Linux Gram articles from October 2008

Linux Gram archives from October 2008

Fretting over Red Hat's Future.(Brief article)
October 6, 2008... Matt Asay, the Alfresco VP who blogs about open source for CNET, is worried that - with Red Hat's stock price within earshot lately of its 52-week low - Oracle may jump out of the weeds and slurp it up. Such a move, Matt says, would "call...

Stallman Condemns Cloud Computing as 'Stupid'.
October 6, 2008... Richard Stallman, the guy who started the free software movement and head of the Free Software Foundation, calls cloud computing "worse than stupidity: it's a marketing hype campaign." Web-based programs are anathema according to what...

Microsoft To Ship Open Source Library with Visual Studio.
October 6, 2008... Microsoft is going to ship jQuery, the popular open source JavaScript library, as a standard, supported part of its all-important Visual Studio toolkit and ASP.NET, a little 15kb stick of dynamite. Microsoft says it won't screw with it or...

Red Hat Delivers Integrated HPC Platform.
October 6, 2008... Red Hat Thursday delivered what it called the industry's first integrated Linux-based High Performance Computing (HPC) platform, otherwise known as the Red Hat HPC Solution, an all-in-one HPC cluster stack that Red Hat and Platform Computing...

Yahoo's Zimbra Reaches Out to Microsoft.
October 6, 2008... Zimbra, Yahoo's open source messaging and collaboration software company whose fate was unclear if Microsoft had bought Yahoo, says it's got a new open extension framework for its Collaboration Suite (ZCS) that will enable two-way...

Amazon EC2 To Add Windows.
October 6, 2008... Amazon said Wednesday that its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), currently limited to various Unix and Linux operating systems, will start supporting Windows Server and SQL Server sometime this fall, describing it as "one of our most requested...

HP Buys LeftHand.
October 6, 2008... Dell got its name in the papers late last year when it bought EqualLogic. HP followed suit Wednesday when it said that it was buying EqualLogic's iSCSI rival LeftHand Networks, the nine-year-old storage virtualization and iSCSI/SAN ISV, for...

Shanghai Due.
October 6, 2008... AMD's first 45nm chip, the Shanghai version of its quad-core Barcelona server processor, is reportedly in full production. The company has reportedly pulled in delivery of two-way and eight-way models from Q1 to any minute now. ...

Microsoft's Hyper-V Released.
October 6, 2008... Let the games begin. First thing Wednesday morning Microsoft said that its standalone Hyper-V Server 2008, the bare metal hypervisor meant to help it wrest leadership of the virtualization market from VMware, was available. Microsoft CEO...

Microsoft's in the Market for European Search Engineers.
October 6, 2008... As should come as no surprise, Microsoft is going to build an enterprise search R&D center in Norway around its Fast Search & Transfer acquisition. It says it will add 50 R&D workers to Fast's ~300 employees. It will be Microsoft's...

Google Wants $4.4 Trillion To Cut US Energy Dependence.(Brief article)
October 6, 2008... In a week of ludicrously large numbers beyond a normal human being's comprehension of what it will cost to barely survive the current economic catastrophe, Google announced that - by its calculations - it will take $4.4 trillion to reduce...

Microsoft Hikes its Skirts, Shows Off Rosario's Ankles.
October 6, 2008... Presumably still months before rollout - there's no date yet - Microsoft started talking up the next version of its developer tools and platform, Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0, Monday describing them as enabling cloud computing and...

Larry Needs an Angle on Cloud Computing.(Larry Ellison )(Brief article)
October 6, 2008... "The interesting thing about cloud computing is that we've redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I can't think of anything that isn't cloud computing with all of these announcements. The computer industry is the...

VMware Workstation 6.5 Hits Market.
October 6, 2008... VMware's Workstation 6.5, its desktop virtualization widgetry, hit general availability Monday. The latest upgrade of the nine-year-old software, VMware's original product, can be used to toggle between windows on different virtual machines and...

Does Yahoo Foresee a Bad End to its Google Adventure?
October 6, 2008... Canadian antitrust regulators have now gone down the same path as the US Justice Department and reached out and hired an outside litigator, David Kent, a Toronto antitrust expert, to look into the Google-Yahoo deal. The news comes from the...

Appistry Pushes into Public Clouds.
October 6, 2008... Appistry, the ISV with the grid-based cloud application platform that's been focusing on in-house clouds like FedEx' and Lockheed Martin's, is extending its reach to so-called public clouds beginning with GoGrid and SkyTap. Appistry's...

