Linux Gram articles from July 2007

Linux Gram archives from July 2007

Time Out.
July 2, 2007... Because of the Fourth of July on Wednesday, the next issue of LinuxGram will be out on July 13. Have a good one.

Prof Claims He's Got a Bead on Pentium's Replacement.
July 2, 2007... A professor at the University of Maryland's A. James Clark School of Engineering, armed with a grant from the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation, figures he's close to having a general-purpose parallel processing chip...

GPLv3 To Lift Off Today.
July 2, 2007... The controversial GPLv3 rewrite is supposed to come into effect at noon New York time today, putting key pieces of the GNU Linux operating system off-limits to friends of Microsoft like Xandros and Linspire if they ever want to upgrade. ...

SGI Builds Ultra-Dense HPC Platform Out of Blades.
July 2, 2007... SGI, which got sucked into the original Itanium morass and paid dearly for it, this week introduced Carlsbad, a cool-running Linux-based integrated blade platform built around dual- and quad-core Xeon 5100 Woodcrest and Clovertown chips that it...

Mandriva Tells Microsoft To Take a Hike.
July 2, 2007... Mandriva says it won't follow Novell, Linspire and Xandros into Microsoft's lair and wants no part of any stinkin' Microsoft patent protection scheme. CEO Francois Bancilhon says he has seen "no hard evidence from any of the FUD...

Linspire CEO Calls Certain Distros 'High-Brow Pirates'.
July 2, 2007... In justifying his deal with Microsoft in an open letter and explaining that there's market demand for functionality that can only be filled by proprietary widgetry, Linspire CEO Kevin Carmony observed that "some distributions have come out,...

SCO Gets e-Government Deal in India.
July 2, 2007... Well, now, here's something you won't read on Groklaw. SCO has gotten a pilot contract from Madhya Pradesh, the second-largest state in India, which intends to use SCO's Mobile Server to develop and deploy online government services for its...

Sun To Open Source Solaris Cluster Code.
July 2, 2007... Sun said Wednesday that it would open source Solaris Cluster source code through the HA Clusters community on the OpenSolaris site. But it will take a while. This Open HA Cluster code will come out in three phases over the next 18 months....

Red Hat Beats the Street by a Penny.(Brief article)
July 2, 2007... Red Hat earned $16.2 million, or eight cents a share, up 17% year-over-year on revenues of $118.9 million, up 42% year-over-year and up 7% sequentially in its first fiscal quarter ended May 31. On a non-GAAP basis it made 16 cents. Wall...

Sun Really Pulls a Switch.
July 2, 2007... Sun wants to be in the HPC supercomputer business and offered a glimpse of its Constellation cluster system, its new petascale architecture, this week ahead of its Q4 due date. Constellation is supposed to be capable of 1.7 petaFLOPS, which...

Red Hat Names Ex-Wyse Guy To Run China.(Andrew Hu )(Brief article)
July 2, 2007... Red Hat has named Andrew Hu president of Red Hat Operations in Greater China, reporting to Gery Messer, president of Red Hat Asia-Pacific. Hu was president of Wyse Asia-Pacific, the thin client operation majority owned by Garnett and Helfrich...

Open Source Ad Vehicle Forming.
July 2, 2007... TechTracker Media (TTM) is trying to pull together an advertising vehicle dedicated to open source, a so-called Open Source Channel, beginning with BetaNews, OSnews and some of O'Reilly's online publications. Figure rates around $30-$50 CPM....

Ingram Micro To Resell Google Hardware.
July 2, 2007... Google has gone into big-time distribution for the first time, picking up Ingram Micro to resell the Google Mini and Dell-made Google Search Appliance, enterprise search devices that Google by itself has sold 9,000 of. It says it wants to...

Oracle's Apps Need a Caffeine Jolt.
July 2, 2007... Oracle, whose magic number is 20%, flaunted fiscal fourth-quarter earnings of $1.6 billion, up 23% year-over-year, on revenues up 20% to $5.8 billion against what it kept reminding people was a hard compare. It claimed it took market share...

Google May Pull its E-Mail Out of Germany.
July 2, 2007... Google lost its Gmail trademark in the UK two years ago and changed the name to Google Mail. Now it's lost an appeal in Germany to electronic postal delivery entrepreneur Daniel Giersch who registered the name seven years, long before Google...

Microsoft Betas Web Storage Service.
July 2, 2007... Microsoft has released limited betas of Windows Live Folders, which means 500MB of free storage, and Windows Live Photo Gallery as part of its Google-addressing strategy to offer online services for its offline software. The Folders...

