Linux Gram articles from October 2005

Linux Gram archives from October 2005

Uh-oh, the PTO Says the Eolas Patent is Valid.(Patent and Trademark Office solved the case between Eolas Technologies Inc. and Microsoft Corp.)
October 3, 2005... In a move likely to send a shockwave through the World Wide Web and rudely unsettle Microsoft the US Patent and Trademark Office Tuesday changed its mind again about the now-famous Eolas patent and said it was filing a so-called "Notice of...

ClearSpeed Watch.(ClearSpeed Technology Ltd. increases the speed of the computer peripherals)(Brief Article)
October 3, 2005... ClearSpeed Technology, the Anglo-American start-up that's been promising to make desktops and even laptops into 150GFLOPS hummers, servers into 300GFLOPS dynamos and common COTS-based HPC clusters into 100TGFLOPS wonders by dint of its co-...

AMD Burns Sun.(market share of Sun Microsystems Inc., Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)
October 3, 2005... AMD has cut the ground out from under its buddy and good customer Sun Microsystems. Sun figured to dine out on the fact that it had the fastest Opteron boxes in town. That boast has been good for all of two weeks and now Sun has had...

Intel Delivers Last Single-Core Xeons.(plans to enhance the product)(Brief Article)
October 3, 2005... Intel Monday announced its last planned single-core Xeon. Kinda the end of an era. It's all dual-core from here on out beginning with the awaited Paxville placeholder, which is still unannounced but out in Opteron-defensive pilot boxes...

IBM Moves To Exploit Dell's Unease.
October 3, 2005... Making a direct run at Dell, IBM Tuesday introduced a new line of entry servers including an SMB-targeting xSeries 100 that it figures is the most affordable entry point available from a top-tier vendor. It's cheaper than a desktop. The other...

Red Hat to Novell: Eat Your Heart Out.
October 3, 2005... Red Hat Wednesday came in with unseasonally strong fiscal second-quarter earnings posting revenues of $65.7 million, up 42% year-over-year and up 8% sequentially, making $16.7 million on it, up 42% year-over-year and up 35% sequentially. EPS...

Red Hat Loses Sun Refugee.(appointment of Andy Bechtolsheim, Tom Goguen and Karen Tegan-Padir at)(Brief Article)
October 3, 2005... Sun, which rehired its co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim last year to design Opteron boxes and also forgave Tom Goguen for his fling with Apple, has brought back another emigre, Karen Tegan-Padir, who left the Sun orbit last year to run Red Hat's...

OpenIB Aims To Dazzle.(OpenIB Alliance, InfiniBand)(interoperability test)(Brief Article)
October 3, 2005... The OpenIB Alliance says it will put together the largest multi-vendor InfiniBand fabric ever deployed at Supercomputing in November with some 30-odd InfiniBand infrastructure equipment vendors, server and storage vendors, software vendors, and...

TRW Standardizes on Linux.
October 3, 2005... TRW Automotive, an old Unix house that does, oh, $12 billion a year, is standardizing on Dell and Linux. The deal involves 24,000 desktops, laptops, workstations, servers and storage and consolidating into four data centers.

MIT & the $100 Linux Laptop.(MIT Media Lab, World Summit on the Information Society)(Brief Article)
October 3, 2005... The US has told the United Nations to take a hike. It ain't gonna run the Internet. Apparently American intransigence could derail the World Summit on the Information Society in November. That's where MIT Media Lab and its co-founder...

JasperSoft Releases JasperReports 1.0.
October 3, 2005... JasperSoft Corporation, the open source reporting maven, has made JasperReports 1.0 generally available. The stuff is supposed to have 750,000 downloads and 10,000 commercial deployments. The company, which says it's quadrupled its...

Red Hat Up for Common Criteria Eval.(International Business Machines Corp., Trusted Computer Solutions Inc., partnership)(Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.0)(Brief Article)
October 3, 2005... Beltway supplier Trusted Computer Solutions Inc (TCS), Red Hat and IBM just got Red Hat Enterprise Linux v.5 into Common Criteria evaluation on a range of IBM eServer systems so it can be declared fit for assured information sharing in and...

