Linux Gram articles from September 2003

Linux Gram archives from September 2003

Sun Uses SCO Brouhaha To Leverage Solaris x86.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Sun Microsystems, which threw its Solaris x86 baby out with the bathwater and then had to go and resuscitate the thing, is uncharacteristically trying to push the operating system on to other people's x86 hardware. It says it has a...

SuSE Teams with SGI.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... SGI, which has been using a Red Hat-based distro of its own on its monster Linux machines, has gotten SuSE to agree to support the beasts. SGI says it'll start bundling SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8 on its 64-processor Itanium 2-based...

SGI Retracts Again.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... The continuing sad state of the once-great SGI given the tight economy and its own peculiar failures has forced the company to cut another 600 jobs to bring costs in line with revenue targets for fiscal 2004. It said the cuts "concentrate...

Open Source Zealot Vandalizes SCO Web Site.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... The SCO Group was hit with a distributed denial-of-service attack last weekend that took its web site out from Friday night through Monday morning. The guy responsible contacted Eric Raymond, the president of the Open Source Initiative,...

Turbolinux Rejoins OSDL.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Turbolinux, which was one of the nominal founders of the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) back before its fortunes turned completely sour and it was sold off to a Japanese integrator, re-upped and rejoined OSDL this week. Turbolinux is...

IBM Kicks HP When It's Down; Aces Out HP & Dell in Servers.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... IBM has just been canonized as "the number one overall server vendor worldwide" for Q2 by IDC, trouncing a flagging HP. IBM, which now controls 30.4% of the market, couldn't help but rub it in how HP missed its third-quarter numbers...

Athlon64 Proliferation.(AMD's 2.2GHz Athlon 3200, the 2.2 GHz FX51 and the 1.67GHz Mobile 2800)(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... When AMD launches the Athlon64 on September 23, it's expected to push three models into the water: the 2.2GHz Athlon 3200 and the 2.2 GHz FX51, both of which are for desktops, and the 1.67GHz Mobile 2800, which is for notebooks. Prices are...

Define Epiphany.
September 1, 2003... "I think there is a reason [Dell] took the word 'computer' out of their name. [Dell] is not a technology company. I think they're a distribution company." - HP CEO Carly Fiorina

Ah, the Old Chinese Wall Problem.
September 1, 2003... One wonders who is uncontaminated enough to rewrite Linux is SCO gave them the chance.

Rackable Fends Off Marauder.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Rackable Systems, which a month ago sued white box maker King Star Computer Inc for treading on the patent to its architecture - the widgetry that lets its dense servers be set up back-to-back in a rack to save space, increase density and cool...

HP Strings 2,000 Madisons Together.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... HP has supposedly built the fastest open system supercomputer in the US out of Itanium 2 processors and Linux. Well, the fastest unclassified one at any rate. The thing now lives at the Energy Department's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory...

Trade Secrets Win Out over the First Amendment.
September 1, 2003... The California Supreme Court unanimously decided the other day that trade secrets can trump First Amendment rights and reversed a decision by a California appeals court holding that one Andrew Bunner had a right under the Bill of Rights to post...

Intel Buoyant.
September 1, 2003... Intel cheered everybody up last Friday by announcing that it expects third-quarter revenues will be higher than thought. It said revenues should be between $7.3 billion and $7.8 billion, not $6.9 billion and $7.5 billion. Intel also said...

PeopleSoft Claims Oracle Bid Has Sputtered Out.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... "I truly believe that the Oracle saga is over." - PeopleSoft CEO Craig Conway who figures PeopleSoft's hurried combination with JD Edwards killed the Oracle bid for all intents and purposes. On the other hand, an evidently still worried...

CA Reaches into its Pocket To Resolve Lingering Lawsuits.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Computer Associates is prepared to divvy up 5.7 million shares of its stock among shareholders and take a charge of 17 cents a share this quarter to settle the three class actions and related litigation that have been pending against it for...

Fujitsu Siemens Launches New Servers.(Primergy RX800 and 1U RX200 )(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Fujitsu Siemens has rolled out two new rack servers, a high-end four- or eight-way Primergy RX800 aimed at enterprise data centers and applications such as database servers or server consolidation and a two-way 1U RX200 positioned as a front...

SGI Lies Low.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... On the theory, it said, that anything that it says will be taken out of context, SGI has refused to discuss the fact that its name is being bandied about as one of companies other than IBM that allegedly put Unix code into Linux and changed the...

