Linux Gram articles from November 2004

Linux Gram archives from November 2004

Microsoft Lost PC Share: Credit Suisse.(Personal Computers)
November 1, 2004... After talking to Microsoft about its September numbers, Credit Suisse figures Microsoft has lost 2%-3% of its global PC market share to piracy and Linux in Asia particularly, the first time anything like that has ever been heard. The...

Security Hole Found in 2.6 Kernel.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... SuSE is warning of a security hole in the 2.6 Linux kernel that can be exploited to cause a denial of service attack. It says an integer underflow problem in the iptables firewall logging rules can let a remote attacker crash the system via...

Dell Gives SuSE a Tad More Respect.
November 1, 2004... Dell plans to offer SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 (SLES 9) on some of its PowerEdge servers extending its partnership with Novell and supposedly making SuSE the equal of its relationship with Red Hat although it's transparent that it's not....

Cray Productizes Red Storm.(Cray Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Cray has productized the giant Opteron-based massively parallel processing (MPP) supercomputer known as Red Storm that it co- designed with the Sandia National Labs, pitting the thing against HPC clusters. It is now shipping the thing,...

QNX Sold.
November 1, 2004... Privately held Canadian RTOS house QNX Software Systems is going to multibillion-dollar-a-year Harman International Industries Inc, the Washington, DC-based outfit best known for its high-end audio and stereo brands, for $138 million. QNX...

VMware Gets Ready for Dual Cores.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Virtualization specialist VMware Inc is working on adding four-way virtual SMP widgetry to its wares, extending itself beyond its current two-way virtual SMP limitations and preparing for the coming onslaught of multi-core chip platforms. ...

Ballmer's Ghostwriter Taunts Linux.
November 1, 2004... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's ghostwriter e-mailed a renewed frontal attack on Linux to customers the other day telling them that Linux is a lot more expensive than Windows, that its TCO sucks, that it's insecure and that it offers no patent...

RLX Goes with Voltaire.(RLX Technologies Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... RLX Technologies, the blade pioneer, has lined up with Voltaire to resell Voltaire's new 10 Gbps Infiniband integrated switch for blade servers to make it easier, they say, for enterprise and HPC customers to deploy small to mid-sized...

US Reclaims Supercomputer Title.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... A Linux-run Itanium-based Altix system built by SGI for NASA and called Columbia is now supposed to be the fastest supercomputer in the world, dethroning Japan's NEC-built Earth Simulator. The 10,240- chip SGI box is supposed to be good for...

SGI Doubles Density.(Silicon Graphics Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... SGI has come up with a new version of its Linux-based Altix 3700 called the Bx2 that it says delivers twice the bandwidth and processor density of its high-end predecessor. The new system uses Itanium 2s with 9MB of cache, SGI's first use...

Tatung Enters UK Server Market.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Tatung is going to try to carve off a piece of the UK server market for the first time. The Taiwan-based company has set up an operation in Swindon called Tatung Server Ltd that will sell a range of PC, storage and blade servers made in...

Geez, What Did Intel Do To Tick Off Merrill Lynch?(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Merrill Lynch is advising IBM to devote a substantial part of its manufacturing capacity in East Fishkill to AMD's chips on the theory that it could be a "significant opportunity" if IBM is "willing to take some risks." The broker says...

Red Hat Red China Bound.(Red Hat Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Red Hat is going to open its first office in China in the next two week, according to what CEO Matthew Szulik and the company's new CFO Charlie Peters said at the Prudential Technology Conference. Red Hat is seeing increased competition from...

World Braces for SCO-Groklaw Shootout.(Santa Cruz Operation Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... SCO is supposed to launch its counter-Groklaw site on Monday so people can have access to all the court filings in the great SCO v IBM suit et al absent Groklaw's usual anti-SCO vitriol. Originally SCO said it was going to call the site...

