Linux Gram articles from March 2007

Linux Gram archives from March 2007

VMware Goes on Attack against Microsoft.
March 5, 2007... Microsoft's virtualization restrictions have ticked off VMware, which committed its passel of complaints, complete with screen shots, to what it calls a white paper. Others might call it the prelude to a lawsuit. It claims that Microsoft...

Samba Wins Draconian Pricing Round Against Microsoft in EU.
March 5, 2007... The European Commission sent Microsoft an apparently surprise Statement of Objections (SO) Thursday morning accusing the company of setting unreasonable royalties for the server protocols that the EC ordered it to make available to its rivals...

Solaris Vultures Cruise Skies over Impending Linux Divide.
March 5, 2007... As the Linux community titters towards what looks like a GPL-induced schism between those like Linux kernel creator Linus Torvalds who hew to the old, somewhat more permissive GPL 2 and those who rush pell-mell to embrace the controversial new,...

Open Source Leader Abandons Red Hat Fedora.
March 5, 2007... Eric Raymond, whose "Cathedral and the Bazaar" became the charter of the open source movement, stomped out of Fedora freeware coven the other day shouting imprecations at Red Hat over his shoulder after a particular trying session with the...

Dell Unmoved by Linux Plea.
March 5, 2007... Since setting up its online IdeaStorm customer suggestion box on February 16, Dell has been awash in requests for factory-installed Linux machines with open source apps like OpenOffice and Firefox. In response Dell posted back last Friday...

Yoo-Hoo, PJ, Come Out, Come Out Wherever You Are.
March 5, 2007... The inimitable screed writer, Pamela Jones, still hasn't returned to her post at Groklaw, and this week, for the first time anybody can remember, the Groklaw site was down. On Monday it reported trouble with its database server and...

Corel Takes on Google To Compete with Microsoft.
March 5, 2007... Taking a page from Google's anti-Microsoft book, Corel is publicly beta testing a free word processor called WordPerfect Lightning. At its core it's a cut-down version of WordPerfect - sorta like what Works once was to Word - that should...

Dell Tanks, Profits Down 33%, Sales Off 5%.(Financial report)
March 5, 2007... Dell turned chicken and canceled its fiscal Q4 conference call with Wall Street, leaving the punters with only its woebegone press release. So much for steely Texans. Profits plunged 33% to $673 million, or 30 cents a share, down from...

PolyServe Goes to HP.
March 5, 2007... HP is buying PolyServe, the Oregon-based virtualization storage software folks, on undisclosed terms. As an indication PolyServe has raised $73 million from the VCs during its eight-year lifetime as an independent concern. HP said the...

Despite Microsoft Novell Loses Money.
March 5, 2007... Novell lost $20 million, or six cents a share, on revenues of $230 million, down roughly 5% year-over-year in its first fiscal quarter ended January 31. Wall Street figured it would do $232 million and return a penny. The numbers are...

Terascala Gets Funding.
March 5, 2007... Terascala, a Massachusetts start-up still in beta with some scalable Opteron-based storage blades aimed at Linux clusters, has raised a $3 million first round from Ascent Venture Partners. The money is earmarked for sales, marketing and...

Losses Moderate at SCO; Revenues Continue To Slide.
March 5, 2007... SCO revenues continued to slide in its first quarter ended January 31 down another $1.3 million year-over-year to $6.015 million. Losses, however, weren't as bad as they were a year ago when they hit $4.58 million, or 23 cents a share. ...

SCO Loses Outside Director.
March 5, 2007... SCO's many critics are going to be able to taunt it with the fact that one of SCO's long-standing outside board member, Ed Iacobucci, the ex-IBM guy who started Citrix, will be stepping down in April reportedly because of the "current and...

AMD's First Chipset Debuts.
March 5, 2007... AMD has its first chipset complements of its 2006 $5.34 billion acquisition of ATI. It's called the AMD 690 series, uses ATI's Radeon X1250 GPU and ATI's new, reportedly true-to-life Avivo graphics technology that can handle high-def. It's...

Windows Reorg.(Microsoft Windows being enhanced)(Brief article)
March 5, 2007... Now that Jim Allchin has retired and Windows isn't being run Roman-style by twin consuls any more, the sole remaining prince, Kevin Johnson, has made a few changes. There's a new Windows Business Group marketing organization with ex-North...

HP Scores Upset in Blade Market; Volume Servers No Longer a Growth Engine.
March 5, 2007... In Q4 for the first time in living memory HP took market share away from IBM in blades, a sacred Blue preserve. According IDC's numbers put out Monday, HP pushed IBM off the blade pedestal and into the number two slot at the end of last...

