Linux Gram articles from July 2008

Linux Gram archives from July 2008

SCO's Back in the Game. There's Nothing Much Good for Novell in the Latest Court Ruling.
July 21, 2008... Linux users might have to start reaching for their checkbooks again because SCO, Linux' worst nightmare, is back. The Utah court that decided a year ago that Novell, not SCO, owned Unix (SVRx) - although SCO was under the impression it had...

Start-up Creates PowerPC-Based Cloud Desktop.
July 21, 2008... There hasn't been a PowerPC-based computer since Apple abandoned the dingus and bolted to Intel, a move that did wonders for Apple's volumes. Now a Mountain View start-up called CherryPal Inc is about to introduce a $249 Debian-based...

Zoho Signs Swisscom to Six-Month Pilot.
July 21, 2008... Zoho, the online Office wannabe, has gotten Swisscom, the telephone side of the old Swiss PTT monopoly, to offer its 300,000 business customers a suite of Zoho's SaaS applications as part of a six-month pilot through its Teamnet portal. ...

Amazon Puts Money into Ruby & Rails Cloud Merchant.(Brief article)
July 21, 2008... Amazon has kicked into Engine Yard's $15 million Series B round along with Benchmark Capital and New Enterprise Associates. The two-year-old 70-man open source company provides a deployment infrastructure, services and support for developers to...

EC Files New Charges Against Intel.
July 21, 2008... That thud you heard yesterday was the European Commission hitting Intel with a second supplemental indictment-like statement of objection (SO) charging the company with three more instances of antitrust violations designed to keep AMD out of...

AMD CEO Steps Down.
July 21, 2008... CEO Hector Ruiz, increasingly blamed for the harrowing of AMD, stepped down during the company's Q2 conference call with Wall Street Thursday in favor of his sidekick, AMD president and patent-carrying engineer Dirk Meyer, the guy who used to...

Microsoft Disappoints, Ditto Google.
July 21, 2008... Microsoft earned $4.3 billion on revenues of $15.84 billion, up 18%, in its fourth fiscal quarter in June, making it a $60 billion company - compliments of emerging markets and demand for Windows Server 2008. It had better-than-expected...

Microsoft's Silverlight Widgetry Sued for Patent Infringement.
July 21, 2008... Microsoft and its cross-platform, Flash-rivaling, RIA-building Silverlight plug-in are being sued in San Francisco for patent infringement by a no-profile Massachusetts outfit called Gotuit Media Corporation. The thin seven-page suit and...

DeathWish Might Have Been a Better Name.(Brief article)
July 21, 2008... As predictable as the bet that night will follow day, Apple sued a little widely watched wannabe Mac cloner in Florida called Psystar Inc that's been selling a $399 box called Open Computer for the last few months. On July 3 Apple charged...

Fujitsu Siemens Computers May Be Toast: Reuters.
July 21, 2008... The 50-50 Fujitsu-Siemens joint venture Fujitsu Siemens Computers, Europe's biggest PC maker, may come unglued because of thin profit margins, according to Reuters. The Suedeutsche Zeitung said the same thing. The alliance is up for a...

Intel Proves Pretty Much Teflon-Coated.
July 21, 2008... As the economy swings from bad to worse and back again, Intel and the techno lust it engenders keep soldering on. The company's second-quarter results surpassed Wall Street's expectations and - despite various warnings of weakening PC...

Citrix' Project Kensho To Create Hypervisor-Independent Application Workloads.
July 21, 2008... Citrix on Tuesday announced Project Kensho, which is supposed to deliver Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools that will let ISVs and enterprise IT folk create portable hypervisor-independent enterprise application workloads that should run...

Sun Peeks from Behind Clouds.
July 21, 2008... Sun, whose stock has been teetering on the brink of disaster, pre-announced its fourth quarter Tuesday and said it could have non-GAAP earnings somewhere between 25 cents and 35 cents because of a $100 million restructuring charge (five-15...

Whither VMware?
July 21, 2008... VMware is supposed to report its second-quarter results on Tuesday July 22 and people will be tuning in to see how EMC's abrupt ouster of the virtualization leader's CEO and co-founder Diane Greene last week is handled and what is added to the...

DOD To Build HP-Based Cloud.
July 21, 2008... About a month and a half ago HP created a Scalable Computing and Infrastructure Organization (SCIO) out of a stealth Web 2.0 group that it's had under the covers for the last year, year-and-a-half and its HPC unit along with its cloud...