PowerCockpit Gets Some Traction at HP.(Cliff Miller of Mountain View Data Inc. contracts with Hewlett-Packard Co.)(Brief Article)
October 3, 2005... Mountain View Data, the start-up founded by Turbolinux founder Cliff Miller after he left Turbo, has gotten its flagship provisioning software, PowerCockpit, verified on the HP BladeSystem and entered in the BladeSystem Solution Builder...

Andressen, Dhillon Join Zend Board.
October 3, 2005... Aging Netscape wunderkind Marc Andressen, now the chairman of Opsware, and Gaurav Dhillon, the founder and erstwhile CEO of Informatica, have joined the board of Zend Technologies, the PHP start-up. PHP of course is a LAMP constituent.

SCO Wants Court To Slap IBM Around.(a case between Santa Cruz Operation Inc. and International Business Machines Corp.)
October 10, 2005... SCO on Wednesday filed a follow-up brief to its latest motion to compel discovery from IBM and asked the court to sanction IBM for failing to produce discovery that SCO claims IBM has been repeatedly ordered by the court to turn over. SCO...

PTO Rejects Microsoft's FAT Patents Kinda, Maybe.
October 10, 2005... The US Patent and Trademark Office this week rejected two of Microsoft's patents on its File Allocation Table, a k a FAT file system. But lest its enemies start hoopin' and hollerin' in victory prematurely, Microsoft claims the thing was...

Check Point Buys Sourcefire for a Mighty $225m.(Check Point Software Technologies Ltd.)
October 10, 2005... Open source got a real shot in the arm Thursday when Internet security house Check Point Software Technologies Ltd said it was buying privately held Sourcefire Inc, the four-year-old creator of Snort, the widely lauded open source network...

RLX Falls to HP.(RLX Technologies Inc., Hewlett-Packard Co., contract)
October 10, 2005... HP is going to buy RLX Technologies, the Texas start-up that created the first blade server and was supposed to become the next big systems house. Terms were not disclosed, but the outfit took in close to $130 million in venture capital...

Concurrent To Unbundle its Red Hat Tools.(new product NightStar LX from Concurrent Computer Corp.)
October 10, 2005... Concurrent Computer Corporation, whose real-time RedHawk Linux is used by the big automotive, aerospace and defense companies, is going to unbundle its Red Hat debugging tools later this month, dubbing the stuff NightStar LX, and enter a new...

IBM Intros Power 5 Linux Boxes.(new products Director 5.10)
October 10, 2005... IBM has announced new Power 5-based systems for SMEs this week claiming to shatter 15 world records in key benchmarks for entry-level Unix and Linux servers. Besides SMEs, IBM imagines them in branch locations running business- critical...

Novell Goes to IBM for New EMEA Chief.(Thomas Francese appointed)(Brief Article)
October 10, 2005... Novell has tapped Thomas Francese, an ex-IBMer, to be president of EMEA, reporting to Ron Hovsepian, head of worldwide field operations and also ex-IBM. Francese, who used to be a VP in IBM's EMEA software group, will be on Novell's worldwide...

Absoft To Peddle HPC SDK for BladeCenter.(High-Performance Computing Software Development Kit)(International Business Machines Corp., partnership)(Brief Article)
October 10, 2005... Absoft Corporation has announced a preconfigured High-Performance Computing Software Development Kit (HPC SDK) in support of IBM's BladeCenter-based Grid and Grow starter kit hardware and services that includes Intel software. Absoft,...

Black Duck Adds to Board.
October 10, 2005... Black Duck Software has named retired Sun executive and Data General alumnus Janpieter Scheerder to its board. Scheerder ran SunSoft for a while.

Ingram To Resell Linspire.
October 10, 2005... Ingram Micro, the big distributor, is going to handle Linspire's desktop Linux distro and its bundled apps like OpenOffice. Ingram is now servicing 100 countries and says it's the only global IT distributor with operations in Asia.