HP Seeks To Length its Lead in Blade Server.
March 5, 2007... HP has got IBM on the run in blades, having displaced it as blade leader last quarter on the strength of its c-Class machines and now it's got a follow-up punch - blade network virtualization technologies. It believes it's redefining blade...

IBM Smells HPC Gold.
March 5, 2007... IBM wants a bigger piece of the HPC market as HPC pushes into business. It's got snap-together pre-architected clusters, based on both Linux and the Windows Compute Cluster Server, for the life sciences, CAE and the financial sector. It's also...

MontaVista Claims 40m Devices.
March 5, 2007... MontaVista claims its software is in 40 million end-user devices.

Will Wonders Never Cease.
March 5, 2007... Firefox 3.0, due in Q3, is supposed to be able to support web applications off-line.

Intel Flexes its Manufacturing Muscle.
March 5, 2007... Intel is gonna put $1 billion-$1.5 billion into its 90nm chip plant in Rio Rancho, New Mexico to gussy it up so it can make next-generation 45nm processors. That'll give Intel four 45nm plants to scare AMD with. Intel's first commercial 45nm...

Dispatch from the Price Wars.
March 5, 2007... There's speculation that Intel might cut prices again on single-core Pentiums and low-end dual-cores before April 22 when it was supposed to. Lehman Brothers thinks that, if true, it's a reaction to AMD's broad-based mid-February cuts and...

LBO Rumors on AMD.
March 5, 2007... There were leveraged buyout rumors abroad on Wall Street Monday about AMD. It's supposed to be having talks with private equity firms because it's in a pickle between the money it's spending and Intel.

Reiser Still in Jail.(Hans Reiser )(Brief article)
March 5, 2007... The piecemeal hearing that's been going on since mid-December to decide whether there's enough evidence to bind Linux file system writer Hans Reiser over for trial on charges that he murdered his wife continues to drag on. It's now supposed to...

British PM Asked To Pressure Microsoft to Cut Prices.
March 5, 2007... There's a petition on British Prime Minister Tony Blair's web site asking him to pressure Microsoft to lower the price of Vista. The petition, part of a beta e-government scheme that started in mid-November letting the English e-petition...

Et Tu, California.
March 5, 2007... Like Texas and Minnesota, a bill has been introduced in California that, if passed, would send the state down the same OpenDocument path as Massachusetts. The bill would exclude using Word, Excel or PowerPoint. This shoe was bound to drop...

W3C Does About-Face on HTML.(Word Wide Web Consortium, hypertext markup language)
March 12, 2007... The Word Wide Web Consortium (W3C), admitting that, well, hmm, it was wrong in trying to XML-ize poor HTML years ago, is going to reverse course and stop trying to force a square peg into a round hole. It's finally figured out that the...

Free Software Out To Corral the Hardware Companies.
March 12, 2007... The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is trying to nudge hardware makers into the fold urging them to support free software drivers, end the "Microsoft Tax," remove proprietary BIOS locks, support a free BIOS and reject DRM. According to a...

Hey, Look, Somebody's Licensed Microsoft's EC-Mandated Protocols.
March 12, 2007... Remember last week when an even-more-bent-out-of-shape-than-usual European Commission sent Microsoft an apparently surprise Statement of Objections on account of the royalties Microsoft was demanding for those server protocols it's supposed to...

NexXen's Got Linux Socket Accelerator.
March 12, 2007... California 10GbE start-up NetXen Inc says it's got the first Linux socket accelerator that requires no modifications to the operating system's kernel, host TCP stack or applications and can offload both user- and kernel-mode applications. ...

SugarCRM Sets Up in Europe.(opens a facility)(Brief article)
March 12, 2007... SugarCRM has opened an office in Dublin to service the continent, naming company co-founder Clint Oram to run the operation. It says a fourth of its commercial customers and 30% of its open source downloads are in Europe. Sugar intends to hire...

Ingres & Wipro Cut Deal.
March 12, 2007... Ingres, which started moving into India late last year, has tied up with Wipro, the Indian outsourcer and integrator, in a strategic alliance that's supposed to see Wipro develop open source solutions like business intelligence, content...

OpenLogic Adds Solaris to its Portfolio.(Brief article)
March 12, 2007... Going beyond Linux and Windows, OpenLogic has added some 60 Solaris 10 open source products to its certified open source library. Interesting timing considering Sun has designs on the Linux space that are only encouraged by what may become...

Mellanox Reports Record Quarter.(Financial report)
March 12, 2007... A newly public Infiniband house Mellanox Technologies earned $3.8 million, or four cents a share, up 31%, on record revenues of $15.8 million, up 30% year-over-year in the fourth quarter. For the year it did $7.2 million, up from $3.1 million,...

