Linux Gram articles from November 2005

Linux Gram archives from November 2005

Start-up Claims To Have Tiger by the Tail.(new product Egenera from Fabric7 Systems Inc.)
November 7, 2005... Fabric7 Systems Inc, a budding three-and-a-half-year-old box merchant that's just broken cover, claims to have achieved a fundamental breakthrough in enterprise SMP server design inspired, it appears, by groundwork laid by Egenera or borrowed...

Oracle CFO Quits.(Greg Maffei)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... After the market closed Thursday, Oracle admitted that its CFO Greg Maffei, four months on the job, had quit to take "a terrific professional opportunity" elsewhere. And so ended a day that started with Goldman Sachs' top analyst Rick...

Dell Falters.(company talks about its earnings)
November 7, 2005... You have perhaps heard that the mighty Dell juggernaut has stumbled again after showing a certain unsteadiness in August because of its own cutthroat pricing. The astute are aware that Dell's growth has been slowing for the last 18 months. ...

SCO Finds At Least 217 Instances of Illegal Copying in Linux.(Santa Cruz Operation Inc., International Business Machines Corp., case)
November 7, 2005... SCO filed its tantalizing case-to-date against IBM on Friday reportedly "several thousand pages of material" but we know little more than we did before because the opus is sealed. Interestingly IBM, which was also under court order to...

Oracle Moves To Crush Open Source Rivals.(Oracle Database XE)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... Told ya so. Told ya so. Told ya Oracle was going to deliver up a 32-bit Windows- or Linux-run freebie database. It's released a so-called starter edition called 10g Express a k a Database XE, based on 10g Release 2, targeted at application...

Novell Cuts 10%; Names Hovsepian President, COO.(human resource management, Ron Hovsepian)
November 7, 2005... Novell, which BusinessWeek and then CNET predicted was gonna fire 20% of its staff Monday, promoted its sales chief Ron Hovsepian on Tuesday instead and made him president and chief operating officer, suggesting that Novell CEO Jack Messman,...

Enter, the Portable Cluster.(Penguin Computing, Orion Multisystems, contract)
November 7, 2005... Penguin Computing's gonna take a shot at this personal cluster business pioneered by the two Transmeta co-founders who started Orion Multisystems a couple of years ago in the name of reinventing the late great technical workstation. Except...

IBM & Sun Join Behind OpenDoc.(Sun Microsystems Inc., partnership)(Open Document Foundation)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... IBM and Sun, two old enemies that seem to have struck a mild form of detente lately, have been trying to rally support for the Open Document format so they can harry Microsoft. Today, November 4, IBM VP, standards and open source Bob Sutor...

Sun's Light Still Dim.(Sun Microsystems Inc. financial report)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... Sun lost $123 million, or four cents a share, on revenues up 3.7% to $2.7 billion in the September quarter, its first fiscal quarter. The revenue increase, which was below analyst expectations, was attributed to its Storage Tech and...

Unisys Attempts Remake.(partnership with Microsoft Corp. and NEC Corp.)
November 7, 2005... Facing financial losses, deep job cuts and a government probe, old Unisys figured it was time for a makeover the works boob job, tummy tuck, facelift, heck, it's even getting its teeth capped, figuratively speaking of course. It all...

Ashcroft To Lobby for Oracle.(John Ashcroft)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... According to papers filed with the House and Senate Oracle has hired former Attorney General-turned- consultant John Ashcroft and his newfangled Ashcroft Group to lobby for it on the Hill. Lobbying the Justice Department's an ethical no-go area...

SGI Delisted.
November 7, 2005... The once hot-shot SGI is being delisted from the New York Stock Exchange effective Monday November 7 and sent down to the OTC Bulletin Board because its stock price has lingered too long below a buck to meet NYSE requirements.

AMD, IBM Cozier.(partnership)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... The AMD-IBM chip alliance has broadened to 32nm and 22nm territory. AMD says it'll be the first time IBM's Research Division has worked with a technology development partner on stuff that's three-five years away from commercialization. The deal...

Wyse To Collaborate with AMD.(Wyse Technology Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... Wyse has got a deal with AMD to deliver thin clients to emerging markets. Apparently Wyse's partner Inveneo is deploying Geode-based Wyse S50 Linux thin clients in Uganda as part of its Solar Power Communication Systems, which are designed to...

HP Intros its First Unix Blade.(Integrity BL60p)(Brief Article)
November 7, 2005... HP Tuesday went down the IBM path and introduced the first Unix blade for its BladeSystem platform, starting at $5,695, with units expected to ship early next year. The new one- or two-way 1.66MHz Itanium- based Integrity BL60p blade supports...

Uh-Oh, Here Comes Another Oracle Wannabe.(acquisition of Ingres by Computer Associates International Inc.)
November 14, 2005... Told ya so. Told ya so. Told ya CA was gonna divest Ingres. Okay, okay, so it took 'em five months to admit it reportedly there was a misunderstanding of the terms and the deal had to be revisited but as we prophesied, Garnett & Helfrich...

