Linux Gram articles from June 2008

Linux Gram archives from June 2008

South Africa Throws a Monkey Wrench into Microsoft's OOXML Plans.
June 2, 2008... South Africa has formally objected to the fast track used to get OOXML to the brink of ISO standardization. South Africa, which has given the world Mark Shuttleworth and Ubuntu, is one of the so-called "P" members of JTC 1 - meaning it's...

MySpace & Opera Adopt Gears.
June 2, 2008... In the largest third-party win yet for the year-old Google Gears, as well as a win for the browser-as-a-platform, they say, News Corp's MySpace social networking site has used the Google widgetry to upgrade its mail so users can search and sort...

Facebook To Open Source Platform.
June 2, 2008... Facebook, the social networking site that Microsoft owns a pricey sliver of, says it's going to open source its year-old Facebook Platform so it's easier for developers to build applications on it. It's reportedly calling the effort fbOpen...

Novell Ain't No Red Hat, Even with Microsoft.
June 2, 2008... Novell made $5.87 million, or two cents a share, in its second fiscal quarter ended April 30 on flat revenues of $235.7 million, up only ~$3 million. A year ago it lost $2.9 million, down a penny. Legal and R&D cost it $4.5 million. On...

Clamshell Open Sourced.(Brief article)
June 2, 2008... VIA's got a so-called OpenBook Mini-Note Reference Design and has open sourced the CAD files for the 2.2lb clamshell case design to push adoption of its 1GHz-1.6GHz C7 x86 chips and companion chipsets by reducing development costs and speeding...

Atom, Part II.
June 2, 2008... Intel is supposed to unveil its second Atom chip, the one for low-cost PCs and so-called netbooks - along with the Atom-optimized Diamondville chipset that'll make the thing a netbook platform - at Computex Taipei, which starts Tuesday June 3....

Norway's SEC Sics Cops on New Microsoft Subsidiary.
June 2, 2008... When Microsoft bought Fast Search & Transfer ASA and its vaunted enterprise search widgetry last month for $1.23 billion cash to compete against Google it bought itself police investigation. When Microsoft agreed to buy it in mid-January,...

Windows 7 Sighted.
June 2, 2008... Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer previewed Windows 7 at the Wall Street Journal's D6 conference in California Tuesday. The next-generation operating system is due in late 2009, Ballmer said, confirming what we reported weeks ago, which probably...

Hey, Dell Still Works Despite US Slowdown.
June 2, 2008... The closing bell in New York had barely sounded when Dell's results moved across the wire, it was that excited to let everybody know that it had done better than anybody expected. Dell increased its revenues and earnings, lowered its...

Google Puts a Price on Its Cloud.
June 2, 2008... Google has opened up App Engine to one and all. The cloud-sharing gambit meant to entice developers to build their web applications on the same infrastructure that powers Google's own applications - and in the process locks them into Google...

Dell Guilty of Fraud.
June 2, 2008... Some of Dell's wayward service chickens have come home to roost. A New York State Supreme Court judge Tuesday found Dell and Dell Financial Services (DFS) guilty of fraud, false advertising, deceptive business practices and abusive debt...

NetSuite Hires Ex-Salesforce VP.
June 2, 2008... NetSuite, Larry Ellison's other company, the SaaS one, and rival of CRM SaaS pioneer salesforce.com, which of course was started by former Ellison lieutenant Marc Benioff - ah, incest - has named Per Brondum Jakobsen, the former head of product...

VIA Pushes To Join the Herd.
June 2, 2008... VIA is making a move up the outside rail trying to join the other two ponies in the mainstream PC market with a new x86 Nano processor while it counters the dust from Intel's sexy new Atom chip. VIA says the 65nm dingus, based on its Isaiah...

VMware Buys B-hive.
June 2, 2008... VMware is buying B-hive Networks Inc, a three-year-old privately held application performance management software company, on undisclosed terms. It says it will use the Israeli start-up and its flagship product, B-hive Conductor, to offer...

EC Denies Finding Intel Guilty of Antitrust Violations.
June 2, 2008... The European Commission's spokesman Jonathan Todd called a story by the Financial Times Deutschland claiming that the EC had reached a provisional antitrust decision against Intel "irresponsible journalism." Todd said "no provisional or...

Citrix Buys German Software Product.
June 2, 2008... Citrix has bought sepago GmbH's sepagoProfile software so user profiles in XenDesktop, XenApp and Provisioning Server are integrated. Terms were not disclosed but as part of the deal the Cologne-based sepago will continue developing the product...

