Linux Gram articles from June 2007

Linux Gram archives from June 2007

Think Symantec & McAfee Are Feeling a Bit, Well, Insecure?
June 4, 2007... Gee, and Symantec and McAfee felt squeezed when Microsoft wandered into their space. Now Google has a toehold too. Talk about being between a rock and a hard place. On May 11 Google quietly bought an outfit, a Mountain View neighbor...

Google Takes the Web Offline.
June 4, 2007... Google, which has recently emblazed its shield with the new motto "Search, Ads and Apps," has come up with a new way to terrorize Microsoft - a technology for running programs like Google's word processor and spreadsheet offline like, like...

Microsoft's Halo Only Stretches So Far.
June 4, 2007... Now that its long but ultimately uneventful backdating investigation is finally over and it's filed all its missing statements, Novell has returned to making conventional SEC submissions and posting its results. On Wednesday it posted its April...

Dell To Cut 10% of its People on Better News.
June 4, 2007... Well, Michael Dell did promise to transform his stumbling company when he came back. And now it seems that transformation is going to involve shrinking its staff 10% over the next year to match its shrunken number two status. That would be...

FTC To Investigate Google's Acquisition of DoubleClick.
June 4, 2007... The Federal Trade Commission, not the Justice Department, has started a preliminary antitrust investigation of Google's proposed $3.1 billion acquisition of online ad placement company DoubleClick, the one Microsoft, Yahoo, Time Warner and AT&T...

CDW Knocked Down for $7.3b.
June 4, 2007... The prize for the gargantuan deal of the holiday-shortened week goes to private equity house Madison Dearborn Partners LLC, which is buying CDW, which sells computer gear to companies and the government over the web, for $7.3 billion, less the...

VA Changes its Name Again.
June 4, 2007... Having forsaken the software business for media and ad sales a few weeks ago, VA Software thought it best to change its name. It's calling itself SourceForge Inc after its good neighborly SourceForge.net open source development hosting...

Fedora 7 Out.(version of linux software from Red Hat Inc.)(Brief article)
June 4, 2007... Fedora 7, the newly available cut of Red Hat's community project, usually a view of things to come, supports the creation of custom distributions and simplifies the creation of appliances. Red Hat says it's the first appliance development...

Brocade To Challenge Emulex & QLogic.(Brocade Communications Systems Inc. developing host bus adapters)(Brief article)
June 4, 2007... Brocade has decided to get into the billion-dollar Host Bus Adapter (HBA) market, a declaration that certainly got the attention of Emulex and QLogic, which own it. In their collective opinion, Brocade's foray won't have an impact on their...

Toshiba, Intel Loyalist, To Use AMD chips.
June 4, 2007... Toshiba, one of the die-hard Intel faithful, is going to use AMD chips in a reported 20% of the products it ships to the US and Europe, apparently beginning with three entry-level Satellite notebooks based the Turion 64 X2 dual-core mobile...

HP's Dirty Tricks Look Practiced: Fortune.(Hewlett-Packard Co. accused by Dell Inc.)
June 4, 2007... Fortune magazine has been poking around those court-sealed charges that HP bought Dell's printer plans from a former senior Dell executive before Dell entered the printer market and got a previously mum Dell to say that "The more we look into...

Salesforce-Google Deal Imminent.
June 4, 2007... Salesforce has been making noises that sound like it'll announce that anticipated, supposedly anti-Microsoft deal with Google on Tuesday June 5. It's assumed to have something to do with Google's online productivity apps.

StarOffice, Road Warrior.
June 4, 2007... Singapore Airlines is going to carry StarOffice for the use of its passengers as part of its KrisWorld inflight entertainment system. Remembering heightened security, Sun says passengers won't have to open their laptops and will be able to...

IBM Runs Up King-Sized Debt.
June 4, 2007... IBM borrowed a king-sized $11.5 billion so it could buy back 8% of its shares for $12.5 billion, tickle its earnings per share 13%-14%, make its stock popular again, add to the shares it has on hand for options and jack the price up. It's part...

