News

Madoff Programmers Busted

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 00:15:00 EST

Two Madoff computer programmers who authorities say made the whole decades-long $65 billion Ponzi scheme possible were arrested Friday and brought up on criminal charges of conspiracy, falsifying the books and records of a broker-dealer and falsifying the books and records of an investment advisor. The SEC, which never tumbled to the ripoff before Madoff up and confessed last December, added civil charges.

Sun Revs Sun Ray

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 15:00:00 EST

Sun Microsystems, whose future is dicey at best right now thanks to the European Commission, revved its virtual desktop Sun Ray software Tuesday. Oracle, Sun’s would-be acquirer, by the way, was an early access customer and is evaluating the software for potential use as part of its own IT infrastructure.

Cisco Takes on Microsoft Exchange

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:30:00 EST

Cisco’s behaving a little like the Lord High Executioner in the Mikado. It’s got a little list and apparently figures nobody on it will be missed if it sent them to an early grave starting with Microsoft Exchange. See, as of Monday Cisco is in the hosted e-mail business up against Microsoft Exchange Online, Google Gmail, IBM iNotes, heck, even Zoho Mail, but especially Microsoft, because it claims it can save users the price of Exchange Server and still leave them with the same experience.

New Members Elected to Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 07:02:00 EST

The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the results of its 2009 Technical Advisory Board (TAB) election, which was held at the Japan Linux Symposium in Tokyo.

Hitachi Gets Serious About Linux

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 12:15:00 EST

Hitachi has joined Red Hat’s year-old Advanced Mission-Critical Program and offer high-end to mission-critical workloads on Linux to customers in Japan. The program is meant to mimic the kind of workloads, services levels, support and long lifecycles previously thought to be supported only on more expensive legacy platforms and should reduce customer costs. Its expanded support options include a 10-year lifecycle, the ability to standardize on a single update release for up to 18 months and proactive notification to reduce system disruption.

Economy Beginning To Accelerate: Cisco CEO

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

Cisco CEO John Chambers, who has turned into something of an economic oracle probably because he is more in command of his catbird seat than most big-time CEOs, said Wednesday when Cisco reported its quarterly results that the economy hit a “clear tipping point” before mid-summer and is now accelerating worldwide, enough for Cisco itself to start cautiously spending again. He’s planning targeted hiring.

Canonical Offers Free Cloudware

Sat, 31 Oct 2009 23:45:00 EDT

Canonical’s Ubuntu 9.10 Server Edition, code named Karmic Koala, became generally available for free download Thursday. That’s the stuff that introduces Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud (UEC), a k a Eucalyptus Software’s open source software, as a fully supported technology. The widgetry is based on the same APIs as Amazon EC2 and, as previously reported, lets businesses build private clouds.

Zend Server Gets a Plane-like ‘Black Box’

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 19:45:00 EDT

Zend Technologies, the PHP company, has hung Zend Server 5.0, which support IBM i as well as Linux and Windows, out for public beta. A production release should be out by the end of the year. The widgetry is a major new version of the company’s enterprise-ready PHP application server, including Code Tracing, which is supposed to slash problem resolution time by up to 50%.

WinMagic Joins Trusted Computing Group

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:45:00 EDT

WinMagic (www.winmagic.com), a full-disk encryption vendor and innovator, today announced that it has joined the Trusted Computing Group (TCG) at the Contributor Level. WinMagic has been working independently with the self-encrypting drive manufacturers for over two years and is uniquely positioned to provide independent software vendor (ISV) insight directly to the TCG Storage Work Group regarding the Opal standard for self-encrypting hard drives. Joining the TCG will enable WinMagic to serve as a Contributor Advisor on the Board of Directors, Work Groups or Special Committees, and chair Work Groups and Special Committees and the subgroups formed by Work Groups or Special Committees.

Open Kernel Labs Completes Extensive Trials

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 11:30:00 EDT

Open Kernel Labs (OK Labs), the leading global provider of embedded virtualization software for mobile phones and broadband Internet devices, today announced that ST-Ericsson, a world leader in wireless platforms and semiconductors, has selected OK Labs as its mobile virtualization partner for joint projects featuring ST-Ericsson 3G multimedia chipsets and open OS platforms.

LynxSecure Selected by the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 05:00:00 EDT

LynuxWorks has announced that FFI (the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment) has selected LynxSecure in support of a program in the field of classified information handling and information flow between security domains. FFI selected LynxSecure due to its unique ability to run Windows as a fully virtualized guest operating system in a secure partition on an Intel x86 family processor. According to Anders Eggen, Project Manager, FFI, "For some military scenarios high assurance systems are required, and products conforming to the MILS architecture are promising platforms on which to implement critical security functions. FFI will use LynxSecure to explore the MILS based technology and to perform research and prototyping activities to examine its ability to solve some of the security challenges raised in the implementation of a future Network Enabled Capability (NEC)."

