Linux Gram articles from May 2008

Linux Gram archives from May 2008

Gluecode Creator Thinks He Can Take Google's App Engine.
May 5, 2008... A Philippines-based Web 2.0 start-up called Morph Labs Inc thinks its cloud can rain on Google's newfangled App Engine. Morph Labs was founded by Winston Damarillo, the guy who did Gluecode, the only open source company IBM ever bought, a...

SAP Flubs SaaS.
May 5, 2008... SAP has run into a nasty little rollout problem with its new on-demand Business ByDesign widgetry, the stuff that's critical to its future growth and competes with, oh, say, Salesforce.com, NetSuite and Microsoft. Seems ByDesign isn't...

Yahoo & Google Think They Can Pull Off Ad Deal: WSJ.
May 5, 2008... At press time the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Yahoo and Google think they've come up with a way around the Justice Department's anticipated objections to them climbing into bed together - one of Yahoo's alternatives to being acquired...

No Decision Yet: Ballmer; Report Says Microsoft May Go Hostile.
May 5, 2008... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer is on the horns of dilemma about what to do about Yahoo since Yahoo ignored his Saturday deadline to deal or be acquired by force at a lower price. And a meeting of Microsoft's board to debate the issue...

PTO Decisions May Be, Well, Unconstitutional.(Patent and Trademarks Office )(Brief article)
May 5, 2008... If patents expert John Duffy, a professor at the George Washington University Law School, is right then the Patent and Trademarks Office unconstitutionally appointed nearly two-thirds of the patent appeals judges currently sitting, and close to...

Adobe Makes Flash & AIR Free for Mobile Widgets.
May 5, 2008... A bunch of the boys have joined Adobe in forming the Open Screen Project to drive a consistent rich Internet experience across TVs, PCs, mobile devices and consumer electronics regardless of operating system. They've been persuaded that the...

Sun's Quarter Sucked; Layoffs Planned.
May 5, 2008... Sun's back in the red again after five profitable quarters and five years in the red following the dot.com bust. The March quarter turned sour on it, starting, it said, with the first week in March when the channel stared reporting a drop...

Vendors Keep On Selling XP.
May 5, 2008... Microsoft claims to have sold 140 million copies of Vista. Ah, but, in an effort to scratch the widespread "Save XP" itch, Dell, HP, Sony and Lenovo all say they are going to supply XP past June 30 when large OEMs are supposed to stop...

AMD Loses its Lock on Cray.
May 5, 2008... Intel and Cray, which when last seen was exclusively an AMD house and a feather in AMD's cap, are now going to work together on HPC and Cray's going to use the multi-core Xeon and fancy interconnect developments in future Cray servers,...

Microsoft Takes Management Cross-Platform.
May 5, 2008... Microsoft is making System Center, its central management scheme, natively manage Linux, Unix and VMware virtual servers. The widgetry has always been a Windows-only affair, but now there are betas available showing off Microsoft's...

Next Stage of the Computer Revolution Waits on Atom.
May 5, 2008... Atom, the new chip that Intel built for so-called netbooks and phones in hopes of touching off the Internet-in-you-pocket phase of the computer revolution and widening its earnings, is in short supply. Asustek, which is supposed to launch...

Another Start-up, Another Desktop Virtualization Scheme.
May 5, 2008... MokaFive, another me-too desktop virtualization company, this one started in 2005 by three Stanford PhDs and their professor, Moka chief scientist Monica Lam, is in the process of pushing out its widgetry, which works on Windows, Mac and Linux....

AMD Unveils Business Class PCs.
May 5, 2008... AMD, which hasn't penetrated the commercial space, is gonna try to pick up some share with a Business Class line of energy-efficient commercial desktops and notebooks targeted at SMBs, government and education. The desktops are based on...

Sun Buys Montalvo Assets.
May 5, 2008... Apple picked up PA Semi, the low-power PowerPC start-up, last week to do who knows what with and Sun picked up the assets of Montalvo Systems, the laconic, heading-for-the-crapper start-up that was supposed to be doing an Intel-competitive...

EFF Faults Microsoft.
May 5, 2008... The Electric Frontier Foundation (EFF) has put an open letter to Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on its site complaining the Microsoft has "betrayed MSN music customers" and urging him to fix the problems Microsoft will cause when it turns off its...

Dell's Peddling a Low-End Appliance to OEMs.(Original Equipment Manufacturer)(Brief article)
May 5, 2008... Dell builds appliances that it sells to OEMs like Google's search box. Its latest effort is the OEM CR100 server, a simple, stripped-down, entry-level platform, built with PowerEdge R200 technology. The short-depth 1U is good for a...