Google Docs Get Facelift.
July 2, 2007... Google has given its Docs & Spreadsheets a facelift: new icons and folders instead of tags. Tags are automatically converted to folders whether you want them or not and documents can live in more than one folder at a time. It also offers...

Google Complains to Court about Microsoft.
July 2, 2007... Google Monday morning filed a brief with the court supervising Microsoft's antitrust settlement with the US government pressing its claim that Vista's desktop search violates Microsoft's 2002 consent decree - despite the supposedly...

What Price Cool?(Apple iPhone smart phone)(Column)
July 2, 2007... It's going to cost at least $1,976 to own and operate one of Apple's iPhones over two years, the only term available - and that's before any add-ons. On the high end, it's going to cost at least $3,036 for a 4.8-ounce...

Lord, Why EDGE?
July 2, 2007... The burning question in technology at the moment is why the heck Apple went with AT&T's horribly slow EDGE network for its dazzlingly pretty iPhone. Well, Steve Jobs reportedly told an all-hands meeting Thursday because EDGE is more pervasive...

Light at the End of the Vista Tunnel Appears To Move Further Away.
July 2, 2007... Microsoft told Google and the Justice Department that it will have a beta Vista Service Pack out by the end of the year. The operative word is beta. See, according to Lehman Brothers that implies it's late and won't be out until sometime next...

Opera Coup Fails.
July 2, 2007... Heads have rolled at Opera Software. Five of its seven board member, including the chairman, were fired at a shareholders meeting last week after they failed to oust co-founder and CEO Jon von Tetzchner. There are now three new directors and a...

Hey, Guys, It Works.
July 2, 2007... Although still in beta, Microsoft.com is now on Longhorn, a k a Windows Server 2008. They took pictures. And, according to Netcraft, which counts such things, so are 2,600 other web sites give or take. Microsoft just released a Longhorn Beta 3...

Hmmm.
July 2, 2007... Although he admits talks with Microsoft about a patent agreement broke down before Microsoft signed up Novell in early November, Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulik couldn't tell Reuters if Red Hat is negotiating patent protection with Microsoft now. "I...

Is MySQL Worth $1b?
July 2, 2007... BusinessWeek has been poking around the anticipated MySQL IPO, maybe this year, and says it was told the offering could value the $50 million-a-year open source database company, new to breakeven, somewhere between $600 million and a billion...

JasperSoft Gets D Round.
July 2, 2007... JasperSoft, the open source business intelligence house, has taken in a $12.27 million D round, well, at least the first $11 million, from Scale Venture Partners along with Partech International, DCM and Morganthaler. That means it will have...

Microsoft to Google: Beware the Ides of March.
July 2, 2007... "Google is going to face the regulatory burdens that Microsoft faced. It's going to be legislation by bad example. Something awful is going to happen, and legislators will run off and draft something that deals with privacy issues." - Microsoft...

Life Inside the Googleplex According to a Microsoft Returnee.
July 2, 2007... http://no2google.wordpress.com/2007/06/24/life-at-google-the-microsoftie-perspective/.

Google Buys Postini To Entice Big Companies to its Hosted Apps.
July 16, 2007... Google, which as we all know (wink, wink, nod, nod) isn't competing with Microsoft, is acquiring privately held Postini for around $625 million cash. The deal just coincidently happens to strengthen its applications push into the...

Longhorn To Launch in 2008.
July 16, 2007... Microsoft was pretty transparent when it called Longhorn Windows Server 2008. On Tuesday at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference in Denver COO Kevin Turner said Windows Server 2008 would launch on February 27, 2008 at festivities in...

Microsoft Resists the GPL.
July 16, 2007... The rewritten GPL 3 license, modified to gut Microsoft's patent claims on open source, has been released and Microsoft's reaction has been to issue a statement saying it's not a party to it, has no legal obligations under it, and that the Free...

Samba Adopts GPL 3.
July 16, 2007... Samba, the open source networked file and print project, and one of the biggest burrs under Microsoft's saddle, particularly with the European Commission, has adopted GPLv3 for all future versions of its code. It is the first major win for...

Turbolinux Sidles Up to Microsoft.
July 16, 2007... This time there's no mention of patent protection, but Turbolinux, which has become a major Linux distribution in Japan, has taken up with Microsoft and will join Microsoft's open source OpenXML-ODF translator project on Sourceforge. It's going...