Zoho Goes Salesforce Route.(Brief article)
October 6, 2008... Zoho, the online apps player, has gone the route of Salesforce.com and opened up an online marketplace for on-demand apps developed by other people, who get all the revenues. Users can test drive, buy and install the programs via their Zoho...

Divining Open Source.
October 6, 2008... The Open Source Census, the catch-as-catch-can opt-in attempt to discern trends in open source adoption that OpenLogic started, has collected six months worth of data on some 300,000 installations on about 2,000 machines and from this very...

Linux Foundation To Start New Conference.
October 6, 2008... The economic auspices ain't exactly favorable right this second but the Linux Foundation is planning a new annual technical conference called LinuxCon set for September 2009 in Portland, Oregon. It will be co-located with the Linux Plumbers...

White House Asked To Create an IP Czar.
October 6, 2008... The US Congress had trouble passing the "save the world" legislation the White House asked for this week, but it didn't seem to have any trouble sending the White House a bill the White House didn't want - and may veto - that would establish a...

Silverlight 2 Reportedly on the Horizon.
October 6, 2008... Silverlight 2 advanced to Release Candidate 0 over the weekend. Microsoft underscores that it is only for testing and "should not be used for launching Silverlight 2 applications for the general public." But final release, covering Windows and...

Yahoo Plunging.
October 6, 2008... Having left Microsoft's $33 a share offer on the table back in May, Yahoo Thursday - a bad day all around - closed at 15.58, a new five-year low.

Ballmer Can't See His Face in the Chrome.
October 6, 2008... "If you talk to Google they'll say it's thin client computing but then they'll issue a new browser that's basically a big fat operating system designed to compete with Windows but running on top of it." - Steve Ballmer in London Wednesday as...

A Little Light Editing.(Brief article)
October 6, 2008... Seems we can expect Microsoft to invest Office with some "light editing" over the web capabilities. Office Live Workspace can currently do online storage and viewing. According to Computer Weekly, the British paper that interviewed Steve...

AMD Spins Manufacturing Off into a Joint Venture with Abu Dhabi.
October 13, 2008... AMD finally pulled the "asset lite" ripcord like it's been threatening to do for over a year and said early Tuesday morning that it's spinning its manufacturing off into a joint venture with the oil-rich sheikdom of Abu Dhabi. The...

Is the AMD Deal Legal?
October 13, 2008... Intel claims it doesn't know whether AMD's life-saving spinout of its manufacturing operations into a new joint venture and its sale of close to 20% of itself to a third party is legal. AMD of course says it is. See, AMD is only in the...

NTT Sticks Money in EnterpriseDB.
October 13, 2008... EnterpriseDB, the four-year-old Postgres open source database start-up, is sure hanging with the big dogs these days. Six months ago, IBM invested in the company, an odd thing for IBM to do on the face of it considering it has its own DB2...

Mono 2.0 Released.
October 13, 2008... The open source Mono project that makes Microsoft's .NET development framework cross-platform - and is meant to entice Windows developers to Linux by making things seem warmly familiar - is now loosely compatible with .NET Framework 3.5. ...

Red Hat Tickles Open Source SOA.
October 13, 2008... The company said the new revs feature cooperative support and allow for remote monitoring and management of open source SOA deployments. Red Hat's SOA strategy is centered on driving down cost and complexity. The lightweight JBoss...

Amazon Cuts S3 Prices.(Brief article)
October 13, 2008... Amazon will be cutting the price of its S3 hosted storage service come November 1. Pricing will be tiered from now on and favor heavier users. The company's entry-level price of 15 cents a gigabyte a month in the US will remain in...

IBM Moves To Calm Earnings Fears.
October 13, 2008... IBM got a jump on what people fear may be a nasty earnings season and pre-announced its Q3 results Wednesday night after the market closed. It said its income would be up 20% to $2.8 billion on revenues up 5% to $25.3 billion. It also...

Symantec Makes Aggressive $695m Bet on SaaS.
October 13, 2008... Symantec is buying MessageLabs, the privately held UK-based online message archiving and security house, for about $695 million in cash, a mix of sterling and dollars, to advance its position in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Symantec...

H-1B Visas Rife with Fraud, Government Finds.
October 13, 2008... Thirteen percent of the H-1B visas granted are based on fraud and another 8% contain so-called technical violations, according to a study just done by the US Citizenship & Immigration Services (USCIS), an arm of the Department of Homeland...

Entellium Duo Charged with Cooking Books, Ripping Off VCs.
October 13, 2008... The FBI arrested former Entellium CEO Paul Johnston and CFO Parrish Jones Tuesday night and on Wednesday the pair was hauled into district court in Seattle to face criminal charges of wire fraud. Seems they kept two sets of books, one that...