Reiser Murder Trial Delayed Again.
June 4, 2007... Linux programmer Hans Reiser can stew in his jail cell a while longer. His trial for murdering his wife has been delayed again because his lawyer is trying another murder case. Reiser's trial is now supposed to start on June 11.

Apple Starts Selling DRM-Free Songs.(digital rights management)(Brief article)
June 4, 2007... Ahead of its own May 31 deadline, Apple Wednesday delivered its promised DRM-free music service called iTunes Plus, still a little light on the $1.29-a-song music - only a few albums were initially available. It will operate along side the old...

AMD Names Ex-Microsoft Canada President to its Board.
June 4, 2007... AMD has named Frank Clegg, the president of Microsoft Canada from 1991-1996 and again from 200-2005 and now the chairman of Navantis Inc, a Microsoft Gold partner, to its board. Before Microsoft, he was with IBM Canada.

Intel, Microsoft & Dell Push NAND.
June 4, 2007... Intel, Dell and Microsoft have formed an Intel-led Non-Volatile Memory Host Controller Interface Working Group to push the adoption of NAND-based Flash memory in PCs by conjuring up a standard software programming interface to be used by...

IBM Trims IGS Staff.
June 4, 2007... IBM, whose huge Global Services growth engine appears to have run out of juice and faces serious competition from India, cut 1,573 service jobs Wednesday, mostly in North America. That makes 3,720 job cuts at IBM so far this year starting from...

Will SCO's Luck Finally Change?
June 11, 2007... Something important happened in SCO's endless litigation the other day. The judge heard the motions for summary judgment in the SCO v Novell case. If SCO loses, it's basically all over. If the court doesn't think SCO can prove it owns the...

LG To Pay Microsoft Linux Tax.
June 11, 2007... Microsoft has signed still another of those patent cross-license that will set the open source community off because it claims to indemnify the licensees' use of Linux. This one is with LG Electronics (LGE) and Microsoft's announcement...

Microsoft Spits in GPL 3's Eye.
June 11, 2007... Goodness, didn't Microsoft just spit in Richard Stallman's eye? The GPL creator's attempts to stop Microsoft from cutting any more of those patent-protection deals like the one it cut with Novell don't quite seem to be working. The...

"Last Call" GPL 3 Draft Out.
June 11, 2007... The Free Software Foundation (FSF) released what it terms the "last call" draft of GPLv3 late last week, giving the industry until June 28 to comment. It expects the license to go into service on June 29. Novell's reaction was one of...

Salesforce To Sell Google Ads.
June 11, 2007... So Salesforce.com is gonna be a distribution channel for Google ads. That's what their big, widely leaked alliance is all about; other things like integrating Google's e-mail and Google's online productivity apps into Salesforce could...

For Some Reason or Another Google Bought PeakStream.
June 11, 2007... Seemingly out of left field, Google has bought PeakStream, the two-year-old start-up whose young tools make it easier to program multi-core processors by kinda doing the parallelizing for you if you write to its APIs. Then you can run the...

PTO To Start Peer Review Pilot.
June 11, 2007... The US Patent and Trademark Office has decided to forge ahead with that precedent-setting Peer Review Pilot that will have the computer industry submitting prior art and trying to knock down patent applications ahead of the PTO examiners. ...

Microsoft Buys Interoperability House.
June 11, 2007... Microsoft has bought a little privately held Cincinnati firm called Engyro. A Microsoft partner, Engyro extends the interoperability of System Center Operations Manager 2007. Its Product Connector Suite lets Operations Manager share...

Sun Tries To Get in the Blades game.
June 11, 2007... Hoping to play tag with HP and IBM, which are a league ahead of it in blades - collectively they hold 76% of the market - Sun Wednesday introduced its Sun Blade 6000 Modular System designed by Sun's billionaire co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim. ...