HP Wants To Be a Cloud Builder.
June 2, 2008... HP's latest answer to scale-out, which it interprets as clouds, grids, compute farms, Web 2.0 and HPC, is the BL2x220c G5, which it says is the world's first two-in-one server, offering the highest compute density in the industry or more than...

Well, Qualcomm Likes Flash.
June 2, 2008... Steve Jobs may not think much of Flash but Qualcomm apparently feels differently and has been collaborating with Adobe on a mobile platform that integrates Flash with its Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW) client software and,...

Google Tests Web Toolkit.(Brief article)
June 2, 2008... Google's Web Toolkit Release Candidate 1.5 is out. That's the stuff programmers can use to develop and debug web applications in Java and then deploy them as highly optimized JavaScript. That way they're supposed to be able to sidestep...

Cisco Reportedly Creates SOAP-Slipping RPC Protocol.(Brief article)
June 2, 2008... According to CIO.com, Cisco has a new SOAP-replacing messaging protocol called Etch, born out of its Unified Application Environment (UAE), to integrate client/server applications. Cisco reportedly intends to beta the thing this summer as...

Yahoo Watch.(Brief article)
June 2, 2008... "We are not rebidding for the company. We reserve the right to do so. That's not on the docket." - Steve Ballmer, this past Tuesday at the D6 conference in California. The current talks, he said, are aimed at a "partnership." That was after...

More Yahoo Watch.(Brief article)
June 2, 2008... Yahoo, whose CEO contends it's not "under siege" while pleading for more time to turn it around, is telling shareholders to ignore any proxy cards sent to them by activist stockholder Carl Icahn, hoping to derail any attempt to unseat the Yahoo...

Still More Yahoo Watch.
June 2, 2008... "I like Google." - Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang when asked about a possible outsourcing deal with his rival.

Android Near Complete.(Brief article)
June 2, 2008... Google demonstrated an almost complete Android operating system for smartphones at the company's I/O developer conference in San Francisco Wednesday. Like Apple's iPhone, the Android demo used a touchscreen that replaces a password with a...

Belgian Papers Seek Damages from Google.
June 2, 2008... The Belgian newspapers that objected last year to Google News reproducing their headlines and running extracts of their stories while archiving the complete stories without permission and got a Belgian court to back them up are demanding...

IBM Joins Barcelona Parade.
June 2, 2008... With Dell and HP out ahead of it with Barcelona machines, this week it was IBM's turn to throw its support to the AMD quad-core by way of three updated System x servers. A new System x3755 will scale from the standard two sockets to three- and...

Dell's Got a 'Hybrid' PC.
June 2, 2008... Dell is promising a desktop that's 80% smaller and 71% more energy efficient than a traditional PC. Michael Dell referred to it as a "hybrid PC."

Sun Claims Virtual Success.
June 2, 2008... Sun says that the cross-platform VirtualBox desktop virtualization widgetry that it bought to give away especially to developers has hit five million downloads in 18 months. It claims its transforming software development, untethering...

Google Up.
June 2, 2008... ComScore says the search giant's paid clicks were up 20% year-over-year in the US in April. The tabulator caused a stir - and a drop in the stock - a few weeks ago when it said Google's paid clicks in the US only grew 1.8% when overall they...

Now That's Penetration.
June 2, 2008... There were 3.3 billion cell phone users in the world at the end of last year according to the International Telecommunications Union. That's 49% of the world's population. The global annual growth rate was 22%.

No Deal! Microsoft-Yahoo Talks Collapse Again.
June 16, 2008... Microsoft Leaves the Door Ajar - Is It Over? Is It Really Over? Hmmm Talks between Yahoo and Microsoft have failed for the second time. Yahoo said Thursday afternoon that Microsoft has refused to buy Yahoo for $33 a share, the price...

Yahoo Cuts Deal with the Devil.
June 16, 2008... After failing to come to terms with Microsoft, and with antitrust regulators hovering in the background, Yahoo has gone and cut that death-defying deal on search advertising with arch-rival Google saying the agreement could clear $800 million...

Red Hat Settles Patent Claims Against It.
June 16, 2008... Red Hat said Wednesday that it had settled patent litigation brought against it two years ago by Firestar Software Inc in what was possibly the very first patent infringement suit ever brought against an open source company. It also turns...

Neelie Takes to the Soapbox.
June 16, 2008... Europe's antitrust chief Neelie Kroes, who has now taken on the role of open standards evangelist, gave a speech at OpenForum Europe the other day recommending that business and government adopt "open standards." "Open standards" in...

