http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/ Latest articles from Maureen O'Gara Copyright 2008 WIRELESS DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL Fri, 16 May 2008 03:41:00 GMT WIRELESS DEVELOPER'S JOURNAL 10 http://backend.userland.com/rss http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/568520.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/568520.htm Thu, 15 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT Corporate raider Carl Icahn started his proxy fight for control of Yahoo this morning, beginning with the classic Icahn opening, the letter of reproach to the Yahoo board telling them they have acted 'irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders and Microsoft.' http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/566429.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/566429.htm Thu, 15 May 2008 15:45:00 GMT AMD has kissed Mario Rivas good-bye and turned processor development over to Randy Allan, the head of its star-crossed server and workstation business, reporting to president and COO Dirk Meyer. Allan is now the new head of AMD's Computing Solutions Group, responsible for the bulk of the company's revenues. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/566387.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/566387.htm Thu, 15 May 2008 15:30:00 GMT HP CEO Mark Hurd has finally done something that Wall Street doesn't like - he's buying EDS, the IT infrastructure outsourcing outfit founded in 1962 by one-time presidential hopeful and outsourcing pioneer Ross Perot, for around $13.9 billion cash - a venture that some people think is poor use of money better spent elsewhere. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/567325.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/567325.htm Thu, 15 May 2008 14:45:00 GMT Verizon Wireless is snubbing Google's Linux-based Android initiative to go with the LiMo Foundation's mobile Linux spec for its next wave of mobile phones expected next year. Along with Verizon, Mozilla signed up - giving the consortium its first major open source ISV - and a key one for conveying applications. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/567764.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/567764.htm Thu, 15 May 2008 14:45:00 GMT Both Reuters and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that Carl Icahn - the greatest stockholder activist of our generation - is going to pull the pin to try to force Yahoo into negotiating a deal with Microsoft. It's unclear whether Yahoo's two biggest shareholders Capital Research & Management and Legg Maison Capital Management will support Icahn. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/540623.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/540623.htm Wed, 14 May 2008 04:30:00 GMT 3Leaf Systems, the four-year-old start-up that has raised $32.5 million in funding - some of it from Intel - is promising - once it gets all its ducks in a row - to virtualize the whole x86 data center infrastructure - memory, CPU and I/O. Such a feat, it says, has never been done before and is 'truly disruptive.' It's supposed to wring mainframe-class availability, scalability and resiliency from commodity servers, saving the world from wasting something like $140 billion on unused server resources, a factor of currently normal over-provisioning. (You know how those x86 rascals only run at 10%-15% utilization.) http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/540676.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/540676.htm Wed, 14 May 2008 04:15:00 GMT VirtualLogix, the real-time virtualization outfit that some might better remember as Jaluna and that used to belong to Sun, has come out with VLX Developer 2.0 with enhanced support for performance-critical Intel systems, a first for Intel systems and a boot up for Intel's so-called MIDs initiative. It claims to be the only game in town. Developer 2.0 complements VLX for Network Infrastructure 3.0, also out now, by letting architects quickly create and deploy high-performance virtual platforms. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563105.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563105.htm Wed, 14 May 2008 01:45:00 GMT At Java One this week Sun has been selling its year-old-but-still-upcoming - and definitely late-to-the-party - Adobe AIR- and Microsoft Silverlight-competitive JavaFX Rich Client environment as a potential revenue-generator capable of putting ads on mobile applications and JavaFX Script, its newfangled high-performance GUI declarative scripting language, as the way to build consumer next-generation RIAs for desktops, mobiles, TV and other consumer devices. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563147.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563147.htm Tue, 13 May 2008 16:00:00 GMT Altor Networks, a 14-month-old start-up backed by $6 million in funding from Accel Partners and Foundation Capital, says the kind of security used on physical machines flat-out doesn't work in the virtual world and that you've got to think of virtualized machines as a network unto itself. Altor's thinking that way and claims to be able to make a virtual environment more secure than a physical one by putting the security at the network level, specifically on the virtual (software) switch. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563145.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563145.htm Tue, 13 May 2008 09:45:00 GMT Citrix says that Dell has started pre-installing XenServer on PowerEdge servers at the factory for worldwide distribution. It said XenServer Dell products are the only virtualization solutions to integrate Dell's OpenManage agent technology, which is supposed to make customer feel comfortable. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563025.