Intel Sets Up SMB Web Store.
May 5, 2008... Intel has set up a community-enabled web store portal for SMBs called the Intel Business Exchange or Intel BX to push bundled software and hardware, standalone business applications and services. It includes product descriptions,...

Red Hat Reupholsters the Chairs.(Brief article)
May 5, 2008... Red Hat has been tinkering with senior management. Paul Cormier, executive VP of engineering, is now executive VP and president, product and technologies, responsible for product market, QA and support as well as engineering. CFO Charlie Peters...

Likewise Adds Oracle Linux & Mainframes.
May 5, 2008... Likewise, pretty much the de facto standard in cross-platform authentication these days, has added Oracle Enterprise Linux 4 and 5, Oracle's version of Red Hat, to the list of some 110 Linux, Unix and Mac platforms that it supports on a...

VIA Tries Open Source.
May 5, 2008... VIA is setting up a Linux Portal, still in beta, to get open source driver developed. It will initially focus on graphics drivers for its CN896 digital media IGP chipset for the latest Ubuntu distribution. Canonical, the company behind...

Reiser Found Guilty of First-Degree Murder.
May 5, 2008... Linux programmer Hans Reiser, 44, has been found guilty of the first-degree murder of his estranged Russian-born wife Nina, who went missing after dropping off their two small children with their father on Labor Day weekend 2006. Reiser,...

SCO & Novell in Court.
May 5, 2008... SCO and Novell have been in court this week trying to figure out how much SCO is supposed to owe Novell in royalties for its attempt to tax Linux. This is the money that SCO claims it doesn't owe Novell at all because Novell signed away...

HP Labs Finds Way To Make Computers Like Elephants.
May 5, 2008... HP Labs says it's found the missing link that would create computers that don't forget, don't need to boot up, consume less power and associate information like the human brain does. It says it's proven the existence of a previously only...

XP & Vista Service Packs On Hold.
May 5, 2008... Pleading a newly found incompatibility with its Dynamics Retail Management System (RMS), Microsoft Tuesday postponed the web release of both XP Service Pack 3 and Vista Service Pack 1 - even if nobody knows anybody who uses RMS. It's unclear...

Asustek Reportedly Plans Eee Brand.
May 5, 2008... Asustek may make Eee an independent brand that includes not only the original cheap Eee laptop but an Eee TV, an Eee desktop and an Eee monitor, all of which should be introduced by October, according to DigiTimes.

Stanford Sets Up Parallel Lab.
May 5, 2008... Stanford has started a new Pervasive Parallelism Lab to "allow software engineers to harness the parallelism of the multiple processors that are already available in virtually every new computer." AMD, HP, Sun, IBM and Nvidia are kicking in.

Adobe Optimistic.
May 5, 2008... A month ahead of the close of its quarter and Adobe, which was worried a month ago that it might have to change its full-year revenue guidance if the US economy continued to tank, is saying it'll come in at the high-end of its $855 million-$885...

Lenovo China To See VMware.
May 5, 2008... Lenovo has started selling and supporting VMware Infrastructure 3 pre-installed on its servers in China.

Dell Signs Ozzie Retailer.
May 5, 2008... Dell's retail push, now bordering on 12,000 stores worldwide, is pushing into Australia with its signing up Officeworks' 104 stores. Shoppers can buy one of the 10 standard Windows-only laptop and desktop configurations the store will sell or...

OpenJDK Bound for Ubuntu & Fedora.
May 5, 2008... Canonical and Red Hat are going to put OpenJDK-based implementations in Ubuntu 8.04 and Fedora 9. The NetBeans 6.0 IDE will also be part of the latest Ubuntu.

Happy Birthday, WWW.
May 5, 2008... The World Wide Web turned 15 on April 30, the anniversary of the day that CERN announced it could be used by anybody for free. There are now something like 165 million web sites, according to the BBC.

Verizon Becomes a Counter-Android Linux Convert.
May 19, 2008... Verizon Wireless is snubbing Google's Linux-based Android initiative to go with the LiMo Foundation's mobile Linux spec for its next wave of mobile phones expected next year. Along with Verizon, Mozilla signed up - giving the consortium its...

Brits Bitch to EC about Microsoft.
May 19, 2008... Becta, the British Educational and Communications and Technology Agency, has taken its gripes against Microsoft's allegedly "anti-competitive" licensing policies for schools and the "interoperability impediments" in Office 2007 to the European...