Egenera Goes Big Memory.(developing Processing Blade servers)(Brief article)
June 11, 2007... This month Egenera will expand its diskless, stateless Processing Blade line-up with a new four-socket pBlade with 64GB of memory based around dual-core second-generation 2.8GHz Opteron 8220 SE processors. It will be Egenera's largest...

Rampant capitalist versus Ivory Tower Academe.
June 11, 2007... Intel is working with Taiwan-based Asustek Computer on a counter to One Laptop Per Child's AMD-based currently $175 XO notebooks. The full-fledged Intel-Asustek PC will start at $199 and go to $299. Other than a low-end Intel chip, the...

Verari Gets Another $25m.
June 11, 2007... The VCs have plunked another $25 million into Verari Systems bringing total capitalization to a little something above $59 million. The new C round came from the company's existing backers, the chi-chi Carlyle Group, Celerity Partners,...

Google Buys FeedBurner.(Brief article)
June 11, 2007... Google has bought a site called FeedBurner that distributes and helps manage blogs and RSS feeds, tracks usage and serves ads. It supports 721,000 feeds representing upwards of 400,000 publishers. Google will put more ads on those feeds giving...

More Virtual Still: The Rented VM.(VMware Inc. is providing its Infrastructure Suite to telecommunications services to sell virtual servers)(Brief article)
June 11, 2007... On the cusp of its IPO, VMware is spreading into hosting. Wednesday it announced a Service Provider Program for web hosting services, telecommunications companies and outsourcers to use its Infrastructure Suite to sell virtual servers as a...

AMD Finishes its DTX Spec.
June 11, 2007... AMD has finalized (gad that word) the DTX specification that it wants made into an open standard for small form factor PCs. And along with it announced two new 45W 65nm dual-core Athlon X2 processors, the $91 BE-2350 and the $86 2300.

HP Accused of Stonewalling over Espionage Charge.
June 11, 2007... It says in the papers that Dell claims HP isn't responding to its demand that HP investigate those claims made by a former HP VP currently in litigation with his old employer that HP paid a former high-ranking Dell executive for Dell's plans...

Eolas Redux.
June 11, 2007... The US Patent and Trademark Office, which has already granted, rejected and then upheld the now-famous Eolas browser plug-in patent before, has now agreed to re-examine its validity again in a so-called interference process that could take a...

Red Hat & Symantec Pair.
June 11, 2007... Red Hat and Symantec have wheeled out what they call secure server bundles for SMBs, either Red Hat Enterprise Linux or the Red Hat Application Stack combined with Symantec Critical System Protection for both pre-configured and...

SUSE Gets Capgemini on its Side.(Brief article)
June 11, 2007... Capgemini is going to start pushing and supporting SUSE and ZenWorks as part of its open source consulting practice along with mixed source applications and management tools. The deal includes the SUSE desktop. Meanwhile, BMW is going...

SCO's Losses Not as Bad as They've Been.
June 11, 2007... SCO posted its second-quarter results Tuesday. Revenues were down but losses weren't near as bad as last year because its litigation expenses aren't running as high as they had been. Revenues were $6 million, down from $7.1 million...

Microsoft Appeal Verdict Due September 17.
June 11, 2007... Reuters says Europe's Court of First Instance is expected to rule on Microsoft's appeal from the European Commission's 2004 antitrust verdict on Monday September 17, the day before the court's president Bo Vesterdorf retires. The appeal was...

Punished for Snubbing Dell Bid?(Tom Barton, Todd Ford)(Brief article)
June 11, 2007... Having canned CEO Tom Barton and replaced him with Mark Barrenechea, Rackable has removed its COO Gautham Sastri and turned him into the executive VP of its RapidScale unit. Executive VP Todd Ford, who had been the company's CFO and president...

