Articles by Maureen O'Gara

Dell Unveils its Nettop

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 17:48:00 EDT

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 some European countries starting at 399 with XP Home.

Red Hat Buys Qumranet

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 16:15:00 EDT

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 technology.

HP Designs Blade To Host Virtual Machines

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 14:15:00 EDT

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 BladeSystems, virtualization poses problems of memory, storage, network connections, access and power utilization.

New Suit Puts Hans Reiser’s Company in Play

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 20:30:00 EDT

Hans Reiser’s children Rory, 8, and Niorline, 7, represented pro bono by Morrison and Foerster, the big-time San Francisco law firm, have sued their father for the wrongful death of their mother, seeking unspecified damages for being deprived of her “love, support, companionship, comfort, affection and society.”

Cloud Computing Expo - Google Chrome & Browser War III

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:45:00 EDT

With Chrome, Google gets to scare the bejesus out of Microsoft by revitalizing Netscape’s old browser-as-platform threat and keep Firefox around as a fallback position in case Chrome doesn’t catch on or is slow in catching on, all the while maintaining the goodwill of the “community.” Firefox currently holds ~18% of the market to Microsoft’s ~75%.

Virtualization Expo - VMware Down Another Senior Executive

Wed, 03 Sep 2008 12:00:00 EDT

VMware said Tuesday that Richard Sarwal, executive VP of R&D, only with the company since December, had quit to go back to Oracle. VMware CEO Paul Maritz said he “expects to announce organizational changes to replace Richard in due course.”

Google Chrome - Browser War III

Tue, 02 Sep 2008 09:30:00 EDT

Google will come out from behind the Firefox browser that it’s been pumping money into – and profiting royally from – and take direct aim at Microsoft with a browser of its very own. The widgetry is called Google Chrome and Google Chrome, like all of Google’s non-search widgetry, will be a beta.

OOXML Standardization Naysayers Apparently Throw in the Towel

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:40:00 EDT

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 thrown in the towel on taking their appeal any further. India, the fourth protester, has not been heard from.

Reiser Sentenced

Mon, 01 Sep 2008 15:25:00 EDT

Two years ago this weekend Linux programmer Hans Reiser murdered his estranged wife. 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 years-to-life sentence to second-degree murder in exchange for taking authorities to the wooded site where he had buried her body.

Virtualization Expo - IT Spending Will Be Up 8% This Year!

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 03:45:00 EDT

Gartner now says worldwide IT spending should be up 8% this year to $3.4 trillion. But if you factor out the vagaries in the US dollar the number is closer to 4.5%. Gartner figures software should be up 10% and service up 9.4%. It reckons that “Software-as-a-service/cloud computing, Service Oriented Architecture/Web 2.0 and open source software are causing huge changes to the software market. Many of these factors are impacting market growth as enterprises replace assets with per-use services.”

Virtualization Expo - Computer Giant Lumbers in, Plops 10% Growth on the Table

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 11:15:00 EDT

HP earned $2 billion, 80 cents a share, up 14%, on revenues of $28 billion, up 10%, in its third fiscal quarter ended July 31, 2008, outperforming expectations against a hard compare. Salvaged by notebooks, blades and overseas growth, the results calmed jitters that the bellwether would miss.

Virtualization Conference & Expo - Intel Watch

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:45:00 EDT

Intel held another one of those Developer Forums this week and said that besides its newly christened i7 next-generation 45nm Nehalem desktop chips, a quad-core energy-efficient dual-processor server part code named Nehalem-EP, a k a Gainestown, will go into production in Q4 as well as Bloomfield, an Extreme Edition of the widget that may be good for 3.2GHz.

AJAX RIA Expo - Yahoo & Intel Partner on Web-Enabling TV

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:45:00 EDT

Yahoo and Intel have partnered to go into the widget business together and create a web-enabled interactive TV channel populated with picture-in-a-picture RIA widgetry like Flickr, Blockbuster, Twitter, e-mail, Yahoo Finance, eBay auctions, news and sports.

Cloud Computing Expo - Concursive Offers Free CRM Software

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:43:00 EDT

Concursive, a Virginia-based open source outfit backed by Intel Capital, is offering its on-demand CRM solution free for a year to companies for up to 100 users. It says its ConcourseSuite 5.0 product provides SMEs with a fully customizable front office solution.

Cloud Computing Expo - Talend Moves into the Data Clean-Up Biz

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:07:00 EDT

Talend, the open source company with the SaaS data integration software, is now moving into the data clean-up business with a software module that identifies stuff like duplicated records and incorrect street addresses by comparing them against reference data from places like the US Postal Service.

Cloud Computing Expo - RightScale Supports Amazon’s Elastic Block Store

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:07:00 EDT

RightScale, the cloud management start-up, is now supporting Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Elastic Block Store (EBS) cloud storage solution. Its users will have access to what it calls a “virtually limitless” storage area network directly from the RightScale Dashboard.

