Linux Gram articles from September 2008

Linux Gram archives from September 2008

Browser War III Starts; Battle Heads to the Cloud.
September 8, 2008... Google has come out from behind the Firefox browser that it's been pumping money into - and profiting royally from - to take direct aim at Microsoft with a browser of its very own. The widgetry is called Google Chrome and Google Chrome,...

Red Hat Buys Qumranet.
September 8, 2008... Red Hat never did like Xen. It liked it even less after Citrix bought XenSource a year ago and Microsoft cuddled up with Citrix, Virtual Iron and Novell, Xen's first Linux promoter. Among other things, it didn't have control of the...

OOXML Standardization Naysayers Apparently Throw in the Towel.
September 8, 2008... Representatives of the state IT organizations of Brazil, South Africa and Venezuela, three of the four countries that protested ISO's standardization of Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) file format, have apparently throw in the towel on...

Adobe Picks Alfresco for its Cloud Infrastructure.
September 8, 2008... Adobe is using Alfresco's open source ECM software as the file repository in Acrobat.com, a set of free online services - file sharing and storage, PDF conversion, online word processing and web conferencing - that can be used to create and...

Dell Unveils its Nettop.
September 8, 2008... Dell Thursday finally trotted out its widely anticipated nettop, giving it what HP and Asustek already have. Dell calls its 1.6GHz Atom-based widget the Inspiron Mini 9 and is selling the thing at www.dell.com in the US, Canada, Japan and...

Microsoft Claims a Million Workspace Registrations.
September 8, 2008... Microsoft claims that a million people have signed up for the beta of the Office Live Workspace in the six months it's been available. Since Microsoft's branding is so utterly God awful, we'll remind you that that's the free, web-based,...

Judge Finds Ellison Destroyed Evidence.(Susan Illston and Larry Ellison )(Brief article)
September 8, 2008... Federal Judge Susan Illston has found that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison either destroyed or deep-sixed e-mail evidence that should have been turned over for discovery in a 2001 insider-trading class-action suit. The suit, which Oracle wants...

HP Designs Blade To Host Virtual Machines.
September 8, 2008... HP has built what it calls the first server blade designed specifically to host virtual machines out of quad-core Opteron 2300 chips. Its name is the ProLiant BL495c. According to Jim Ganthier, director of marketing and solutions for HP's...

Zoho Claims Chrome Rusts Out Flash & Silverlight.
September 8, 2008... Sridhar Vembu, the CEO of Zoho, the online Office wannabe, sent a note around in the wake of Google's Chrome announcement, claiming its impact "goes beyond the browser" and that the "biggest losers" are the "competing rich client engines like...

VMware Up One, Down One.
September 8, 2008... VMware said Tuesday that Richard Sarwal, executive VP of R&D, only with the company since December - and hired by the company's ousted CEO Diane Greene - quit to go back to Oracle. It's unclear whether he was pushed but VMware's new CEO...

IBM Claims New Blade Server Cuts Security Threats.
September 8, 2008... IBM claims its new intelligent blade server will reduce security threats - such as Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and viruses - while helping server providers manage network traffic better. It says consumers are using advanced...

Intel Buys London Firm for Atom.
September 8, 2008... Intel has acquired Opened Hand, a Gnome-leaning London-based operation that specializes in mobile Linux development and services. The company is supposed to play in the Moblin community that's working on a Linux stack for Intel's chi-chi...

Microsoft Cuts Patent Cross-License with Nikon.
September 8, 2008... Microsoft has cut another one of those patent cross-licensing deals, this one with Nikon reportedly covering digital cameras and other unidentified consumer products. Microsoft will get an undisclosed amount of money. It is unclear whether it...

Novell Results Mixed.
September 8, 2008... Novell lost $15.1 million, or four cents a share, in its fiscal third quarter - up from $3.7 million, or a penny, last year - on revenues up 3.5% to $245.2 million, better than the $241.4 million generally expected. Its operating margin was...

Xen 3.3 Hypervisor Out.
September 8, 2008... Xen.org has released a Xen 3.3 engine, the latest version of the open source hypervisor, enhanced to improve overall performance and optimized for Intel's next generation Nehalem microarchitecture. It also of course supports other x86, IA64 and...

Reiser Sentenced.
September 8, 2008... Two years ago this past Labor Day weekend Linux programmer Hans Reiser murdered his estranged wife. Last Friday he was sentenced to 15 years to life as part of a deal that reduced his first-degree murder conviction and its mandatory 25...