Virtualization Journal "Readers' Choice Awards" Voting Is Now Open

Wed, 14 Oct 2009 12:00:00 EDT

SYS-CON's Virtualization Journal announced today that the voting in its second annual Virtualization Readers' Choice Awards is now open. Voting will end October 23, 2009, and winners will be announced the week of November 2-4, 2009, at the 7th International Virtualization Conference & Expo. To vote for your favorite Cloud products and services today - don't put it off, voting takes just a few seconds.

Parallels Fields a Bare Metal Hypervisor

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:30:00 EDT

Parallels, which thinks of itself as a cloud enabler, has joined the bare metal hypervisor business with a little number called Parallels Server 4 Bare Metal that leverages its desktop hypervisor and gussies it up to make it good at stuff like test and development and consolidating multiple – and not necessarily the same kind of – operating systems on a single server.

Red Hat Says Windows and KVM Are Talking to One Another

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:15:00 EDT

Red Hat said Wednesday that its KVM hypervisor, its pet virtualization scheme, can talk to Microsoft’s Windows Server and that customers can now deploy jointly supported server virtualization environments that combine Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). The two companies have done the tests and validated the widgetry.

Trustee Backs SCO’s Litigation Against Novell

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 14:00:00 EDT

In the unlikely event that Novell and IBM harbored any hope that the trustee set over SCO would abandon its litigation, that hope has been dashed. SCO last Thursday sent in its brief opposing Novell’s bid for a rare en banc rehearing of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision overturning a Utah summary judgment that Novell owns Unix “by and through Edward W. Cahn as Chapter 11 Trustee.”

Bright Computing Launched to Make HPC Clusters Easy to Use

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 10:15:00 EDT

Bright Computing, a specialist in cluster management software and services for high-performance computing (HPC), was launched today to offer a fundamentally new approach to the technical challenges posed by HPC cluster management. Its innovative software product - Bright Cluster Manager(TM) (http://www.brightcomputing.com/Bright-Cluster-Manager.php#) - makes HPC Linux clusters of any size easy to use, manage and scale.

NETGEAR Launches RangeMax Wireless-N Gigabit Router

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 08:30:00 EDT

NETGEAR, Inc., has announced the launch of RangeMax Wireless-N Gigabit Router with USB (WNR3500L), a full-featured Wireless-N router offering high-performance wireless range and speed along with Gigabit Ethernet ports and ReadyShare(TM) USB storage access. The RangeMax Wireless-N Gigabit Router with USB is also designed to serve as a reliable, high-performance open source Linux® platform supporting a wide variety of applications created by multiple development partners and the dedicated open source community. Some of these partners include BigFoot Networks for boosting network speeds for online gaming, Leaf Networks for easy remote access, Paragon Software for high-speed USB file reads and writes, and Sputnik for hotspot solutions.

Ulitzer Aid Campaign for the Typhoon Ondoy Victims

Thu, 01 Oct 2009 09:30:00 EDT

Yesterday morning I checked the Ulitzer home page on my iPhone on my way to the office and I realized two of the top three stories were about the "Typhoon Ondoy" in Philippines. 36 hours later we still have three stories filed from Manila on Ulitzer's home page. Top Ulitzer stories on Ulitzer from around the 25 distinct subject categories it covers are processed every 60 minutes and displayed by an algorithm which we believe is more sophisticated than , say, Google News algorithms.

The Laptop Meets Vaudeville, Linux Opens for Windows

Wed, 30 Sep 2009 07:00:00 EDT

This must have been what vaudeville was like when a none-too-successful act opened for the star. Dell unveiled a high-end anorexic laptop Tuesday that basically has Linux opening for Windows. Windows has a bit of a problem with this instantly gratifying instant-on booting business. So Dell stuck a low-power Linux-bearing secondary ARM-based motherboard next to the 1.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo in its new $1,999 Latitude Z 600 widget. That means users can instantly access Windows 7 and its e-mail, Firefox browser, calendar and document accoutrements as soon as the dingus is opened.

GRIDSCALE 5.1 for IBM DB2 Now Available

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:30:00 EDT

xkoto, the database virtualization company, has announced the availability of GRIDSCALE 5.1, the latest release of its active-active solution for IBM DB2. GRIDSCALE 5.1 features a new cluster management system that improves the performance of online transaction processing (OLTP) applications. The product also is now available on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), delivering the first cloud-based scale-out solution for DB2. With GRIDSCALE, businesses can eliminate DB2 downtime, implement real-time disaster recovery solutions, and lower the costs for business-critical DB2 databases running on Linux, UNIX and Windows systems.