Microsoft To Move into Grids.(company is planning to enter the grid computing service)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Bill Gates is supposed to keynote at Supercomputing this week and show off Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003, basically marking Microsoft's move into grid computing, a bleeding-edge segment currently dominated by Microsoft's mortal foe,...

Db4objects Implements Native Queries.(use of new technology)
November 14, 2005... Db4objects, the open source embedded object database start-up that Veritas founder Mark Leslie chairs, is about to become the first company to implement native queries for Java, C Sharp and Visual Basic.NET to increase developer productivity....

Novell Loses SuSE Founder.(Hubert Mantel resigned)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Without explaining exactly why SuSE founder Hubert Mantel resigned from Novell Tuesday, announcing his departure to the SuSE mailing list. He said it was "too late" for him and complained that "This is no longer the company I founded 13...

Linux Worm Circulating.(report on computer viruses)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Linux Web servers have been under attack from a worm that McAfee has dubbed Lupper that's looking for boxes hosting vulnerable PHP/CGI scripts. McAfee says it's a derivative of the Linux/Slapper and BSD/Scalper worms and infected computers...

Zend Fields PHP IDE.(enhanced product from Zend Technologies Ltd., integrated development environment)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Zend Technologies, the PHP house, announced Zend Studio 5 on Tuesday, the enhanced Integrated Development Environment for PHP that it promised. The widgetry has new features for developing, debugging, deploying and managing PHP...

GroupWise To Embed Intellisync.(Novell Inc., partnership)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Novell is going to embed Intellisync's real-time wireless push e-mail and Personal Information Management (PIM) in GroupWise 7 for access to "any platform, any device" for wireless messaging and collaboration. Novell said an important...

Steeleye Ogles Virtualization.(Xen, SteelEye Technology Inc., VMware Inc., partnership)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Steeleye's going to get into the virtualization game next year by cozying up to VMware and Xen, according to its CTO James Bottomley. VMware is a tactical play, he says. Xen is strategic since as open source it's likely to make...

Dell Appears To Back Off $80b Bogie.(earnings of the company)
November 14, 2005... Dell came in Thursday with earnings of 39 cents, off 28%, on revenues of $13.9 billion after a charge of $422 million due to restructuring, product rationalization, facilities closing and a bum capacitor in one of its PC lines and for the first...

Oracle VP Becomes CEO of Borland.(Tod Nielsen joined Borland International Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... Besides losing its CFO to Liberty Media, Oracle Tuesday lost its senior vice president of marketing and global sales support Tod Nielsen, another ex-Microsoft guy, to Borland. Only at Oracle for eight months, Nielsen is going to be...

AMD Gaining.(market share of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... At 67.7% market share, AMD topped Intel in selling chips into retail-bound desktop PCs in the US last month according to the numbers compiled by market researcher Current Analysis, which says the situation is fluid and could change again this...

Microsoft Research Builds a Prototype OS from Scratch.
November 14, 2005... Because of Windows' myriad vulnerabilities and the fact that it's showing its age heck, its underpinnings are pre-Internet Microsoft Research decided to throw out all the old dependencies and try its hand at building a brand new operating...

The SAP Angle in Oracle's Innobase Move.(comapny earnings because of the SAP AG database)(Brief Article)
November 14, 2005... So SAP has been paying MySQL a reportedly not insubstantial amount of money to make the MySQL database enterprise-worthy. (Remember that deal two years ago where MySQL got SAP DB and the two were supposed to build a next-generation MySQL based...

Gnome It Is Then.
November 14, 2005... To simplify things in its hour of need, Novell is reportedly going to default to Gnome from now on. Apparently OpenSuSE will still support KDE. Gnome is more enterprise.

How Much IP Do You Suppose You Can Get for $40m?(Invention Network)(planning of Open Invention Network)
November 21, 2005... Apparently the newfangled non-profit Open Invention Network (OIN) patent-neutering scheme put in train by IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Philips and Sony to buy up patents that Linux might infringe didn't quite come together the way it was supposed to....

Sun Goes with Postgres.(Sun Microsystems Inc., partnership)(Brief Article)
November 21, 2005... Oracle's sometimes best friend Sun is going to distribute and support the open source Postgres database 24x7 with Solaris 10. Sun didn't say so until after Oracle named Solaris its preferred 64-bit open source development and deployment...

Intel Reportedly Rejigs its Famous Brand.(Eric Kim)(management on corporate marketing)(Brief Article)
November 21, 2005... It looks like Eric Kim, the Samsung import now running Intel's corporate marketing, is apparently going to leave his mark on the company by redoing the famous Intel Inside logo. The remake samples of which happened to reach a French site...

Post-Carly, HP's Getting It Together.(revenue report of Hewlett-Packard Co.)
November 21, 2005... Well, now here are words you don't hear everyday: HP had a better quarter than Dell. At least nobody's questioning HP's business model right this moment. The HP board should be pleased. Performance is tickling the stock price. Amazing as...

