Linux Gram articles from May 2007

Linux Gram archives from May 2007

Linux-Microsoft Brawl Turns into Gang Bang.
May 7, 2007... Oracle, IBM, NEC, Hitachi, HP, Dell, NTT Data and others are joining in a consortium to sell Linux servers and systems in Japan, according to a Japanese press report. The Nikki Shimbun says it would be the first time major IT firms...

3Leaf Aims To Make Scale-Out Scale Up.
May 7, 2007... Now here's a curiosity. Intel is backing a start-up that depends on AMD technology to do what's it's doing. No, really, swear to God. In fact, Intel led the stealth outfit's $20 million B round last September, bringing total investment to $32.5...

Dell To Pre-install Ubuntu on Consumer PCs.
May 7, 2007... On Tuesday, ironically enough May Day - at least somebody in Round Rock hasn't lost their sense of humor - Dell announced that it would be pre-installing Ubuntu 7.04, a k a Feisty Fawn, from South Africa's up-and-coming Linux distributor...

OpenLogic Introduces Inventory Tool.
May 7, 2007... In June OpenLogic will be introducing a free software tool called OpenLogic Discovery to help enterprises inventory the open source software that's installed on their Windows, Linux and Solaris systems. OpenLogic says the inventory would...

R.I.P. Progeny Linux.
May 7, 2007... The wake's over and now they're burying the corpse. Progeny Linux Systems ceased operations on Monday. Its founder, Debian creator Ian Murdock, now at Sun as chief operating systems officer, got a day job with the Free Standards Group months...

Zmanda Brings in New CEO.
May 7, 2007... Zmanda, the open source backup and recovery operation, has brought in a ex-Red Hat guy, Peter Childers, as CEO replacing founding CEO Chander Kant who will serve as CTO. Most recently Childers was VP of online strategy and operations at...

SCO Ups its Unix Prices.
May 7, 2007... SCO has raised the price of its Unix operation system including patches and upgrades 20% across-the-board, a move that was reportedly well tested with its remaining network and customer base. Hearing that might give the judge overseeing the...

DevZuz Offers Global 2000 Open Source Management.
May 7, 2007... Fresh from selling LogicBlaze to Iona a few weeks ago, almost two years to the day after he sold Gluecode to IBM, serial entrepreneur Winston Damarillo, who cut his teeth at Intel Capital, is back with another start-up, one that he's folding...

SaaS Becomes 'Software Plus Services' in Microsoft's Mouth.
May 7, 2007... Bill Gates' replacement Ray Ozzie on whose shoulders the company's future rests, the guy who has to dig Microsoft out of the Internet hole it finds itself it and at all costs salvage the client, started this week to try to redefine SaaS,...

Rackable Dumps Barton for Barrenechea.(Rackable Systems's Todd Ford and Tom Barton were terminated and appointed Mark Barrenechea)(Brief article)
May 7, 2007... Something happened at Rackable between last Thursday when Rackable president Todd Ford was ousted and CEO Tom Barton took over his job and Monday morning when Barton himself was tossed out on his ear and replaced as president and CEO by...

Egenera vBlades Out.(virtualization software)(Brief article)
May 7, 2007... Egenera has gone to market with its promised vBlade software, the extension to its PAN Manager that provides a single environment for configuring, allocating, repurposing and managing both physical servers and virtual machines. This...

Supremes Rule for Microsoft; Change Patent Rules.
May 7, 2007... US software houses can rest easier in their beds. The Supreme Court ruled seven-to-one in favor of Microsoft and said it didn't owe AT&T royalties on software sold overseas that infringed AT&T patents. AT&T had claimed in its patent...

Judge Tells Microsoft To Get Out its Checkbook.
May 7, 2007... The judge hearing the Alcatel v Microsoft MP3/Windows Media Player patent case that resulted in an award of $1.53 billion to Alcatel told Microsoft the other day to get out its pen and write the French company a check. Microsoft however...

Dell Contemplates Apostasy.
May 7, 2007... In a leaked e-mail sent to employees worldwide on April 25 that surfaced last Friday its author Michael Dell admitted that Dell's vaunted business model wasn't working and that the company needs another approach to the market. "The direct...

ClearSpeed Adds Second Accelerator.
May 7, 2007... ClearSpeed Technology, the Anglo-American HPC acceleration maven, has just introduced its second iteration add-in card, a smaller Advance e620 that piggybacks on a machine's PCI Express interconnect, keeping the widgetry abreast of the latest...