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563025.htm Tue, 13 May 2008 09:15:00 GMT AMD has rethought its roadmap and, given its limited resources and near-death experience with Barcelona, it's scrubbing Montreal, the eight-core chip that was supposed to follow Shanghai, the chip after Barcelona, and substituting a six-core part code named Istanbul to be followed by a 12-core part called Magny-Cours. Speculation has also been rife this week that AMD would finally tease out its so-called asset-lite manufacturing plans, some kind of cost-saving outsourcing scheme, at its shareholders meeting Thursday, chatter that has flamed into speculation that it will break in two - a manufacturing business and a chip design and development operation. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/564566.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/564566.htm Tue, 13 May 2008 08:45:00 GMT Hewlett-Packard is supposed to be this close to buying Electronic Data Systems for somewhere in the heady neighborhood of $12 billion-$13 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal, a pretty premium over its $9.5 billion market cap Friday. The paper thinks there could be an announcement on Tuesday. Buying the consultant is meant to help HP compete on the services side against rival IBM. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563152.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563152.htm Tue, 13 May 2008 08:30:00 GMT Google has taken its Postini investment and turned out Google Web Security for the Enterprise, which is supposed to protect against spyware, viruses and zero-hour threats in real-time whether the user is on the corporate network or working remotely like at a hotel or in an airport. If it detects malware it's supposed to neutralize it before it can reach the company network. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563106.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563106.htm Tue, 13 May 2008 08:15:00 GMT The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit en banc heard oral arguments Thursday in the Bilski case, which, if their honors get to feeling radical and rule broadly, could outlaw not only business methods patents in the United States but - by extension - void all existing software patents and patent applications. It could take the court maybe nine months and into a new administration to decide. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563179.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563179.htm Tue, 13 May 2008 08:00:00 GMT For a 22% interest, Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House Networks are putting $3.2 billion into a new company that Craig McCaw's Clearwire and Sprint Nextel, two of the walking wounded, are forming that combines their WiMax wireless broadband businesses. Trilogy Equity Partners is investing directly. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/561924.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/561924.htm Tue, 13 May 2008 06:45:00 GMT It's only taken Borland two years but it's finally dumped its CodeGear tools division, responsible for Borland's hereditary JBuilder, Delphi and C++ Builder lines as well as its new web ventures into PHP and Ruby, said to be used by 7.5 million developers. Embarcadero Technologies is buying it for about $23 million and the transaction's supposed to close in 30-60 days. Thomas Cressey Bravo the private equity house that bought Embarcadero and took it private last year, is fronting the money. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563067.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563067.htm Tue, 13 May 2008 06:30:00 GMT Contrary to what you may have read elsewhere, AMD has not added anything new to its antitrust charges against Intel - just some color - mostly black redactions - even after riffling through the 145 million pages of discovery that Intel turned over to it. According to AMD, 'Intel has made sure that the written record tells little of the story.' The case has now reached the deposition stage and what's new this week is the revelation that AMD wants the right to take 48 times more depositions than the federal standard allows. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563148.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563148.htm Tue, 13 May 2008 06:30:00 GMT HP is racing to the rescue of those threatening to drown in their own data, but that Web 2.0 lot had better be able to hold on until the fourth quarter when HP can deliver what it calls 'Extreme' storage, the NAS-style ExDS9100. It's a 10U BladeSystem that can hold 820TB of SATA-based data and through the wonders of HP's PolyServe clustering can be strung together into a multi-petabyte system - along the lines of what EMC is promising to do with Hulk and Maui widgetry - that can be managed by a single administrator. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563069.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563069.htm Tue, 13 May 2008 06:15:00 GMT Sun's mule train has finally pulled into Indiana after three years on the road. Indiana is the Linux-friendly Fedora-like OpenSolaris project meant to move the Solaris-shy Linux community off Linux and on to Solaris tempted by Solaris widgetry like the highly scalable, rollback-easy, 128-bit ZFS default filesystem, Linux-like network-based Image Packaging System (IPS) application install accelerator, DTrace predictive self-healing and scalable Containers virtualization, not to mention its Gnome 2.22 front-end and built-in Firefox browser. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563103.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563103.htm Mon, 12 May 2008 14:30:00 GMT MySQL has backed off a plan to charge for some encryption and compression backup widgetry in the next version of the database - and, heavens, NOT OPEN SOURCE THE STUFF, an idea it trotted a few weeks ago and predictably caught hell for. Sun, which bought MySQL for a billion dollars, a good reason to try to make some of the money back, took the rap. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563149.