The Processor with Two Brains.
October 10, 2005... It looks like Intel will finally announce its dual-core Paxville Xeon chip on October 10, a few months ahead of the original schedule but six months behind AMD's dual-core Opterons. Intel's promoting the unveiling as "The Processor with Two...

Google To Pay for JRE.(Java Runtime Environment)(Sun Microsystems Inc., partnership)(Brief Article)
October 10, 2005... Aside from the cachet of the Google name, Sun will be getting paid to bundle the Google Toolbar with its Java Runtime Environment (JRE). How much is unclear though it's probably modest. Anybody who wants the two things together and just go and...

IBM & Zend To Aim PHP at .NET.(International Business Machines Corp)(Zend Technologies Ltd)
October 17, 2005... IBM would like nothing more than to nail .NET's little web feet to the floor like a pate-bound goose, according to Zend Technologies CEO Doron Gerstel. IBM had hopes of J2EE running interference and blocking .NET from sweeping into corporate...

Oracle Buys Open Source Company To Harry MySQL.
October 17, 2005... Well, IBM has one so naturally Oracle wanted one. An open source acquisition I mean. Both moves were made to harry an open source rival, IBM to bother JBoss, Oracle to bother MySQL. Oracle bought 10-year-old Finland-based Innobase OY, a...

SCO's Plans Go Awry; IBM Does Them a Favor.
October 17, 2005... SCO's fancy and fancily paid lawyers badly misread the court's mood and flubbed last Friday's mission to get IBM sanctioned for failing to produce discovery that SCO claims IBM was repeatedly ordered by the court to turn over. Magistrate...

Cell Has Another Taker.(Brief Article)
October 17, 2005... The fabled Cell chip created by Sony, Toshiba and IBM for PlayStations and televisions has found another customer. Mercury Computer Systems has announced a Linux-run dual-Cell blade, based on IBM's Cell BE (Broadband Engine) processor and...

IBM Seeks To Make Eclipse Rational.(Brief Article)
October 17, 2005... IBM said the other day that it has contributed about 15% of its Rational Unified Process (RUP) platform, a set of project planning and management tools based on the unified modeling language (UML), to the Eclipse Foundation for a prospective...

Microsoft Programs Moved to Linux.
October 17, 2005... Mainsoft and IBM say that they've proven that hard-core Microsoft applications can be ported to Linux quickly and easily. The two companies challenged members of the Code Project, the virtual community of 2.3 million Visual Studio...

IBM, Novell Cut Price of SuSE on BladeCenter.(International Business Machines Corp)(Brief Article)
October 17, 2005... IBM and its little buddy Novell have cut the price of running SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on IBM's market-leading BladeCenter. IBM doesn't have a similar deal with Red Hat. Instead of charging per-blade, they've thought up a new flat...

Novell Launches the Better Desktop Initiative.(Brief Article)
October 17, 2005... Novell has launched what it calls the Better Desktop initiative, a new component of the openSUSE project that's supposed to give open source developers the usability testing data and resources to improve the quality of the Linux desktop. ...

Red Hat Taps CTO.(Brian Stevens appointed as chief technology officer.)(Brief Article)
October 17, 2005... Red Hat has named Brian Stevens CTO and VP of engineering. Red Hat hasn't had a CTO for a while. Stevens has been the company's VP of operating system, storage and clustering development, leading Red Hat's enterprise strategy and was...

Anti-Microsoft Format Spawns Fellowship.(Brief Article)
October 17, 2005... There is now an Open Document Fellowship, a consortium started to advance the Oasis-forwarded XML-based Open Document Format that has besotted the state of Massachusetts and gotten the support of the European Union much to Microsoft's chagrin....

New Red Hat Rating.
October 17, 2005... Red Hat has got a new security certification for IT professionals: Red Hat Certified Security Specialist (RHCSS), which it says is the first performance- based certification focused on security competency for enterprise Linux servers.

Intel Announces Paxville DP.
October 17, 2005... Intel on Monday, as expected, announced the availability of its first, moved-up, catch-up, hyper-threaded, dual-core Xeon processor for dual-processor servers, a k a the 90nm Paxville, good for 2.8GHz. The part isn't expected to do much volume...

