http://ajax.sys-con.com/ Latest articles from Maureen O'Gara Copyright 2008 AJAX & RIA JOURNAL Sun, 20 Jul 2008 13:56:00 GMT AJAX & RIA JOURNAL 10 http://backend.userland.com/rss http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614015.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614015.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 20:15:00 GMT The court also said Novell couldn't run interference for Linux and stop SCO from seeking royalty payments for alleged UnixWare and OpenServer infringement by Linux users under its infamous SCOsource licensing program. , it's merely a matter of time before SCO starts seeking those payments. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614540.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614540.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 19:00:00 GMT You have perhaps heard that while we were on vacation Linux file system ace and convicted wife killer Hans Reiser took the cops to where he had buried her body. Two days later when Reiser was supposed to be sentenced to 25 years to life for first decree murder the judge disclosed that Reiser could have pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter in exchange for three years in jail and - given the time served while awaiting trial - could have been out next spring, which would have saved his little boy from testifying. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614532.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614532.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:00:00 GMT VMware is supposed to report its second-quarter results on Tuesday July 22 and people will be tuning in to see how EMC's abrupt ouster of the virtualization leader's CEO and co-founder Diane Greene last week is handled and what is added to the news that VMware isn't going to make its full-year 2008 guidance of 50% growth over 2007. Parent company EMC said last week that VMware would come in 'modestly below' its revenue goals because of a more challenging spending environment but left Q2 guidance of 55% growth in place. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614562.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614562.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT Apple is now the third-largest PC vendor in the US, according to IDC and Gartner's preliminary Q2 data, ousting Acer from the slot. Gartner thinks Mac shipments were up 38% year-over-year in Q2 to give Apple 8.5% of the sputtering US market, up from 6.4% this time last year. IDC figures the US PC market was up 3.6% in Q2, which Gartner, which had forecast only 2% growth, claims it was achieved on the back of a lot of price cuts, Apple included. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614459.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614459.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT As predictable as the bet that night will follow day, Apple sued a little widely watched wannabe Mac cloner in Florida called Psystar that's been selling a $399 box called Open Computer for the last few months. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614538.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614538.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT HP is going into the shipping container business following down the path already trod by Sun and recently IBM and some other smaller firms except HP of course figures it can do these data center add-ons better than its rivals. HP calls its 40-foot containers PODs, short for Performance Optimized Data Centers, and says that unlike its competitors its containers will house rival gear from Dell, Sun, IBM, Cisco and whomever as well as HP?s own. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614563.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614563.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:45:00 GMT Citrix has tapped its VP of channels and emerging product sales Al Monserrat to replace its departing sales chief John Burris, who, as previously reported, is going to Sourcefire as CEO. A couple of years ago Monserrat was responsible for Citrix' North American sales. Meanwhile, Citrix has named former PeopleSoft chief marketing officer and HP veteran Nanci Caldwell to its board. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614458.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614458.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:15:00 GMT Microsoft and its cross-platform, Flash-rivaling, RIA-building Silverlight plug-in are being sued in San Francisco for patent infringement by a no-profile Massachusetts outfit called Gotuit Media Corporation. The thin seven-page suit and its venue comes compliments of California lawyer Spencer Hosie who brought us the highly diverting Burst.com antitrust suit against Microsoft and its delicious tales of Candy and the Microsoft document shredder. Burst of course was settled on the courthouse steps for less than it might have gotten inside. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614374.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614374.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 14:00:00 GMT That thud you heard yesterday was the European Commission hitting Intel with a second supplemental indictment-like statement of objection (SO) charging the company with three more instances of antitrust violations designed to keep AMD out of the market. Miraculously the news arrived just as AMD was posting its seventh consecutive quarterly loss. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614502.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614502.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:45:00 GMT Citrix on Tuesday announced Project Kensho, which is supposed to deliver Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) tools that will let ISVs and enterprise IT folk create portable hypervisor-independent enterprise application workloads that should run across XenServer, Hyper-V and VMware ESX virtual environments. Citrix is expecting to have a free technical preview for download in September. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614373.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614373.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:15:00 GMT Amazon has kicked into Engine Yard's $15 million Series B round along with Benchmark Capital and New Enterprise Associates. The two-year-old 70-man open source company provides a deployment infrastructure, services and support for developers to take their Ruby and Rails applications to the cloud. The money should underwrite its anticipated cloud computing cluster platform and expand its business. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614372.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614372.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 13:00:00 GMT Zoho, the online Office wannabe, has gotten Swisscom, the telephone side of the old Swiss PTT monopoly, to offer its 300,000 business customers a suite of Zoho's SaaS applications as part of a six-month pilot through its Teamnet portal. The Zoho Business suite, including Zoho Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook and Meeting, will be free. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614441.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614441.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:45:00 GMT CEO Hector Ruiz, increasingly blamed for the harrowing of AMD, stepped down during the company's Q2 conference call with Wall Street Thursday in favor of his sidekick, AMD president and patent-carrying engineer Dirk Meyer, the guy who used to run AMD's chip operation and was responsible for the Opteron chip that brought grief to Intel. Since the two have been so closed aligned it is unclear whether the change will make any substantive difference in AMD's fortunes. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614456.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614456.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:45:00 GMT Microsoft earned $4.3 billion on revenues of $15.84 billion, up 18%, in its fourth fiscal quarter in June, making it a $60 billion company - compliments of emerging markets and demand for Windows Server 2008. It had better-than-expected Vista sales this time through, up to $4.37 billion, and solid results everywhere but in retail sales of the high-end Office kit - a function of all those freebies out there? - and in its online business which lost $488 million - impacted by the weak economy and explaining why Microsoft is desperate to buy Yahoo, AOL, somebody. Yahoo, meanwhile, has also been eying AOL. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614536.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614536.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:45:00 GMT About a month and a half ago HP created a Scalable Computing and Infrastructure Organization (SCIO) out of a stealth Web 2.0 group that it's had under the covers for the last year, year-and-a-half and its HPC unit along with its cloud intentions. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614530.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614530.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 12:30:00 GMT Sun, whose stock has been teetering on the brink of disaster, pre-announced its fourth quarter Tuesday and said it could have non-GAAP earnings somewhere between 25 cents and 35 cents because of a $100 million restructuring charge (five-15 cents GAAP) on revenues of $3.725 billion-$3.8 billion. Its gross margin is supposed to be 44%-45. Wall Street folks figured it would do 27 cents on $3.8 billion. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614497.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614497.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:45:00 GMT Such speculation makes one wonder if that means Fujitsu, whose track record in the United States hasn't been anything to write home about either, would be reluctant to buy Sun, which has been looking anemic enough lately to have spawned reports it's looking for a new CEO to replace Jonathan Schwartz and may need an exit strategy. Fujitsu, which makes and sells Sparc machines, has always been Sun's backstop. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614498.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/614498.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 11:45:00 GMT As the economy swings from bad to worse and back again, Intel and the techno lust it engenders keep soldering on. The company's second-quarter results surpassed Wall Street's expectations and - despite various warnings of weakening PC demand worldwide - CEO Paul Otellini said in a prepared statement that 'As we enter the second half, demand remains strong for our microprocessor and chipset products in all segments and all parts of the globe.' http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/575071.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/575071.htm Fri, 18 Jul 2008 10:30:00 GMT Since Microsoft's forecast - and its margin implications - is nothing to sneeze at, we asked industry analyst and cloud spotter Amy Wohl what she has been seeing. 'The first thing to keep in mind is that we have some semantic confusion, as is usual at this stage of a new market, around just what is a cloud. We are now pretty sure that what we used to call grids and what we now call clouds is the same thing. But we also have things called 'platforms' that seem to be very much like a kind of cloud (and are sometimes called clouds) and then there is SaaS itself which looks very much like a cloud with some application software (and some SaaS vendors describe their offering just that way). I'd say we can agree that a cloud is managed computing power, often with applications, accessed across the Internet. And I'll agree that a company can have its own cloud, if it wants one. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/606837.