Linux Gram articles from March 2008

Linux Gram archives from March 2008

Start-up Closes the Memory Gap; Cuts High-End Systems' Prices 90%.
March 3, 2008... If you heard a thump Monday, that was the cost of memory crashing. What cost maybe five grand last week can now be had for, oh, $1,500. See, Monday was when ex-AMD CTO Fred Weber's stealth start-up, MetaRAM, came out of hiding sporting...

Google Takes Out After SharePoint.
March 3, 2008... Google has blown a new cloud over Redmond's way to rain on Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration server - even if it has a ways to go before being recognized as a thunderhead. The cloud is called Google Sites. It's a googlized version...

Burp Alert: Sun Swallows MySQL.
March 3, 2008... Sun closed on its acquisition of MySQL the other day, calling the billion-dollar purchase the "most important acquisition in Sun's history" - oh, heck, make that the "modern software industry" - with Sun preening that it completed the deal in...

Gartner to OSS: 'Beware the Patent Trap' in Microsoft's Newfound Openness.
March 3, 2008... Gartner is almost as suspicious of Microsoft's week-old interoperability promises as European Commission antitrust chief Neelie Kroes. It's warning open source developers to beware the patent trap. "Do not use Microsoft's...

EC Fines Microsoft $1.33 Billion.
March 3, 2008... The European Commission Wednesday morning slapped Microsoft with a massive $1.33 billion fine (899 million euros) for charging too much for the communications protocols it was ordered to share with competitors in March of 2004. It is the...

Dell Still Searching for its Lost Mojo.
March 3, 2008... Dell's Q4 profits - which tellingly include January - dropped 6% year-over-year and down 11% sequentially to $679 million, 31 cents-a-share, on revenues up 10% year-over-year to $15.99 billion. Subtracting the costs for job cuts, R&D...

Adobe's AIR War Can Now Proceed in Earnest.
March 3, 2008... Adobe greased up Monday for its wrestling match with Microsoft over who gets to call the shots in the all-important rich Internet apps (RIA) department, that blurry future where web applications and desktop applications start looking and acting...

Novell Buys PlateSpin.
March 3, 2008... Novell is buying five-year-old Toronto-based PlateSpin Ltd for $205 million cash, calling it a "huge step" and a "strategic acquisition" whose management software will help define Novell as an infrastructure company and assure it a place...

IBM, Dell, HP & Fujitsu Siemens To Bundle Free VMware Teaser Software.
March 3, 2008... A couple weeks ago Citrix bragged that its Xen open source virtualization widgetry would be pre-installed by big unnamed servers vendors by the end of the year. Well, rival VMware Tuesday stole a march on both Citrix and the tangle-footed...

Vista-Capable Class Action Certified.
March 3, 2008... Looks like that Vista-capable class action against Microsoft is going ahead. A federal judge in Seattle Friday certified it but narrowed its complaint to whether the Vista-capable label PCs sported artificially created PC demand during the...

Sun To Sell VMware.
March 3, 2008... Sun, which is supposed to have serious ambitions for its own upcoming xVM virtualization technology, said Wednesday that it would sell and provide front-line support for VMware's Infrastructure product suite on Sun hardware under a deal with...

BEA + VMware = Virtual Java Appliances.
March 3, 2008... Doesn't Oracle have its own virtualization scheme? Isn't it Xen? Well, Oracle's soon-to-be takeover, BEA - the feds just okayed the merger - said Wednesday that it had teamed with VMware to deliver Java virtualization to the enterprise....

IBM Unveils its New Five-Years-in-the-Making Mainframe.
March 3, 2008... IBM is aiming its brand new z10 mainframe, the one that bowed this week, straight at the garden-variety x86 server. Well, the 1,500 garden-variety x86 servers the new mainframe can replace - using maybe 85% less power and definitely 85%...

PSI Continues To Bait IBM.
March 3, 2008... Platform Solutions Inc (PSI), the company suing IBM for monopolizing the mainframe market while IBM tries to put it out of business, has given IBM a bigger target to shoot at. This week it expanded its line, pushing out a Microsoft SQL...

Google Giant Has Feet of Clay.
March 3, 2008... Google's stock dropped 7% Tuesday morning - down to the $450s - after comScore sprung the lever on the trapdoor under its feet and reported that US paid-click growth in January was flat year-over-year and down 7.5% sequentially. Google...

HPC Market Back Up.(Brief article)
March 3, 2008... The HPC server market was up 15.5% to $11.6 billion last year, according to IDC, up from 9.2% growth in 2006, which was the first single-digit growth since 2002. IDC expects the market to be worth $15 billion by 2011. The supercomputer...