Chinese Rival Looking for Evidence To Nail Microsoft

Tue, 26 Aug 2008 09:01:00 EDT

China’s new anti-monopoly law went into effect August 1 and China-based Evermore Software, an Office wannabe, would love to haul Microsoft into court. It says it’s collecting evidence and has suggested to MarketWatch that the integration between Office and Windows might be just the ticket it’s looking for to pin Microsoft’s ears back.

Cloud Computing Expo - Poland Complains to the EC about Microsoft

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 09:12:00 EDT

Poland’s Office for Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) has complained to the European Commission about Microsoft Windows being on laptops to the exclusion of Linux. It suspects collusion between Microsoft and the laptop makers that Microsoft allegedly greases with rebates, a charge reminiscent of AMD’s complaints against Intel that the EC is also pursuing.

Google, Virtualization and Cloud Computing

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:00:00 EDT

New England-based Egenera has opened a West Coast office in Santa Clara, California, saying it’s a growing market. Google.com, Google’s philanthropic arm, intends to put upwards of $10 million in steam-producing geothermal energy that circulates water through hot rocks to lower the cost of electricity from renewable sources. Google thinks it could be the energy equivalent of a killer app. The money is going to AltaRock Energy Inc in Sausalito and Potter Drilling Inc in Redwood City. Microsoft co-founder Paul Allan’s VC arm Vulcan Capital, Khosla Ventures, Kleiner Perkins, and Advanced Technology Ventures are piling on the AltaRock deal. Google’s selfish motivation is the cost of its data centers.

Virtualization Journal - Is Windows 7 More Like Windows 6BD?

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 12:00:00 EDT

According to what Microsoft is saying now, the so-called Windows 7 Server is not a major release and is really nothing more than Windows Server 2008 R2, a continuation of the Long Horn code base, with no changes to the core operating system components. And although the Microsoft Server team maintains that the Windows 7 client is a major release, according to what Mary Jo Foley, that doyenne of Windows watchers, is now reporting, the Windows 7 client and Windows Server 2008 R2 are based on the same code base and should RTM together.

Is VMware Buying Red Hat?

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 10:15:00 EDT

Because of its slow growth - a factor of the freebie open source business model - Red Hat has become fodder for Wall Street acquisition speculation, BusinessWeek says, and offers VMware as a possible suitor. Such an acquisition would give VMware the operating system it's lacking, make its products cheaper and make it a more viable competitor against Microsoft - or so the theory goes. BusinessWeek claims to have heard from "some industry executives" that VMware is looking for an operating system and says ousted VMware CEO Diane Greene "had set up meetings with Red Hat in part to position VMware as friendly to open source and possibly as a prelude to a buyout discussion." Red Hat also needs the virtualization halo for growth.

IBM To Offer Cloud Cover

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 14:00:00 EDT

IBM’s going to peel off another $300 million and sink the money into building 13 clouds scattered in 10 countries around the world where business and government can tuck their data and applications against disaster and destruction.

Cloud Computing Journal - Corel May Get Sold

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 17:30:00 EDT

It said late Wednesday night that it is in talks with an unidentified third party regarding a potential sale of the company, but that there’s no agreement yet or even the assurance of an agreement. The statement followed a Reuters report that Corel had received “multiple preliminary offers from private equity firms and strategic buyers” late Wednesday afternoon.

iPhone Developer Summit - Android Watch

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:39:00 EDT

On Monday the Federal Communications Commission approved the first Android phone, a 3G widget that High Tech Computer is making for T-Mobile called the Dream. There’s talk of pre-ordering next month with reputed pricing running anywhere from $150-$399, with availability conceivably in November.

Virtualization Conference & Expo - Corel May Get Sold

Fri, 22 Aug 2008 16:15:00 EDT

Salesforce.com's Stock Drops 15%

Thu, 21 Aug 2008 15:45:00 EDT

Salesforce.com, the king of SaaS, reported Q2 earnings of $10 million, eight cents a share, nearly triple its results last year on revenues up 49% to $263.1 million. The strong results Wednesday were roughly in line with expectations but the company’s stock dropped 15%. Oppenheimer blames weaker-than-expected deferred revenues that hint of a “meaningful slowdown.”

Cloud Computing Expo - PTO Denies Dell’s Trademark

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 22:15:00 EDT

If Dell is going to pursue its quixotic quest to trademark the expression “Cloud Computing,” it’s going to have to convince the US Patent and Trademark Office that the buzzword is neither merely descriptive (like, say, spotted pony) or generic and so “incapable of functioning as a source-identifier” for Dell’s services because that’s what the PTO called it in its latest communiqué to the company, a “non-final action” that denies its trademark application.

Microsoft To Funnel Up to $100M More to Novell

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 16:45:00 EDT

Microsoft is going to pump up to $100 million more into Novell for additional certificates that it will sell or give to customers to redeem for SUSE Linux support. Novell should get the money on November 1 right before the second anniversary of the widely loathed Microsoft-Novell pact that indemnifies SUSE users against infringing Microsoft patents under a so-called covenant not to sue and got the open source community’s knickers in a twist.