VMware's Hypervisor Gets Microsoft Stamp.
September 8, 2008... VMware's ESX hypervisor has become the first third-party hypervisor accredited under Microsoft's months-old Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP). The validation applies to VMware ESX 3.5 update 2 (ESX 3.5u2) and means VMware...

Citrix Ups Tags.
September 8, 2008... Citrix has quietly increased prices on its virtualization gear by 10% everywhere in the world but the US where the market is fragile.

Yahoo's Lifeblood Flowing Away.
September 8, 2008... The beginning of the week Yahoo was trading around $18.75, below the $19.18 it was at on January 31 right before Microsoft entered the scene with its $31-a-share bid. The pundits said that was a five-year low. On Thursday, a really lousy day...

Sony Recalls Laptops.
September 8, 2008... Sony is recalling 438,000 Vaio laptops for fear some errant wires will cause a short and set the things on fire. The problem affects the VGN-TZ100, 200, 300 and 2000, some 72,800 of which are in the US. It's unclear what the promised repairs...

Egenera To 'PAN' VMware.
September 8, 2008... Egenera is about to preview a new joint capacity-on-demand solution that's supposed to provide VMware VirtualCenter users with direct access to Egenera's PAN Manager processing widgetry. With capacity-on-demand, users can automatically...

Do Regulators Matter in the Google-Yahoo Deal?
September 8, 2008... While at the Democratic National Convention last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt, a Barack Obama technology advisor, told Bloomberg Television that Google's deal with Yahoo will start in October, suggesting it didn't much matter what regulators...

Oracle Finally Names a CFO.
September 8, 2008... Oracle has named Jeff Epstein CFO, replacing Safra Catz who remains co-president. Epstein has been CFO of Oberon Media, a games house, since March of last year and used to work at DoubleClick. Catz had to take over the CFO job at Oracle in...

Observation Towers Are Trained on Apple.
September 8, 2008... According to a "Let's Rock" invitation Apple e-mailed to the press, a pre-holiday product announcement of some kind or another is set for Tuesday, September 9. Best guess is it's iPod-related and not a new Mac laptop, but you never know. iPod...

VMware Pays Off Greene.(Diane Greene )(Brief article)
September 8, 2008... VMware is paying ex-CEO Diane Greene to go away. There was no provision in her contract for a mid-year bonus or a pro rata payout, but the company is going to write her a check for $400,000 anyway to settle all claims. That's on top of her...

VIA Wins Chinese Nettop Account.(Brief article)
September 8, 2008... VIA has gotten a nettop design-win from Beijing-based PC OEM Tsinghua TongFang for its 1.6GHz C7-M processor and VX700 chipset. The 10.2-inch S1 imini MiniNote Series includes a business card manager, portable hard drive with battery pack, and...

Salesforce Taps HP Refugee To Run Asia-Pac.
September 8, 2008... Salesforce.com has named Steve McWhirter, an HP Software VP, president of its Asia-Pacific region, replacing Stephen Russell who's had the job for almost three years. McWhirter has 15 years experience in the region. He's also done stints with...

Cloud Watch.
September 8, 2008... Microsoft is building its fourth big data center in Iowa. It's got one in the state of Washington, another in Texas and a third in Chicago.

Lenovo To Pre-Load Mozy.
September 8, 2008... Lenovo is going to pre-load a free trial of EMC's Mozy remote online data backup widgetry on some of its laptops. It is Mozy's first such deal with a PC maker. Eee creator Asustek told the Wall Street Journal it's going to offer 20GB of free...

PayPal President Named to Zuora Board.
September 8, 2008... PayPal president Scott Thompson has joined the board of Zuora, the SaaS subscription billing start-up.

AMD To Sell its TV Unit.
September 8, 2008... Financially strapped AMD, struggling to break even, is going to sell its digital TV unit to Broadcom for $192.8 million. The deal should close by the end of the year.

NComputing & its Disruptive $70 PC.
September 15, 2008... IDC doesn't recognize the company that claims to be the leading thin client house on the planet as a through and through thin client company. Seems two-thirds of it doesn't fit IDC's standard definition of what a thin client should be. ...

Sun Adds to the Free Hypervisor Heap.
September 15, 2008... With a ranking Microsoft ideologue dancing attendance, Sun Wednesday trotted out and open sourced xVM Server, its promised Xen-based bare-metal hypervisor, and xVM Ops Center 2.0, its management update. It will sell support, including...

MySQL Creator Reportedly Quits.(Monty Widenius)(Brief article)
September 15, 2008... The blogs have been saying that after less than seven months under Sun MySQL author and CTO Monty Widenius has had enough and is quitting. The news has yet to be confirmed though MySQL allows that it may happen. It says, "Should Monty...