FreeBSD Gets JDK 1.3.1 Support.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... The FreeBSD Foundation has got a binary distribution of the Java JDK 1.3.1 for FreeBSD. It can be downloaded at http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/downloads/java.shtml. The foundation is also providing OEM licenses so FreeBSD developers can ship...

So Screw PeopleSoft.(Brief Article)
September 1, 2003... Prudential thinks Oracle " has turned the corner and is headed back into positive growth territory in FY04 after two years of negative year-over-year growth." The broker also doesn't think Oracle needs PeopleSoft to achieve organic growth in...

SCO Plans To Bill 'Thousands' of Companies.
September 8, 2003... The SCO Group is supposed to start sending out "thousands" of bills this month demanding payment of what is effectively a Linux tax, according to SCO spokesman Blake Stowell. At least that's the plan, he said. It may not come together at...

Ex-USL Chief Stabbed.(Unix System Labs)
September 8, 2003... SCO CEO Darl McBride and SCOsource chief Chris Sontag have had enough threats come their way since the Unix-LinuxIP flap began to have given a passing thought or two to getting a bodyguard so it's highly ironic that the guy who used to run Unix...

And Now for its Next Trick, The Poor Man's Itaniums.(Deerfield)
September 8, 2003... Deerfield, the low-cost/low-power version of the Madison Itanium shrink, is due to appear on Monday, September 8, debuting as the LV Itanium 2. As Intel has already said, the gismo is supposed to come in at 1GHz with 1.5MB of Level 3 cache...

Stratus Re-engineers its Exotic Five9s Windows Servers.
September 8, 2003... Stratus Technologies is expanding on the dense second-generation modular packaging it kicked off when it introduced its low-end 3300 Five9s fault-tolerant system in March. Now besides the 3300 it's got itself a new spiffier mid-range...

PeopleSoft To Offer Up 750-1,000 Living Sacrifices.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... During a two-hour presentation to analysts that was webcast after the market closed Thursday, PeopleSoft said it will cut 750 to 1,000 jobs, 7%-8% of its workforce, to contain costs now that it's trying to swallow its $1.8 billion JD Edwards...

Oracle Extends PeopleSoft Tender.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... At press time, a few hours after PeopleSoft met with Wall Street, Oracle - claiming that "PeopleSoft's plans means confusion and execution risk for customers and shareholders" - extended its hostile bid for the company for the fourth time. The...

Intel's Outlook Gets Better and Better.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... It was only the other day that Intel poked its head up to say that things were looking brighter than it figured and now for its mid- quarter update Thursday things got brighter still. Intel said it now expects revenues to be between $7.6...

Server Sales Stop Declining.
September 8, 2003... Servers worldwide have been declining for the last nine quarters, but IDC says the drop stopped in Q2 when server factory revenues were up 0.2% year-over-year to $10.6 billion. The growth is too miniscule to count as evidence of a rebound, the...

PC Club Sells Lindows.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... PC Club, the retail chain with 50 stores spread around Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, Ohio, Oregon, Utah and Washington State, is moving Lindows on its low-end Intel-based Sparx desktops. Lindows.com says it's the "first major US chain"...

SCO Wants XFS Out of Linux.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... SGI has been reluctant to answer any questions about its alleged participation in the Great SCO Ripoff (CSN No 513) so we asked SCO what it wanted out of SGI. SCO spokesman Blake Stowell indicated that SCO is demanding that XFS be removed from...

Red Hat Plays Numbers Game.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Word on the street claims Red Hat is trying to trim the price of the next version of its enterprise operating system - which is said to be unstable - down to $1,500 by turning Cluster Manager and the Piranha load balancer into add-on packages...

Opteron's Off to School.(University of Utah's Arches supercomputer )(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... In October the Center for High Performance Computing at the University of Utah is supposed to accept delivery of a 500-node supercomputer cluster, code named Arches, designed to hold 1,000 Opteron chips put together by Angstrom Microsystems out...

WANsync Betas on Linux.(XOsoft)(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Business continuity software provider XOsoft has released a beta of its WANsync application on Linux. Previously available only on Windows and Solaris, WANsync is a WAN-based application integrity and availability program. It is designed to...

Another IBM Layoff Rumored.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... Word from inside has it that IBM is telling its managers to brace for another round of layoffs which may take until the end of the year to make. It's speculated that the reduction in force, aka RIF, may be a thinning of the weaker sisters who...