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563149.htm Sun, 11 May 2008 09:00:00 GMT Intel wants to transition from 300mm to 450mm wafers in 2012 and has gotten Samsung and TSMC to agree to an 'industry-wide collaboration' to ensure that everything's in place and there are pilot lines being tested by then. It should mean lower-cost MPUs, diminish overall use of resources per chip and cut air pollution, global warming gases and water use. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563180.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563180.htm Sun, 11 May 2008 09:00:00 GMT Microsoft, which spent $6 billion on aQuantive and was chasing Yahoo for its ads before it came to a dead stop, has been supporting - as in helping write - legislation in New York and Connecticut that would regulate the data that companies like Yahoo and Google collect for targeted advertising. The New York bill, which Google, Yahoo, AOL and Facebook oppose, would let consumers opt-out of tracking. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563068.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563068.htm Sun, 11 May 2008 08:45:00 GMT So how does it feel to have witnessed one of technology's little miracles this week? I mean Yahoo's stock price successfully defying gravity. It's as close as any of us will ever get to an apparition of the Virgin Mary floating on a cloud without any visible means of support. Apparently Wall Street isn't convinced that Microsoft has indeed pushed on despite leaks that it has reached out instead to Facebook, another company with an inflated view of itself. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563150.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/563150.htm Fri, 09 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT As oil headed in the direction of $200 a barrel this week, VMware claimed that its virtualization widgetry has saved users 39 billion kWh since 1998, more power than it takes to heal and cool Denmark a year. It calculates the savings at $4.4 billion. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/525932.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/525932.htm Fri, 09 May 2008 13:45:00 GMT Dell will take a big giant step out ahead of HP and IBM in the virtualization sweepstakes when it announces that it is OEMing PAN, Egenera's data center virtualization and management software. Egenera, which has been doing virtualization way longer than most people, claims PAN is the epitome of what IDC calls 'Virtualization 2.0,' the next step beyond simple VMware-style single server virtualization replete with scalability, faster provisioning, high availability, disaster recovery and resource balancing. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558074.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558074.htm Fri, 09 May 2008 13:45:00 GMT Microsoft is making System Center, its central management scheme, natively manage Linux, Unix and VMware virtual servers. The widgetry has always been a Windows-only affair, but now there are betas available showing off Microsoft's cross-platform prowess, important to Microsoft's place in the data center. Microsoft has released a public beta of so-called Cross-Platform Extensions to its System Center Operations Manager 2007, which for the first time can manage HP-UX, Red Hat, Solaris and SUSE out-of-the-box. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558148.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558148.htm Fri, 09 May 2008 13:45:00 GMT Dell builds appliances that it sells to OEMs like Google's search box. Its latest effort is the OEM CR100 server, a simple, stripped-down, entry-level platform, built with PowerEdge R200 technology. The short-depth 1U is good for a two-year lifecycle. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/540636.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/540636.htm Fri, 09 May 2008 12:15:00 GMT Dell is talking with Tecom Investments, an investment arm of the Dubai government, about a joint venture that could raise Dell's sales profile in the Middle East. Michael Dell mentioned it at a press conference in Dubai but offered no details and early reports suggested Dubai was going to make a direct investment in Dell a la AMD, which may be what happens. Both Dow Jones and Bloomberg quote Michael Dell as saying he'd welcome an investment from the oil-rich emirate. Local papers quote Telcom CEO Abdulatif Almulla as saying, 'We are considering some strategic initiatives.' http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558114.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558114.htm Thu, 08 May 2008 13:15:00 GMT MokaFive, another me-too desktop virtualization company, this one started in 2005 by three Stanford PhDs and their professor, Moka chief scientist Monica Lam, is in the process of pushing out its widgetry, which works on Windows, Mac and Linux. It started going commercial a few weeks ago with a preview paid for by angel money supplied by Sun founder Vinod Khosla and Sun's old strategy chief Bill Raduchel. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/559383.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/559383.htm Thu, 08 May 2008 13:15:00 GMT Yahoo's stock dropped roughly 19%-20% this morning at the open, shaving $8.7 billion off its value, its first installment on the price of its independence from Microsoft. Yahoo, whose position improved a couple of percentage points in the first half-hour of trading, is being held up by investor confidence that Microsoft will be back after the stock sinks, a widely held view, or alternatively that Yahoo will align with Google. At around 10 o'clock it was around $23.70. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/555100.