HP Goes into the POD Business.
July 21, 2008... HP is going into the shipping container business following down the path already trod by Sun and recently IBM and some other smaller firms except HP of course figures it can do these data center add-ons better than its rivals. HP calls its...

Guilty of Arrogance Too.
July 21, 2008... You have perhaps heard that while we were on vacation Linux file system ace and convicted wife killer Hans Reiser took the cops to where he had buried her body. Two days later when Reiser was supposed to be sentenced to 25 years to life...

Apple Number 3.
July 21, 2008... Apple is now the third-largest PC vendor in the US, according to IDC and Gartner's preliminary Q2 data, ousting Acer from the slot. Garner thinks Mac shipments were up 38% year-over-year in Q2 to give Apple 8.5% of the sputtering US market,...

DOJ Serving Subpoenas.
July 21, 2008... The Justice Department has reportedly started issuing subpoenas as part of its coming antitrust review of the Google-Yahoo advertising deal.

Microsoft's Sweetener.
July 21, 2008... That Microsoft deal that Yahoo rejected Saturday guaranteed Yahoo $2.3 billion in annual search advertising revenues for the next five years, $19.5 billion-$26.5 billion over 10 years. Last month Microsoft offered $9 billion upfront and a...

One Million iPhones in 3 Days.
July 21, 2008... Apple said Monday that it had sold a million of its new iPhone 3Gs over the weekend. The thing only went on sale last Friday morning. That means Apple sold four times as many of the new phone as its predecessor in its first three days but of...

Citrix Replaces Sales Chief.
July 21, 2008... Citrix has tapped its VP of channels and emerging product sales Al Monserrat to replace its departing sales chief John Burris, who, as previously reported, is going to Sourcefire as CEO. A couple of years ago Monserrat was responsible for...

Ex-HP VP Pleads Guilty.
July 21, 2008... Ex-HP VP Atul Malhotra pleaded guilty last Friday to stealing trade secrets from IBM, his former employer. Remember? He's the one who brought some confidential pricing information with him from IBM and offered it to his HP bosses. Now he's...

Google To Anonymize User Data.
July 21, 2008... In the name of user privacy, Google is going to anonymize YouTube user data and Internet addresses before turning it over under court order to Viacom, which is suing YouTube for a billion dollars for copyright infringement. The deal was cut by...

Online Storage Start-up Gets $8m.(Steek SA)(Brief article)
July 21, 2008... Four-year-old Paris-based Steek SA, an online storage venture, has raised $8 million in second-round financing from AGT Private Equity, part of the Allianz Group, and existing backer Innovacom. It already had a $4 million A round in mid-2006....

Google Down.
July 21, 2008... Last week, while we were on vacation, Google's Documents and Spreadsheets service went down for 45 minutes according to Cnet, one of the hazards of web-based widgetry.

Microsoft Reorgs After Key Exec Bolts.
July 28, 2008... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is now running the company's Windows, Windows Live and Internet properties after Kevin Johnson, the president of the company's Platforms and Services Division (PSD) and a key player in the failed Microsoft-Yahoo...

'OK, Boys, Here's the Plan': What Ballmer's Telling People.(Company overview)
July 28, 2008... With Microsoft mandarin Kevin Johnson bolting to Jupiter, leaving Microsoft to lick its wounds over Yahoo and reorganize, CEO Steve Ballmer sent out an all-hands e-mail to Microsoft folk encapsulating the message he delivered to financial...

Great Yahoo Proxy Fight Ends with a Whimper.
July 28, 2008... There ain't gonna be no highly diverting no-holds-barred fight-to-the-finish proxy fight over Yahoo come the company's stockholders meeting August 1. The two sides cut a deal Monday. Yahoo will be giving corporate raider Carl Icahn - who...

Yahoo Misses, Tokes Up, Says Everything's Fine.
July 28, 2008... A year into Jerry Yang's turnaround strategy - and 10 days before a potentially ear-boxing stockholders meeting - and Yahoo has produced second-quarter results that missed Wall Street's reduced expectations. And, as the AP observed, its...

VMware To Cut its Hypervisor Price To Free.
July 28, 2008... Blames the Economy - Not Microsoft - for Projected Shortfall But Just in Case.... Two weeks after its co-founder and CEO Diane Greene was abruptly dismissed, VMware - now run by one of Microsoft's old rulers, Paul Maritz - disclosed...

Clouds Have Their Blue Screen of Death Too.(Brief article)
July 28, 2008... One of the problems with clouds is that they have this tendency to rain as it did on Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) on Sunday when it was down - and not for the first time - in both the US and Europe for something like eight hours -...