Yahoo Responds; Hangs Tough.
May 19, 2008... Late Thursday Yahoo released the text of the letter it sent to Carl Icahn telling him he's misguided and that the current Yahoo board knows better what good for the company. It repeats what Yahoo has said before - that it is willing to sell for...

Yahoo Watch.
May 19, 2008... Between the time corporate raider Carl Icahn notified Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock Thursday morning to expect a proxy fight for control of the company if Yahoo didn't crawl on its belly to get Microsoft to buy it and Yahoo sent a non-answer back,...

Fedora 9 Out.
May 19, 2008... Fedora 9 is out. Red Hat says its community-driven operating system features the first non-destructive live USB with persistence - which Red Hat thinks is a first of a kind anywhere - and marks the first major KDE 4-based distribution. ...

Zoho Designs Unified Google-Yahoo-Zoho Login.(Brief article)
May 19, 2008... Zoho is gonna trying rustling some of Google's prized Apps users. It's designed a unified login to encourage Google and Yahoo visitors to try Zoho applications using the user names and passwords they use with their Google and Yahoo...

NYSE Runs on Red Hat.(Brief article)
May 19, 2008... Red Hat is sporting a feather in its chapeau. It's got the mighty NYSE Euronext using its operating system for its mission-critical trading platform and purring compliments like "Red Hat is almost like water, it's pervasive within our...

Skype Drops GPL Appeal.
May 19, 2008... Skype has thrown in the towel on its appeal of the German court conviction last year that it violated the GPL by not furnishing GPL2-covered source code with a Linux-based SMC Networks VoIP phone. The case was brought by Harald Welte of the...

Flash Player 10 Goes to Broad Beta.
May 19, 2008... Adobe Thursday turned its little piece of Disneyland for developers loose. The pre-release of Flash Player 10, a k a "Astro," which promises richer, more immersive Web 2.0 experiences, has gone to public beta ahead of general availability...

Mark Hurd's Teflon Coating Chips.(Company overview)
May 19, 2008... HP CEO Mark Hurd finally did something that Wall Street didn't like - he's buying EDS, the IT infrastructure outsourcing outfit founded in 1962 by one-time presidential hopeful and outsourcing pioneer Ross Perot, for around $13.9 billion cash -...

HP Signs Up for DaaS.
May 19, 2008... Desktone, the start-up with the desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) vision, has signed up Hewlett-Packard to deliver virtual desktops as a service. Desktone is already supposed to have Verizon, IBM, Softbank and Deutsche Telekon interested - and...

AMD Whistles Up New Champions To Slay its Dragons.
May 19, 2008... AMD has kissed Mario Rivas good-bye and turned processor development over to Randy Allan, the head of its star-crossed server and workstation business, reporting to president and COO Dirk Meyer. Allan is now the new head of AMD's Computing...

Sun Finally Gets its Barcelona Boxes Out.
May 19, 2008... Sun, which lost some traction selling x86 servers when AMD flubbed the Barcelona - and had to run hurry up and pull some Intel quad-based machines together last year - finally got to announce its first AMD quad machines this week in the shadow...

PTO Files Notice of Appeal in Rules Case.(Patent and Trademark Office )(Brief article)
May 19, 2008... Just making the window as it was closing - which is supposed to suggest that it was only taking the step after much soul-searching - the US Patent and Trademark Office filed a Notice of Appeal with the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit....

AppSense Makes XenDesktop More Sensible.(Brief article)
May 19, 2008... Citrix is supposed to trot out XenDesktop - its virtual Windows desktop trick - any minute now and when it does the UK firm AppSense is supposed to be there to make the Xen widgetry useful. See, the way it works every time you restart...

VMware Close To Popping More Software.
May 19, 2008... Next week you'll be able to order that disaster recovery pack that VMware has been promising since last September, Site Recovery Manager, but it'll take them another month to deliver it. It's supposed to let you set up, test and automate...

Littler & Littler.(VIA Technologies Inc's motherboard)(Brief article)
May 19, 2008... VIA, the other x86 player, has produced a 10cm-by-7.2cm board fitted with one its one-watt 500MHz Eden ULV chips, its contribution to the MIDs race. The fan-less widget includes both LVDS/DVI and VGA support, integrated 5.1 channel audio, fast...

Duffield Start-up Signs Big SaaS Deal.(Dave Duffield's Workday)(Brief article)
May 19, 2008... Workday, PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield's new start-up, has in hand what is believed to be the one of the largest SaaS deals to date, a 200,000-seat contract from contract manufacturer Flextronics to replace a reported 80 different legacy HR...