Wind River Earnings Crash & Burn.(Brief article)
March 12, 2007... Wind River was only able to deliver earnings of $546,000, or a penny a share, in Q4, down from $16.1 million, or 18 cents a share, the year before although revenues were up 8% to $76.1 million and Wall Street was expecting a dime. The...

Red Hat Goes Mexican.
March 12, 2007... Red Hat is setting up direct operations in Mexico City. It says it's hiring locals. It has already penetrated a couple of big Mexican banks and telecom companies and is expecting HP, IBM, Dell, Intel, SAP, AMD, even Oracle to help it push...

Fate of SCO Suit in Judge's Hands.
March 12, 2007... After days in court listening to IBM's final pleas for an assortment of summary judgments that could put an end to SCO's case of Unix abuse against it, the decision as to whether SCO's suit ever gets heard by a jury is pretty much in the hands...

Intel Sloppy with Discovery-Bound E-Mail.
March 12, 2007... From what it told a Delaware federal court Monday, it appears that Intel dumped e-mails that AMD wants as discovery in its antitrust suit against Intel. Seems Intel's system automatically deletes e-mail every 35 days and it didn't change...

AMD's First Quarter Sours.
March 12, 2007... Before turning up at a Morgan Stanley confab Monday morning AMD put out a statement confessing that it was unlikely to meet its first-quarter revenue guidance of $1.6 billion to $1.7 billion. Considering the way things have been going...

Microsoft Calls Google 'Cavalier' with Copyrights.
March 12, 2007... Microsoft associate general counsel Tom Rubin, the head of the company's IP legal team, attacked Google's 'novel' interpretation of the so-called fair use doctrine before a meeting of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) Tuesday...

ACE 2 Hits Public Beta.
March 12, 2007... VMware's second-generation ACE 2 Enterprise Edition deployment software moved to public beta Monday ahead of an anticipated release sometime next quarter. The widgetry creates a standard PC environment, consisting of operating system,...

Cray To Use Baby Opterons.
March 12, 2007... Cray says it's gonna put AMD's new low-power low-end Opteron models 1220 (2.8GHz, 103W) and 1218 HE (2.6GHz, 68W) in future versions of its XT4 supercomputers to reduce TCO. It'll upgrade to AMD's Barcelona quad when it gets here.

Leopard May Break Cane Early.
March 12, 2007... Rumor has it that Leopard, Apple's next version of the Mac OS, could be out by the end of the month, a month or two ahead of schedule. It should sell a few Apples. People will watch to see if it eats into Microsoft sales. It's the first new rev...

Google Denies M&A Designs.
March 12, 2007... Reluctant acquisition targets can sleep more peacefully in their beds. It seems it's unlikely they'll be Googlized. Google CEO Eric Schmidt told a Morgan Stanley Technology Conference Monday that it's unlikely the company will use the billions...

Even Intel Postpones Vista Deployment.
March 12, 2007... It looks like any real tickling done by Vista will have to wait until the second half. Wise to the ways of Microsoft by now, even Intel is postponing moving to Vista until after the first Service Pack and then it only intends to do "modest...

Microsoft Appears To Be Regrouping.
March 12, 2007... The head of Microsoft's tail-dragging losing-share-to-Google Live Search operation, Christopher Payne, one of the guys who got Microsoft into search in the first place, is reported to be leaving to start his own company. Microsoft has cut its...

Dell Needs To Ape HP: Wall Street.
March 12, 2007... Wall Street is starting to beat the drum for Dell to make layoffs, especially since its workforce at the end of Q4 was up 26% year-over-year to 82,200 people, double what it was two years ago. On Tuesday Toni Sacconaghi of Sanford Bernstein...

Patents Worth $1.3b Last Year.
March 12, 2007... Patent verdicts totaled $1.3 billion last year, according to research done by the National Law Journal and its VerdictSearch affiliate. It seemed a lot until Alcatel got more than that in one fell swoop against Microsoft the week before last.

Is Oracle All Bluster?
March 12, 2007... There hasn't been a peep out of Oracle about its "Death to Red Hat" move into Linux since it started last October. No major wins announced. Major software packages like IBM and SAP are uncertified on the Red Hat look-a-like Oracle Linux....

Red Hat Starts Moving Out RHEL 5.
March 19, 2007... Red Hat Wednesday pushed out Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL 5), the first major update of its operating system in a couple of years, a rev on which much hangs considering the threatening noises coming from the direction of Oracle, Sun,...