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/555100.htm Thu, 08 May 2008 10:30:00 GMT The Virtual-D Platform enables service providers to offer hosted, subscription-based virtual desktops. A solution that integrates all desktop virtualization layers through a single, automated self-service platform, it helps enterprises realize the full benefits of centralized virtual desktops without having to build and deploy the infrastructure internally. It reduces desktop TCO, transforming computing costs from fixed CAPEX to variable OPEX. And because the Virtual-D Platform is designed along two tiers (enterprise and service provider), it lets enterprises maintain ownership and control over their Windows OS images, applications and all relating licensing while outsourcing just the physical data center infrastructure powering their virtual desktops. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/535349.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/535349.htm Thu, 08 May 2008 10:15:00 GMT Dell was supposed to cut 10% of its workforce, about 8,800 jobs. That was last year's plan. Now it's saying it will go deeper in an effort to save $3 billion a year by 2011. Michael Dell made the announcement Thursday at the company's first meeting with financial analysts in three years because of the trouble it got into with the SEC. 'To be very clear,' he said, 'we are not satisfied with the current state of affairs and are on a mission to fix it. There are no fixed costs at Dell. Everything is being looked at.' http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/540702.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/540702.htm Thu, 08 May 2008 10:15:00 GMT Rumor has it that Salesforce.com, that CRM paean to cloud computing, is going to start selling Gmail and Google Docs integrated into its system. The pair cut a deal nine months ago for Saleforce to include Adwords in its applications. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558115.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558115.htm Tue, 06 May 2008 16:30:00 GMT AMD, which hasn't penetrated the commercial space, is gonna try to pick up some share with a Business Class line of energy-efficient commercial desktops and notebooks targeted at SMBs, government and education. The desktops are based on seven AMD 'image stable' new triple-core and quad-core Phenom and dual-core Athlon chips good for the next two years; the laptops will use the company's upcoming Puma platform, due in the second half. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558116.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558116.htm Tue, 06 May 2008 15:15:00 GMT Apple picked up PA Semi, the low-power PowerPC start-up, last week to do who knows what with, and Sun picked up the assets of Montalvo Systems, the laconic, heading-for-the-crapper start-up that was supposed to be doing an Intel-competitive low-power/mobile four-core x86 chip for reasons it hasn't shared yet. It apparently plans to integrate the Montalvo technology into its own processors to what effect remains to be seen. Popular wisdom thinks Sun's interest has nothing to do with x86 compatibility. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558073.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558073.htm Tue, 06 May 2008 15:00:00 GMT Intel and Cray, which when last seen was exclusively an AMD house and a feather in AMD's cap, are now going to work together on HPC and Cray's going to use the multi-core Xeon and fancy interconnect developments in future Cray servers, apparently starting in the so-called Cascade timeframe, say, 2010-2012. They're talking about tackling 'fundamental and historical problems of science and industry' and they plan to develop a range of HPC systems and technologies over the next few years. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558004.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558004.htm Tue, 06 May 2008 13:15:00 GMT A Philippines-based Web 2.0 start-up called Morph Labs thinks its cloud can rain on Google's newfangled App Engine. Morph Labs was founded by Winston Damarillo, the guy who did Gluecode, the only open source company IBM ever bought, a move made to protect its precious WebSphere franchise. The start-up claims to have done all the back-end cutwork to make it easy for developers to get their software up and running as a service on Amazon?s Web Services (AWS), freeing them from Google's Microsoft-like vendor lock-in. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558039.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558039.htm Mon, 05 May 2008 18:15:00 GMT Sun's back in the red again after five profitable quarters and five years in the red following the dot.com bust. The March quarter turned sour on it, starting, it said, with the first week in March when the channel stared reporting a drop in sales, a miasma that spread to its end-user business as the month progressed. It blamed the US economy, where business was down 10%, some of it traceable to smaller businesses and the government, it said. (Former Sun CEO Scott McNealy runs Sun Federal.) http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558006.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558006.htm Mon, 05 May 2008 16:15:00 GMT At press time the Wall Street Journal was reporting that Yahoo! and Google think they've come up with a way around the Justice Department's anticipated objections to them climbing into bed together - one of Yahoo!'s alternatives to being acquired by Microsoft - and that a deal could be announced next week. http://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558037.htmhttp://www.wbt.sys-con.com/read/558037.htm Sun, 04 May 2008 20:45:00 GMT A bunch of the boys have joined Adobe in forming the Open Screen Project to drive a consistent rich Internet experience across TVs, PCs, mobile devices and consumer electronics regardless of operating system. They've been persuaded that the way to squeeze the World Wide Web into those little bitty phones and newfangled MID things - and make it look like a PC - is to enable, maintain and optimize a consistent runtime environment using Adobe's Flash Player and later on Adobe AIR.