Fujitsu Siemens Leverages Opteron To Combine Scale-Out & Scale-Up.(Brief Article)
October 17, 2005... Fujitsu Siemens, which when last seen was OEMing boxes from Egenera, announced what it called a major enhancement of its Dynamic Data Center, a so-called Primergy Advanced Blade Ecosystem. It says the architecture, based on the Primergy...

AMD Resurgent, Earnings Climb 73%.
October 17, 2005... AMD came in with better-than-expected third-quarter sales of $1.523 billion, up 23% year-on-year and 21% sequentially, earning $76 million, or 18 cents a share, up 73%. It was only expected to clear eight cents on $1.38 billion. It is...

Oasis Forms New RF-on-RAND WS-Transaction Committee.(Brief Article)
October 17, 2005... There is now a new Oasis Web Services Transaction (WS-TX) technical committee meant to define a set of protocols for coordinating the outcome of distributed application actions. It will refine and finalize a set of specifications based on...

Whoops.(OpenOffice.org)(Product defect)(Brief Article)
October 17, 2005... OpenOffice.org missed its scheduled October 13th rev 2.0 official release on the fifth anniversary of its founding because of a showstopper in the code that saved graphical elements incorrectly in the vaunted OpenDocument format. OpenOffice 2.0...

AMD Looks for Paper Trail.(Advanced Micro Devices Inc.)(Brief Article)
October 17, 2005... As expected, AMD, the reason for Intel's hurry-up dual-core launch this week, has served almost two dozen companies with subpoenas searching for documentary evidence of monopoly-maintaining bullying for the antitrust lawsuit it filed against...

Start-Up To Make Linux Work with Windows.
October 24, 2005... There's a little company called Centeris Corporation that lives down the road from Microsoft in Bellevue, Washington, and has more than its fair share of ex- Microsoft people working for it. It got started a year ago on a $5 million check...

Is Oracle Suiting Up for Bomb Run over Open Source Rivals?(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... MySQL is figuring on shipping a new version of its software, which has been in development for the last two-and-a-half years, in the next couple of weeks. However, it may be persuaded to get off the dime a bit quicker if rumors prove true...

Big Novell Reorg Predicted.(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... Novell is going to announce a major restructuring on Halloween, according to BusinessWeek, that could take out at least 20% of its 5,800-man workforce. Novell, which has cut back piecemeal, has hinted it will cut deeper but the company's...

GroundWork Re-Rigs its Flagship Monitor.(GroundWork Open Source Solutions)
October 24, 2005... GroundWork Open Source Solutions, the two-year-old company that intends to eventually reinvent OpenView and Tivoli using open source, has released Monitor 4, a major rev of its end-to-end open source IT monitoring system that is supposed to...

IBM Virtualizes the PC.
October 24, 2005... In a variation on the PC blade, IBM, VMware and Citrix are trying to put the fat client on a diet. The trio has produced the IBM Virtualized Hosted Client Infrastructure, which is supposed to deliver desktop-style functionality to any...

VMware Unveils its Next Generation.
October 24, 2005... VMware has announced its expected next-generation ESX Server 3 and VMware VirtualCenter 2, the software that provisions and manages the virtual infrastructure. The stuff is still in limited beta and won't be generally available until Q1 after a...

SCO Gets Big New OpenServer Account.(The SCO Group Inc)(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... Bloodied but unbowed by the Linux wars, SCO said Wednesday that Los Angeles County, which is the largest county in the country, housing 28% of all Californians, had opted to use SCO's new OpenServer 6 as a platform for TelSoft's MegaCall...

OSDL Chases Phones.(Open Source Development Labs )(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... The Open Source Development Labs has branched off into mobile handset, creating a working group to develop a single Linux platform to accelerate Linux adoption in marketplace expected to reach 2.8 billion phones by 2009. It's called the...

Bob Young Quits Red Hat Board.(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... Red Hat co-founder and former CEO Bob Young, a one-time Linux demigod, has resigned from its board. Young hasn't been active in the company since 1999 after making a killing on its IPO. Red Hat said Young intends to focus on growing...