Proginet Debuts Linux Password Tool.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Proginet has introduced a Linux password management tool. Dubbed SecurPass for Linux, it's aimed at companies that have deployed or intend to deploy Linux systems and securely manages passwords for Linux applications. SecurPass for...

Continuous Ports upSuite to Linux.(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Continuous Computing has ported its upSuite High Availability middleware for telecom vendors to Linux. The San Diego, California concern said upSuite for Linux had been optimized for modular communications platforms that use Xeon and...

Sharp Kills Linux PDA in States.(Sharp Corp.)(Personal digital assistants)(Brief Article)
November 1, 2004... Sharp is going to stop selling its Zaurus SL6000 Linux PDA in the US, according the AP. It reportedly plans to continue offering the widget in Japan. No reason was given for its decision, but Linux PDAs haven't exactly been a hot item...

Stone Out at Novell.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Novell vice-chairman Chris Stone, the guy credited with orchestrating Novell's death-defying move into Linux and its acquisition of SuSE and Ximian, is out. Supposedly he's leaving to pursue "other professional opportunities." ...

Cluster Start-up - with a Little Help from the HyperTransport Consortium - Challenges SMP Systems.
November 8, 2004... PathScale Inc, the Linux cluster start-up, whose contribution so far has been a compiler suite, claims its brand new interconnect, its first foray into hardware, is an SMP killer. It claims the enterprise will no longer have to go out and...

Wind River Opens the Kimono on its First Linux.
November 8, 2004... Wind River Systems, which hopped on the Linux bandwagon last October, launched its first Linux operating system the other day, calling it the Platform for Network Equipment, Linux Edition (or Platform NE) and aiming it at the telecommunications...

New 7000s Expected from Unisys.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Unisys is about to release three new ES7000 servers implementing Intel's new Itanium 2 chip, the Madison with 9MB of cache that Intel is supposed to launch on Monday. The systems double the number of processors and quadrupled the memory...

SCO Muffs Groklaw Rejoiner.(Santa Cruz Operation Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... SCO shot itself in the foot the other day - as it is often wont to do - and failed to materialize the Groklaw-fighting prosco.com web site as promised on Monday. It seems it and its lawyers got cold feet at the last minute and want to give the...

Linux Networx Launches Storage Appliance; Gets $40m.
November 8, 2004... Linux Networx, which sells Linux clusters to commercial and government accounts, rolled out a new storage system called Xilo on Thursday. Designed specifically for the company's cluster systems, Xilo is supposed to combine storage devices,...

OSDL Backs OpenAIS.(Application Interface Specification)(Open Source Development Labs)(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... The Open Source Development Labs has joined hands with the Service Availability Forum in support of OpenAIS, the open source Linux project kicked off by Montavista Software that aims to implement the Forum's Application Interface Specification...

RLX Puts Yamhill in a Blade.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... RLX Technologies, the company that invented the blade server, is now up to its sixth generation machine, the new SB6400. The thing uses dual Xeons, the Nocona chip with the AMD-like 64-bit extension, aka the Intel EM64T, or more familiarly...

IBM Recruits Cognos for Linux-on-Power Play.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Cognos is getting behind IBM's precious Linux-on-Power push and is going to offer its ReportNet kit on the Linux-on-pSeries platform. The arrangement is reportedly part of a global multi-year agreement to drive business intelligence adoption on...

Topspin Cozier with Both IBM & Sun.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Topspin's relationship with both IBM and Sun has reportedly taken a new turn. Topspin's Infiniband switches are going to be offered on IBM's BladeCenter server while the Topspin-Sun alliance, which started modestly enough, has reportedly been...

HP To Integrate Brocade Switch in BladeSystems.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... HP is going to build Brocade's new 4 gigabit-per-second storage networking switches into its P class BladeSystems under a new arrangement between the two companies. It will be the blades' first optimized, embedded Fibre Channel fabric...

Scali Bears Down on US Market.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Scali, the Norwegian high-performance clustering house, has set up a new US headquarters in Westborough, Massachusetts where it is consolidating its operations and personnel under newly installed executive VP and general manager James Biggs....