HP Shifts Marketing Chief to Printers.
May 7, 2007... HP's chief marketing officer Cathy Lyons is being "repotted," as Peter Drucker would say, returning to the company's printer unit "to take on responsibility for strategic change management," whatever that means, reporting to printer boss...

Qantas Abandons Linux for AIX.
May 7, 2007... Qantas is abandoning the Linux it's been using under its finance systems for AIX to "address some stability issues," according to a story in ZDNet Australia quoting a speech given by the airline's general manager for finance improvement and...

Novell Recruits New Identity Boss.
May 7, 2007... Novell has named Jim Ebzery, an ex-IBMer and former president of the Viisage Division of L-1 Identity Solutions, to run its identity and security management unit. Kent Erickson, who's been running both identity and security and workgroup...

Google Brands iGoogle.
May 7, 2007... Google has dubbed gadget-bedecked personalized versions of its home page "iGoogle" and provided a new coding-free Gadget Maker customization tool with seven templates for adding stuff like personal photos, YouTube favorites and users' own...

The Massachusetts Halo Effect.
May 7, 2007... Texas, California, Minnesota and Oregon are considering bills that could push them down the Massachusetts path and into the arms of the anti-Microsoft Open Document Format (ODF).

Solaris Boots on Rock.(Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Brief article)
May 7, 2007... Sun is preening about Solaris booting on its next-generation high-end, heavily multithreaded, high-throughput, 16-core 65nm Sparc chip Rock ahead of schedule and within six weeks of Sun getting its first Rock prototypes back from TI. First...

Red Hat Plays the Desktop Card.
May 14, 2007... Red Hat made some guttural, almost inarticulate, awfully confusing noises Wednesday from its user-cum-analyst meeting in San Diego when it tried to say that it's finally going to play the desktop card. Red Hat has always been rather, oh,...

IBM Sticks Novell in the Corner.
May 14, 2007... OK, let's sit up and try to follow these moves. So Novell - which got into Linux on IBM's nickel and then stuck its head into what may turn out to be a SCO noose for the Big Boy - has wandered off the reservation and is now hugging...

Dell Becomes Microsoft-Novell's Third Wheel.
May 14, 2007... Dell Sunday night went and stuck its head in the lion's mouth by cutting a deal to buy SUSE server licenses off of Microsoft and redistribute them, making it a third leg in the controversial Microsoft-Novell alliance that moved the keepers of...

Microsoft & Novell Name Names.
May 14, 2007... Wednesday morning Microsoft and Novell waved around the names and testimonials of 12 new customers that they said have come into the controversial Microsoft-Novell interoperability-IP assurance fold, giving Novell the chance to brag that its...

Lemme Get This Straight. Red Hat is Going To Secure Windows.
May 14, 2007... Under a joint program with Intel, Red Hat is going to deliver a Red Hat-branded software platform that supports desktop PCs imbued with Intel's vPro processor technology. It's supposed to bring hardware-assisted virtualization to the...

All of Java That Can Be Open Sourced Is.
May 14, 2007... Java is now open source as far as Sun is concerned. At JavaOne Tuesday, it released a fully buildable JDK for Java SE to the OpenJDK community under the current GPL 2, remarking that it was delivering on its promise in under a year and...

MySQL Goes Outside for Four9s High Availability.(partnership with ISV Linbit)(Brief article)
May 14, 2007... MySQL has tied up with Austrian ISV Linbit, which supplies high-availability Linux widgetry called DRBD. MySQL is going to support the Four9s LAMP technology directly. It's meant to narrow the gap between MySQL and proprietary databases....

Novell Loses Desktop Architect.
May 14, 2007... Novell has lost the chief architect of its Linux desktop effort Robert Love to Google and its Open Source Program Office. Many would like to ascribe it to the Microsoft-Novell relationship but Love denied it on Slashdot. It's simply the thrill...

Intel & Ubuntu Collaborate on Silverthorn.
May 14, 2007... Ubuntu, Dell's pick for some of its PCs and laptops, is going to try its hand in the mobile and embedded market next and is talking about riding on small handheld Internet-enabled tablets powered by energy-efficient Intel chips, the tiny...

Red Hat Exchange is Born.
May 14, 2007... The promised Red Hat Exchange (RHX) has come into existence. That's where Red Hat is going to sell third-party software, open source stuff build around Red Hat Enterprise Linux and JBoss, sort of like what Linspire does, in combination with...

Sun Seeks To Cure Java Bloat.
May 14, 2007... Remember how complicated and obtuse Java has gotten? Well, there's a thing called JavaFX Script coming, previewed by Sun at JavaOne this week and described as a "radically simple" scripting language for creating rich content and...