Where, Oh Where is the Third Draft of GPL 3?
March 19, 2007... Novell's traditional Brainshare conclave is this week coming up. Now you don't suppose that the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is going to release the reportedly belated, reportedly disruptive third draft of its proposed GPL 3 rewrite in the...

Dell Appears To Inch Closer to Factory-Installed Linux PCs.
March 19, 2007... What with its new IdeaStorm suggestion box crammed full of requests for factory-installed Linux, the Direct2Dell blog has started taking soundings to put a face on the demand. It says "we're crafting product offerings in response, but we'd...

Sourcefire IPOs.
March 19, 2007... Sourcefire Inc, the intrusion detection and prevention house whose mojo is based on the popular open source Snort system, went public last Friday at $15 a share, higher than the $12-$14 initially proposed and raising $71.8 million. Despite...

Microsoft To Supply HSBC with SUSE Subscription Certificates.
March 19, 2007... Novell said Tuesday that HSBC, the big London-based bank, is going to take SUSE subscription certificates off Microsoft under the four-month-old Microsoft-Novell alliance that scandalized the open source community. It said HSBC wants to...

Centrify Adds to Cross-Platform Software.
March 19, 2007... Centrify, which makes Microsoft's Active Directory cross-platform and extends its real-time authorization, authentication and group policy capabilities to Linux and Unix, is adding to its portfolio. It's developed a thing called...

JOnAS Makes Enterprise-Grade.
March 19, 2007... Remember JOnAS, the European consortium-backed open source J2EE-based application server that had Red Hat's backing there for a while until Red Hat up and bought JBoss? Well, sans Red Hat, JOnAS 4.8, the first enterprise edition, has just...

SWsoft Virtualization To Piggyback on SUSE.
March 19, 2007... SWsoft said from CeBit that it was going to bundle its open source-based Virtuozzo server virtualization software with a standard distribution of SUSE 10 and deliver it through SWsoft channels. It's supposed to be available next quarter and...

Novell Delivers Native Directory Support for Microsoft Networks.
March 19, 2007... Novell says it's got a new way to manage Windows operating systems like Vista for people with a heterogeneous environment. Apparently it's made ZenWorks Configuration Management natively integrate both Microsoft's Active Directory and its...

Power Virtualization.
March 19, 2007... IBM says it's merged virtualization capabilities with its SOA middleware on selected Power-based Unix and Linux p servers and dubbed them System p Configurations for SOA Entry Points, those entry points being people, processes, information,...

Vista On Hold, If Not Deep Six'd.(government agencies banning the use of Microsoft Windows Vista)(Brief article)
March 19, 2007... With people being cautious about rushing to deployment, Vista has been banned at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), the Department of Transportation and the Federal Aviation Administration, according to InformationWeek....

Red Hat Reaches Out to Resellers.
March 19, 2007... Red Hat is promising resellers deeper relationships with customers, improved margins and new revenue opportunities. It wants them to pick up JBoss.

Reiser To Stand Trial for Murder.(Hans Reiser)(Brief article)
March 19, 2007... The judge responsible for deciding whether there's enough evidence to try Linux programmer Hans Reiser for murdering his wife even though her body has never been found figures there is. Still the judge isn't buying the prosecution's theory...

Toshiba To Use Concurrent.
March 19, 2007... Toshiba TEC is going to use Concurrent's Opteron-based iHawk widgetry and its RedHawk Real-Time Linux to develop its next-generation document processing systems, machines that will have multiple functions like copy, print, fax and scan. It's...

Google To Be Eaten by Wales?
March 19, 2007... Wikipedia creator Jimmy Wales has commercial designs and that three-year-old for-profit ad-based Wikia Inc venture of his is aiming to build an open source search engine to take on Google. He wants 5% of the market according to reports out of...

Felony Charges against Patti Dunn Dropped.
March 19, 2007... In a deal struck by California Superior Court Judge Ray Cunningham, the four felony charges pending against former HP chairman Patti Dunn have been dismissed. Dunn, a cancer victim, was supposed to be the force behind HP's boardroom spying...

Google To Shield User Data.(Brief article)
March 19, 2007... Google, which knows all about everybody's searches and has been storing all that information on its servers much to the consternation of the privacy-sensitive, has decided to come up with a privacy policy and "de-personalize" the data every...

Hitachi To Resell HP PCs.
March 19, 2007... An unprofitable Hitachi Ltd says it's gonna sell HP's business PCs under the Hitachi label in Japan starting in May, replacing its own Flora line of desktops and laptops. The agreement is still being worked out. Hitachi currently sells HP...