Appeals Denied, OOXML Inches Toward Apotheosis

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:30:00 EDT

ISO said Friday that the appeals made by Brazil, India, South Africa and Venezuela protesting the standardization of Microsoft’s Office Open XML (OOXML) file format hadn’t gone anywhere – it was unclear whether any of them had any standing anyway – but since they “failed to garner sufficient support” from the ISO/IEC technical committees, as ISO put it – the standards body is going to go ahead and publish OOXML as an ISO/IEC International Standard, ISO/IEC DIS 29500 – or it will provided another, effective appeal isn’t registered.

Virtualization Update: Microsoft Lightens Up on its Virtual Migration Rules

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 18:30:00 EDT

Microsoft Tuesday liberalized its virtual machine policies, as expected, and said that starting September 1 its big customers will be able to move Microsoft virtualized server applications between servers “in a server farm” as often as they want without paying additional licensing fees. The company is overturning its existing customer-irritating “90-day reassignment rule” that has restricted virtualized Microsoft applications to the physical servers they were assigned, allowing them be moved only every three months.

GraphOn Sues Google & YouTube for Patent Infringement

Tue, 19 Aug 2008 07:45:00 EDT

GraphOn, the old-line Citrix wannabe, has sued Google and its little friend YouTube in the Eastern District of Texas for patent infringement. That particular district court is partial to patent holders and their complaints. This one charges Google’s Base, AdWords, Blogger, Sites and YouTube online services with trespassing on four GraphOn patents, to wit Nos. 6,324,538 (the ‘538 patent), 6,850,940 (the ‘940 patent), 7,028,034 (the ‘034 patent) and 7,269,591 (the ‘591 patent).

Cloud Computing Expo - Lenovo To Field Netbook

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 23:00:00 EDT

Lenovo has gone into the netbook business with a one-inch-deep 2lb XP-based Atom IdeaPad S10 with a 10.2-inch screen. The company says it intends to add other models that target students. The widget can be had in black, white or glossy ruby red.

Cloud Computing Expo - Cloud Spotting

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 22:15:00 EDT

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.

Cloud Computing Expo - Schmidt Speaks

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 21:00:00 EDT

Jim Cramer’s been doing a stint on CNBC in the middle of the trading day and, being a Google booster, managed to entice Google’s usually standoffish CEO Eric Schmidt on the air the other day. Schmidt said Google’s stock wouldn’t split and that Google wouldn’t start issuing guidance (it would distract Googlers from “trying to change the world,” he said).

LinMin API Adds Bare Metal Provisioning All Around

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 20:45:00 EDT

A new API is supposed to integrate LinMin Bare Metal Provisioning 5.2 into environments that haven’t been able to do bare metal provisioning of Windows, Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu, CentOS, Fedora or Asianux on physical systems or virtual machines before. The rev also features single-command installation.

Virtualization Expo - Microsoft Schedules Virtualization Party To Spoil VMware’s

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 16:00:00 EDT

Microsoft is inviting its nearest and dearest – (and probably VMware’s nearest and dearest too) to a great one-day virtualization launch event on Monday September 8 in Bellevue, Washington. It’s the beginning of a six-month drumbeat.

Sun Nabs OEM for its VirtualBox Desktop Virtualization

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Sun has got multi-year OEM deals with Avanquest Software, Q-layer and Zenith InfoTech to move its bought-in cross-platform xVM VirtualBox widgetry. The stuff is free from Sun and runs multiple operating systems on the same desktop at the same time, which means OEMs can use virtual machines as self-contained distribution mechanisms for their solutions. Sun claims five million VirtualBox downloads since January 2007 although it only bought the stuff in February.

Intel Brands Nehalem

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:45:00 EDT

Intel Corporation says its upcoming Nehalem desktop chips, due to start rolling out in Q4, will be branded Intel Core processors. The first members of the new architecture family, including an Extreme Edition, will have a telltale “i7’ handle attached so they’ll officially be Intel Core i7 processors.

Virtualization Expo - New Release of VMware Lab Manager Announced

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 05:00:00 EDT

VMware has announced the pending availability of VMware Lab Manager 3, which is supposed to provide greater automation and control for IT lab environments. Software developers and QA engineers use VMware Lab to provision multi-VM environments and it’s also meant to give IT departments more control over policies. The new release supports multiple organizational units – like helpdesk operations, training organizations and sales teams – advanced networking capabilities, and tighter integration with VMware Infrastructure.

Cloud Computing - E7 Is Born

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 04:00:00 EDT

At least 16 or 17 months ahead of the appearance of Windows 7, the next generation of the operating system, Microsoft has set up a blog hosted by senior engineering managers Jon DeVaan and Steven Sinofsky to discuss the project and ostensibly get feedback.