Desktop Linux Do Scheduled.(Brief Article)
September 8, 2003... The breakaway Desktop Linux Consortium, unhappy with the Lindows- serving Desktop Linux Summit in February, is going to have its own conference dedicated to Linux on the desktop at Boston University's Corporate Education Center in Tyngsboro,...

The Anything-But-Windows Plan.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... There's a proposal on the table for Japan, China and Korea to throw in their lots together and collaborate on R&D using Linux as the basis for the next-generation cell phones, digital cameras, GIS systems and other widgets. Actually the idea is...

Avoid Linux on the Desktop: Gartner.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Opinion maker Gartner Inc is telling its clients to steer clear of Linux on the desktop; they're not going to see a cost savings from migrating off of Windows. Gartner VP David Smith says Linux has cut costs in the server market, but Linux...

OSDL Sets Up Special Japanese Working Group.(Open Source Development Lab)(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... The Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) has set up a Linux Working Group in Japan to develop enhancements that will push Linux into the Japanese data center and telecoms. It's basically a subset of OSDL's existing Carrier Grade Linux and...

VeriSign Goes with Red Hat.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Guess VeriSign can expect to get a tax bill from the SCO Group, which is taking names of big Linux users long about now. To cut costs, VeriSign is moving 2,000 servers from Unix to Red Hat Enterprise Linux, beginning with its Naming and...

SGI Heads Down-Market.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Supercomputer maker SGI says it'll be going to Deerfield, Intel's new 1GHz low-voltage Itanium 2 processor with 1.5MB of L3 cache, and Intel's unexpected 1.4GHz "DP Optimized" Itanium also with 1.5 megs of L3 cache in an Altix 3000 model that...

.NET Cheaper than Java & Linux for Portal Development.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Okay, so Microsoft paid Giga Research some money and Giga came up with some limited findings that say that it could be a lot cheaper to use .NET as a development platform rather than Linux and J2EE. Giga says it talked in depth to a dozen large...

First Novell Linux Beta Due Next Month.(Nterprise Linux Services beta)(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Novell has set mid-October as the date for the open beta of its first, expected, company-saving Linux product, Nterprise Linux Services 1.0, its suite of networking services like file, print, messaging, management and directory. Pricing and the...

Sun, Linux & Infiniband.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Sun and its Infiniband partner TopSpin Communications were at Oracle World this week showing off Infiniband-based Oracle 10g database clustering solution running Red Hat Linux on Sun's low-end Sparc- based Sun Fire V65x and V60x servers, Sun's...

Platform Computing Pushes Grids.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Platform Computing intends to provide industry-specific grid solutions to the financial services, government and the electronic business and meanwhile has set up global grid acceleration centers for the three sectors, one in New York for Wall...

Opera Aims To Run Microsoft Out of Set-Tops.
September 15, 2003... Microsoft doesn't exactly have a lock on the set-top market, but Opera, which is new to the market, wants to run it out of the business altogether. It figures that with Microsoft on board, a set- top box costs over 300 bucks. Linux with the...

UXComm Gets its First Institutional Funding.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... A two-year-old Oregon start-up by the name of UXComm, which has got some embeddable Java-based software to manage storage, networks and blades, has picked up $6 million in first-round venture financing from OVP Venture Partners and Foundation...

SCO CEO Posts Open Letter to the Open Source Community; Slams the 'Fundamental Structural Flaws of Linux Development'.
September 15, 2003... The most controversial issue in the information technology industry today is the ongoing battle over software copyrights and intellectual property. This battle is being fought largely between vendors who create and sell proprietary software,...

Linux More Vulnerable To Attack than Windows: mi2g.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... According to mi2g, a UK security shop that has tracked and substantiated such things since 1995, Linux is the most attacked operating system. In August, it says, 67% of all successful overt digital attacks were made on Linux, with Windows at...

Ah, Another Future-Proof Panacea.(Radixs' MXI operating system)(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... The papers say that a Singapore outfit founded by two twentysomethings that used to be called Intramedia and now goes by the name of Radixs thinks it's got a client/server operating system dubbed MXI that will run Windows, Linux, Java and Palm...

Blade Pioneer Figures To Find Exit Strategy in Storage.(RLX Technologies)
September 15, 2003... RLX Technologies, the first of the blade houses - storm-tossed but a survivor and certain it will eventually be a great monolith although it had only sold 3,700 blades last time it counted - has gotten another $10 million in backing. It is, it...