Sun Updates Blade.
March 3, 2008... Sun has put Intel's Tigerton Xeon quad in a new Sun Blade X8450 server module, using the occasion as an opportunity to toot its horn about being tied with Fujitsu Siemens for fourth place in blades behind HP, IBM and Dell, a dubious distinction...

Winners & Losers: Q4 Server Report Card is Out.
March 3, 2008... The server industry Q4 report card is out. According to IDC, factory revenues worldwide were up 2.4% year-over-year to $15.7 billion. And unit shipments were up 9%. Gartner puts the numbers at 3% and 11% respectively. For the full...

OSA To Expand CCV Project.(Open Solutions Alliance)(Common Customer View)(Brief article)
March 3, 2008... The year-old Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), the commercial open source consortium with the interoperability brief, says its Common Customer View (CCV) project is going to add loosely coupled integration best practices including SOA and REST and...

Sun Cuts OpenSparc Deal with Chinese Department of Ed.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief article)
March 3, 2008... In one of those deals that you just knew was in the cards - though long-term it may prove to be ill-advised - the Communist Chinese are going to take Sun up on its OpenSparc offer and start training aspiring young developers on the artistry of...

Sun Open Sources Honeycomb Storage Code.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief article)
March 3, 2008... In what appears to be an extension of its competitive interest in the OpenDocument Format, Sun has donated the source code for its Solaris/Java-based StorageTek 5800 digital archive storage system, the erstwhile Project Honeycomb, to the...

Novell Back in the Black.(Financial report)
March 3, 2008... Novell is back in the money. Beating estimates, it earned $16.8 million, or a nickel a share, on revenues up year-over-year to $230.9 million in its first fiscal quarter. Lower costs contributed. Because of its PlateSpin acquisition...

SUSE at Point of Sales.
March 3, 2008... Novell has started pushing SUSE Linux Enterprise Point of Service to retail environments saying they can customize POS systems. It says it can support big multi-tier POS environments and retail-specific standards like JavaPOS. NCR has certified...

Ballmer Predicts the Rise of Computing Super-Powers.
March 3, 2008... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has been dazzling the Financial Times with the prediction of the emergence of a "new super-group of tech companies" that will dominate cloud computing, "each of them managing what amounts to a giant centralized...

Brussels Tittle-Tattle.
March 3, 2008... Forbes picked up some Brussels tittle-tattle that the European Commission's own lawyers questioned the legality of the size of the latest $1.3 billion Microsoft fine and memorialized their angst in an internal memo. The historic sum works out...

Yahoo Finds Microsoft Distracting.
March 3, 2008... Yahoo has told the SEC that Microsoft's unsolicited acquisition offer and trying to find an alternative "have been, and may continue to be, a significant distraction for our management and employees and have required, and may continue to...

Iona Pondering Bid.
March 3, 2008... Iona Technologies, the Irish-American SOA middleware company started in 1991, has hired Lehman Brothers to advise it on its "strategic alternatives," including sale or merger. It said a few weeks ago it got a "very preliminary" unsolicited...

Google Finds Discovery Search a Slog.
March 3, 2008... Google's lawyer, complaining that the task was "daunting," had begged for another three months to go through 4.5 billion documents and turn over discovery to Viacom in Viacom's billion-dollar YouTube copyright suit against Google. Kinda funny...

Citrix Needs To Dance Faster.
March 3, 2008... Jefferies & Co thinks Citrix is going to be too long at recognizing OEM revenue from its XenSource acquisition and that IBM won't pick the open source virtualization widgetry up until later this year. So now the Wall Street firm thinks...

IBM Shores Up Wall Street.
March 3, 2008... IBM was credited Tuesday with stopping the market from cratering over more nasty economic reports by announcing a $15 billion stock buyback, the lion's share completed Thursday, that should boost IBM's 2008 earnings up a nickel, past where Wall...

IE8 Beta Soon.
March 3, 2008... Microsoft's got a beta 1 of Internet Explorer 8 in the wings and is rounding up testers.

Carbon Watch.
March 3, 2008... Dell Wednesday became the first computer company to join the Climate Group, which is working to reduce carbon pollution. Dell is pledged to carbon neutrality for its facilities, plants and business air travel this year.

Google To Try AOL Move with Yahoo?
March 3, 2008... The Tech Crunch blog titillated Wall Street with the rumor that Google is thinking of buying just under 20% of Yahoo to screw up the Microsoft-Yahoo deal. Like what it did with AOL-Microsoft.