IBM Frees Web Services Patents.
July 16, 2007... IBM says it is foreswearing enforcement of a bunch of patents it holds that might be necessary to implement upwards of 150 standards designed to make software interoperate. It says it is granting "universal and perpetual access" to the IP...

SCO v Novell Case Down To Pre-Trial Schedules.
July 16, 2007... The judge overseeing the SCO v Novell case over who the heck owns Unix hasn't ruled on the summary judgment motions piled on his desk, but he did sign the pre-trial schedule for the housekeeping that has to be handled before the trial starts on...

Massachusetts Comes Around.
July 16, 2007... Three CIOs later, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which was going to ditch Microsoft over its proprietary formats and gave the rival OpenDocument Format (ODF) a lot of credibility, has in hand a draft proposal recognizing Microsoft's Office...

JBoss Application Platform Arrives.(Red Hat Inc. introduced JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2)(Brief article)
July 16, 2007... Red Hat has delivered JBoss Enterprise Application Platform 4.2, an expansion out of mere operating systems and heavy on the enterprise as its target market. It combines the JBoss open source application server with the Hibernate...

Oracle Seems To Put Linux First.
July 16, 2007... Well, the only thing Oracle is willing to confirm is that it's supposed to ship its shiny new 11g database, the result of a reported 36.000 man-months of development, for Linux this quarter, maybe August. Oracle's been beating the ground to...

Microsoft Starts SaaS Price War.
July 16, 2007... Playing catch-up Microsoft says it's going to undercut salesforce.com later this quarter when it trots out Dynamics Live CRM, its first in-house hosted customer relationship management software. Microsoft's already got third parties hosting...

Dell Creates Small Business Line.
July 16, 2007... Whatever sins of omission or commission the United States government is planning on charging Dell with once its two-year investigation is over have got to pale beside Dell's current abuse of a poor dead language. Long-buried Latin masters...

VMware IPO Priced; Intel Buys In.
July 16, 2007... Intel is going to buy $218.5 million worth of VMware's Class A common stock. That means it will own 2.5% of VMware once the EMC subsidiary goes public, but less than 1% of the voting share. However, Intel will get a board seat. VMware...

VirtualLogix Raises $16m.
July 16, 2007... VMware ain't the only place Intel is laying a virtual bet. Besides the position it's taking in the soon-to-IPO EMC subsidiary, it's part of the $16 million B round raised by VirtualLogix to underwrite its real-time virtualization software...

MySQL Goads Oracle.
July 16, 2007... MySQL is going to wave a red cape in front of Oracle by offering senior Oracle database administrators a free one-day course of technical training in its advanced techniques. Roughly a third of Oracle users are supposed to have MySQL in their...

SAP Confesses to Petty Theft, Not Industrial Espionage.
July 16, 2007... SAP has admitted that its TomorrowNow (TN) subsidiary downloaded unauthorized "fixes and support documents" from Oracle's web site but claims there was a Chinese Wall between SAP and TN that prevented SAP from having access to Oracle's IP as...

SOA Decisions Kicked Upstairs.
July 16, 2007... IBM quotes a survey it had the Link Group do and says strategic decisions to adopt a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and what partners should be brought in to do it are shifting away from IT staff to C-level executives and business...

First Barcelona Chips To Ship Next Month.
July 16, 2007... AMD says it's going to ship its first Barcelona quad chips for revenue in August and that it'll be the first time it delivers both standard and low-power parts at the same time. The date pushes the first shipping systems into September. ...

Voltaire To Go Public.
July 16, 2007... Voltaire is going down the same IPO road as Infiniband fellow traveler Mellanox. Although it's still losing money - $4.2 million on sales of $8.6 million in the March quarter - and does close to 70% of its business with HP, IBM and Sun,...

SA Disaffection.
July 16, 2007... Forrester Research surveyed 63 Microsoft customers up for renewal in the first half and found that 26% weren't reupping their Software Assurance contracts and another third were undecided. It's the money and the long stretches between upgrades...

SEC Charges Former Veritas Executives with Fraud.
July 16, 2007... The SEC has charged Mark Leslie, the former CEO of Veritas now teaching at Stanford, and four other former Veritas higher-ups with fraud. Leslie and ex-CFO Kenneth Lonchar and ex-executive VP Paul Sallaberry have been accused of...

Backdating Watch.(Brocade Communications Systems Inc. accused for securities fraud)(Brief article)
July 16, 2007... The first - and at times highly entertaining - stock options trial may never get to the jury - and goodness knows what that would mean for the other backdating cases standing in line behind the Brocade mess and taking their cue from it. ...