Amazon Pays Off IBM To Settle Big Patent Suit.
May 14, 2007... Remember last October when IBM sued Amazon claiming the great dot.com had knowingly built its business model on the back of IBM's patents? Well, the pair patched up their difference the other day outside the courtroom after Amazon paid IBM some...

E-mail Gaffe Forces HP To Raise its Numbers.
May 14, 2007... HP raised its fiscal Q2 guidance Tuesday. When it reports its numbers on Wednesday, it expects its revenues to be between $25.5 billion and $25.55 billion, up a billion over its last call. It said it should earn 64 cents-65 cents a share,...

VMware Workstation 6 Hits Market.
May 14, 2007... VMware's sixth-generation desktop virtualization software VMware Workstation 6 made it to general availability Wednesday. This is the stuff that supports Vista and cross-platform paravirtualization as well as such niceties as multiple...

Santa Rosa Arrives.
May 14, 2007... Santa Rosa, Intel's pace-sustaining contribution to the laptop push, is here at last, pulling in its wake 230 design-wins, by Intel's count, 50 more than the last Centrino outing. Some will be out faster than others and not everybody will...

Microsoft & Yahoo Reported Talking about Google Counterweight.
May 14, 2007... According to the press Microsoft and Yahoo are supposed to be trying to figure out a configuration that would let them fight Google together. The notion of Yahoo's acquisition by Microsoft for, oh, $50 billion advanced by the New York Post...

Transitive Prices Upcoming Solaris Widgetry.(Brief article)
May 14, 2007... Transitive showed up at JavaOne this week with its Sun-sanctioned Solaris/Sparc-to-Solaris/x86 you-don't-have-modify-nothing QuickTransit widgetry in toe, saying that a beta would be available in July and a production release in September. ...

Ericsson To Build Multimedia App Server with Sun.
May 14, 2007... Ericsson has signed up to co-develop and then license an open source Java-based multimedia application server from Sun and contribute parts of it to the open source GlassFish project. It's also supposed to license the Java System...

Sun Releases Java Real-Time 2.
May 14, 2007... Sun has released Java Real-Time System 2.0, which pairs the Java extension with Solaris 10 for creating deterministic systems. RTS helps developers set process priorities according to their importance, something not typically supported by...

Asia a Dynamo for HP.
May 14, 2007... HP Asia is selling PCs at a growth rate of about 36% a year on average, twice the market rate according to what a senior executive told Reuters. The territory includes China, India, Southeast Asia, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The company...

Viridian Comes Up Short.
May 14, 2007... VMware and Xen will be delighted. Microsoft is putting its Viridian Longhorn virtualization widgetry through the same slimming exercise that Vista went through to get it out the door. It's not going to have the 64-processor support that pushed...

Sun Supports OpenID, Seeks Friends.
May 14, 2007... Sun has opened a new initiative in support of OpenID, the decentralized, web-friendly single sign-on mechanism used across different web sites. OpenID is currently limited to facilitating low-risk transactions like blog comments. Sun wants...

Spring Creator Picks Up $10m.(Interface21, Benchmark Capital)(Brief article)
May 14, 2007... Interface21, the open source Java Spring start-up, has fetched $10 million in Series A financing from Benchmark Capital. The money is earmarked for product development, sales and marketing, and fleshing out its support infrastructure. ...

AMD Lets the First 430 Go.
May 14, 2007... Remember we said AMD was making guttural noises that sounded like it wanted to say it might lay people off? Well, the Austin Business Journal tumbled to the fact that the company was laying off 80 people down their neck of the woods and then...

Solaris Wants To Look like Linux.
May 14, 2007... Sun is going to try to make Solaris look like, behave and install like Linux to get developers over their adoption rejection. The project is code named Indiana and opens the door to issues of backward compatibility and code sharing.

GPL & Apache Make Eyes at One Another.
May 14, 2007... The Free Software Foundation is talking about bringing its GPLv3 rewrite into compatibility with the more liberal, business-friendly Apache License before it's engraved in stone this summer. Just what that means remains to be seen.

Leopard Beta Due Next Month.
May 14, 2007... Apple's saying it'll have a "feature-complete" beta of its iPhone-delayed Leopard operating system available the middle of next month at its Worldwide Developers Conference. Now the question is what sexy new features are we talking about.

Does Greta van Susteren Know About This?
May 14, 2007... Evidently Nina Reiser had exquisitely bad taste in men. Her estranged husband stands accused of her murder, his trial was to have started this past Monday, but not before prosecutors were reportedly forced to tell the court that an ex-lover...