Oracle Grid Lock.(10g Database, the 10g Application Server and the 10g Enterprise Manager)(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Oracle is being mysterious about the price and availability of the next-generation 10g database that it unveiled this week. The stuff of course is still in beta and isn't supposed to ship into production environments until late this year. ...

AMD May Have Solved Its SOI Problems with Hammer.(with 2GHz Opteron chips)(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... AMD has added two more hybrid 2GHz Opteron chips to its lists in a move that suggests it may have resolved most of its SOI issues with the Hammer architecture, according chip guru Nathan Brookwood. The mid-range 246 Opteron that AMD brought out...

Dell: A Standard Unto Itself.
September 15, 2003... IBM and Intel may be under the impression that they've been spinning out a blades standard, but Michael Dell - and remember Dell has been kinda diffident on the subject of blades - suggested the other day at OracleWorld that Dell - in the name...

IBM Tarts Up BladeCenter.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... IBM has gussied up its BladeCenter with enhancements that could turn into performance and functionality increases of as much as 33%, it said. First, it's gone to the latest Intel Xeons, 3.06GHz ones. Second, it's integrated a Nortel...

Bull Legacy OS Rides IA-64.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Bull has started selling the NovaScale 9000 Series, a new generation of GCOS 8 enterprise servers based on Itanium 2 chips and Bull's Flexible Architecture for Multiple Environments (FAME). Bull says apps that run on it proprietary GCOS 8 OS...

Oracle Headed for Proxy Fight.(in PeopleSoft takeover)(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Larry Ellison said he expects the Justice Department to approve his pursuit of PeopleSoft in October or November while, the Financial Times claims that IBM told the DOJ that an Oracle-PeopleSoft tie-up would significantly limit competition....

Bill Joy To Leave Sun.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Sun co-founder and chief scientist Bill Joy, who developed many a Unix technology like the BSD Unix redesign and the seminal Network File System (NFS), contributed to Sun's defining Sparc chip and has recently been behind the poorly adopted...

Bomb Scare Empties OracleWorld.(Brief Article)
September 15, 2003... Seems there was a bomb scare - complete with police dogs and helicopters hovering overhead - that cleared out the Moscone Center in San Francisco Wednesday during OracleWorld. Nothing came of it otherwise it would have been on television.

SCO Seeks To Derail Red Hat Suit against It.
September 22, 2003... Controversy? What Controversy? The SCO Group has asked the District Court in Delaware, where Red Hat is suing SCO, to throw Red Hat's suit out on its ear as groundless. Red Hat CEO Matthew Szulek called the SCO move a "delaying...

Red Hat Scores First Operating Profit.(fiscal 2nd qtr ended Aug 31, 2003)
September 22, 2003... Red Hat came in with its first operating profit in its fiscal second quarter ended August 31, a period that's historically soft. Not that it came to much: $240,000 as against a loss of $1.1 million in Q1 and a loss of $4.7 million in Q2 last...

Sun Stages Software Pricing Revolution.
September 22, 2003... Sun has been talking about Project Mad Hatter, now officially restyled the Java Desktop System, since last September and here we are a year later and Sun has yet to actually deliver the code - as simple as it might be considering it's made out...

Carly Chases the Elusive Growth Muse with $750m Check.('Smart Office' initiative)
September 22, 2003... First came the Adaptive Enterprise program for large enterprises in May. A big consumer push involving 150 new products followed in August. On Thursday, a stagnant Hewlett-Packard launched a $750 million initiative to pursue the estimated 80...

HP Executive Ranks Thin.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... Howard Elias, the one-time Compaq guy who was running HP's $4 billion storage unit until, oh, four months ago when the company decided it should look a bit more like IBM and unite storage and all its servers together under one roof and one...

Intel Gives People a Peek into its Bag of Tricks.(Vanderpool)
September 22, 2003... Vanderpool used to be a town in Texas. Now it's a kinda shadowy mainframe-style Intel virtualization technology that partitions the chip so two independent operating systems can run on a single PC. There's no software emulation involved, Intel...

Opteron's Ambitions Swell.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... At the Embedded Systems Conference in Boston this week, AMD said it's going to push its hybrid 64-bit Opteron chip into blade servers, storage devices and high-performance clusters where power consumption and heat affects operating costs in the...

Intel Offers Pre-Packaged Blades.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... The Intel-IBM blade collaboration has reportedly produced the new Intel Enterprise Blade Server, a 28-processor Xeon-based widget that Intel wheeled out at IDF this week. A thing that was code named Hampton. It includes the chassis,...