Bull Moves To Advance its HPC Ambitions.(Brief article)
October 13, 2008... Bull wants to be king of the HPC hill in Europe and so it's buying science + computing AG, an HPC solutions and services house in Germany, which happens to be the largest HPC market in Europe. What it's paying is a secret but the...

Unisys Hires Ex-Gateway Boss as CEO.
October 13, 2008... Unisys, the old computer dinosaur struggling to turn into a service provider, has turned to former Gateway chief Edward Coleman for a turnaround, hiring him as both chairman and CEO, effective immediately. Coleman, who has IBM and CSC...

The Sky over Armonk is Thick with Clouds.
October 13, 2008... IBM said Monday that it's going full bore at cloud computing and launching a company-wide initiative to fill the cloud with new software and services. Amazon and Google have something of a first mover advantage with SMBs and ISVs; anyway...

Quest To Stage Auction Buyback.
October 13, 2008... Quest Software was one of the only tech companies whose stock price was up after Thursday's holocaust and that was because it said Wednesday that it would buy back $135 million-$400 million worth of stock through a modified Dutch auction tender...

Alleged Palin Hacker Indicted.
October 13, 2008... David Kernell, the kid who allegedly hacked Republican vice-presidential nominee Sarah Plain's Yahoo e-mail, distributed screenshots to the Internet and gave others access to the account, has been indicted and arraigned in federal court in...

AOL & Yahoo Reportedly Close.
October 13, 2008... TechCrunch claims - based on what it's heard from the proverbial "sources close to the negotiations" - that there could be a Yahoo-AOL deal this month. It says Yahoo would get AOL sans dial-up and Time Warner would kick in a few billion...

Sounds More Like Rocks than Clouds.
October 13, 2008... There's speculation that what Steve Ballmer last week called Windows Cloud and said was a placeholder name might be called Windows Strata. Seems a blogger found the name in a list of sessions set for Microsoft's upcoming Professional Developers...

Facebook Launches Windows Live Search.
October 13, 2008... Facebook has put Windows Live Search on its site like it said it was gonna do a few months ago. Users can search the web without leaving the site or they can search the site itself. Remember, Microsoft has money in the joint.

Does Steve Even Have a Heart?
October 13, 2008... One of those so-called "citizen journalists" posting for the first time on CNN's amateur-magnifying iReport.com site falsely reported last Friday that Steve Jobs had suffered a major heart attack. Apple's stock was sent reeling and the SEC,...

HP To Run PC Plant in Western China.
October 13, 2008... Beginning in 2010 HP is going to be making state-of-the-art laptop and desktops for the Chinese market out of a 20,000-square-meter facility in Chongquing, said to be one of the fastest-growing cities in China with 500,000 university students...

Where Are They Now?
October 13, 2008... Bill Strecker, CTO at DEC and then at Compaq after Compaq bought DEC, has been named to the board of Terascala, the Lustre-based high-throughput storage appliance start-up, a little ex-DECie enclave. These days Strecker is a partner at Flagship...

Untangle Joins the Linux Foundation.
October 13, 2008... Open source network gateway developer Untangle has joined the Linux Foundation.

Abu Dhabi Already Down $400m on AMD.
October 13, 2008... Mubadala Development Company, the Abu Dhabi sovereign fund that bought ~8% of AMD in November for $12.70 a share, pumping $622 million into the joint, is down over $400 million on the investment.

Sun Hires Strategic Planner.
October 13, 2008... Sun has hired Christine Bucklin out of Internet Brands Inc as senior VP of corporate strategic planning where she was COO, a job that she got by being entrepreneur-in-residence at the Idealab Internet incubator. The ex-McKinsey management...

HTC Counts Androids.
October 13, 2008... HTC, which makes T-Mobile's G1 smartphone, the first of the Android phones to be out, has been whispering to Taiwanese press that it could sell 500,000 of the things this quarter and 1.5 million-2 million through '09.

Intel SSD Unleashes the True Performance of its CPUs.
October 20, 2008... Intel is giddy with delight to be shipping its new high-performance solid state drive (SSD) into the server, workstation and storage markets. So are its customers, who came to testify at its launch Wednesday. Great things are expected of...

Intel Takes the EC to Court.
October 20, 2008... Intel has formally objected to the way the European Commission is conducting the antitrust case against it, appealing last Friday to the Court of First Instance in Luxembourg to force the EC to consider a line of defense that the regulators...