Apple Hits the Pause Button.
June 16, 2008... Apple is in features-lockout mode as far Snow Leopard, the next edition of its operating system, goes. There aren't going to be many of new ones. Apple calls it "hitting the pause button." Instead it's concentrating on supporting...

Supremes Say No to Royalty Double-Dipping.
June 16, 2008... In a unanimous decision Monday the Supreme Court restricted patent holders from collecting multiple royalties by charging the supply chain for IP that's already been sold upstream. Their Honors found for Quanta and against LG Electronics in...

AMD v Intel Trial Delayed To Fit In All the Depositions.
June 16, 2008... The AMD v Intel private antitrust suit - otherwise known as the "No Lawyer Left Behind Program" - is so big and unwieldy that the special master in charge of sorting out discovery has pushed the trial date back from April of 2009 to February of...

iPhone 3G Only Looks Cheaper.(Apple Inc.)
June 16, 2008... Apple has a history of carriage trade pricing, and, although such practices cost it the PC market - while imbuing it with a certain cachet - the policy was enshrined in the original iPhone. For the first time Monday Apple sorta kinda...

WiMAX Supporters Form Patent Pool.
June 16, 2008... Intel, Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Clearwire, Samsung and Sprint have formed the Open Patent Alliance (OPA) in hopes of ensuring the future of WiMAX with a patent pool that helps participating companies get access to WiMAX patent licenses at a...

You Can Never Be Too Rich or Too Thin.(Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief article)
June 16, 2008... HP, which is trying to be stylish, is going up against Apple's MacBook Air with a Voodoo Envy notebook that's all of 0.70-inches deep and weighs 3.37 pounds wrapped in a carbon fiber skin. It's supposed to boot in seconds to access a...

FTC Starts Formally Investigating Intel for Antitrust.
June 16, 2008... The Federal Trade Commission has decided to formally investigate Intel for antitrust for pushing AMD to the wall with its sales incentives, an answer to a prayer AMD has been saying for years now. AMD supposedly only brought its mammoth...

IDC, Gartner Adjust Their Periscopes.
June 16, 2008... IDC and Gartner have boosted their worldwide PC growth projections for the year. IDC thinks shipments will be up 15.2% to 310 million units compared to last year, not 12.8% like it said it March and Gartner puts the number at 12.5% rather than...

Parascale Hires CEO Out of NetApp.(appointment of Sajai Krishnan as chief executive officer)(Brief article)
June 16, 2008... Parascale, the four-year-old firm with the Cloud Storage system software layered on the Linux XFS file system, the Linux operating system and the Internet Protocol networking protocol stack, has hired Sajai Krishnan out of NetApp to be its CEO....

AMD & Intel Play Roadmap Leapfrog.
June 16, 2008... Lehman Brothers analyst Tim Luke thinks maybe, just maybe mind, AMD might try to move up Shanghai, the 45nm version of the 65nm Barcelona from 4Q08/1Q09 to 3Q08, which by the calendar is just around the corner. However, he's not giving the...

Reiser May Take Authorities To Murdered Wife's Body: Wired.
June 16, 2008... Hans Reiser, the 44-year-old Linux programmer who brought new meaning to the expression "killer app," may tell authorities where his wife's body is buried in exchange for a reduced sentence, according to Wired, which covered his trial...

Yahoo Biggie Quits.
June 16, 2008... Jeff Weiner, a key Yahoo executive, a Semel holdover second, they say, only to CEO Jerry Yang, isn't waiting around to collect on any controversial severance plan; he's leaving Yahoo reportedly to become an entrepreneur-in-residence at both...

Firefox 3.0 Due.
June 16, 2008... After three years development and testing, Firefox 3.0, Internet Explorer's nemesis, is supposed to be released Tuesday, June 17. It's supposed to block phishing scams based on StopBadware.org and Google tips. Mozilla is praying for a record...

Vista's Screwed.
June 16, 2008... A survey of 372 IT people, mostly Americans, done by Sanford C Bernstein analyst Chris DiBona last month indicates that Vista isn't selling and, in fact, will take Microsoft revenues down $395 million or two cents a year in the fiscal year...

Why Apple Bought PA.
June 16, 2008... PA Semi, the boutique PowerPC chip house that Apple puzzlingly bought without much explanation in April is going to do system-on-chips for iPhones and iPods, according to what Steve Jobs told the New York Times Monday in an interview. He did...

HP & Acer Settle.
June 16, 2008... HP and Acer have settled their patent litigation, which involved three federal lawsuits and two investigations by the International Trade Commission. HP filed suit 15 months ago demanding that Acer gear be stopped at the border; Acer then filed...