Veritas in Provisioning Deal with Intel.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... Veritas scored an important win in Intel's decision to license its OpForce provisioning software. Intel plans to offer OpForce as an option with its new blade servers as well as Itanium-based server building blocks. The provisioning...

There's Life in the Old Girl Yet.(Brief Article)(Industry Overview)
September 22, 2003... IDC says that according to its numbers spending on servers - well, x86 servers at any rate - is on the "upswing" in the US and so it's going to project that servers recover to the tune of $18.2 billion in the states this year, working out to 3%...

Sun Standardizes on SleepyCat.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... SleepyCat Software, purveyors of the embedded Berkeley DB, has cut a worldwide deal with Sun for Sun to use the database in all current and future products including Project Orion, now renamed the Java Enterprise System, and Project Mad Hatter,...

Sun Shores Up its Low End Sun is practicing how to spell the word c-o-m-m-o-d-i-t-y as.
September 22, 2003... evidenced by the new shock-and-awe price tags it's hung on its software. Of course, Sun is a hardware company and only makes relatively insignificant revenues off its software so one might think that it holds fewer ambitions for the tactic...

OSDL Hires Giga Analyst.(Open Source Development Labs )(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), anxious to become the center of gravity for Linux, continues to collect brand names like Linus Torvalds who started working for the outfit in June. This time through, the consortium has lured Stacey...

Lindows Out To Drain One of Microsoft's Beer Kegs.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... Seeking to suck up whatever Microsoft resources it can, Lindows.com is going to try to insure that the software goliath pays out all of the $1.1 billion that it's agreed to pay to settle those California class actions claiming Microsoft...

A CEO's Reaction to Sun's New Pricing.(Brief Article)(Column)
September 22, 2003... On the face of it, Sun's pricing seems dangerous - for $100 per employee per year, we get the entire server product on all the machines we want. For another $50 per employee per year (the cheaper option for us, counting heads rather than...

No Bills in the Mail Yet.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... The SCO Group has yet to move on its threat to send big Linux users a bill for using its Unix IP. According to its spokesman Blake Stowell, the company has been "satisfied enough with the amount of activity around the license, answering...

Sun Lays Off 3%.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... Well, f*%#ed company was right. A month ago it predicted more Sun layoffs (CSN No 512). Sun this week said it was dumping 3% of its crew, eliminating about 1,080 jobs. Sun's sales have been falling now for, oh, the last nine quarters.

Them Too, Huh.(security flaw in the Linux DB2 7.0)(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... IBM says there's a security flaw in the Linux version 7 of DB2 that hackers could use to seize root privileges and get at what's inside the database. The Boston security firm Core Security Technologies discovered it. Blue has put a patch,...

Merrill Flip-Flops.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... In the wake of HP's poor third-quarter showing, Merrill Lynch's high-tech guru Steve Milunovich flip-flopped again on the wisdom of the HP-Compaq merger and has been saying that HP may eventually have to spin off its printer unit or separate...

Imelda Marcos Had That Many Shoes.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... According to IDC, 3,250 Itanium systems found homes in Q2 and HP shipped 3,178 of them. Illuminata ran the numbers and realized that that means only 72 were moved by other companies. By comparison 5,140 Opteron systems moved in Q2.

StarOffice on Steroids.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... From what we read in the papers Sun has in mind to field an enterprise version of StarOffice next year, a package with better management, links to e-mail and digital rights management.

Carly Quits Cisco Board.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... HP CEO Carly Fiorina isn't going to stand for re-election to Cisco's board next month. At first we thought it was because she had her hands full at home, but it appears the pair are going to broaden their relationship in a way that would put...

On to HyperTransport 1.1.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... From what we hear, the next HyperTransport rev will use packet-based data traffic. The new DirectPacket spec defines HyperTransport 1.1, which supports native packet handling, P2P communications topology, a more robust retry protocol in support...

SuperMicro Builds Itanium 1U.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... SuperMicro Inc, a motherboard maker and third-tier server supplier, figures it's got the world's first Itanium 2 1U. It uses the company's own Itanium-optimized board and chassis and Intel's E8870 chipset. The SuperMicro board uses a 128-bit...

Akibia Debuts Linux Services.(Brief Article)
September 22, 2003... Westborough, Massachusetts-based Akibia Infrastructure Management Services has added a bunch of Linux offerings to its portfolio of multi-vendor Unix and Windows services. They include a Linux systems administration course geared toward helping...