Linux Gram articles from January 2008

Linux Gram archives from January 2008

Sun Buys MySQL, Gets Oracle for an Enemy.
January 21, 2008... Sun, Oracle's sometimes best friend, turned into an Oracle competitor Wednesday morning when it said it was buying MySQL, the open source database that's part of the famous LAMP stack. It's paying a billion dollars. MySQL was supposed to...

Analysts Trash ODF.
January 21, 2008... With about a month to go before the ISO ballot on standardizing Microsoft's Open Office XML (OOXML) format, the Burton Group has thrown gasoline on the fire of the great OOXML v ODF debate. In a 36-page analysis of the relative merits of...

VMware Buys Thinstall & Foedus.
January 21, 2008... VMware is buying a little San Francisco-based application virtualization house called Thinstall on undisclosed terms to expand its ability to provision, deploy and update the desktop. VMware observes that delivering applications is the...

Mandriva, Turbo Join Their Distros at the Hip.(Brief article)
January 21, 2008... Remember the ill-fated UnitedLinux? Well, the French-Brazilian Mandriva and the Asian Turbolinux, second-string Linux vendors, are trying to reprise a junior version of that cost-effective dream, hoping to win new customers. They set...

Eclipse Kicks Off Key SOA Project.
January 21, 2008... Eclipse is trying to develop an open source Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework based on technology contributed by Deutsche Post World Net. Nicknamed Swordfish, the Eclipse project is meant to result in widgetry used in...

BEA Falls to Oracle After All.
January 21, 2008... What Oracle wants Oracle gets. It said Wednesday morning that it had reached a compromise price with BEA and that the acquisition would go through after all, having been resisted by BEA, demanded by the dangerous Carl Icahn, BEA's biggest...

AMD Takes Huge Charge, Widening Losses.
January 21, 2008... AMD lost $1.77 billion, or $3.06 a share, in the fourth quarter. That's $1.6 billion, or $2.89 a share, lost to impairments in its Spansion investment (12 cents) and write-offs of goodwill and intangibles connected with ATI, its $5.6...

AMD Confirms Phenom Delay.
January 21, 2008... Late last Friday AMD confirmed reports that its quad Phenom 9700 and 9900 would be no-shows until the second quarter, claiming the decision was based on "OEM input on how AMD should prioritize its next two waves of AMD Phenom processor models."...

So How Far Down the Line Can Patent Royalties Go?
January 21, 2008... Having already thrown patent law for a loop last year in its decision on obviousness in the now-famous KSR v Teleflex case, the US Supreme Court is now deciding whether LG Electronics, which owns patents on IP that Intel uses in its chips and...

HP Still Playing Catch Me If You Can.
January 21, 2008... If you listen to IDC, PCs were up a solid but still less-than-expected 15.5% worldwide in Q4. If you listen to Gartner the number was 13.1%. If you listen to Credit Suisse, which is a lot more buoyant, you hear that the IDC-Gartner results...

Intel Tanks; Blames Television in Part.
January 21, 2008... Intel's Q4 results, as good as they were, failed to impress a panicky "the sky is falling" stock market and Intel's light Q1 forecast, which the company called "a little bit cautious" on the US economy, sent the stock and the market down...

EC Sizing Up M'soft for New Thumb Screws.
January 21, 2008... The European Commission has more than made good on its threat to open a new investigation of Microsoft. It's opened two new investigations and neither is about Vista. One comes in response to Opera Software's complaint last month that...

Apple Give 'Thin' New Meaning.
January 21, 2008... Apple unveiled that thinny thin thin notebook at MacWorld, the fruit of 100 design prototypes, just like the rumor mill said it would. Less than an inch thick, it's called the MacBook Air and weighs in at three pounds with a full-sized...

Intel Tempts White Box Makers.
January 21, 2008... Intel has put out modular server building blocks that white box makers can use to integrate computing, networking and storage into systems bound for the SMB market. It describes them as based on Intel Multi-Flex Technology, a set of...

Patent Watch.
January 21, 2008... IFI Patent Intelligence has counted up the US patents granted last year and says there were 157,284 of them, down 9.5% from 2006's all-time high when the Patent Office really started complaining about the backlog, which is currently around 1.1...

Tibco Next?
January 21, 2008... With BEA gone to Oracle, the speculators have turned to Tibco Software, figuring the smaller middleware company is likely to be swallowed by some bigger fish. Its stock shot up better than 11% on the news that Oracle was buying BEA. Its market...

Vista SP1 Betas.
January 21, 2008... The largely bug-fixing Vista Service Pack 1 release candidate has gone to public beta.

Leopard Hits 5m Copies.
January 21, 2008... There are five million copies of Leopard out there now, Apple says, almost 20% of the installed base and a wonder after only 90 days.

At Least 4m iPhones Sold.(Brief article)
January 21, 2008... Apple CEO Steve Jobs said Tuesday during his MacWorld keynote that four million iPhones have been sold and using Gartner data claimed the widget garnered a 19.5% share of the US smartphone market between June and September, its first three...

Quest for the $75 Laptop Starts.(Brief article)
January 21, 2008... Having failed to established a $100 laptop, the ex-CTO of One Laptop Per Child Mary Lou Jepsen and her shiny new for-profit Pixel Qi start-up is going to shoot for a $75 laptop while also commercializing the sunlight-readable, low-cost,...

Microsoft Cuts Another Patent Cross-License.
January 21, 2008... Microsoft has cut another one of those patent cross-licenses it's grown fond of, this one with JVC. The agreement is said to cover a broad range of consumer products that each company manufactures and sells and while no details were released -...

SGI To OEM Panasas Gear.
January 21, 2008... SGI is going to sell Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage Clusters to customers deploying SGI-based Altix ICE and XE HPC Linux clusters. The Panasas goods will augment SGI's InfiniteStorage line. The two have already collaborated on a few...

Secret to Long-Life Laptop Batteries May Be at Hand.
January 21, 2008... Stanford University researchers may have figured out a way to increase the life of the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries used in laptops, iPods and other consumer goods 10 times.

Sun Bright.
January 21, 2008... Sun pre-announced its positive calendar Q4 results in the latest fashion among large companies and said it's untroubled by recession fears. It is however expecting to take a $50 million-$100 million charge against in-process R&D because of its...