Citigroup Claims Barcelona Chip Late.
June 11, 2007... Citigroup has been saying that AMD's "save-the-bacon" Barcelona quad chip will be late, not shipping until September or October. There had been talk it could be out as early as April then failing that June or July. Citigroup says it's heard...

HP Raids Oracle.
June 11, 2007... HP has plucked Randall Runk out of Oracle to head US enterprise sales for its Technology Solutions Group. He's there, as you might suspect, to grow revenues and margin and expand into the mid-market. He will also be responsible for US software...

What Do You Suppose He Knows?
June 11, 2007... Sun's new board member Michael Marks of private equity house Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and chairman of Flextronics - who's supposed to be canny with investments - bought a million dollars worth of Sun's stock about a month after he joined the...

Dell Exploring Services.
June 11, 2007... Michael Dell told the Financial Times that he is contemplating a series of acquisitions and partnerships that would turn Dell into more of a services business. Seems that despite IBM growth hiccups with services, Dell's $6 billion services...

Sun Says Apple Will Use its File System.
June 11, 2007... Sun's chatty CEO Jonathan Schwartz breached Apple security and publicly disclosed that Leopard, Apple's next-generation operating system, is going to substitute Sun's 128-bit open source ZFS file system for its nine-year-old HFS+. ZFS pools...

Google Good for $750?(Brief article)
June 11, 2007... Spending on Internet ads in the US hit $4.9 billion in Q1, up 26% and a new high. Expectations are it'll work out to around $20 billion for the year, up $3 billion. Some punters think Google is going to $750. It's managed to stay safely north...

Canadian Start-up Uses a Puck To Rethink the Enterprise PC.
June 18, 2007... There's a fabless semiconductor start-up hidden away out of sight in Vancouver, British Columbia that been rethinking the problem of thin clients and the so-called PC Blade for the last three years. And now that it's got the necessary...

Linspire Next To Pay for Patent Protection.
June 18, 2007... My goodness, they're starting to fall like nine pins. Linux distributor Linspire has followed Novell and Xandros into a patent protection deal with Microsoft despite the fire-breathing, contract-scorching wrath of the Free Software...

Penguinistas Huddle.
June 18, 2007... A reported 150 Penguinistas gathered this week at Google at a three-day first-ever Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit that ends today and, according to Reuters, after they emerge from their closed-door meetings Thursday and Friday they're...

Linux Foundation's Top Engineer Goes To Work for Microsoft.
June 18, 2007... Microsoft has tapped Tom Hanrahan to run its side of its interoperability efforts with Novell. The appointment comes seven months after Microsoft and Novell signed the now-famous pact that raised FOSS hackles because of the built-in patent...

Think Linus Will Defer to Sun on GPLv3?
June 18, 2007... The Answer May Hinge on a Bottle of Wine Linux creator Linus Torvalds thinks the last GPLv3 draft is better than earlier drafts, but he still doesn't like it much, preferring the existing GPLv2 that the Linux kernel is currently licensed...

WSO2 Rethinks the ESB.
June 18, 2007... WSO2 is the ambitious two-year-old Sri Lanka start-up that's writing a complete open source middleware platform for Web Services on Intel Capital's nickel expecting it to become the standard. It says it's the same as a comprehensive SOA...

Adobe Takes Web 2.0 to the Desktop.
June 18, 2007... Adobe has delivered itself of a public beta of Flex 3, a free open source cross-platform framework for creating Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) except they don't necessarily have to run on the Internet. The Flex 3 drop includes a...

Intuit No Longer Windows-Pure.
June 18, 2007... Intuit says it's taking a step down the Linux path and will put its mid-market QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions on Linux servers in its first ever expansion beyond Windows. It's easing into the water; the client will still need to be a...

Novell Plans Small Business Edition of Linux.
June 18, 2007... Novell said Wednesday that by September it would have an Open Workgroup Suite Small Business Edition of its Linux server and desktop with GroupWise e-mail and calendaring, OpenOffice, and its own Open Enterprise Server for storage management,...