Dell's Jiu-Jitsu. Strategic Genius?

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 12:00:00 EDT

While I was off enjoying some brain candy by way of obtaining PMI's PMP (Project Management Professional) certification last week, the IT landscape was busy reconfiguring itself. I enjoyed reading Jeffrey Kaplan's analysis of the Perot acquisition by Dell, and Information Week's perspective. At this early juncture I probably have more questions than answers, but also viewed the acquisition from a slightly different perspective.

Burton Migrates from UNIX to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 08:30:00 EDT

Novell has announced The Burton Corporation moved its mission-critical applications from UNIX* to SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server from Novell to improve system uptime and reduce overall server-related costs by 80 percent. Burton migrated to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server in 2008. Burton's previous operating platform had experienced frequent downtime, putting a strain on all aspects of the business. After determining a UNIX upgrade would be cost-prohibitive, the company chose SUSE Linux Enterprise Server as a stable, reliable platform for its SAP- and Oracle-based IT environments.

Penguin-On-Demand Goes with Panasas Storage

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:45:00 EDT

POD, Penguin Computing’s Linux-based Penguin on Demand HPC cloud, is going to get high-performance parallel storage from Panasas whose petabytes-supporting ActiveStor line is supposed to ensure against bottlenecks. POD, which doesn’t use machine virtualization, is targeted at researchers, scientists and engineers who require surge capacity for time-critical analyses and organizations that need HPC cluster capabilities.

SCO Told to Rebut Novell’s Appeal-of-a-Appeal

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 16:45:00 EDT

The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, which overturned the Utah district court’s summary judgment that Novell owns Unix, has given SCO until October 1 to file a retort to Novell’s motion for an en banc rehearing of the case. Apparently that’s standard operating procedure. The odds are still against Novell getting a rare rehearing but it does drag out how long it will be before SCO can get a trial date back in Utah, which appears to be Novell’s object in the move.

IBM to Push Cloud-Attached Ubuntu Notebooks

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:00:00 EDT

IBM is proposing to score points against Microsoft, bridge the digital divide and maybe even cure piracy by teaming up with Canonical and pushing Ubuntu-based netbooks fitted with either locally run or cloud-based IBM applications in Africa, a small but growing market. It is the pair’s first cloud- and premise-based Linux netbook software scheme.

The Obese Penguin, How Like Windows

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 12:45:00 EDT

Linux creator Linus Torvalds said at LinuxCon this week that Linux is “getting bloated” and that “it’s a problem.” “I’d love to say we have a plan,” he lamented. “I mean, sometimes it’s a bit sad and we’re definitely not the streamlined hyper-efficient kernel that I had envisioned 15 years ago….The kernel is huge and bloated, and our icache footprint is scary. I mean there’s no question about that.”

Creator of Splashtop Instant-On Technology Joins Linux Foundation

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 12:01:00 EDT

The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, has announced that DeviceVM has become its newest member. DeviceVM is the creator of the award-winning Splashtop(TM) instant-on platform, which is powered by Linux. Splashtop allows users to access the Internet and their favorite desktop applications within seconds of turning on the machine, rather than waiting long minutes for a full boot-up.

EmbedOne Linux Shows the Way for New Level of OS Integration

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:00:00 EDT

Meshcom Technologies, Inc. today announced its new brand name - EmbedOne - for its new embedded Linux line of business. At the same time, new publicly available suite of software and services for the embedded Linux community was announced.

Secure Managed File Transfer (MFT) Goes Online

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:15:00 EDT

GoAnywhere Services securely allows trading partners (e.g. customers, employees, vendors, etc.) to connect with your organization for exchanging files. This innovative solution eliminates the need for departmental stand-alone tools and methods that were traditionally required for sharing data. It also removes the risk of using unsecure email to exchange information – greatly reducing data privacy concerns.

Citrix Joins The Linux Foundation

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 07:01:00 EDT

The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, has announced that Citrix Systems has become its newest member. Citrix is a provider of virtualization; cloud computing, and software as a service (SaaS) offerings for companies worldwide, including 99 percent of Fortune 500 enterprises. Citrix leads the open source Xen® hypervisor project which is based on Linux.

Phoenix HyperSpace to Be Bundled with Intel Atom

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 08:30:00 EDT

Phoenix Technologies, a provider of PC 3.0(TM) products, services and embedded technologies, today announced an agreement to distribute HyperSpace, an instant-on computing environment, with Intel(R) Desktop Boards featuring the integrated Intel(R) Atom(TM) processors 230 and 330 . These Intel motherboards with HyperSpace technology will be available worldwide in CYQ42009. The agreement means that millions of nettop users and other low-cost, light-weight computing devices powered by Intel's market-leading Atom processors can enjoy the same high levels of efficiency, fun and ease-of-use that HyperSpace brings to laptop and netbook users.