Learning to Live with Vista.(Brief article)
September 15, 2008... An HP skunkworks is assembling a homegrown, consumer-friendly version of Linux in case management can be persuaded to put it on the company's mainstream desktops and notebooks, according to BusinessWeek. The CTO of HP's Personal Systems...

Novell To Sup as Guest at the Hyper-V Table.
September 15, 2008... The industry's resident odd couple, Microsoft and Novell, announced a joint virtualization solution for customers running mixed-source environments Thursday, promoting it as "the first complete, fully supported and optimized virtualization...

Microsoft Matches VMware's Zero Price Tag.
September 15, 2008... Matching VMware tit for tat, Microsoft Monday cut the anticipated price of its standalone, OS-detached, hypervisor to zip, zero, nada. When released sometime in the next 30 days, Hyper-V Server 2008 will be free for the download and can be...

Jerry Brown Piles On Yahoogle.
September 15, 2008... California's own Attorney General Jerry Brown has decided that his office ought to investigate the proposed monopoly-enhancing Yahoo-Google revenue-sharing ad deal too. Brown's letting the Justice Department do his legwork and is reviewing...

Google Kinda Sorta Makes Privacy Concessions.
September 15, 2008... Sick of trying to justify its data retention policies to the privacy police, particularly the European privacy police, Google's lawyers said late Monday on the company's official blog that it was cutting the time it holds user-identifiable...

Remaining VMware Co-Founder Bails.(Mendel Rosenblum)
September 15, 2008... In a show of spousal loyalty, VMware co-founder and chief scientist Mendel Rosenblum has followed his wife, ousted VMware CEO Diane Greene, out the door. He will focus on his other job as a Stanford professor. The timing of Rosenblum's...

For Sale: Dell's Factories.
September 15, 2008... Dell is trying to sell its factories - strategic when direct-order desktops were king, now uncompetitive in a laptop world - to contract manufacturers that would then make its PCs, according to the Wall Street Journal. HP has already...

Intel Launches PC SSDs.
September 15, 2008... Intel, which has lost a shirt or two on flash memory in its time, has finally delivered those solid-state drives it promised a while back. OEM products using them should dutifully follow in the next few weeks. The widgets are targeted at...

Corel Cuts Staff.
September 15, 2008... Corel, which recently turned down an offer to sell out to its major investor to pursue a possible sale to an unidentified third party, now says that it's going to cut 8% of its workforce, 90 people. WordPerfect purveyor says the move is...

HP Claims To Break the 24-Hour Battery-Life Barrier.
September 15, 2008... Describing it as the Holy Grail of mobile computing, HP says it has developed an ultra-capacity battery that can run for 24 hours on a single charge and has put it, as an option, in a new XP-only EliteBook 6930p notebook. However, HP warns...

Intel Ships Halogen-Free Xeons.
September 15, 2008... Intel Monday launched its first halogen-free Xeons and said all existing versions of the Xeon 5200 and 5400 series will now be halogen-free too. According to their creator, the four new quad-core chips "reach new heights in performance and...

Cloud Computing Defined.
September 15, 2008... This is an excerpt from Amy Wohl's soon to be published book Succeeding at SaaS: Computing in the Cloud. You will find other comments on cloud computing on her SaaS weblog at http://amys.typepad.com/amy_wohls_opinions_on_saa/ (Copyright Amy...

Apple & Microsoft Face a 'Warrior Rabbit'.
September 15, 2008... Canonical has nicknamed the future Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty Jackalope, a jackalope being an imaginary creature said to be a cross between a jackrabbit and an antelope. Picture a bunny rabbit with antlers like the star of "Boundin." Canonical CEO Mark...

Adobe AIRs Numbers.
September 15, 2008... Adobe says there have been more than 25 million installations of applications deployed on AIR in the six months since its release. It counts AOL, eBay, Nasdaq and the New York Times as users. Atlantic Records and DirecTV are joining the list.

Amazon To Sell One Laptop's XO.(Brief article)
September 15, 2008... One Laptop Per Child is going to resuscitate that Give One Get One scheme it tried last Christmas to boost the number of XO machines that Quanta was making. But this year Amazon is going to be handling sales and distribution to eliminate last...

Berners-Lee Faults IE.
September 15, 2008... W3C director Tim Berners-Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web, doesn't usually go around knocking people's products but he made an exception of Microsoft the other day when he talked to the AP and told the news service that Internet...

Ex-Microsoft Exec Lands Behind Yahoo's Lines.
September 15, 2008... How's this for ironic...Yahoo has hired ex-MSN chief media officer Joanne Bradford, who left Redmond for an ad boutique six months ago, to replace its US ad sales chief David Karnstedt. He's leaving after a year to go to Redpoint Ventures as an...