Google Passes Yahoo Traffic.
May 19, 2008... Among Yahoo's other problems, Google has just shot past it to become the most trafficked web site in the US, according to comScore. Still Google is only ahead by a nose - 466,000 unique monthly visitors. In April Google's traffic was up 18% to...

Another Dell Exec Goes.
May 19, 2008... Martin Garvin, the head of procurement at Dell - on which much of the company's earlier success rested - has retired. Dell of course is cutting jobs and Garvin hasn't been a top dog since Michael Dell brought in Michael Cannon last year as...

More Barcelonas Out.
May 19, 2008... AMD Monday started selling five low-power 55W versions of its quad-core Barcelona chips. They are for two-, four- and eight-way rack and blade servers, especially ones with virtualization in mind.

CBS To Buy CNet.
May 19, 2008... CBS is buying CNet Networks for $1.8 billion, or $11.50 a share, a 45% premium and a number CNet's never seen before. The deal gets CNet out of a proxy fight for its board with the Jana Partners hedge fund, which owns, oh, upwards of 10% of its...

Novell To Repurchase Stock.
May 19, 2008... Novell, whose stock price remains in the proverbial commode, says its board has authorized it to repurchase up to $100 million shares.

Microsoft Inks Another Patent Cross-License.
May 19, 2008... Microsoft has signed another one of those patent cross-licenses that so annoy some people. This one's with Hoya's Pentax Imaging Systems Division and covers its digital cameras and a "broad range" of each other's consumer products but...

Novell gets New Chairman.
May 19, 2008... Novell has switched chairmen. VC Rick Crandell, the founding managing director of Arbor Partners, will now ramrod its board instead of ex-Pan Am CEO Thomas Plaskett, who remains a director. Crandall started Comshare way back when.

XP SP3 Bewitched.
May 19, 2008... Apparently installing the new XP SP3 sends some PCs - AMD ones, it looks like - into an endless reboot loop. The delayed service pack was just released the other day after being held up by a late-appearing incompatibility with Microsoft's...

First Sight of Moonlight.
May 19, 2008... Novell has released the source code for Moonlight, the Linux implementation of Microsoft's Silverlight RIA widgetry for developers to try out.

I'm Greener. No, I'm Greener.(Brief article)
May 19, 2008... Dell is going to try to cut the energy consumption of its laptops and desktops by up to 25% between now and 2010 to avoid millions of tons of CO2 emissions, comparing its pledge to HP's, which is supposed to cut relative its 2005 levels. It...

Google Buys into Solar Power Start-up.
May 19, 2008... Google.org is one of a clutch of new and existing investors including BP and Chevron putting a $115 million C round into solar power start-up BrightSource, which uses heat from the sun to create steam for generating electricity. The new round...

Microsoft To Support ODF.
May 26, 2008... Office will support the Microsoft-hostile OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.1 when Office 2007 Service Pack 2 arrives in the first half of 2009. Microsoft said users will be able to open, edit and save documents in ODF directly from inside Office...

Yahoo Director Quits; Company Postpones Annual Meeting.
May 26, 2008... The Yahoo board is one short. Edward Kozel, a former Cisco CTO, now a VC, and a Yahoo board member since October of 2000, tendered his resignation Thursday saying he meant to leave in February but stayed on because of Microsoft's...

How Many Billionaires Does It Take To Screw in a New Yahoo Light Bulb?
May 26, 2008... Carl Icahn, the billionaire with the shotgun in Yahoo's ribs, has picked up a couple of friends to hand him bullets. Third Point LLC, a $6 billion hedge fund, has bought five million shares in Yahoo on its way perhaps to 10 million shares...

Yoo-Hoo, Steve, We're Still Here.
May 26, 2008... Google co-founder and billionaire Larry Page in Washington to speak at the think tank where Google CEO Eric Schmidt is chairman of the board - and apparently meet with government officials too - claimed that a Microsoft-Yahoo merger would...

Cloud Formation.
May 26, 2008... Microsoft figures that in five years time half the Exchange mailboxes in the world - perhaps 160 million mailboxes - will be running on its servers in its cloud infrastructure on Exchange Online. At least that's Microsoft senior...

Cloud Spotting.
May 26, 2008... Since Microsoft's forecast - and its margin implications - is nothing to sneeze at, we asked industry analyst and cloud spotter Amy Wohl what she has been seeing. "The first thing to keep in mind is that we have some semantic confusion, as...

Can Windows Save OLPC? And If Not $100, Why Not $75?
May 26, 2008... Despite hisses and boos from the open source side of the house One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is now officially soldered at the hip to Microsoft. Its novel XO laptop is supposed to go to trials in a half-dozen developing countries next month...