The Curious Case of Build Release Management eBook

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 13:15:00 EDT

Build Release Management (BRM) is truly the next generation of IT Change Management. With BRM, you can get compliant and implement total process automation while continuing to work with whatever version control tool, testing application or IDE you are currently using. Download this essential eBook "The Curious Case of Build Release Management" and learn the basics of what BRM is, why users love it and why every application development team should consider it.

Novell Asks Appeals Court To Reverse its Decision on SCO

Sat, 12 Sep 2009 16:00:00 EDT

Novell Tuesday asked the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear en banc its decision overturning the Utah summary judgment awarding ownership of Unix to Novell and sending SCO’s suit against Novell back to Utah for trial. En banc would mean all of the God knows how many judges on the circuit’s bench not just the three who heard it the first time through, a situation usually reserved for unusually complex cases or cases of unusual significance. Novell’s nine-page petition attempts to invest the case with grave significance but what are the odds that the 10th Circuit will throw out a unanimous 54-page decision by three of its jurists written by one of the finest mind on the bench, Michael McConnell, a constitutional law scholar who just stepped down to be director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School? Figures suggest it’s a rare thing indeed and rarer still to win. Anyway, this is first-year law school kinda of stuff. Judge McConnell found that the Utah district court ignored a dispute over facts that should have been sent to jury to decide, not resolved by an “inappropriate,” “improper” and “premature” summary judgment. You can’t have a summary judgment when there are conflicting facts.

Novell Releases SecureLogin 7

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 13:15:00 EDT

Novell has released SecureLogin 7, the latest take on its enterprise single sign-on (SSO) solution, said to cut the time required to SSO-enable an organization’s applications from weeks to days. Password proliferation is supposed to cause significant losses in IT and end-user productivity. A recent Novell survey found that at least 30% of IT help desk time is spent dealing with password-related issues.

Nokia Linux Phone: Take It or Leave It

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:30:00 EDT

Nokia isn’t planning to customize its first-ever Linux Maemo phone, the N900 unveiled last month. It’ll be the same from all of the carriers it signs. The company told Reuters, “Very clearly Apple, Android…are a whole lot less about providing customization to the operators and a whole lot more about providing a really cool, compelling value proposition to the end customer. We have an opportunity that we are going to take advantage of with the Maemo platform to play the game a little bit more along those lines than with Symbian lines.”

Red Hat Announces Enhancements to Enterprise Linux Management Solutions

Wed, 02 Sep 2009 12:15:00 EDT

Red Hat has announced the availability of Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3, the latest version of Red Hat's on-premises systems management solution that provides software updates, configuration management, provisioning and monitoring across both physical and virtual Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers. Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 is globally available today and is automatically delivered to customers with a Red Hat Network Satellite subscription. The availability of Red Hat Network Satellite 5.3 marks the first release based off of the open source project Spacewalk, announced in June 2008.

Novell Revenues Unexpectedly Down 12%

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 14:45:00 EDT

Novell, which contrary to public opinion took a serious hit the other day when a federal appeals court threw its ownership of Unix – and its ability to silence SCO – back to a jury to decide, earned five cents a share or $16.7 million on revenues down 12% to $216.1 million in the July quarter. Thanks to cost cuts its earning picture, as expected, improved over last year when the company lost $15 million, or four cents a share, but its revenue performance was another matter. Wall Street expected it to do $216.6 million.

Decision Novell Owns Unix Overturned

Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:30:00 EDT

The legal claims SCO made against Linux are back. The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals today threw out the Utah district court’s August 2007 summary judgment awarding ownership of Unix and UnixWare copyrights to Novell. The appeals court also overturned Novell’s waiver of SCO’s termination of IBM’s right to distribute AIX and Novell’s order telling SCO to abandon its breach-of-contract and copyright suit against IBM and Sequent.

Moonlight 2 Beta Out

Fri, 21 Aug 2009 17:30:00 EDT

The open source Mono Project sponsored by Novell has put out a beta release Moonlight 2, the Linux equivalent of Microsoft’s Silverlight 2, which gives users a platform to view and use Silverlight and Windows Media content on Linux. The beta offers improved functionality compared to Moonlight 1, including support for adaptive video streaming and audio playback, which means better streaming of multimedia content based on the quality of the user’s connections.

LiMo Foundation Expands Market Footprint

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:46:00 EDT

LiMo Foundation has announced the newest round of LiMo-compliant handsets has been released to market. Developed by leading device manufacturers and LiMo members NEC and Panasonic Mobile Communications for LiMo board member NTT DOCOMO, these latest handset models offer an array of next-generation features and functionality.