Zmanda Takes to the Cloud.
October 20, 2008... Zmanda, the not-yet-profitable open source backup and recovery start-up that likes to think of itself - in an allusion to MySQL - as the "next billion-dollar acquisition," is touting its widgetry for the cloud. It can back up Windows...

Scalent Supports Red Hat.(Brief article)
October 20, 2008... Red Hat says Scalent Systems is supporting Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 standalone and with Xen, extending virtualization and data center automation beyond hypervisors to bare metal servers, network and storage connectivity. Scalent V/OE...

Novell Betas Open Enterprise Server 2 SP1.
October 20, 2008... Novell has put Open Enterprise Server 2 with Service Pack 1 (SP1) out for public beta. Built on SUSE Linux, it's supposed to bring interoperability between Linux, Windows, Macintosh and NetWare to the next level and function as an alternative...

LSB 4.0 Beta Out.(Linux Standard Base )(Brief article)
October 20, 2008... The first beta of Linux Standard Base (LSB) 4.0 is out, with general release set for later this fall. Among other things it includes a new multi-version SDK that will let developers build programs to earlier LSB specifications without...

Kickfire Cuts MySQL Deal with Sun.(Brief article)
October 20, 2008... The Kickfire start-up is going to include a MySQL Enterprise subscription with its Linux-based MySQL appliances under a multi-year deal with Sun. It'll make the things plug-and-play and offer users a single point of support. The appliance is a...

OpenOffice 3.0 Out after Breech Birth.
October 20, 2008... One gets a bit suspicious when an operation like OpenOffice.com reports that its servers were swamped and knocked offline for days by the pressing demand for the first formal release of its native open source application suite for Mac OS X. ...

Zoho Offers Offline E-mail.
October 20, 2008... Zoho Mail, the start-up latest feather in its peacock-like tail, has left private beta and is being offered around free for up to 10 users - $50 a head a year after that. Zoho will host the e-mail and handle the back-end storage. The widgetry,...

Google Shares its Blankey.(Brief article)
October 20, 2008... On another day of hysterically wild swings - when the stock market - as a proxy for the global economy - badly needed a comfort blanket - Google gave it one. It came in Thursday with Q3 net earnings of $1.56 billion, or $4.92 a share...

Ballmer Puts Yahoo in Play.
October 20, 2008... When Yahoo rolled out of bed Thursday morning its stock was at an abysmal $11.75. Then it lost another 40 cents in early trading as the market plummeted again. At lunchtime, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer threw it a lifeline. On stage at...

Worldwide PC Market Up 15% in Q3: Gartner.(Industry overview)
October 20, 2008... Come out from under the bed for a minute. Despite the horror of September Gartner says worldwide PC shipments hit 80.6 million units in Q3, up 15% year-over-year. The way Gartner counts the number includes desktops, mobiles and x86...

Apple Only Gives an Inch on Price.(Brief article)
October 20, 2008... It took the global economy falling off a cliff for Apple to bring out a sub-$1,000 notebook and it's only a buck under a grand at that - a hundred bucks cheaper than its last entry-level model - disappointing onlookers who wanted tags more like...

Citrix Releases Kensho Preview To Push Portable VMs.
October 20, 2008... Citrix has released a technology preview of Project Kensho, its toolkit for developing and deploying portable virtual machine appliances in enterprises and clouds. First announced in July, the widgetry is described as a multi-hypervisor...

Intel Admits its Crystal Ball is Foggy.
October 20, 2008... Despite tales elsewhere of sales evaporating toward the end of September, Intel plunked down its Q3 results Tuesday and declared them to be "the best third-quarter revenue in its history." It was shooting for somewhere between $10 billion...

Losses at AMD Not as Bad as They've Been.
October 20, 2008... Things at AMD weren't as bad during Q3 as they might have been. It returned to profitability on an operating basis and only lost $67 million net, 11 cents a share - down from $396 million this time last year - on revenues up 32%...

So 7 It Is Then.
October 20, 2008... Microsoft is going to use the code name Windows 7 as the official name of its next-generation operating system. Microsoft has never done that with Windows before. But, according to a blog by Mike Nash, corporate VP of Windows product...

Microsoft Releases Silverlight 2.
October 20, 2008... Microsoft's Silverlight 2, the latest plank in the company's rich Internet applications development platform, made its formal debut Tuesday. Although Silverlight is only a year old, Microsoft claims one in four consumers has access to a...

