intel say they have the drivers that will let Windows run unmodified in a Xen virtual environment on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 on Intel servers fitted with Intel's Virtualization Technology. They said the paravirtualized...

Fleury Leaves Red Hat.(Marc Fleury)(Brief article)
February 19, 2007... Red Hat and Marc Fleury, the petulant, tirade-addicted Frenchman who started JBoss and sold it to Red Hat eight months ago, have officially parted company. Fleury is about $150 million richer for the experience. He hasn't really been...

Opsware Patent Challenged.(by Public Patent Foundation )(Brief article)
February 19, 2007... The Public Patent Foundation is challenging an Opsware remote computer management patent, saying it was pre-empted by open source work that was publicly available more than a year before the patent was filed. PUBPAT has submitted the prior...

Sun Tilts LAMP.(Sun Microsystems Inc. developing Solaris + AMP operating system)(Brief article)
February 19, 2007... Sun has taken a leaf out of SCO's book and appropriated the famous open source LAMP stack and turning it into Solaris + AMP like SCO tried SCAMP, short for SCO Unix plus Apache, MySQL/PostgresSQL and PHP et al. Sun is directing its version...

DST Threat Solution.
February 19, 2007... Responding to the new Daylight Saving Time threat, Novell said Thursday that its ZenWorks Patch Management solution would tell Linux, Windows, Solaris and HP-UX computers to set their clocks ahead an hour the second Sunday in March and back...

Ingres Eclipses.
February 19, 2007... Ingres has unveiled an Eclipse Bundle for Java developers to build and deploy applications on the Ingres 2006 database. It includes Ingres enhancements to the Eclipse Data Tools Project. It's also picked up Satyam Computer Services, the Indian...

Black Duck Raises Another $12m.
February 19, 2007... Black Duck Software, the IP sorter-outer, has raised a $12 million C round. A new investor, Focus Ventures, led with participation from existing backers Intel, SAP, Fidelity Ventures, Flagship Ventures and General Catalyst Partners. The money...

Novell Makes its Interim CFO Permanent.
February 19, 2007... Novell has made its interim CFO Dana Russell a permanent fixture. Russell has been serving as interim CFO since last June. He's been at Novell since 1994, a WordPerfect legacy. Novell owes financial reports. It's been investigating options...

FTC Seeks Vengeance on Pretexters.(Federal Trade Commission investigating Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief article)
February 19, 2007... In a unanimous decision, the Federal Trade Commission has asked a US district court in Florida to order a permanent halt to the pretexting operations of investigators that HP used in its boardroom spy caper and says it will ask the court to...

Dell Down Two Executives, Up One.
February 19, 2007... Well, the feeling that it's not worth fighting the good fight has apparently settled over Dell, especially with Dell's stock in the tank and Michael Dell canning bonuses. John Hamlin, the guy who's been running Dell's online business, is...

Beam Me Up, Scotty, There's a Teraflop Monster Here!
February 19, 2007... Well, if it can make it x86-compatible, get somebody to write a workable operating system for it, teach the world a new way of parallel computing-style programming, and produce it in volume, Intel is going to have itself a general-purpose...

Servers & Global Warming.
February 19, 2007... The amount of power consumed by servers doubled between 2000 and 2005, sucking up the generating capacity of roughly 14 power plants worldwide, according to Lawrence Berkeley National Lab scientist Jonathan Koomey in a study paid for by AMD....

AMD Quad To Regulate the Frequency on Each Core.
February 19, 2007... AMD said at the International Solid State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) this week that its upcoming Barcelona quad-core Opteron chip has been designed with new power- and thermal-management techniques that should reinforce its...

Hitachi To Cool HP AMD Boxes.
February 19, 2007... Hitachi says it's going to provide HP's high-performance Opteron-based xw9400 workstations with a new Liquid Cooling System it's developed that's supposed to reduce heat and noise better than air-cooling. HP is the first American vendor to go...

Belgian Court Finds Google Infringed Copyrights.
February 19, 2007... Google says it's going to appeal a Belgian court decision Tuesday finding it ignored the copyrights on a bunch of local French- and German-language newspapers. Google currently faces a possible fine of $4.3 million and claims it's pulled...

ODF Hits 1.1 Stage.
February 19, 2007... OASIS and the backers of the Microsoft-alternative OpenDocument Format (ODF) have gussied up the standard to give it accessibility features that governments demand for the incapacitated that it was under pressure to provide. There is now a dot...