Layoffs Likely at AMD.
March 24, 2008... The Inquirer claims that AMD has quietly started cutting 5% of workforce across-the-board, tying the reported downsizing to speculation that the company will miss this quarter badly and characterizing the layoffs as a preemptive attempt to get...

Son of Classmate Finds its Way to US & Europe.
March 24, 2008... The other shoe has dropped - not that it's that unexpected - just that it could screw up some economic models. See, the general manager of Intel's emerging markets unit Lila Ibrahim told Reuters Wednesday that Intel was going to see to it...

Microsoft: 'Batteries Included'.
March 24, 2008... The olive branch - well, okay, twig - olive twig - that Microsoft extended to the open source Eclipse Foundation Wednesday was the undertaking to help make the Eclipse Standard Widget Toolkit (SWT) work with Windows Presentation Foundation...

Novell Sketches Out SLES 11.
March 24, 2008... When the next generation of SUSE Linux arrives, and goodness knows when that will be - Novell doesn't even want to talk about an ETA until the end of this year - but it says that when it does get here one of its avatars will be as an appliance,...

Russia Post To Go with Red Hat.(Brief article)
March 24, 2008... Russia Post and US Linux market leader Red Hat have signed what the post calls a "protocol" agreeing to work together to introduce the Linux operating system and other unnamed open source programs to the post's IT structure. The deal was...

Sun To Push Zmanda Backup for MySQL.(Brief article)
March 24, 2008... MySQL - and by extension Sun's sales force - are going to start peddling Zmanda's open source backup and recovery software written especially for MySQL to the enterprise. Starting April 1, MySQL Enterprise customers will be able to buy...

Hyper-V Virtually Done.
March 24, 2008... Microsoft's Hyper-V, its delayed, VMware-scratching hypervisor-based virtualization software, is now feature-complete and broadly available as a first release candidate. A beta of the stuff was included in Windows Server 2008 when it...

HP To Serve Up Virtualization Smorgasbord.
March 24, 2008... HP is going to bundle VMware, Citrix XenServer and in due course Microsoft's Hyper-V virtualization under an umbrella operation called ProLiant iVirtualization that's supposed to appeal to SMBs as well as the enterprise. When an...

The Future According to Intel.
March 24, 2008... In the run-up to its Developer Forum next month, which is way the heck over in Shanghai, Intel dropped a few factoids about Nehalem, Dunnington and Larrabee on the press this week. This being an even number year, Intel is going to move to a...

Oracle Open Sources XQuilla XQuery.(Brief article)
March 24, 2008... Oracle has open sourced the embeddable XQilla XQuery engine code, its implementation of the W3C XQuery 1.0 standard, which lets developers query XML data like SQL for relational data. The widgetry, now at SourceForge under the Apache 2.0...

AMD Contributes Eclipse Plug-in.
March 24, 2008... AMD has open sourced an Eclipse plug-in called CodeSleuth, apparently the equivalent of its CodeAnalyst Performance Analyzer, meant to give Java developers an idea of how their software is performing on AMD chips, including the quad-core...

Alcatel-Lucent Promises To Expand Red Hat's Business.
March 24, 2008... Alcatel-Lucent, which owns Bell Labs, where Unix was created, says it's going to integrate Red Hat's Enterprise Linux and Realtime technologies into its communication products for SMEs with availability set for the first half of next year. ...

Red Hat Frees its Certificate System.
March 24, 2008... Red Hat has open sourced its Certificate System - or rather those parts of it that weren't already open sourced. Certificate System, its identity management and security system, derives from the Netscape technology that Red Hat got from AOL...

US Supreme Court Won't Hear Microsoft's Novell Appeal.
March 24, 2008... The US Supreme Court has refused to hear Microsoft's appeal of Novell's multibillion-dollar antitrust suit against it. The news hit just as Novell's annual BrainShare user conference was getting starting. Basically a private replay of...

Sun Turns Over Third Virtualization Card.
March 24, 2008... Sun is laying a third bet at the virtualization roulette wheel besides its yet-to-be-announced Xen-based xVM Server and whatever it does with its shiny new open source VirtualBox desktop virtualization acquisition. This one's a centralized...

BMC Buys BladeLogic.
March 24, 2008... Putting a burr under HP's Opsware saddle, BMC Software is buying BladeLogic, the server automation company, for a pricey $800 million less BladeLogic's cash on hand. It plans to tender for BladeLogic's stock starting next week probably and...