Exchange Being Reverse Engineered.
July 16, 2007... One open source project that's supposed to Microsoft biting its lower lip is OpenChange, a European-based attempt to create a native open source implementation of Microsoft Exchange Server and Exchange protocols under Unix and Linux. It's...

Former ATI CEO Resigns from AMD.
July 16, 2007... As might have been expected, former ATI Technologies president and CEO Dave Orton has resigned from AMD where he's been an executive VP puttering with ATI's integration into AMD since last October. He's leaving the end of July. AMD said Adrian...

Turnaround Takes Time: Dell.
July 16, 2007... At the Vostro announcement in New York Tuesday, Dell CEO Michael Dell stated to the obvious: "There is a lot to be done" to fix the company. The plan is to bring in new talent, control costs, strike partnerships and make acquisitions.

LG Sues Quanta.
July 16, 2007... LG Electronics is suing Quanta in US district court in Wisconsin claiming the Taiwan contract manufacturer and its laptops infringe four of its DVD patents. LG wants damages and an injunction. The suit says the laptops were made for US computer...

Microsoft's aQuantive Buy a Go.
July 16, 2007... Microsoft's proposed $6 billion aQuantive online advertising acquisition, a putative Google holding action, has cleared the FTC regulatory hurdles unscathed.

Dell Begs Patience from Nasdaq.
July 16, 2007... Dell, which is like a year behind in its paperwork, has got until Monday July 16 to produce its missing financial statements to stay in Nasdaq's good graces, but the company says it's going to ask for still another extension promising the...

Sourceforge Monetization.
July 16, 2007... As a way of monetizing Sourceforge, the open source development rendezvous, they're letting folks buy and sell services from the site.

Start-up Dangles Open Source SaaS in Front of Consumers.
July 23, 2007... Software-as-a-service took another twist this week. A start-up called Zonbu started peddling a small router-size Gentoo Linux-based consumer PC pre-loaded with a swat of free or open source applications and games, stuff like the OpenOffice...

Google Finds Another Way To Charge for Search.
July 23, 2007... As a way of diversifying - this time exploiting its core competency - and bringing in still more money, Google wants to sell SMBs a way for visitors to search their sites. It calls the hosted, extranet service Custom Search Business...

OOXML's Fast Track to ISO Standardization a Minefield.
July 23, 2007... V1, the subcommittee advising the International Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) on formats, has failed by a tantalizing two votes to endorse Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format, already standardized by ECMA, as...

Everex To Sell OpenOffice-on-Windows Box at Wal-Mart.
July 23, 2007... Everex is taking a different tack with this open source stuff and is going to sell a $298 Vista Home Basic-based back-to-school PC at Wal-Mart's with OpenOffice 2.2, saving the user the cost of Office and letting him get used to the idea of...

A la Mobile Promises Really Secure Linux Smartphone.
July 23, 2007... Two-year-old a la mobile is promising to announce the world's most secure Linux operating systems platform for smartphones any minute now. Its patented Mobile Security Engine combines enterprise security features like sandboxing and encryption...

Dell Hopes It's Buying a Gorilla.
July 23, 2007... Dell - which has little to no acquisition skills - but has been promising - well, at least in part - to buy its way out of its current mess - is going to acquire privately held managed service provider Silverback Technologies Inc on undisclosed...

Google's DoubleClick Gauntlet Just Got Longer.
July 23, 2007... Concern about Google's proposed acquisition of DoubleClick - some of it presumably fanned by the Microsoft lobby - is rising. Besides a pre-merger investigation by the Federal Trade Commission and a newly confirmed review by the European...

HP Remains King of the Hill.
July 23, 2007... Gartner and IDC figure PC shipments were up ~12% worldwide in Q2, more than expected because of Asian and surprising American demand. Google puts the number at 61.1 million units, IDC at 58.8 million. Laptops were up about 50%. Vista...

Price War Creams Intel's Margin.
July 23, 2007... Intel came in with Q2 revenues of $8.7 billion, up 8% year-over-year, veering toward the high end of the company's April prediction of $8.2 billion-$8.8 billion and reportedly spread pretty evenly worldwide. Net income was up 44%...

AMD Revenues Up; Heavy Losses Continue.
July 23, 2007... Limping from the price wars, AMD actually did better than many expected after Intel reported on Tuesday. Yeah, sure, it lost a nasty $600 million, or $1.09 a share, but that includes 24 cents attributable to its $5.6 billion acquisition of...