AMD Says Otellini, Barrett, Maloney Mail Missing.
March 19, 2007... Intel CEO Paul Otellini, Intel's head of worldwide sales and marketing Sean Maloney, Intel chairman Craig Barrett and other "worldwide heads of Intel" are among those at the company whose e-mail wasn't saved for discovery by AMD in its...

Intel Adds to Quad Line-up.
March 19, 2007... Intel added two energy-efficient 50W Bensley platform server chips to its quad portfolio Monday - that's 12.5W per core. The 1.6GHz L5310 and 1.86GHz L5320 represent a 35%-60% decrease in power from Intel's existing 80W and 120W quads. ...

Virtualization Watch.
March 19, 2007... The researchers at TheInfoPro (TIP) figure only 10% of the server production environment in Fortune 1000s and mid-sizes firms was virtualized at the end of last year and that, based on answers to their questions, 25% of production applications...

Viacom Sues Google & YouTube for $1b.
March 19, 2007... You've of course heard that Viacom, which owns MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon, among others, has sued Google and its unprofitable but pricey $1.65 billion YouTube acquisition for damages of upwards of a billion dollars and an injunction....

Microsoft Accused of Violating its US Consent Decree.
March 19, 2007... An anonymous company has accused Microsoft of playing fast and loose with "middleware" - what kind of middleware exactly is unclear - and violating its 2002 antitrust settlement with the US government, according to a filing that surfaced during...

Dell Reportedly Cuts Notebook Sales Projections.
March 19, 2007... Dell has cut and cut deep, reducing its projection of notebook sales this year by four million, down to 16 million, according to CitiGroup, which has had its ear to the ground in Taiwan. It also quoted one Taiwan ODM as claiming that Dell would...

Microsoft Pushes Google off Lenovo.
March 19, 2007... Lenovo, the world's third-largest PC maker, is going to pre-load all its boxes with a default Microsoft toolbar that includes Windows Live online services and search instead of the Google toolbar it's been distributing.

Congress Still Sniffing Around HP.
March 19, 2007... Having painted a bull's eye on its chest with that cloak and dagger spy escapade that drew the attention of Congress to its existence, the US Senate's Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs late last month tapped HP on the...

Oracle Sues SAP for Theft; German Firm Charged with Bringing New Meaning to the Word 'Pretexting'.
March 26, 2007... Oracle sued its great rival SAP Thursday in a federal court in San Francisco claiming that the German company broke into its computers and stole massive amounts of its customer support material, including copyrighted software updates, bug...

Ellison to Red Hat: 'Hide Your Wives & Daughters. We're Coming'.(Brief article)
March 26, 2007... During the company's earning call Tuesday Oracle CEO Larry Ellison uttered the first words out of the company about its hijacking Red Hat Linux since it opened its front against Red Hat at the end of October. Despite recent press...

Novell's Flirtation with Delisting Gets More Serious.
March 26, 2007... Novell has gotten a third notice of non-compliance from the Nasdaq because now its 10-Q covering the January quarter is MIA along with its 10-Q for the July quarter last year and its annual report for the year ending in October. Novell was...

Debian Creator Goes To Work for Sun.
March 26, 2007... Sun has hired Debian creator and failed entrepreneur Ian Murdock, who's lately - and briefly - been CTO of the Linux Foundation, the new amalgam of the old Open Source Development Labs and the old Free Software Group, where he was CTO before...

Novell To Try Its Hand at Powering Thin Clients.
March 26, 2007... Novell is going into the thin client business with a server-based version of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop and an image-creation toolkit that resellers can configure, sort of like a poor man's Citrix or Sun Ray. A California school...

Novell Releases SUSE 10 SP1 Beta.
March 26, 2007... At Brainshare on Monday Novell released a public beta of the first service pack for SUSE Linux Enterprise 10, expecting general availability in May. It includes enhancements in virtualization - Microsoft Server 2000/2003/XP will run unmodified...

SUSE Certified on SAP.
March 26, 2007... Novell says SUSE with its Xen virtualization is now certified on SAP NetWeaver and mySAP. SUSE's high-availability storage infrastructure, developed with SAP's LinuxLab, and including clustering software that monitors parts of an enterprise...

Computer Industry Turns Cannibal.
March 26, 2007... We've been waiting for projections like this to come down. IDC says that virtualization and multi-core chips are going to cost the computer industry 4.5 million x86 server shipments and $2.4 billion in customer spending between now and...

Start-up Claims It's Got the World's Only Secure OS.
March 26, 2007... A Colorado start-up by the name of Secure64 Software Corporation claims to be the only company in the world with a genuinely secure operating system. Let's just let that worrisome thought sink in a minute. Okay, now. This here start-up...