Streamline Spins Out Allinea.(Streamline Computing Ltd)(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... UK VAR Streamline Computing Ltd, a purveyor of cluster supercomputer systems and apparently a close friend of Sun's, has spun out Allinea Software Ltd to exploit and evolve the technologies it's been developing the last few years. Allinea is...

SGI Lands Linux Supercomputer Deal.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... The Japan Atomic Energy Research Institute (JAERI) plans to roll out a SGI Altix Linux supercomputer as its core computational system for developing energy systems. The value of the deal was not disclosed. SGI and Fujitsu, its systems...

SuSE 9.2 Eval Ready.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Novell has an evaluation LiveDVD of SuSE Linux 9.2 available for download. It will let users test drive the open source desktop, server and applications functionality in SuSE's consumer distribution. It includes both the Gnome 2.6 and...

Open Source Ingres Moves into GA.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... Computer Associates made its open source Ingres r3 database generally available the other day. The widgetry is for both Linux and Windows and is out under a CA Trusted Open Source License. CA started giving open source developers a shot at...

Wyse Reorg Claims More Victims.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... It looks like the bloodletting continues at Wyse Technologies. After quietly dismissing its CEO, COO, marketing chief and head of EMEA sales, it appears to have dumped its VP of sales, Americas Jim Crocco and its CFO Lumin Chang too - and...

Groklaw To Expand.(Brief Article)
November 8, 2004... The Groklaw blog that's been following the SCO court cases against IBM, Novell and others says it's going to start carrying "daily links" to other "legal and related IT news stories," evidently stuff provided by Groklaw readers. It says...

Novell Reportedly Replaces Stone with ex-PeopleSoft Exec.(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... Novell is reportedly going to replace newly departed vice-chairman Chris Stone, who ran engineering, product management and alliances, with former PeopleSoft executive VP, products and technology Ram Gupta. The appointment will reportedly...

Microsoft Flips Linux the Bird.
November 15, 2004... In a move intended to make Linux users feel edgy, Microsoft Wednesday threw the cloak of its indemnification protection against any IP claims around the shoulders of all Microsoft end users everywhere. Microsoft's timing is precious. ...

Novell Bites the Hand That Just Wrote It a Half-Billion-Dollar Check.
November 15, 2004... Dollar Check Monday, the day Microsoft paid Novell $536 million cash not to sue it on antitrust grounds for damaging the competitive position of NetWare, Novell's once-dominant network operating system, Novell announced the imminent...

Novell, the Spoilsport.
November 15, 2004... What a killjoy. If Novell has its way we'll never get to find out who owns the Unix copyrights - and since we've all been sucked into the SCO soap opera that would be like never finding out who shot J.R. Novell and SCO are still...

VC Joins OSDL.(Open Source Development Labs)(Voyager Capital)(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... Open Source Development Labs, whose recruitment is on a roll, has picked up Voyager Capital, its first venture capital company, an early-stage investor, as a member. OSDL said it expected Voyager, which includes Verari Systems, the old...

SuSE First To Cross the LSB 2.0 Finish Line.(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... Novell said Thursday that SuSE Linux Professional 9.2, its retail package, was the first Linux product to comply with the Free Standards Group's new LSB 2.0 Runtime Environment Product Standard for IA-32. The only question now is whether...

Red Hat Sets Up Beijing Operation.(Red Hat Software (Beijing) Ltd)(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... Red Hat has set up Red Hat Software (Beijing) Ltd, hoping to advance its prospect in the vast xenophobic Linux-leaning Chinese market. It's going to start with the Red Hat Academy training program to make friends. It said it would work...

Microsoft Woos Government with a New Open Source-Kissed Program.(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... Microsoft is batting its baby blues at government agencies holding out a new global initiative kissed by the open source movement called Solutions Sharing Network that promises to lower the cost of e-government and boost operational...