US Patent Reform Bill Moves Out of Committee.
July 23, 2007... The proposed Patent Reform Act of 2007 that critics of the US patent system put so much stock in has cleared the House Judiciary Committee and should now wend its way to the House floor for debate. Its backers are hoping for action before the...

Microsoft Appeal Decision Definitely On for September 17.
July 23, 2007... The Court of First Instance in Luxembourg has confirmed that it will rule on Microsoft's appeal of the European Commission's pricey 2004 antitrust decision on Monday September 17, the day before the head of the court Bo Vesterdorf retires. ...

EC Testing Another Front Against Microsoft.
July 23, 2007... Bloomberg reports being told by three knowledge albeit anonymous people that the European Commission has sent a second questionnaire to Microsoft's rivals asking for specific evidence of Microsoft abusing its monopoly in word processing and...

Wanna Bet AMD Can Kiss That One Good-Bye?
July 23, 2007... Well, it seems that Intel and One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) altruist Nicholas Negroponte are supposed to stop pissing on each other's shoes and work together for the good of humanity "through the synergy of their respective programs." This after...

Intel Gets Extreme.
July 23, 2007... Intel has released its first mobile dual-core Core 2 Extreme chip for hardcore gamers, artists and the media set, celebrating the first anniversary of the Core microarchitecture. Both cores run at 2.6GHz and overclock protection has been...

Yahoo Numbers Hint Pressure to Sell Out Will Rise.
July 23, 2007... The Q2 profits that Yahoo reported Tuesday were shaky, down year-over-year from $164 million to $161 million, and its second-half forecasts were limp, which might explain why CEO Terry Semel bailed. Semel's replacement Yahoo co-founder...

Virtualization Start-up Gets Second Round.
July 23, 2007... InovaWave and its DXtreme virtualization performance and efficiency management software has brought in a $7.2 million second round on top of its $2 million first round six months or so ago. Matrix Partners led with Silverton Partners, its...

Talend Gets More Money.(AGF Private Equity and Galileo Partners)(Brief article)
July 23, 2007... Talend, the open source data integration ISV, has secured $3.5 million in Series B financing from AGF Private Equity and Galileo Partners, the firm's existing backers. The money is for marketing, product development and "global expansion of...

Veritas Certified on Oracle's Linux.
July 23, 2007... Symantec's Veritas software has been certified on Oracle's Linux widgetry. Both vendors are supposed to support Veritas Storage Foundation 5.0, Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle 5.0, Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System 5.0,...

Intel Puts Solaris on Telecom Gear.
July 23, 2007... The recent Sun-Intel disarmament pact has resulted in Intel putting Solaris on its carrier-grade rack-mounted servers that are NEBS Level 3- and ETSI-compliant and blades that meet the ATCA spec, in other words telecom gear. Intel says the new...

HP Tops Out.
July 23, 2007... HP has gotten top Linux security certification for an unmodified, commercial operating system, otherwise known as Evaluation Assurance Level 4 (EAL4+) Common Criteria, Red Hat 5, which applies HP servers, workstations and notebooks.

IBM Betas AIX 6.
July 23, 2007... IBM has made an unusual open beta version of AIX 6, its next Unix operating system, which can run Linux applications natively, free to all comers ahead of final release in November. The stuff has virtualization enhancements and reduces the...

HP, MIT Form DSpace Foundation.
July 23, 2007... HP and the MIT Libraries have formed the DSpace Foundation to push the use of DSpace, the open source software for accessing, managing and preserving scholarly works in a digital archive that the pair jointly developed. Currently some 200...

Zoho Puts SaaS Apps on Facebook.
July 23, 2007... Zoho, one of those off-brand online office applications wannabes that dreams of putting Microsoft out of business and heading off Google, has put some of its free widgetry on Facebook, the social networking site, via a Facebook-embedded widget,...

Credit Suisse Gives BEA Six Months Tops Before It's Acquired.
July 23, 2007... Renewed - or maybe the word is just louder since it's been pretty constant - speculation that BEA is up for grabs has Credit Suisse, for one, believing that the company is in play and that it could go for $15-$18 a share. It says, "While...

Microsoft Sprang October Surprise on Novell.
July 23, 2007... Ahh, it seems that Novell didn't know until two weeks before its infamous deal with Microsoft was announced that there was a sine qua non patent component to the thing. The poor little innocent thought Microsoft was negotiating interoperability...

Tealeaf Readers Claim Ubuntu's in HP's Cup.
July 23, 2007... The gossip figures HP will go down the Dell path and start pre-installing Ubuntu on some of its consumer PCs and laptops.