Sun Ups the Core Race.(new product UltraSparc T1 from Sun Microsystems Inc.)
November 21, 2005... You can't get a Niagara box just yet, but Sun has announced the much-heralded chip officially changing its name to the UltraSparc T1, an eight-core 90nm number that will be put into new Sun Fire servers in December. Each core is good for four...

AMD Comes Out Swinging.(forecast of Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 21, 2005... AMD got aggressive at its analysts day the other day and said it'll be gunning for 2x market growth, which it thinks will be 10% year- over-year, led by servers where it's becoming a "safe" choice and where it wants 20% of the market next year,...

IBM Viper Rears its Head.(preview of the new product)(Brief Article)
November 21, 2005... This week at the XML 2005 conference and ahead of release next year, IBM previewed Viper, its next DB2 take, which is supposed to be designed for this newfangled Service Oriented Architecture stuff, saying it would go into beta with customers,...

PubPat Tries To Cut the Legs Out from Under Patent Troll.
November 21, 2005... The open source-leaning Public Patent Foundation said Wednesday that it has asked the US Patent and Trademark Office to revoke Compression Labs' patent on data compression, the one it's suing just about everybody over. Compression Labs...

Microsoft Inches Closer to HPC.(high-performance computing, Microsoft Windows Compute Cluster Server )(Brief Article)
November 21, 2005... To mark its expected entry into HPC this week, Microsoft released a second this time public beta of Windows Compute Cluster Server and said it would fund joint research projects at 10 academic centers around the world. Microsoft said...

Oracle Continues To Binge But It's Taking Small Bites.(acquisition of OctetString and Thor Technologies Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 21, 2005... Oracle has bought Thor Technologies, the cross-platform provisioner, and OctetString, the virtual directory ISV, in the name of strengthening its security offerings inside the firewall. Financial terms were not disclosed and probably aren't...

Intel's Virtualization Widgetry Inches Out.(virtualization technology added to the products)(Brief Article)
November 21, 2005... Intel has finally started delivering its virtualization technology (VT) on the desktop except it's going to have relatively limited circulation. None of the first-tier companies are picking it up, preferring to wait until next year when...

Neoware Adds to Line.(new products c50 and e370 from Neoware Systems Inc.)(Brief Article)
November 21, 2005... Neoware has added the c50 and e370 thin clients to line, claiming it now has the broadest family of thin clients of anyone. The c50 starts at $299 and runs on Windows CE, Windows XPe or Linux. The e370 starts at $1,049. It is the first...

Xandros Learns German.(Xandros Desktop OS 3.1 Deutsche Version)(Brief Article)
November 21, 2005... Xandros, a name you don't hear much any more, popped up in Frankfurt-am-Main, of all places, with a German version of its Corel-derived Debian-based desktop operating system, saying it was responding to demand for a Windows alternative. It...

Andy's Eight-Way Does Tokyo.(development plan of a supercomputer by Sun Microsystems Inc.)(Andy Bechtolsheim)(Brief Article)
November 21, 2005... Sun's design maven Andy Bechtolsheim has been promising to deliver an eight-way Opteron box and it looks like that's what's underneath the massive 100 teraFLOP Sun Fire x86-based grid that's going into the Tokyo Institute of Technology. ...

Just Call Me CA.
November 21, 2005... To distinguish it from the company that got into trouble with the government for fiddling with its numbers, the new reform management of Computer Associates has decided that the company should simply be called CA from now on.

MySQL 5.0 at a Million and Counting.
November 21, 2005... MySQL AB said Monday that its freebie MySQL 5.0 upgrade had been downloaded over a million times since its introduction on October 24 three weeks before. Guess it doesn't matter that much that MySQL is in bed with SCO. MySQL 5.0 adds SQL 2003...

Red Hat Taps New Board Member.
November 21, 2005... Red Hat had named Narendra Gupta, Wind River's vice-chairman, to its board. Gupta co-founded Integrated Systems (ISI), an embedded software development company, in 1980. It went public in 1990 and merged with Wind River Systems in 2000. Red Hat...

US Okays Oracle-Siebel Deal.
November 21, 2005... The US antitrust regulators, who fought Oracle's acquisition of PeopleSoft and lost, have rubber stamped Oracle's $5.9 billion purchase of its rival Siebel Systems. That leaves Europe. The deal is scheduled to close in Q1.

IBM Marketing Chief Resigns.(Abby Kohnstamm)(Brief Article)
November 21, 2005... Effective January 3, IBM's marketing chief Abby Kohnstamm, who came to the company with the Gerstner administration, consolidated IBM's 80 ad agencies down to one and helped develop its eBusiness campaign, is leaving to pursue other marketing,...

A Cheaper Microsoft Virtual Server 2 Due.
November 21, 2005... Microsoft Virtual Server Release 2 is due out early next month priced at $99 a server for the standard edition and $199 for the enterprise version. Microsoft cut its prices like 80%. It was $499 and $899 respectively.