Linux Foundation Bags Black Duck.
September 15, 2008... Black Duck Software has joined the Linux Foundation. It intends to work on legal programs that support software development that includes Linux and open source, sensible enough given its copyright-sensitive solutions for software development...

Sun Claims Money Deal for MySQL, GlassFish.
September 15, 2008... Sun claims it's struck a "multimillion-dollar" deal on behalf of its MySQL database and GlassFish app server with Belgian ISV Stsud, an ERP provider with e-government clients in the Belgian government. MySQL will replace Oracle.

Apple To Pay for Backdating.
September 15, 2008... Apple and some of its officers and directors - (Apple's insurance companies actually) - are going to pay $14 million plus $8.5 million in attorney fees and $350,000 in court costs to make an assortment of five derivative state and 14 federal...

VMware to Microsoft: Choke on My Dust.
September 22, 2008... Microsoft built virtualization on top of its operating system - which supposedly gives it something of an edge - at least on the cost side. So now VMware, under serious competitive pressure because of its envied market leadership - and needing...

Sun Backs Data Warehouse Start-up.
September 22, 2008... Sun has kicked in on Infobright's $10 million C round, joining existing investors Flybridge Capital Partners and RBC Venture Partners in backing the MySQL-integrated analytic data warehouse start-up. Infobright just went open source and the...

Wyse & Novell Deliver Thin Client OS.
September 22, 2008... Wyse and Novell are delivering the promised Wyse Enhanced SUSE Linux Enterprise, an operating system designed for thin computing. It will be available only on Wyse devices starting with Wyse's X50L mobile thin clients in Q4. The pair...

Android to iPhone, Blackberry & Nokia: Buzz Off.
September 22, 2008... The first Android phone, known as the Dream and built by HTC, is reportedly supposed to hit the crowded mobile market probably in a month after being announced Tuesday, September 23 by T-Mobile USA, the Deutsche Telekom arm. The price will...

Upstart Seeks To Overthrow OpenOffice.
September 22, 2008... Softmaker Software GmbH, a German Office wannabe, has taken out after open source darling OpenOffice, saying it's not good enough to score against Microsoft and proposing its own widgetry as a substitute. The company has just put out a...

Start-up Integrates ECM, BI & Portal.
September 22, 2008... Bluenog - a nog being a peg that holds a structure together - has rolled out ICE 4.0, or Integrated Collaborative Environment, calling it the industry's first pre-integrated suite of enterprise content management, RIA portal development...

Fujitsu Apes HP/EDS.
September 22, 2008... Evidently HP's acquisition of EDS persuaded Fujitsu that there's money to be made in the services sector because it's combining its US product and service businesses under one roof to drive revenue growth and help it compete against IBM and HP....

Confessions of Sergey Brin.(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... Google co-founder Sergey Brin started a personal blog Thursday, beginning with the revelation that he has a genetic predisposition to Parkinson's, the nasty incurable disease that has crippled Michael Fox, the actor. Brin's mother's got it and...

Google CEO Says Yahoo-Google Deal's a Go.
September 22, 2008... In the absence of the regulators investigating the proposed Yahoo-Google deal saying either "aye" or "nay," Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the press Wednesday that Google will start putting search ads on Yahoo's sites on or about October 11, the...

Things are Getting Worse, Dell Says.
September 22, 2008... Adding to the Galveston-like carnage that is Wall Street, Dell Tuesday recalled its warning of only - note only - three weeks ago when it posted its earnings-frayed Q2 results that the lousy American economy was spreading to Western Europe and...

Samsung Makes Hostile Bid for SanDisk.
September 22, 2008... Shades of Oracle and PeopleSoft! Shades of Microsoft and Yahoo!! Samsung has been chasing SanDisk trying to get it to accept an acquisition offer of $26 a share cash, $5.85 billion total, and was frustrated enough with the American flash...

Oracle's Earnings Soar.
September 22, 2008... Oracle drew the short straw and posted its Q1 results Thursday amid the Wall Street wreckage. It immediately described its exposure to banks as "immaterial" and to financial institutions on the ropes as "de minimis" even though it's supposed to...

Intel Releases its Six-Headed Monster Chip.
September 22, 2008... Intel formally announced its six-core 45nm Dunnington chip Monday, officially christening it the Xeon 7400 and claiming it sets a new standard in virtualization performance. AMD doesn't have anything like it. The company said a...

