Virtualization Viewpoint:
Cloud Computing Casts
Shadow on Walled Gardens
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MOST READ THIS WEEK |
Maureen O'Gara
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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 ...
Sun is now offering a new
virtualization service
that will let ISVs run
their Solaris apps in a
multi-tenant on-demand
environment without
having to rewrite any
code. The trick is in
Solaris' Containers
virtualization and its
xVM widgetry. The new
Solaris On Deman...
SCO and Novell have been
in court this week trying
to figure out how much
SCO is supposed to owe
Novell in royalties for
its attempt to tax Linux.
This is the money that
SCO claims it doesn't owe
Novell at all because
Novell signed away its
source code rights and
...
HP Labs says it's found
the missing link that
would create computers
that don't forget, don't
need to boot up, consume
less power and associate
information like the
human brain does. It says
it's proven the existence
of a previously only
theorized fourth
fundament...
VIA is setting up a Linux
Portal, still in beta, to
get open source driver
developed. It will
initially focus on
graphics drivers for its
CN896 digital media IGP
chipset for the latest
Ubuntu distribution.
Canonical, the company
behind Ubuntu, says it
will work to...
Likewise, pretty much the
de facto standard in
cross-platform
authentication these
days, has added Oracle
Enterprise Linux 4 and 5,
Oracle's version of Red
Hat, to the list of some
110 Linux, Unix and Mac
platforms that it
supports on a Microsoft
network using Act...
Red Hat has been
tinkering with senior
management. Paul Cormier,
executive VP of
engineering, is now
executive VP and
president, product and
technologies, responsible
for product market, QA
and support as well as
engineering. CFO Charlie
Peters is now also
respo...
Intel has set up a
community-enabled web
store portal for SMBs
called the Intel Business
Exchange or Intel BX to
push bundled software and
hardware, standalone
business applications and
services. It includes
product descriptions,
interactive
demonstrations, white ...
The Electric Frontier
Foundation (EFF) has put
an open letter to
Microsoft CEO Steve
Ballmer on its site
complaining that
Microsoft has 'betrayed
MSN music customers' and
urging him to fix the
problems Microsoft will
cause when it turns off
its Music validation
...
Atom, the new chip that
Intel built for so-called
netbooks and phones in
hopes of touching off the
Internet-in-you-pocket
phase of the computer
revolution and widening
its earnings, is in short
supply. Asustek, which is
supposed to launch an
Atom-based Eee next
mo...
Microsoft claims to have
sold 140 million copies
of Vista. Ah, but, in an
effort to scratch the
widespread 'Save XP'
itch, Dell, HP, Sony and
Lenovo all say they are
going to supply XP past
June 30 when large OEMs
are supposed to stop
supplying it.
If patents expert John
Duffy, a professor at the
George Washington
University Law School, is
right then the Patent and
Trademarks Office
unconstitutionally
appointed nearly
two-thirds of the patent
appeals judges currently
sitting, and close to
half of the tradema...
Pleading a newly found
incompatibility with its
Dynamics Retail
Management System (RMS),
Microsoft Tuesday
postponed the web release
of both XP Service Pack 3
and Vista Service Pack 1
- even if nobody knows
anybody who uses RMS.
It's unclear how long the
delay wil...
SAP has run into a nasty
little rollout problem
with its new on-demand
Business ByDesign
widgetry, the stuff
that's critical to its
future growth and
competes with, oh, say,
Salesforce.com, NetSuite
and Microsoft. Seems
ByDesign isn't properly
automated and so SAP...
Microsoft CEO Steve
Ballmer is on the horns
of dilemma about what to
do about Yahoo! since
Yahoo! ignored his
Saturday deadline to deal
or be acquired by force
at a lower price. And a
meeting of Microsoft's
board to debate the issue
Wednesday apparently
didn't fin...
IBM claims to have
created new species of
custom-built,
industry-standard,
Linux-based rack server
for Web 2.0 and Cloud
Computing companies with
massive data centers and
tens of thousands of
servers, like online
gaming, social networks,
search and Internet
firm...
Linux programmer Hans
Reiser has been found
guilty of the
first-degree murder of
his estranged
Russian-born wife Nina,
who went missing after
dropping their two small
children with their
father on Labor Day
weekend 2006. Reiser,
who's been in jail since
Octob...
Well, it looks like
Richard Stallman, the
father of FOSS, is going
to have to cut his hair
and get a suit because
the warmed-over hippie
movement he's been
leading is no longer the
radical anti-software
establishment
counter-culture his
rag-tag army fancies it
i...
The Wall Street Journal
thinks that Microsoft is
about to break the break
the deafening silence
that has hung in the air
since Yahoo! ignored
Microsoft's Saturday
deadline to deal or be
acquired by force at a
lower price. The Journal
thinks that Microsoft
could no...
Ubuntu's first 'Long Term
Support (LTS' rev in
almost 23 months was
pushed out the door this
week along with the
promise that another LTS
rev would follow every
two years from now on out
and in between there
would be point releases
first at the three-month
mark an...