Hyperic Raises Second Round.
June 18, 2007... Hyperic, the three-year-old San Francisco open source systems management start-up, has picked up $6.1 million in second-round funding from Benchmark Capital with Accel Partners kicking in. It got its first $3.8 million from these folks a year...

Novell Calls SCO's Evidence Irrelevant, Inadmissible & Hearsay.
June 18, 2007... Novell has asked the court hearing SCO's slander of title suit against it to strike the testimony of the business people who were responsible for Novell's sale of Unix to the Santa Cruz Operation - all of whom testified they sold Santa Cruz the...

Dell's Retail Push Begins.
June 18, 2007... Any second now Wal-Mart's more upscale Sam's Clubs will be selling a Dell E1501 Inspiron notebook for $899 and a Dimension desktop for $829 in the states. Dell started selling two E521 Dimension desktop PCs, priced at $698 with a 19-inch...

Google Claims Microsoft's Violating its Consent Decree.
June 18, 2007... The Justice Department has brushed off a complaint from Google alleging that Microsoft is violating its 2002 consent decree because Vista supposedly discourages users from using Google's local desktop search as opposed to Vista's own. The...

Google Called "Endemic Threat to Privacy".
June 18, 2007... Privacy International says Google, the self-proclaimed "do no evil company," has an "entrenched hostility to privacy," a rating shared by no other web site it has been following. The British watchdog put out an interim report over the...

Apple Puts its Safari Browser on Windows.
June 18, 2007... Apple Monday put its Safari browser on Windows, a browser that isn't even supposed to be the best browser for the Mac. Immediately the move was cast as a reprise of the browser wars and by jingo within 48 hours Apple was reporting more than a...

FTC Probing Microsoft & Yahoo Ad Deals as well as Google's: WSJ.
June 18, 2007... At press time, the Wall Street Journal was reporting that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating Microsoft's proposed $6 billion acquisition of aQuantive and Yahoo's $680 million buyout of the rest of Right Media as well as Google $3.1...

Voltaire Sells 20 Gbps Switch.(Infiniband netwqrk switch)(Brief article)
June 18, 2007... Voltaire, the Infiniband house, has started offering a 20 Gbps 288-port director-class switch for high-performance grid computing. The Infiniband device, designated the Grid Director ISR 2012, is supposed to require less than 10% of the...

Industry Unites To Save the World.
June 18, 2007... Intel and Google together with Dell, EDS, the Environmental Protection Agency, HP, IBM, Lenovo, Microsoft, Pacific Gas and Electric, the World Wildlife Fund and a dozen other organizations say they're going to form the Climate Savers Computing...

War Debt.
June 18, 2007... Although PC units are expected to be up 10% this year, the Semiconductor Industry Association has slashed its 2007 revenue growth forecasts from 10% to 1.8%, citing the sharp decline in the ASPs of processors, DRAM chips and NAND Flash. It's...

Acer Blames Vista.
June 18, 2007... Acer, complaining the slow consumer adoption of Vista, has trimmed its PC shipment projections back from over 40% growth to only 30%-40%.

SCO, Novell Square with Nasdaq.
June 18, 2007... SCO is out from under the threat of being delisted by Nasdaq - at least for now. Its stock perked up apparently on more buoyant news from its suit against Novell. Mid-week it was on its way to a buck fifty then fell back. Novell is also back in...

Talend in the Chips.
June 18, 2007... Talend, the open source data integration ISV, is moving to an SaaS model. It also picked up $3.5 million in financing from AGF Private Equity and Galileo Partners.

Reiser's Murder Trial Delayed.(Hans Reiser)(Brief article)
June 18, 2007... Linux programmer Hans Reiser's murder trial was supposed to get started Monday but, after a conference between his lawyer and the judge, it's been delayed until September or October after what is forecast to be a month spent empanelling a jury....