SugarCRM Betas New product Line.
May 26, 2008... SugarCRM has pushed out a closed beta of Sugar Data Center Edition (DCE), a new product line, due this summer, described as a complete set of system management provisioning and monitoring tools so service providers and large organizations can...

Openbravo Picks Up $12m Second Round.(Brief article)
May 26, 2008... Two-year-old open source ERP house Openbravo has just picked up a second-round check for $12 million signed by Amadeus Capital, the publicly traded GIMV and Adara Venture Partners. The money is supposed to take the Pamplona-based concern...

Citrix Unleashes XenDesktop.
May 26, 2008... Pushing back against VMware, its chief rival, Tuesday, Citrix released its ballyhooed, on-demand XenDesktop, the widgetry that delivers custom, managed virtual Windows desktops from a data center server to a user over the network, and priced...

Hyper-V Moves to RC1.
May 26, 2008... Microsoft has taken the next step in getting its VMware-upsetting Hyper-V widgetry out the door; Release Candidate 1 is there to be downloaded now. If you've been paying attention you know that this is actually Microsoft's second release...

Dell Changes CFOs.
May 26, 2008... Dell is replacing its CFO Donald Carty effective June 13. It's importing Brian Gladden, an industry outsider who was CEO of SABIC Innovative Plastics, the old $7 billion GE Plastics spun off last August to the Saudis. Fortune takes...

VMware Borrows Sun Protocol.
May 26, 2008... VMware is combining its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure with Sun's Sun Ray software and thin clients, promising superior performance especially on WANs. It borrows Sun's Appliance Link Protocol (ALP), which is supposed to outperform other...

The World's Biggest Computer Company Bigger Still.
May 26, 2008... HP, the largest computer company in the world, is pretty pleased with itself. Sales were up 11% in its second quarter, its margin expanded and it delivered its best cash flow performance in the company's history, $4.8 billion. Yes, there are...

VMware Starts Certifying Thin Clients.
May 26, 2008... VMware has started certifying thin clients used with its Virtual Desktop Infrastructure aimed at replacing conventional PCs with virtual machines centralized in the data center and available to users from any device, reducing TCO, increasing...

Salesforce Posts Strong Quarter.(Brief article)
May 26, 2008... SaaS poster child Salesforce.com did $247.6 million in revenues, up 52%, returning $9.6 million, or eight cents a share, up sevenfold, in the quarter ended April 30. It said it generated more than a quarter billion dollars of operating...

Wind and the Atom.
May 26, 2008... Wind River and Intel are putting their heads together to create an extensible open source Linux platform for the automotive industry - an infotainment (gad, that horrid word) platform for Intel's newfangled Atom chip. Its part of a major...

Red Hat & Novell Upgrade.
May 26, 2008... Red Hat has made Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 available, saying it enhances virtualization, desktop, security, clustering, networking and hardware support. Virtualization of very large systems, with up to 64 CPUs and 512GB of memory, is...

Concurrent Pushes into Automotive.(Brief article)
May 26, 2008... Before we're all reduced to shank's mare, Concurrent is wading into the automotive industry, observing that with the amount of electronics in cars constantly on the uptick, it's a good place for an embedded Linux-based networking system. ...

HP Grows Horns.
May 26, 2008... "I believe that this move has really polarized the ecosystem. They've essentially declared war - or at least hostility - toward all of their ecosystem - the outsourcers and the integrators that historically were a key part of HP's software...

Alibaba To Build its Own PC.
May 26, 2008... Alibaba.com, the big Chinese e-commerce site that Yahoo owns a 40% piece of - part of those seemingly priceless Asian assets that could reportedly get sold in a Microsoft deal to pay off disappointed stockholders - is going to build an...

Google's Advance Continues.
May 26, 2008... ComScore has upped Google's US search share. It was 59.8% in March and now for April it's 61.6%. It gave Yahoo 20.4% and Microsoft 9.1%.

IBM Eats HP's Dust.
May 26, 2008... HP passed IBM in servers in Q1, according to Gartner. It captured most of the revenue (29.6% or $4 billion) and most of the units (30.1%). IBM did $3.9 billion (28.9%), relegating it to second place. HP took better than half of the blade...

HP Building PC Plant in Russia.
May 26, 2008... HP and Foxconn International, a unit of Taiwan-based Hon Hai Precision Industry, the big contract manufacturer, are building a $50 million factory outside St Petersburg where they will produce a half-million PCs a year for the Russian market...