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/606837.htm Wed, 16 Jul 2008 14:15:00 GMT There's a little puddle on Wall Street where VMware, the virtualization leader and the most brilliant IPO since Google went public, used to be. EMC, VMware's parent company, announced mid-morning that VMware co-founder Diane Greene was out presumably because the company isn't going to make its full-year 2008 guidance of 50% growth over 2007 and it hasn't reported its second quarter yet. EMC said it would come in at 'modestly below' its goal. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605481.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605481.htm Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:00:00 GMT Parallels CEO Serguei Beloussov sent around his response to Microsoft's surprise release of Hyper-V last week: 'While he figures it'll lower the barriers to server virtualization adoption - and tear a piece out of VMware's hide - 'the breath of 20 deployments will still be fairly narrow the feature set of Hyper-V is limited...with no support for Red Hat, Fedora, CentOS, FreeBSD.' http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/609800.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/609800.htm Mon, 14 Jul 2008 15:15:00 GMT In the statement Yahoo put out, chairman Roy Bostock said, 'After negotiating among themselves without the involvement of Yahoo!, Carl Icahn and Microsoft presented us with a 'take it or leave it' proposal under which we would be required to restructure the company, hand over to Microsoft Yahoo!'s valuable search business and to Carl Icahn the rest of the company, giving us less than 24 hours to respond. It is ludicrous to think that our board could accept such a proposal. While this type of erratic and unpredictable behavior is consistent with what we have come to expect from Microsoft, we will not be bludgeoned into a transaction that is not in the best interests of our stockholders.' http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605292.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605292.htm Mon, 14 Jul 2008 08:15:00 GMT Woe has come to a chip company and for a change it isn't AMD. In fact it may be AMD-inflicted. Late Wednesday GPU leader Nvidia, which competes with Intel and AMD's ATI graphics side, said its current quarter had come a cropper and that everybody should cut their expectations from $1.1 billion in revenue to somewhere between $875 million to $950 million, something like a 17% sequential drop. It had predicted a seasonal 5% decline a couple of months ago. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/595781.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/595781.htm Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT Mithras Capital, which owns a relatively small block of 1.7 million shares of Yahoo and would vote for Icahn's replacement slate in a heartbeat, sent an open letter to Microsoft Thursday asking Steve Ballmer to take Microsoft's 'alternate transaction' directly to Yahoo's stockholders. That's the better-than-Google deal that Microsoft claimed - after talks with Yahoo fell apart a second time - was worth better than $33 a share. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/602624.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/602624.htm Fri, 11 Jul 2008 15:00:00 GMT Monday was theoretically the day that, over protests and despite its popularity, Windows XP was retired as a way of pushing people to adopt the widely reviled Vista operating system before the very Vista-like 'next-generation' Windows 7 arrives, supposedly at the end of next year or at least by January of 2010. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/600707.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/600707.htm Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:45:00 GMT VMware has cut an OEM deal with Inspur, the Chinese company whose name used to be Langchao and said to be the largest native server maker. Inspur will bundle and support VMware's Infrastructure 3 widgetry on its servers. Inspur says there's little virtualization deployment experience in China. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/603561.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/603561.htm Fri, 11 Jul 2008 14:45:00 GMT Five years after Samba 2.0 - with 31 dot releases intervening - the Samba team has finally delivered Samba 3.2, the latest FOSS file and print server suite for Microsoft Windows clients. Samba now has 90% of the file functionality and 95% of the printing functionality and 60% of the authentication functionality it needs to subsist but Microsoft, meanwhile, has pushed on to SMB 2 protocol and there Samba is 90% behind, according to Samba team leader Jeremy Allison. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605486.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605486.htm Thu, 10 Jul 2008 16:00:00 GMT Remember those Interoperability Principles Microsoft came up with back in, oh, February? Well, on Monday it posted polished-up 'Version 1.0' documentation on the protocols in Office 2007, SharePoint Server 2007 and Exchange Server 2007 following a preliminary release in April as well as 5,000 pages worth of new documentation on the binary formats in Word, Excel and PowerPoint. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605121.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605121.htm Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:45:00 GMT Five years after Samba 2.0 - with 31 dot releases intervening - the Samba team has finally delivered Samba 3.2, the latest FOSS file and print server suite for Microsoft Windows clients. Samba now has 90% of the file functionality and 95% of the printing functionality and 60% of the authentication functionality it needs to subsist but Microsoft, meanwhile, has pushed on to the SMB 2 protocol and there Samba is 90% behind, according to Samba team leader Jeremy Allison. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605122.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605122.htm Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:45:00 GMT Sun is offering to put its open source Glassfish application server and MySQL database on as many servers as a company's got for a flat annual subscription - no counting servers, CPUS, cores or virtual machines, it says. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605487.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605487.htm Wed, 09 Jul 2008 14:30:00 GMT After much soul-searching but finding no 'compelling reason,' Intel of all people is not going to upgrade its 80,000 PCs to Vista except in a few places; XP is just fine, thank you, according to a piece on a New York Times blog that actually started in the Inquirer. That started people to wondering whether Intel, when it finally does upgrade, will go to the Vista-beholden Windows 7 or to Linux or the Mac, its newest hero. It also got other people to remembering that Intel exhibited the same resistance to XP when it was new. It took four years for XP to get 50% of the market. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605430.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605430.htm Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:00:00 GMT Tom Brokaw during his exit interview with Bill Gates last Friday asked, 'Do you think in a year from now, when you're down at the foundation offices, you'll look up at Microsoft and see Yahoo as a permanent wing of Microsoft, a part of it? Do you think the deal will get done?' To which Gates replied, 'No, I don't think so. But there are plenty of decisions ahead that Steve [Ballmer] will get to make about what he invests in, R&D, and what kind of deals he does. I don't think that one's likely but there are plenty of others that will get done and I'll look on with great respect.' That said it's still not over. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605485.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605485.htm Wed, 09 Jul 2008 06:00:00 GMT Adobe says it's going to 'dramatically improve' the search results of dynamic web content and rich Internet applications (RIAs) for Google and Yahoo by giving them optimized Flash Player technology. This new widgetry, which will read and index SWF files, is supposed to uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines and provide more relevant automatic search rankings for the millions of RIAs and the other dynamic content that runs in Flash Player. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605392.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605392.htm Wed, 09 Jul 2008 05:30:00 GMT Microsoft has confirmed that it's buying the Powerset semantic or natural language search start-up and its staff of 50 to give Google and its keywords a run for their money, as rumored last week. How long it takes Microsoft to go algorithm-to-algorithm with Google, which doesn't have natural intuitive language skills and is committed to the keyword approach, remains to be seen. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605484.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605484.htm Wed, 09 Jul 2008 05:30:00 GMT Brace yourself for a new era of creative web addresses. ICANN, the non-profit Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, has opened up top-level domains, the little .com, .org, .gov, .edu, .net suffixes or country abbreviation at the end of a web address, to any styling the human mind can conceive - and in scripts other than Roman - provided the creator coughs up $100,000. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605391.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605391.htm Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:45:00 GMT Well, if the economy - and not just software, mind you - is going from products to services and perforce subscriptions then vendors are going to need an appropriate billing system that chases down and captures all the monthly payments, right? Well, that's what a couple of lads out of the on-demand school thought too and that's why they started Zuora Inc on Marc Benioff and Benchmark Capital's combined nickel. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605480.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605480.htm Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:45:00 GMT Verizon, Google, Cisco, HP, Motorola, Sun, Telefon AB and Ericsson have banded together as the Allied Security Trust to buy IP before any trolls can take them to court. They've paid $250k to join and are each kicking it about $5 million in funding. They will then get non-exclusive licenses to the acquired technology and afterwards sell it on. The non-profit calls the concept 'catch and release.' It currently has 11 members and is expecting 30-40. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605482.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605482.htm Wed, 09 Jul 2008 02:45:00 GMT A New York federal judge has ordered Google to turn YouTube user data over to Viacom's outside counsel so Viacom, which is suing YouTube for upwards of a billion dollars in damages, can prove YouTube users are watching copyrighted videos. That's every YouTube username, associated IP address and video watched. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605291.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605291.htm Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:45:00 GMT Microsoft has finally explained what its subscription-based Albany gambit is and it's like what we said it would be. Microsoft officially calls it Microsoft Equipt and it's meant to push out Office Home and Office Student 2007 as kinda, sorta, almost, but not quite SaaS widgetry to get more retail buyers buying Office when they buy a PC - seems they don't usually - and to fight back incursions into its base by such as Google Apps. http://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605393.htmhttp://ajax.sys-con.com/read/605393.htm Tue, 08 Jul 2008 10:45:00 GMT The Justice Department has reportedly opened a formal antitrust investigation of the multimillion-dollar Microsoft-escaping deal for Google to provide advertising to Yahoo's search engine, with a demand for documents going out to other than the immediate parties, not just the voluntary collection of information Yahoo and Google were prepared to supply.