IBM may be starring down
the barrel of an EC
investigation of its
precious mainframe
business, significant to
its bottom line.
According to both
Bloomberg and Dow Jones,
the commission has sent
Big Blue a questionnaire
asking for details about
its mainframe busine...
Parallels said Wednesday
that its Desktop
virtualization widgetry
for the Mac, which lets
Intel-based Apples run
Windows or Linux along
with Mac OS X, has sold
more than a million
copies, a nice chunk of
the Macs out there. It is
the largest-selling Mac
utility an...
Apple has finally bought
PA Semi, the fab-less
low-power PowerPC
start-up that supposedly
swooned when Apple
switched from the PowerPC
Intel. What Apple's going
to do with it now become
fodder for the
speculators. The iPhone
uses an 32-bit
ARM-derived chip that
...
After a $1.5 million
angel round, Desktone,
which was started in 2006
by Eric Pulier, who also
started SOA Software, US
Interactive and IVT,
picked up $17 million in
first-round funding about
a year ago from Highland
Capital Partners,
SoftBank Capital, Citrix
Syst...
Corel, the owner of
Office rival WordPerfect,
is looking for a new CEO
now that the incumbent
David Dobson, there since
2005, is leaving before
the end of June for a
senior position at some
unidentified Fortune 500.
Dobson's move follows
Corel's largest investor
C...
Microsoft has finally
released the
Vista-delayed XP SP3 to
manufacturing and will be
sending the code to PC
makers. It supports the
Network Access protection
and Peer Name Resolution
Protocol (PNRP) used in
Vista so XP apps can
communicate with Vista
apps that use...
The Legal Times has been
poking around IBM's
misadventure with the
Environment Protection
Agency (EPA) and how it
was briefly barred from
doing any new business
with the United States
government a few weeks
ago, and it says,
paraphrasing Robert
Meunier, the EPA of...
Amazon is now offering
two premium support
levels for application
developers using its
cloud computing services,
to wit its S3 storage
service, its EC2
computing service and SQS
application messaging
service. It's got Silver
support, priced at $100 a
month or 10 c...
While SCO is only days
away from a court
appearance in Utah that's
supposed to determine how
much money it owes to
Novell, a necessary step
before it tries to get
all legal decisions
related to Novell
overturned, it's cut a
revenue-sharing deal with
FranklinCovey ...
An on-the-beach IT
executive who's been
watching a lot of
political coverage lately
called to ask what
cabinet post Carly
Fiorina was likely to get
if John McCain is elected
because Carly, now the
so-called 'victory
chairman' of the
Republican National
Committee...
Remember that Mesh stuff
that Microsoft chief
architect Ray Ozzie was
hinting around about a
few weeks ago? Well,
Microsoft's new
contribution to the
cloud, what we called
'the Big Sync,' is now
Live Mesh, a preview Web
Service that, as
previously reported, is
s...
Microsoft is going to
experiment with
subscription-based
software that as near as
we can figure out won't
be on-demand or web-based
- or even available as a
download - so it's hardly
a retort to Google Apps
and its ilk like people
thought. This is the
stuff that's...
In its efforts to keep
the boat afloat, it's
generally assumed that
AMD will throw its
consumer electronics
business overboard. Its
revenues last quarter
were a measly $81
million, down 26%
sequentially, and its
operating margin was
-10%, down from 11%
quarter-over-quarter. 
Microsoft and Novell have
taken it into their
collective head to push
their peculiar axis into
China - and elsewhere -
to convert unsupported
Linux users to SUSE. They
say they've had demand
'to build a bridge
between open source and
proprietary software and
provi...
After three strong
quarters and against a
backdrop of heady
expectations, Microsoft
came in with
lighter-than-expected
fiscal Q3 revenues of
$14.45 billion Thursday,
earnings of $4.38
billion, or 47 cents a
share, and operating
income of $4.41 billion.
Earnings ...
SnapLogic, the open
source start-up that been
fostering the eponymous
data integration project
for the past year, is
going commercial with the
widgetry, claiming that
the stuff can do what
proprietary software from
TIBCO and Infomatica
can't and make it easy to
ta...
Microsoft pushed its
Dynamics CRM Online out
into general availability
in North America Tuesday
and into competition with
Salesforce.com. Microsoft
is doing the hosting with
accessibility through a
browser or Office and
Outlook and claims to
deliver more capabilitie...
Word documents generated
by the current version of
Office 2007 don't conform
to ISO/IEC 29500, the
OOXML file format draft
standard Microsoft moved
heaven and earth to get
ISO to accept. At least
that's what Alex Brown,
the guy in change of the
ISO group that's supp...
One Laptop Per Child, the
effort to put technology
in the hands of
third-world kids, has
lost its number two guy
Walter Bender, who was
president, software and
content until last month
when he was shifted to
head of deployment
although not many of
OLPC's novel Lin...
BT is going to distribute
and support both
SugarCRM, the commercial
open source CRM people,
and its rival NetSuite,
Larry Ellison's other
company. Both companies
are competing against
salesforce.com, the
brainchild of former
Ellison lieutenant Marc
Benioff, with o...