Sun Herd Thins Again.
June 16, 2008... John Gage, Sun employee number 5 and its chief researcher, head of its science office - the guy who coined the Sun tag line "The Network is the Computer" - a seemingly nonsense slogan Sun used to wish it could shake - has finally left the...

Verari Sets Up Leasing Arm.
June 16, 2008... Verari Systems has set up a leasing unit, the Verari Financial Services Group underwriting hardware, software, data centers, professional services, heck, even buildings promising competitive terms, trade-ins and pay-as-you-grow plans.

Penny Wise, Pound Foolish.
June 16, 2008... Gartner VP and chief analysts Bryan Lewis claims the reason behind the "design issue" that led to Microsoft's billion-dollar recall of all those Xbox 360s last year was because it got chintzy and designed the graphics chip itself to avoid...

Conspicuous Consumption.
June 16, 2008... Google co-founder and president of technology Sergey Brin is apparently not a "green." In these days of $138-a-barrel oil, talk of "finite supply" and carbon counts he has put down a $5 million deposit on a private trip to the International...

Jobs Watch.(Steve Jobs)(Brief article)
June 16, 2008... As anyone who's seen any of the pictures of the event knows, Apple CEO Steve Jobs looked like shit when he announced iPhone 2.0 Monday, which made everybody remember that he was operated on for a rare pancreatic cancer a few years ago after...

Start-up Turns Office into Software-as-a-Service.
June 23, 2008... eXpresso, a year-old venture-backed California start-up, has taken Excel to the clouds with Microsoft's blessings. PowerPoint, Word and PDF files are set to follow by the end of the summer. eXpresso webifies legal Excel users and lets them...

Red Hat Adds to the Virtual Clutter.
June 23, 2008... Virtualization solutions have gotten to be about as plentiful as dandelions in the full sun - so it will come as no surprise that Red Hat, which never seemed quite happy with its open source Xen widgetry anyway and had less reason to smile...

JBoss Hits Amazon's EC2 Cloud.(elastic compute cloud)(Brief article)
June 23, 2008... Red Hat is beta testing its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform as a solution on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). It's a way to tickle enterprise adoption of its Java application server. EC2 offers developers, enterprises and...

SUSE Kernel Patched for VMware.
June 23, 2008... SUSE, which is packaged up with Xen, has started supporting VMware's Virtual Machine Interface (VMI), Vmware's brand of paravirtualization. Novell worked on the widgetry with VMware for nine months and modified the SUSE kernel to support...

Citrix Loses Sales Chief.
June 23, 2008... Citrix is losing its sales boss John Burris to one of the open source contingent's few publicly traded companies, the struggling Sourcefire, creator of Snort, the security/intrusion prevention software, whose $15 IPO price has been shaved in...

Novell Cuts Top Sales Post.
June 23, 2008... The executive VP of worldwide sales at Novell, Tom Francese, is leaving the company at the end of July and won't be replaced. His position is being eliminated, having reorganized the sales force and broadened the company's indirect channels....

MSI To Pre-Load SUSE on Netbook.
June 23, 2008... Micro-Star International (MSI) is going to pre-load SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on its cheap new netbooks starting with a $399 Atom-based model called the Wind Notebook. The Taiwanese company plans to sell Wind worldwide starting this...

Was GPLv3 Worth the Effort?
June 23, 2008... GPLv3, the great General Public License rewrite, is now a year-old and used by 2,345 open source projects including Ubuntu, SugarCRM and Samba. Adoption has reportedly been growing at about 20% a month over the past six months. ...

After Dizzying 15 Years, Wine Called 'Stable'.
June 23, 2008... It only took 15 years but Wine, the open source Windows rewrite, so to speak, that lets Linux run Windows applications natively, has reached its first stable release, Wine 1.0. Compatibility isn't perfect, the Wine folk say, and not...

Sun Upgrades MySQL.
June 23, 2008... Sun has released a new real-time, shared-nothing, carrier-grade version of MySQL called MySQL Cluster Carrier Grade Edition 6.3 certified for use in telecom environments, such as subscriber data management systems (hlr, hss) and service...

Firefox: 8.2m and Counting.
June 23, 2008... After a bit of a breech birth - caused by visitors overloading its web servers - Mozilla released Firefox 3 Tuesday seeking to set a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in 24 hours as a way to stir up interest and at the same time...

Red Hat Opens Spacewalk.(Brief article)
June 23, 2008... Red Hat is open sourcing Project Spacewalk, the Red Hat Network (RHN) Satellite code base under the GPLv2 license. RHN Satellite is the stuff behind the Red Hat Network and lets customers manage RHEL updates inside their firewall. It does...