Zimbra Revs Desktop.
July 28, 2008... Zimbra, Yahoo's open source Microsoft-opposing e-mail and calendaring folks, bought last September for $350 million, have released rev 3 beta of their offline e-mail client, Zimbra Desktop, which competes with Outlook, Thunderbird and everybody...

AMD Loses Share.
July 28, 2008... According to Mercury Research by way of Lehman Brothers AMD lost share in both desktops and notebooks in Q2 measured in both units and revenue. Intel was up two points to 87.5% in notebook units aided and abetted by AMD's...

NGASI Takes its AppServer Manager to the Cloud.
July 28, 2008... Application server management software developer NGASI has introduced a hosted version of its AppServer Manager on Amazon EC2. The "no installation required" service gives Amazon EC2 users the option of not installing their own version of...

3PAR Puts its Snapshot Widgetry at the Service of VMware VDI.
July 28, 2008... 3PAR, the utility storage company, says it's got an integrated virtual desktop provisioning and management solution for the VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) that will also scale VDI storage. It's supposed to automatically...

Apple Blows Up after Blow-Out Quarter.
July 28, 2008... Apple got pared in after-hours trading Monday, dropping 18 bucks, close to 11%, apparently because of the weak guidance it issued for the current quarter and because it declared the state of Steve Jobs' health off-limits on a day when the New...

Nehalem Scheduled Unchanged.
July 28, 2008... DigiTimes' defect rate seems to be rising. It reported Thursday that Intel has moved up its Nehalem launch to September. It hasn't. Production is still set for Q4. Meanwhile, Intel has unveiled eight highly integrated, multifunction,...

Lehman Raises its PC Estimates.
July 28, 2008... Based on Q2 results, the advent of low-end notebooks and the fact that the US market didn't turn into an oil slick, Lehman Brothers has raised its worldwide PC forecast. It expects 2008 to be up 15% from 11.5% (5% growth US, 15% Europe and...

EnterpriseDB Encouraged by Survey.(Brief article)
July 28, 2008... EnterpriseDB, the open source database company, surveyed 500 corporate IT folk on topics related to enterprise adoption of open source databases and found that respondents using PostgreSQL picked it for transaction-intensive applications twice...

SnapLogic-SugarCRM an Item.(Brief article)
July 28, 2008... SnapLogic, the outfit that calls itself the really simple integration company and leverages RESTful web technology, has announced a SugarCRM Solution Pack, an extension to its open source data integration framework. SnapLogic enables...

Jobs Not Dying, Press Figures.(Steve Jobs)(Brief article)
July 28, 2008... Apple telling the press that the state of its CEO's health is a "private matter" was like waving a red cape in front of a bull. Within hours Fortune and the New York Times were reporting that the 53-year-old cancer survivor probably wasn't...

Yahoo Patent Theory.
July 28, 2008... Industry gadfly John Dvorak is advancing a theory culled from the blogosphere that Microsoft wants Yahoo for some all-important patent or another that would give it an edge in cloud computing, SaaS and portable search advertising.

Google Launches Knol.
July 28, 2008... Google has launched Knol, its monetized Wikipedia rival in which contributors will be identified and any copy changes have to be approved by the authors who'll get a piece of the AdSense take. There are supposed be multiple articles on the same...

How Did That Happen?
July 28, 2008... Com.score says Microsoft's share of US search rose in June and Google's didn't; Google's fell. The tracker gave Google 61.5%, of the market, down from 61.8% in May and said Microsoft did 9.2%, up from 8.5%. Both AOL and Ask were down.

Google's Reportedly Buying Digg.
July 28, 2008... Google is buying Digg.com for ~$200 million for Google News, according to TechCrunch, which thinks they may have signed a letter of intent. Rumors dating back a few months claimed Microsoft and Google were competing over who would carry off the...

Appirio Funded.(Brief article)
July 28, 2008... Appirio, the two-year-old start-up with products and professional services using software-as-a-service (SaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) from Google and salesforce.com that are supposed to jumpstart enterprises on the on-demand path, has...

Nettop: No Margin.
July 28, 2008... "It is a product that essentially has no margin." - Paul Moore, Fujitsu's senior director of mobile product management, on the so-called nettop in the New York Times.

Apple's MobileMe Bombs.(Brief article)
July 28, 2008... Apple's first flirtation with the Cloud has turned stormy. The Wall Street Journal's great and powerful technology critic Walt Mossberg, a known Apple devotee, has panned its $99-a-year corporate-style synchronization service as unreliable....