Microsoft Forces VMware To Cut the Price of GSX.(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... VMware, the virtualization maven, has pared the price of its three- year-old GSX Server for both Windows and Linux to $1,400 for a two- CPU license and $2,800 for an unlimited license that supports systems with up to 32 CPUs to stand off...

Honey, I Shrunk the Cluster.(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... IBM flashed around an ultra-thin 64-bit Power5-based pre-release box called the p5-575 at Supercomputing this week that it described as an "entirely new form" of cluster building block, gushing over how small it was and how it was going to...

Revelation of the Week.(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... The first incarnation of Microsoft's Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition won't support Itanium. It'll run on 32- and 64-bit Xeons and Opterons instead - 128 of them if you like. The revelation, which surfaced with the SDK this week, is...

Um, We Hit a Nerve There.(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... According to Netcraft, Microsoft sent its strategic new Search widgetry over to Akamai for hosting, like it does other stuff. Microsoft is a tad sensitive to the fact that Akamai's got it running off a Linux infrastructure. A Microsoft...

Red Hat Marketeer Disappears.(Red Hat Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... John Young, the ex-Compaq VP that Red Hat brought in last year to head marketing, has quietly disappeared from the Red Hat management team. Reportedly he was moved to the side and then vamoosed. Looks like the post is open.

You Honor, We Did a Closet Sweep.(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... IBM has another week before it has to trot into court bearing those extraordinary, though little remarked on, affidavits it's been ordered to materialize from each of its board of directors, its CEO Sam Palmisano and Linux evangelist, VP Irving...

Dell Trots Out Rack-Dense Server for Supercomputing Clusters.(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... Dell, which currently owns 54% of Linux cluster market, showed up at the Supercomputing conference this week with a new Xeon EM64T-based PowerEdge SC1425 1U server under its arm that it thinks is divine for high-performance supercomputer...

IBM Puts Topspin Switch in BladeCenter.(International Business Machines Corp.)(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... IBM figures it's got the first blade server with an integrated Infiniband switch complements of some collaboration with Topspin Communications. The widgetry, which will ship next month, will give the BladeCenter 80-Gbps connectivity to the...

Berkeley DB Enhanced.(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... Sleepycat Software has released a new rev of its Berkeley DB open source developer database. Berkeley DB 4.3 comes with in-memory transaction logging as well as other speed and ease-of-use enhancements aimed at improving the development of...

Pogo Claims Linux-Optimized Opteron Eight-Way.(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... Pogo Linux says it's got the first eight-processor Opteron server optimized for Linux, specifically SuSE Enterprise Server 9 and Red Hat Enterprise 3. The company expects to ship the box, called the PerformanceWare 5864, next month. ...

Penguin Snags $10m.(Penguin Computing)(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... Penguin Computing, which has never made its finances very clear, has picked up $10 million from London Merchant Securities, Convergence Partners and other existing investors. Evidently it's a D round. Penguin proposes to use the money to...

NEC Debuts Itanium 2 Blade Server.(NEC Solutions America)(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... NEC Solutions America claims it's the first major hardware maker to ship an Itanium 2-based blade server. Targeted at the Fortune 1000, research centers and universities, the new Express5800/102Ba blade server is designed for...

Appro's New Box Morphs.(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... Appro says it's got an Opteron blade server that can morph from a two-way to a four-way to an eight-way, and back again, poof, like that. It says it's the first of its kind and a natural for enterprise utility and grid computing. It can also be...

Latest Itanium Launched.(Brief Article)
November 15, 2004... On Monday Intel launched the Madison 9M, the new 1.6GHz Itanium 2 MP chip with 9MB of L3 cache, the last single-core Itanium, saying that the thing should be 15%-35% faster than the Madison with 6MB of cache depending on the application. It's...