SCO Gets Extension.
June 23, 2008... Novell was foiled in its attempt this week to persuade the bankruptcy judge in Delaware, who's holding SCO life in his hands, to deny SCO another extension in filing a formal plan of reorganization. If the judge had agreed with Novell -...

Telstra Heads for the Clouds.
June 23, 2008... Telstra, the old Australian phone company before government-owned monopolies became unfashionable and now the country's leading telecom and media house, is going into the Software as a Service (SaaS) business. It's got a platform called...

Armed with a Blade, HP Takes Another Stab at IBM's Mainframe Market.
June 23, 2008... Hewlett-Packard has torn a page out of Sun's book - at least the Sun edition that reads give gear away for free to buy market share - except HP's target is IBM and IBM's precious, profitable mainframe preserve. The notion, called the...

China May or May Not Sue Microsoft for Antitrust.
June 23, 2008... So the Shanghai Securities News - sort of the Wall Street Journal of China but basically a government house organ often used for conveying official announcements - reports this week that Microsoft is being investigated for antitrust violations...

AMD Names Chief Sales Officer.
June 23, 2008... AMD has named senior vice-president Gustavo Arenas chief sales officer, a job that's sort of been open since Henri Richard, head of both sales and marketing, quit last September to go to Freescale. Arenas reports to the Office of the CEO. Like...

Microsoft To Open Search Center Somewhere in Europe.
June 23, 2008... Microsoft says it's going to open a Search Technology Center in Europe in the fiscal year that starts in July. The center is supposed to "accelerate Microsoft's investments in Live Search and disrupt the search and advertising marketplace...

Microsoft's Side of the Yahoo Story.
June 23, 2008... In a Microsoft internal e-mail that just "happened" to get out, Microsoft said it lost interest in acquiring all of Yahoo because of Yahoo's foot-dragging and that it offered instead $1 billion for just Yahoo's search operation and another $8...

And Now the Begging.
June 23, 2008... Mithras Capital, which owns a relatively small block of 1.7 million shares of Yahoo and would vote for Icahn's replacement slate in a heartbeat, sent an open letter to Microsoft Thursday asking Steve Ballmer to take Microsoft's "alternate...

Microsoft Kinda Moves Offline.
June 23, 2008... Microsoft has bought Navic Networks, a move that puts it in the business of placing TV commercials in near real-time, one of the things that Steve Ballmer may have had in mind when he said there were a lot of things you could do with $50...

It's the Video, Stupid.(Brief article)
June 23, 2008... Having peered into various crystal balls, Cisco figures global Internet traffic will grow 46% a year between now and 2012, nearly doubling every two years. The projection translates into an annual bandwidth demand of more than a half a...

HP & VMware Cozy Up.
June 23, 2008... HP has cuddled up closer to VMware and introduced integrated management software for heterogeneous environments, basically a bunch of business technology optimization (BTO) software that's supposed to automate management across both physical...

Yahoo To Reorg: WSJ.
June 23, 2008... At press time the Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo is going to reorganize and centralize product units like mail, search and homepage in a global organization. The company is still in search of a strategy - beyond the Google deal - to...

The Media Color Yang Out.
June 23, 2008... The New York Times tried putting a horse's head in Jerry Yang's bed Saturday, prophesying that his "days as Yahoo's CEO are numbered." In a piece entitled "Oh Jerry, It's No Longer Your Baby," it excoriated him for "shafting" Yahoo...

Quickie Yahoo Trial Denied.
June 23, 2008... The two Detroit pension funds suing Yahoo in Delaware to invalidate its severance plan "poison pill" have been denied the expedited trial that they asked for ahead of the August 1 stockholders meeting. The plan is supposed to incentivize Google...

Yahoo Execs Abandon Ship.
June 23, 2008... The latest departures from Yahoo, according to TechCrunch, which is now sporting a scorecard of ex-Yahoos, are Stewart Butterfield and his wife Caterina Fake, the co-founders of Flickr, the photo-sharing site Yahoo bought in 2005; executive VP,...

Google Docs & PDF.
June 23, 2008... Google Docs is now partially supporting PDF files. Users can upload, preview and share them but not edit or search them although they can copy and paste text.

HP Changes M&A Guy.
June 23, 2008... HP has named Marius Haas senior VP and general manager of its Procurve networking business, reporting to chief strategy and technology officer Shane Robertson. Haas had been senior VP if strategy and corporate development, with a hand in all...