Google & Yahoo Dicker with Feds To Salvage Deal: WSJ.(Brief article)
October 20, 2008... Google and Yahoo may have to make changes to their controversial revenue-sharing ad deal if they hope to save it, according to a story in the Wall Street Journal Tuesday. The companies delayed implementing the deal a couple of weekends ago...

A Yahoo Investor Blows on the Cold Microsoft-Yahoo Embers Hoping for a Spark.
October 20, 2008... Mithras Capital, an investment fund that, poor thing, owns 1.9 million shares of Yahoo, which amounts to a fractional percentage in the company, has suggested that Microsoft buy the joint for $22 a share, these days something like a 60% premium...

rPath Writes a Cloud Primer.(Brief article)
October 20, 2008... rPath has got itself a Cloud primer, a supposed hype-dispelling five-step plan for the incremental adoption of technologies that create a foundation for cloud computing. The start-up calls it the Cloud Computing Adoption Model and suggests...

Virtualization & Clouds Top Strategic Technologies: Gartner.
October 20, 2008... Gartner singled out virtualization as the top strategic technology for 2009 at its Symposium/ITxpo this week, restating what it said six months ago when it identified virtualization as the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and...

IT Spending Not Negative Yet.(Brief article)
October 20, 2008... Global IT spending will grow only 2.3%, not 5.8%, next year for a total of $3.5 trillion, according to Gartner's latest reworked predictions - worse if the economy continues to disintegrate but not as bad as 2001 or 1991-92. Hardware will take...

IBM To Open Research Facility in Shanghai.
October 20, 2008... It's been 10 years between research facilities but IBM is going to open one in Shanghai to build new applications for small business and the Internet including text-to-speech and translation software. It will eventually employ 100 people.

Wanted: American IP Czar.
October 20, 2008... The next administration is going to have an IP czar to fight piracy. President Bush signed the PRO-IP Act Congress sent down to him. It triples criminal copyright damages and gives the government the right to seize property used to commit IP...

Yahoo Layoffs Rumored.
October 20, 2008... According to Valleywag, which got it from a "tipster," Yahoo is going to lay off 3,500 people in December after the company's "multimillion-dollar" Christmas party. Supposed the cuts will be coming from sales, finance, engineering and G&A. The...

Larry Getting Shopping Itch Again.(Larry Ellison )(Brief article)
October 20, 2008... Larry Ellison told stockholders last Friday that with stock prices off Oracle may go bargain-hunting. "Acquisitions that we have been looking at for some time may now be more attractive," he said. He's targeting small growing concerns rather...

Symantec Wants SaaS Resellers.
October 20, 2008... Having thrown its hat in the SaaS ring, Symantec has added a software-as-a-service program to its normal partner program starting in North America.

Cloud Investors.
October 20, 2008... Atlanta-based TechOperators, a new early stage VC targeting cloud computing and SaaS as well as Internet services, security, infrastructure and mobile, is launching its first venture fund and claims it didn't have too many problems raising the...

Linux Foundation Wrestles with the Question of What Linux is Worth.
October 27, 2008... The Linux Foundation asked its people to wet their pencils and figure out the total value of Linux and the effect the open source platform was having on software economics. And so according to their calculations it would take $10.8 billion...

Amazon's Cloud Sheds Beta Status, Adds Windows.
October 27, 2008... Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) - it's Linux-based one - has moved to production status after two years in beta and now offers a 99.5% Service Level Agreement (SLA) while a Windows one, running Windows Server and SQL, both 32- and 64-bit,...

IBM Starts Hosting Lotus Notes.
October 27, 2008... IBM has turned Lotus Notes into a fluffy hosted service called Lotus Notes Hosted Messaging as it's been threatening to do. The move sorta catches IBM up to Microsoft with its $10-a-head-a-month Exchange Online. Big Blue is targeting...

Rackspace Arms To Take On Amazon.
October 27, 2008... Rackspace Hosting, maybe the last company to go public for God knows how long, is anteing up $12 million in cash and stock - with another $16 million in payouts possible - to buy Slicehost and Jungle Disk so it can chase the cloud and compete...

Centrify Suites Up.
October 27, 2008... Centrify, the folks with Active Directory savvy clever at using it on non-Microsoft platforms, is moving out Centrify Suite 2008, an integrated family of Active Directory-based auditing, access control and identity management solutions that...

Zimbra Chief Buys into Dimdim.(Satish Dharmaraj)(Brief article)
October 27, 2008... Zimbra co-founder and CEO Satish Dharmaraj, the guy who sold Zimbra and its AJAX-based groupware to Yahoo, has put some of his own money - how much is unclear - into open source web conferencer Dimdim. For what it's worth he gets to join...