HP's Back in the Eight-Socket Business.
March 24, 2008... Hewlett-Packard dropped out of the eight-socket x86 business a couple of years ago because it couldn't do a Xeon box without doing its own chipset and it had stopped making its own chipsets. It threw itself into two- and four-socket...

Dell To Build Special PCs for India & China.
March 24, 2008... Dell, whose revenue base has always been the US, is now thinking it may become Asia, at least its growth engine will be Asia. Its Chinese consumer sales last year were up 54%, three times the industry average. To cultivate this new...

Vista SP1 Kinda, Sorta Out.
March 24, 2008... You can at long last go and download Vista SP1 from the Windows Update service, a fact that should signal an uptick in Vista adoption, the once-burned-twice-shy having learned to wait for such things from Microsoft. People who want...

Carly & Meg Work for McCain Presidency.
March 24, 2008... Ousted HP CEO Carly Fiorina and soon-to-retire eBay CEO Meg Whitman are both working to get Republican nominee-in-all-but-fact John McCain elected president. Whitman is now the co-chair of McCain's campaign and Fiorina is "victory chairman" of...

DoubleClick's Price Went Up.
March 24, 2008... Google told the SEC it's going to wind up paying $3.24 billion for DoubleClick. A year ago it said it would pay $3.1 billion.

AMD Hires CMO.(appointment of Nigel Dessau at Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief article)
March 24, 2008... AMD has tapped Nigel Dessau to be its chief marketing officer, responsible for its image, which could use some burnishing. Dessau, a Brit, was CMO of StorageTek before Sun bought it and stuck around as head of storage marketing, alliances and...

OOXML Betting Pool.
March 24, 2008... The smart money is currently betting that Microsoft's OOXML file format will squeak into ISO standardization by the hair of one vote cast by some dumb place like Cuba that needs the money leaving behind it a trail of broken glass.

Cloud Central Dublin.
March 24, 2008... IBM is going to put a Cloud Computing Center in Dublin that will act as a hub in delivering cloud research and services to a number of satellite facilities that IBM builds in EMEA to get customers on cloud computing solutions. Dublin's first...

Google Claims To Be Insulated.
March 24, 2008... "We believe that if there were [a US recession], we'll be well positioned. We're not particularly dependent on any particular one market. There's not a lot of advertising for any one market over another." - CEO Eric Schmidt in Sydney Tuesday...

The Novell 6,000.
March 24, 2008... Novell is celebrating the fact that it has almost 6,000 customers for its identity and security management software ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500s.

Google's Bid Fails.
March 24, 2008... Google did not win the great American airwaves auction so one can take it that it will not be going into the wireless business. It made a bid for the so-called consumer-friendly C block licenses, but didn't offer enough money. Verizon Wireless,...

IBM Buys into EnterpriseDB.
March 31, 2008... IBM has taken a piece of open source database start-up EnterpriseDB, a relatively odd thing for IBM to do considering its DB2 interests - unless, of course, it wants to throw sand in Oracle's eyes - since EnterpriseDB can replace Oracle for...

Oracle Props Up Unbreakable Linux.
March 31, 2008... Oracle is throwing its Clusterware software at its paying Unbreakable Linux support customers for free. Unbreakable Linux being Oracle's controversial year-old version of Red Hat, which it now claims has won 2,000 customers. Previously...

JasperSoft Says It's Working with Microsoft.
March 31, 2008... JasperSoft, the open source business intelligence venture - which just last week was rattling off a bunch of numbers contending that it's "the world's most widely deployed BI suite" - said from the Open Source Business Conference in San...

GPL 2 Suit Against Verizon Settled.
March 31, 2008... Remember that suit that the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) filed against Verizon Communications back in December for not providing source code as the GPL 2 requires? Well, it's been settled. Verizon, the biggest name among the four...

When Yahoo Says Cloud, It Means a Freakin' Big Cloud.(Brief article)
March 31, 2008... Yahoo has tied up with Tata subsidiary Computational Research Laboratories (CRL) to do cloud computing research. Financial terms were not disclosed. What CRL brings to the party is the fourth-fastest supercomputer in the world, a beast...

Likewise Practices Saying De Facto.
March 31, 2008... Likewise Software, which some people may remember as Centeris, has revved its namesake cross-platform authentication software calling the latest thing Likewise Open Spring '08 - at least to the outside world. Inside they call it 4.1. ...

Open Source Developers Not 'Fanatics': OpenLogic.
March 31, 2008... Not exactly the psychological profile attempted, say, by Erik Erikson in his landmark "Young Man Luther," but for what it's worth OpenLogic surveyed its own expert community, got 50 sets of answers back - roughly a third of the group's members...