Novell Billet Stymied.(Brief Article)
November 22, 2004... Novell CEO Jack Messman's plans to bring in former PeopleSoft exec Ram Gupta to replace recently departed vice-chairman Chris Stone has reportedly met with rebellion in the ranks. Sources say senior VP David Litwack, who runs Novell's...

Warning: This News Will Upset the Patent Adverse.(Brief Article)
November 22, 2004... Nathan Myhrvold, who used to be Microsoft's CTO and chief strategist, and Edward Jung, who used to be Microsoft's chief architect and advisor to the executive staff, have been building a patent factory since they left. It's called...

Novell Wants To Re-try the Government's Antitrust Suit.
November 22, 2004... Novell sued Microsoft for scuttling WordPerfect with its anti- competitive behavior last Friday just as it said it would four days before when it took that $536 million check off of Microsoft for not suing Microsoft over NetWare. The suit...

Oracle's Pursuit of PeopleSoft Comes Down to the Wire.
November 22, 2004... Midnight tonight is the Oracle-PeopleSoft witching hour. Oracle has threatened to walk away from its 18-month pursuit of PeopleSoft if PeopleSoft's stockholders don't tender it 51% of PeopleSoft shares by 12 o'clock tonight, a warning two...

Sun Undercuts Red Hat.
November 22, 2004... Sun Microsystems dragged Solaris 10, its much-ballyhooed next- generation operating system, its first attempt at a mainstream OS, out to the edge of the runway Monday afternoon in anticipation of the thing taking off on January 31 when Sun says...

EU's Pro-Patent Majority Crumbles.(European Union)(Brief Article)
November 22, 2004... The Polish government Wednesday decided not to support the legislative proposal currently before European Union that would have Europe ape the American system of software patents, upsetting the majority that the EU Council has had since May....

Novell Hints It Could Use IP To Bedevil Open Source Solaris.(Brief Article)
November 22, 2004... Novell says it's curious to see what kind of license Sun will embrace if it open sources all of Solaris 10 like its president Jonathan Schwartz says it will. See, there's code in Solaris that doesn't belong to Sun. "We are going to be...

Egenera To Resell Enemy Solaris.(Egenera)(Brief Article)
November 22, 2004... Egenera, the start-up born to eat away at Sun's installed base on Wall Street, has suddenly reversed its "Kill Sun" position and has agreed to support Solaris 10 on its BladeFrame system from the second half of next year. Sun publicly...

Linux Second String Create LSB-Supporting Consortium.(LINUX Standard Base)(Brief Article)
November 22, 2004... There is now something called the Linux Core Consortium (LCC), a combination of Mandrakesoft, Conectiva, Progency and Turbolinux, a shadow of the old, brief, second-string United Linux, brought together to produce a common implementation of the...

Stratus Joins OSDL.(Open Source Development Labs)(Brief Article)
November 22, 2004... Stratus has joined the Open Source Development Labs and says it will participate in both the consortium's Carrier Grade and Data Center working groups. Stratus of course sells fault-tolerant machines. It's thinking telecom sales.

Is That Sound the Death Knell for Microsoft's Spreadsheet Monopoly?(possible trademark infringement by SavvySoft)(Brief Article)
November 22, 2004... SavvySoft, a New York City ISV, says Microsoft is threatening to charge it with trademark infringement for calling its software TurboExcel. SavvySoft says that when it called Microsoft in the spring to see if there was any problem about...

Grid App Server Start-up Gets First Round.(ActiveGrid Inc.)
November 22, 2004... Mitchell Kertzman, the erstwhile CEO of Sybase and now a partner in Hummer Winblad, and Jean-Louis Gassee, the one-time Apple product chief and founder of the ill-fated Be Inc now a general partner in Allegis Capital, have put $3 million in...

NEC Launches Linux Fault-Tolerant Server.(Brief Article)
November 22, 2004... NEC Solutions America has rolled out a new fault-tolerant version of Linux for its Express5800/320Lb fault-tolerant server. The high-availability server and OS, meant for mission-critical business operations and database services, are...