Microsoft Opens Pandora's Box.
May 21, 2007... Microsoft has let loose the Furies. It would love the three terrible winged goddesses in charge of avenging wrongs to bring open source to book but it seems inevitable that Microsoft will get entangled in their serpentine hair. It's a...

Microsoft's on a Short Linux Leash: Moglen.
May 21, 2007... The Free Software Foundation is currently expecting to circulate a "Last Call Draft" of the GPLv3, with its anti-Microsoft codicil, on May 31, ahead of its final adoption on June 30. At that point, according to Eben Moglen, the lawyer who wrote...

VMware Reportedly Wants IPO Money for Acquisitions.
May 21, 2007... It's whispered that EMC subsidiary VMware will be spending its post-IPO money on acquisitions and that it has Opsware in its sights because Opsware, whose market cap is around $814 million, would give it a virtualization management suite....

Panasas Uses Open Source To Spur pNFS Adoption.
May 21, 2007... Panasas, the parallel clustered storage house, is going to open source its proprietary DirectFlow client software to accelerate the adoption of pNFS, the emerging Parallel Network File System standard, the first performance upgrade to NFS...

Pinch Me. Microsoft Vote Backs Enemy ODF.
May 21, 2007... Microsoft - in a head-snapping game of good cop-bad cop played this week with open source devotees - voted in favor of adding the enemy OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.0 to the American National Standards list. Then went out and bragged about...

Novell Thinks Acquisitions.
May 21, 2007... Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian, who's sitting on a tidy little stash, says the company has been looking at acquisitions in its core markets.

SAP Backs SUSE.
May 21, 2007... SAP is recommending SUSE as its preferred Linux platform, the stuff of which stacks are made, and Novell is going start being the first line of defense for people running SAP applications on SUSE. SAP's great rival, Oracle, of course is now...

Red Hat & EMC Snuggle.
May 21, 2007... EMC says its Symmetrix, Clariion, Celerra and Invista platforms have completed their interoperability qualification with Red Hat Linux. It is now going to start a Cooperative Resolution Center to support joint customers through an enhanced...

Red Hat Frees Fonts.(Brief article)
May 21, 2007... There are now three sets of what Red Hat calls Liberation fonts: Sans (an open source substitute for Arial, Albany, Helvetica, Nimbus Sans L and Bitstream Vera Sans), Serif (a substitute for Times New Roman, Thorndale, Nimbus Roman and...

Linux Foundation Plays Travel Agent.
May 21, 2007... The Linux Foundation has started a Community Developer Travel Fund so technical "rock stars" can attend conferences saying that there's no substitute for face-to-face meetings and recalling that a lot of important technical breakthroughs in...

Red Hat & Sybase Collaborate on Appliance.
May 21, 2007... Red Hat and Sybase are collaborating on a database appliance with integrated virtualization, a first. The virtualization is supposed to provide on-demand resource management and increased database performance. It'll use Sybase's Adaptive Server...

New York Sues Dell for Bait & Switch Tactics.
May 21, 2007... Consumer complaints have spurred New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to sue Dell, charging Dell and its finance arm of fraud, false advertising and using deceptive terms and interest rates to boost sales. Cuomo wants such...

HP Looks Like It Whupped Dell Big Time.
May 21, 2007... Somebody somewhere ought to give HP's ousted CEO Carly Fiorina some credit. In the hands of her successor Mark Hurd HP Wednesday returned $2.1 billion, or 65 cents a share, up 27% year-over-year, on revenues of $25.5 billion, up 13%, in...

Oracle Spends Another $495m in its Arms Race with SAP.
May 21, 2007... While SAP fills in the missing beads on its necklace with what looks like penny-ante purchases, Oracle, the great consolidator, has gone and bought Agile Software, laying out another $495 million in cash in its race to catch up with SAP, a...

AMD Breaks Out a Quad Desktop Chip.
May 21, 2007... In the wake of Intel's Santa Rosa notebook release last week, AMD trotted out a four-core desktop version of the widely anticipated Barcelona server quad on which its future rests. It said it hopes the desktop chip will be shipping in systems...

Vista at 40m Sold.
May 21, 2007... Rebutting the Linux huggers who contend that Vista sucks and Microsoft is on the ropes, Bill Gates said from the WinHEC Tuesday that Vista sold 40 million copies its first 100 days, twice as fast as XP, making it Microsoft's fast-selling...

Broadcom Promotes its 10 gigE NIC.
May 21, 2007... Broadcom is all atwitter about what it says is the industry's "first true single-chip, dual-port 10 gigabit Ethernet converged network interface controller (C-NIC)." It figures the device, sampling now and due to be in production by the...