'Mr. Wizard' Dead.
June 18, 2007... Don Herbert, NBC television's beloved 'Mr. Wizard' from 1951-1965, died of bone cancer Tuesday at the age of 89.

Google Fortifies its PowerPoint Knockoff Effort.
June 25, 2007... There's only a Google logo, the words "Google has acquired Zenter" and a pointer to a Google blog left on the web site of the precocious six-month-old start-up said to have software for creating online, viewer-polling slide presentations,...

Nvidia, The New Supercomputer.
June 25, 2007... Nvidia is diversifying into HPC with a new family of high-margin graphics chips called Tesla, a counter to ATI's stream processor card that's supposed to turn existing workstations into "personal supercomputers." The company claims it...

No, No, We Won't Go: Canonical.
June 25, 2007... Canonical's billionaire CEO Mark Shuttleworth took to his blog over the weekend to squelch speculation that Canonical and Ubuntu would be next to follow in the steps of Novell, Xandros and Linspire and cut a patent deal with Microsoft, deals he...

The Microsoft Decision That Didn't Happen.
June 25, 2007... This week Microsoft was all set to free the low-end Vista Home Edition to run virtual machines like, oh, with Parallels' software on the Mac or VMware. Then it changed its mind, saying it had "reassessed Windows virtualization and decided that...

First Backdating Trial Could Hang on a Perry Mason Moment.(Brocade Communications Systems Inc.'s Greg Reyes accused for options backdating)
June 25, 2007... The prosecution waltzed into the second day of the first backdating trial - the case against ex-Brocade CEO Greg Reyes - armed with 11th hour testimony from ex-Brocade HR staffer June Weaver that Reyes - whose defense is that he didn't know...

Microsoft Changes Vista for Google.
June 25, 2007... Microsoft has cut a deal with the US government and is going modify Vista to hush Google's complaints that it discourages users from using Google's local desktop search as opposed to Vista's own desktop "Instant Search." The move comes...

SUSE Gets Service Pack & Xen Driver Kit.
June 25, 2007... SUSE Linux Enterprise 10 has gotten its first service pack, which is supposed to goose its virtualization, HPC, security, Active Directory interoperability and system management capabilities. The enhancements include quad-core support and a...

Okay, Yahoo, Now What?
June 25, 2007... Wall Street wants Yahoo to do more than just kick Terry Semel upstairs to be chairman. There seems, however, little pixy dust in the notion of Rupert Murdoch throwing MySpace into Yahoo in exchange for 25% of the combined operation. ...

Azul & Sun Settle.
June 25, 2007... Azul Systems and Sun have settled the "chip multithreading" patent suits they've had aimed at each other since a year ago March, but nobody knows what the settlement deal is - and it might be nice to know whether Sun got a piece of Azul like...

HP Hires Pepsi Guy for Printers.
June 25, 2007... HP has hired the chief marketing officer of Pepico's $10 billion international operation Ron Coughlin as senior VP, worldwide marketing of its printer unit. Hope he does better than John Sculley did at Apple.

Linux Wants To Be Green.
June 25, 2007... The Linux Foundation and the 230 Penguinistas who gathered together at Google last week for their very first Collaboration Summit emerged from their consistory to say that the Linux Foundation would organize a "Green Linux" initiative to...

Solaris Support Cheaper than Red Hat, Sun Says.
June 25, 2007... Something like 70% of Solaris deployments are on non-Sun hardware so Sun has taken to offering a new blanket support contract that covers all Sun hardware and software - and optionally other people's x64/x86 hardware too - for a single price....

Db4o in Strategic Alliance with Prosyst.(Db4objects)(Brief article)
June 25, 2007... Db4objects, the open source object database, has tied up with Prosyst, which reportedly owns 50% of the commercial OSGi market, meaning db4objects gets a crack at a swat of automotive, mobile carrier, house alarm and such like implementations....