VMware Spawns Banks of Clouds.
September 22, 2008... VMware has whistled up outside support for its newfangled vCloud Initiative, collecting upwards of 100 partners such as BT, Rackspace and Verizon Business, it said, for the push to deliver enterprise-class cloud computing by federating compute...

AppSense Claims To Be VDI's Sine Qua Non.
September 22, 2008... UK-based AppSense Ltd claims to be the only show in town that can automatically personalize standardized virtual desktop environments. It turned up at VMworld this week with AppSense Environment Manager 8.0 in tow. The software, which now...

RightScale Goes Multi-Cloud.(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... RightScale, the Santa Barbara cloud management start-up, has gone multi-cloud. Besides Amazon's EC2, where its users reportedly have hundreds of thousands of instances running, RightScale widgetry now works on GoGrid and UK-based...

Citrix Joins the Cloud Race.
September 22, 2008... Citrix took its virtualization widgetry, repackaged it, and went into the cloud business Monday, announcing a new Citrix Cloud Center (C3) product family targeted at the would-be hosted cloud services that are chasing both consumers and...

And Now the 'Hybrid' Cloud.(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... Two-year-old venture-backed Skytap Inc, a University of Washington cloud infrastructure spin-out, says it's got an API to enable "hybrid" clouds. The widgetry lets users blend Skytap's cloud-based Virtual Lab platform with their existing...

NEC Pioneers the Virtual Desktop.
September 22, 2008... NEC, it appears, has rolled out one of the world's largest implementations of VMware virtual desktops, cutting TCO by an estimated 46% over the next three years. It's got a mere three people supporting the 12,000 thin clients in production so...

IBM Claims VDI Breakthrough.
September 22, 2008... IBM, the company that invented virtualization back in the mainframe's Pleistocene period, claims it's made a breakthrough that will accelerate the spread of the virtual desktop by slashing VDI storage requirements by as much as 80%. The...

Lenovo Breaks into Servers.
September 22, 2008... Amid unsubstantiated rumors that it might buy IBM's x86 server unit - well, see, it's already using IBM-licensed technology - and it did buy IBM's PC operation - Lenovo Tuesday unveiled its first industry standard servers bound for the global...

Perfman Offers Virtualization Lifecycle Management.
September 22, 2008... Perfman, the old-line enterprise systems management company, has arrived at virtualization's door with a new cut of its cross-platform performance and capacity planning software that includes a Virtualization Planning Tool (VPT) and VMware...

OVF 1.0 Standardized.
September 22, 2008... The Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) says the Open Virtualization Format 1.0 (OVF), developed by Dell, HP, VMware, XenSource, Microsoft and IBM for packaging and distribution a virtual appliance, is now officially a standard. It's...

Ingram Micro Feels the Pinch.
September 22, 2008... Ingram Micro, the world's biggest IT distributor, has lowered its third-quarter outlook. It's now expecting to net $30 million-$39 million, 18-23 cents a share on revenues of $8.3 billion-$8.6 billion. "Earlier this month, we disclosed...

Tim Berners-Lee Kicks Off W3 Foundation.(World Wide Web Foundation)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee is starting a World Wide Web Foundation, set to launch early next year, to "advance a web that is open and free" and find a way to introduce that 80% of the world's population still enjoying normal,...

Novell Licenses Xenocode's Application Virtualization Mojo.
September 22, 2008... Novell is licensing Xenocode's application virtualization technology so users of its ZENworks Application Virtualization solution can deploy their applications inside a "virtual container" without any installation or configuration bother. ...

Adobe Earnings Dip.(Adobe Systems Inc.)(Brief article)
September 22, 2008... Adobe's profits were off 6.6% at $191.6 million, or 35 cents a share, in its third quarter ended last month on revenues up 4.2% to $887.3 million. It said Acrobat and LiveCycle scored record revenues. Adobe launches Creative Suite 4 any minute...

SCO Watch.
September 22, 2008... So SCO has gotten an extension from the bankruptcy court in Delaware that gives the company until the end of the year to file a reorganization plan without Novell or IBM hijacking the plan - what is termed exclusivity in bankruptcy circles. ...

Wall Street Meltdown Slops Over into IT's Shoes.
September 22, 2008... Wall Street firms, banks and insurers are the single biggest consumers of IT and the IDC-owned Financial Insights research firm calculates that IT budgets for hardware software and service recoiled almost 6% this week because of the Lehman...

What's In It for Maritz?
September 22, 2008... OK, so what does VMware CEO Paul Maritz, a guy who thanks to Microsoft doesn't have to work and could be in Africa saving animals, have to gain by jumping back in the trenches - this time to take on the company that made him rich? Well,...