Microsoft Christens Longhorn.
May 21, 2007... Microsoft has confirmed that the Vista-generation Longhorn Server is officially going to be called Windows Server 2008, a name indicative of when it will come out. The company already admitted last week that the Viridian virtualization...

Death Notice Goes Out for Newisys.
May 21, 2007... Remember Newisys? It was the ambitious start-up founded in 2000 by a bunch of IBM hot shots to make a line of servers culminating in a great 32-way Linux-based box ultimately out of dual-core Opteron chips. It couldn't make it on its...

Google & the Search for the Right Answer.(Brief article)
May 21, 2007... Google said Wednesday that it is taking its first step toward what it calls "universal search" and will introduce an updated homepage and new navigation features that make it faster and easier to find what you're looking for. Universal...

VMware's ACE 2 Available.
May 21, 2007... VMware, which is dying for attention 'cause it's going public soon, has announced the general availability of ACE 2 Enterprise Edition so desktop managers can create a standard PC environment that includes an operating system, data and...

Java SE Headed for Itanium.
May 21, 2007... The Itanium Solutions Alliance is expecting Intel, which is porting and optimizing the code, to deliver Sun's Java Platform, Standard Edition for Itanium machines next year as part of the regular Java SE 6 update. Sun - and you know how Sun...

Google & Salesforce.com?
May 21, 2007... There's been speculation on Wall Street about Google buying Salesforce.com but Credit Suisse says it's more likely to signal a partnership agreement that could be announced in the next month. The broker thinks the putative arrangement could...

AMD Dot Release.
May 21, 2007... AMD's I/O Virtualization Technology specification is up to rev 1.2 and promises stronger, more secure input/output connections by tinkering with the I/O Memory Management Unit, which also improves reliability in non-virtualized environments and...

Sun To Spend $3b on Buy Back.
May 21, 2007... Sun, which is sitting on a pile of cash, is going to buy back $3 billion worth of stock to try to tickle its price. When isn't clear.

As Printers are to HP So Software to IBM.
May 21, 2007... IBM said in overheads used at an investor briefing then filed with the SEC that software could account for maybe half of the company's profits by 2010, up from ~40% last year. IBM also figures earnings could be worth around $11 a share by then,...

Concurrent Raises $14m.
May 21, 2007... Concurrent is raising $14 million through a private placement and will use the money for general purposes including working capital and capital expenditures.

Bill & Dave's Garage Makes National Register.
May 21, 2007... The famed Bill Hewlett-Dave Packard garage from whence sprang both HP and Silicon Valley has been put on the National Register of Historic Places, ensuring its perpetual preservation.

There's One Less Batchelor Billionaire on the Marriage Market, Ladies.
May 21, 2007... Google co-founder Sergey Brin, worth an estimated $16 billion, has quietly gotten married in the Bahamas to Anne Wojcicki, the sister of the lady and early Google employee who rented her Menlo Park garage to the proto-Google in 1998 and...

Novell To Go Public with Redacted Version of its Microsoft Agreement.
May 28, 2007... Seems we are going to be treated to a redacted reading of the infamous Novell-Microsoft accord that Microsoft wants to use as template for resolving its 235 patent claims against Linux. Novell spokesman Bruce Lowry dropped this little...

Novell Tries Striking Delicate Balance on Patents.
May 28, 2007... Novell is taking a new tack with respect to rehabilitating its image with the Penguinistas. See, it's been between a rock and hard place ever since that deal with Microsoft so loathed by the open source community was announced in November....

Dell's Linux PCs Go on Sale.
May 28, 2007... Congratulating itself on how quickly it was responding to customer demand, Dell US Thursday started selling two consumer desktops and a notebook fitted with a factory-loaded copy of the new Ubuntu Linux 7.04, making it the first of the major...

Microsoft To Build Bridge to China.
May 28, 2007... Microsoft says it and Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics are going to create an open source translator between China's emerging Unified Office Format (UOF) and Microsoft's own Open XML (OOXML) file formats. It is a burst of...

IBM Chip Claims To Crush Itanium to Bits.
May 28, 2007... IBM says it's got the fastest chip ever built and a box to put it in. The 65nm widget, which IBM hails as being three times as good as the latest enemy Itanium, is a contrarian tour de force 4.7GHz dual-core Power6 processor that doubles...

Dell Sticks its Toe in Retail Channel.
May 28, 2007... Dell is supposed to start selling a couple of Dimension desktops in around 3,000 Wal-Mart stores in the US, Canada and Puerto Rico by June 10, a historic counter-culture move for the struggling Texas giant, whose greatness has always rested on...