Red Hat Makes Its Numbers.(Financial report)
March 31, 2008... In its fourth fiscal quarter closed February 29 Red Hat earned $22 million, a dime a share, up 7% or a million and a half more than a year ago, on revenues up 27% year-over-year to $141.5 million. Cost of sales and marketing, it said, up...

Virtual Infighting.(Brief article)
March 31, 2008... HP's nose is out of joint because Dell has stolen a march on it by OEMing Egenera's PAN data center virtualization and management software. HP's first reaction to the news, which it apparently knew was coming, was to say, "Oh, we can do...

Oracle's Sales Don't Cut It.(Financial report)
March 31, 2008... Oracle, the center of much Wall Street anticipation this week, came in $100 million and change shy of expectations on the revenue front but gave the punters the 30% increase in profits they expected. It took a nasty 7% hit and passed the...

Sun Loses Yen, Sets Off To Build a Virtual Supercomputer.
March 31, 2008... Sun has lost David Yen, the head of its chips unit, Sun Microelectronics, who's going to Juniper Networks as EVP, emerging technologies where he's supposed to gather a team to develop widgetry for "the intersection of HPC and networking." ...

Adobe Erects Photoshop on the Cloud.(Adobe Systems Inc.)(Brief article)
March 31, 2008... Adobe, which is not exactly unfamiliar with the concept of the free giveaway, has put out a public beta of a simple version of its popular Photoshop photo-editing software for free over the web. Think of it as an answer to Google's Picasa. ...

AMD Spinning Off Fabs?
March 31, 2008... As luck would have it The Inquirer stumbled upon Raymond James financial analyst Hans Mosesmann's recent note on AMD, which isn't pretty. Not pretty at all. He thinks that AMD is going to spin off manufacturing, finally explaining what its...

Google's Going Through Its First Rough Patch.(Brief article)
March 31, 2008... Ya know, maybe it's not the economic slowdown. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said January 31 that the company was feeling no pain from any macroeconomic softening. Maybe the novelty of Google search is wearing thin because it doesn't return what...

VMware To Put $100m in India.
March 31, 2008... VMware says it's going to put $100 million into India in the next two years and double its local engineering staff to more than a thousand people, cultivating India as a market as well as a cheap source of talent. Along with waiting for...

AMD at 3s & 4s.
March 31, 2008... AMD Thursday announced its anticipated never-before-seen-on-an-x86-chip triple-core processor hoping it removes some of the tarnish of its Barcelona debacle. The chip and its friends are out a bit earlier than thought, given the erratum...

Finding Android a Home.
March 31, 2008... Outbid by Verizon Wireless in the great American airwaves auction last week, Google plunked a six-page letter on the Federal Communication Commission's desk asking the government to make the "white spaces" - the airspace between TV channels -...

Androids for Xmas.
March 31, 2008... Google's making noises that sound like Android gismos could be out this fall. It says some 34 companies are now working on the open source platform.

Gartner Cuts PC Forecast.
March 31, 2008... Gartner's now saying that worldwide PC shipments will be up only 10.9% this year to 293 million units, not 11.6%, because of the state of the US economy. And things could get worse. The number could fall into the single digits depending, it...

Small Chip, Small Price.
March 31, 2008... Intel is supposedly pricing its new entry-level Atom 230 chip below $29 in 1,000-unit quantities, according to what Taiwan motherboard makers have been telling DigiTimes, to scotch an AMD grab for the low-cost desktop PC market with its...

Laptop Batteries in Short Supply.
March 31, 2008... A March 3 plant fire at LG Chem, the second-biggest Korean battery maker, has created a shortage of laptop batteries and has sent OEM scurrying for alternate supplies. Prices could be impacted. It will take LG two or three months to get the...

Wisconsin: The New Texas.
March 31, 2008... Apparently Texas isn't the only jurisdiction that smiles on patent plaintiffs. According to the National Law Journal, the latest so-called "rocket docket," given to quick-time-to-trial and patent holder-friendly jury pools, is the Western...

OpenOffice Revved.
March 31, 2008... A new, enhanced, patched OpenOffice 2.4 has been released claiming improvements in printing and PDF handling. The next major 3.0 release is due in the fall.

Kovacic To Chair FTC.
March 31, 2008... Well fancy that now. The White House has named Bill Kovacic, the antitrust expert we leaned on so heavily when covering the Microsoft case, chairman of the Federal Trade Commission. He replaces Deborah Platt Majorcas who's going off to handle...