OpenOffice 2.0 Arrives.(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... OpenOffice 2.0 has finally made it out after a last-minute showstopper forced developers to cancel its formal debut last week that was set for the software's fifth anniversary. Google CEO Eric Schmidt said recently when it was hinted that...

Microsoft Loses Wiki Inventor to Eclipse.
October 24, 2005... Microsoft has lost the guy who invented the Wiki, the visitor-edited blog. Ward Cunningham has defected to the Eclipse Foundation, the IBM-created open source tools project.

SugarCRM Scoffs Down $18.77m.(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... SugarCRM, the open source CRM house, has taken in a $18.77 million third round led by New Enterprise Associates, which gets a board seat for general partner Scott Sandell. Existing backers Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Walden International...

FTC Opens GPL File.(United States. Federal Trade Commission)(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... Daniel Wallace, the guy who's got the GPL, the Free Software Foundation, IBM, Red Hat and Novell up on price-fixing charges, has heard back from the Federal Trade Commission after writing them a letter complaining of the GPL being anti-...

Firefox at 100m.
October 24, 2005... Firefox, Microsoft's growing nemesis, has just passed 100 million downloads despite security concerns. Meanwhile, developers at the Flock start-up led by erstwhile Eazel co-founder Bart Decrem also just released their eponymous...

Surprise MicroUnity Settlement Nips Intel Quarter; Q4 Guidance Too Conservative for Market.
October 24, 2005... Intel earned $2 billion, or 32 cents a share, in Q3 on record revenues of $9.96 billion, up 18% year-over-year and up 8% sequentially. Earnings, which were impacted by a surprise $300 million legal settlement with MicroUnity to make a patent...

Intel Better Brush Up on its Korean.(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... AMD says Korea's Ministry of Education & Human Resources Development is using Opteron servers for its National Education Information System Project (NEIS), its online education information system AMD says it is the largest IT project going...

Google Apparently Suffers Kai-Fu Loss.(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... Well, it didn't go at all the way Google planned in court. Google was hoping to knock the stilts out from under Microsoft and get Microsoft's case against it and its hireling, ex-Microsoft VP Kai-Fu Lee, moved to California, where it fully...

Google Too Socialist for Ayn Rand's Tastes.(Ayn Rand Institute, Association of American Publishers, case)(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... While the allegedly freeloading Google Print Library Project aimed at creating a searchable library of all the world's books that Google could rake millions off of has ticked off the Author's Guild and now five members of the Association of...

Unisys To Cut 10%, Divest.
October 24, 2005... After reporting a preliminary $54.3 million loss in Q3, Unisys said this week that it's going to cut 10% of its people, some 3,600 folks, divest unnamed businesses that contribute roughly 6% of its revenues and focus on services, security,...

Google Rakes in the Dough.(management and earnings of the company)(Brief Article)
October 24, 2005... Google, in a biblical turn reminiscent of Joseph and his dream of seven years of plenty, came home with Q3 earnings seven times what they were last year and revenues that were double. It did $381.2 million, or $1.32 a share, on revenues of...

IBM Organizes EMC-Free Aperi.(Brief Article)
October 31, 2005... Where there were consortia, there are now open source communities. Led by IBM, some of the storage old guard but noticeably not EMC and HP say they're going to form an open source community, initially given the project name Aperi,...

Microsoft Re-Jigs its Shared Source Licenses; Flirts with GPL.(general public license)
October 31, 2005... Microsoft, which needs to look less than, well, Microsoft to developers, says it's been suffering from the same kind of license glut that has beset the open source community and so it's revamped the Shared Source licenses that the open source...

Intel's Itanium Nightmare Continues.(development of Montecito Itanium drooped)
October 31, 2005... Intel's not going get its vaunted next-generation dual-core 90nm Montecito Itanium chip out any time soon, suggesting that it's returning to the screw-ups of the Barrett administration. It's been delayed. And since Montecito's been...