Sun To Resell Deep Nines.(Brief Article)
November 22, 2004... Sun is going to resell Deep Nines' Security Edge Platform on both its Solaris and Linux systems. The stuff sits in front of the router providing a firewall, intrusion prevention, secure content management and forensic reporting, essentially...

Infiniband Stack Gets Funded.(Open infiniband Alliance)(Brief Article)
November 22, 2004... The OpenIB Alliance, which is chartered to deliver a single open source Linux-based software stack for deploying Infiniband, has gotten a grant from the US Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration to underwrite the...

Desktop Linux Summit Set.(Brief Article)
November 22, 2004... The Linspire-run third annual Desktop Linux Summit, set for February 9-11, is going to be a three-day rather than a two-day affair and include updates on Mozilla, the Firefox browser and OpenOffice.org. Linspire has persuaded Lotus 1-2-3...

Novell Narrowly Profitable in Q4.
November 22, 2004... Novell earned a narrow $13 million, or three cents a share, on revenues of $301 million in its fiscal fourth quarter ended October 31 compared to last year when it lost $109 million, or 29 cents a share. On a non-GAAP basis, Novell earned...

HP Recovers from Q3 Drubbing.
November 22, 2004... Recovering from the third-quarter missteps that pushed it to pull out the stops internally and benefiting from an improving enterprise environment, Hewlett-Packard said it earned $1.1 billion, or 37 cents a share, on record revenues of $21.4...

Ballmer Plays Patent Card against Linux.(Brief Article)
November 22, 2004... Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer warned Asian governments that could find themselves staring at the wrong end of some patent infringements suits if they adopt Linux. Ballmer's been on a trip to the Orient all week and after a speech in...

Dell Makes AMD Noises.(Brief Article)
November 22, 2004... Stories have been circulating since last week that Dell may soon reach that historic moment when it ceases to rely on Intel for all of its chips and becomes the last of the major vendors to add an AMD line as well. In Paris to roll out the...

Help Wanted.(Brief Article)
November 22, 2004... Sun is reportedly looking for a new CTO for its software operation. When Jonathan Schwartz was running software, he had his own personal CTO, John Fowler. When Schwartz was named president and COO of Sun, Fowler switched over to running Network...

Java Desktop Gets Hunting License in Japan.(Brief Article)
November 22, 2004... Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry has approved Sun's Java Desktop System for future bids. Which is not to say that it's ready to buy or deploy thing - at least not yet.

Exquisitely Timed Start-up Tracks IP.
November 29, 2004... Timing is everything in sex, cooking and product introductions. Given the current climate, the timing of Austin, Texas start-up ioLogics looks exquisite. It has a way of tracking intellectual property - and as the former head of...

IBM Files Affidavits under Seal in SCO Case.(Brief Article)
November 29, 2004... Last Friday, like it was supposed to, IBM responded to that extraordinary court order asking for affidavits from its board, its CEO and its top Linux guy as to whether or not the company has coughed up all the non-privileged documents it has in...

Open Source Stars Oppose European Patent Directive.(Brief Article)
November 29, 2004... Ahead of a key meeting, Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, Monty Widenius, the CTO of MySQL, and Rasmus Lerdorf, the original author of the PHP scripting language, advertised as the three most famous European authors of open source software,...

About That IBM Guy Going to CA as CEO...(Chief Executive Officer)
November 29, 2004... Computer Associates getting IBM veteran John Swainson as CEO - a move generally considered nothing less than brilliant - makes other ex-IBMers wonder how John managed to dodge the IBM border patrol and escape outside of a body bag. After...

Judge Wants P'Soft To Explain Why It Turned Oracle Down.
November 29, 2004... During a scheduling hearing Wednesday, the judge overseeing Oracle's attempt to overturn PeopleSoft's takeover defenses said he wants to know exactly why PeopleSoft has turned down Oracle's offer again. See, Oracle raised its bid from $21...