Is Intel Screwed?(plans on microprocessor development)
October 31, 2005... While Intel struggles with its Itanium line, it's also dicking with the Xeon MP. It's up and killed the so-called four-way Whitefield and replaced it with a four-core four-way widget code named Tigerton. The substitution, which may be...

Chip Start-Up Claims 10Fold Performance-per-Watt Advantage.(new product PWRficient from PA Semi)
October 31, 2005... Fabled Alpha and StrongArm chip designer Dan Dobberpuhl's hyper-secretive start- up, PA Semi, two-and-a-half years in incubation with scarecrows pitched outside to ward off the press, finally surfaced this week at the Fall Processor Forum where...

IBM Opens All Its Patents to Some.(Brief Article)
October 31, 2005... IBM has pledged royalty-free access to all of its huge patent portfolio of 45,000 patents to designated folks in standards bodies developing healthcare and education software built around Web Services, Xforms electronic forms and...

Neoware Buys Maxspeed.(Neoware Systems Inc.)
October 31, 2005... Continuing its shopping spree, Neoware is going to buy Maxspeed Corporation for $24 million cash, marking its entry into Asia since the privately held supplier of customized thin clients has sales and development offices in Beijing and...

NEC Tries Newfangled Lease To Push Itanium Boxes.(NEC Solutions America offers storage disc arrays and storage management software)
October 31, 2005... Oh boy, the Itanium loyalists, a small but hearty band, are getting desperate. NEC and its financing arm are offering a "no money down/no payment for 90-days" leasing agreement on NEC's Itanium 2-based fault tolerant servers, storage disk...

Appro Starts Making its Own Boards.(new product XtremeServers from Appro Systems Inc.)
October 31, 2005... Appro, the white box maker trying to go legit and crash the big-time vendor scene, has decided that using off-the-shelf motherboards doesn't cut it. There's too little revision control or adaptability in them for its tastes so for the sake...

VMware Betas a Player.(new product VMware Player)(Brief Article)
October 31, 2005... VMware has come up with a VMware Player, free new beta software that lets anyone run, share or evaluate software in a virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC. It basically reads 32- and 64-bit virtual machines. It installs like a standard...

IBM Sticks It to JBoss.(new WebSphere Application Server Community Edition)(Brief Article)
October 31, 2005... Although it won't be available until later this year, IBM Tuesday announced its expected J2EE-certified Apache Geronimo-based WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WAS CE), which includes technology from Gluecode Software, which IBM...

SCO's Day in Court.(Santa Cruz Operation Inc., International Business Machines Corp., case)(Brief Article)
October 31, 2005... Today, Friday, October 28, is the day SCO is supposed to show up in court and prove it's got a case against IBM. Naturally its legions of critics, convinced that the discovery exercise such as it was couldn't have possibly turned up anything...

Here Comes Paxville MP.(new microprocessor from Intel Corp.)(Brief Article)
October 31, 2005... Intel is supposed to announce the dual-core Paxville MP Xeon on Tuesday, November 1, its first dual-core, hyper-threaded platform for servers that run four or more processors. The widget, dubbed the Xeon 7000 sequence and good for up to 3GHz,...

Intel's Chipset Outreach.
October 31, 2005... Intel, which had been suffering from a capacity-induced shortage of desktop chipsets with no immediate relief is reaching out to third-parties like ATI to fill the void. Intel has never used other people's chipsets on its own motherborads...

Sun Shareholders Choke on Poison Pill.
October 31, 2005... Sun's shareholders showed a bit of spunk Thursday and overwhelming shot down the company poison pill. The vote is non-binding but a pressure point. Reportedly Sun CEO Scott McNealy was also asked whether he should still be running the company.

Whoops.
October 31, 2005... The co-president of Dell's Chinese operations, Foo Piau Phang, has up and retired perhaps because the company's market share in Asia in Q3 dropped a point to 7.8%, according to IDC.

IBM General Counsel To Retire.(Ed Lineen)(Brief Article)
October 31, 2005... IBM says its general counsel Ed Lineen will retire in January. One can't help but wonder whether it will make any difference in the conduct of the SCO suit. Lineen, 64, was understood to want to see that case closed on his watch. He will be...