IT News - Candid news for Developers & IT Pros

Mark Hurd’s Teflon Coating Chips

mog — Tue, 13 May 2008 23:23:16 -0400

AMD Whistles Up New Champions To Slay its Dragons

mog — Tue, 13 May 2008 15:33:52 -0400

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. The company also set up a newfangled centralized engineering operation that’s...

HP Tipped To Buy EDS To Level Playing Field with IBM: WSJ

mog — Mon, 12 May 2008 16:06:25 -0400

Hewlett-Packard is supposed to be thisclose 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 tomorrow.

RIM & Friends Hunt Mobile Apps

mog — Mon, 12 May 2008 15:39:19 -0400

With the announcement – but not the release – today of the first 3G Blackberry, the iPhone-offensive 9000 Bold, there is now a BlackBerry Partners Fund, a $150 million venture capital fund – the money’s in US greenbacks – set up by Research In Motion, Thomson Reuters, JLA Ventures and RBC Venture Partners to invest in mobile applications and services for the BlackBerry platform and -...

MySQL Backs Off Closed Source Plan

mog — Sat, 10 May 2008 12:17:35 -0400

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 predicably 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.

Altor Applies Network-Think to Virtual Security

mog — Sat, 10 May 2008 12:13:34 -0400

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...

AMD Wants To Depose 486 People in Intel Case

mog — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:22:29 -0400

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.”

Yahoo! How Like the Virgin Mary!

mog — Fri, 09 May 2008 11:16:57 -0400

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.

HP Labs Reaches Out to Schools

mog — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:32:53 -0400

HP has set up an Innovation Research Program to encourage colleges, universities and research institution to do joint research with HP Labs. It’s looking for proposals in information explosion, dynamic cloud services, content transformation, intelligent infrastructure and sustainability by June 18.

AMD Kills Montreal for Istanbul

mog — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:53:00 -0400

Borland Finally Sells Off CodeGear

mog — Wed, 07 May 2008 15:26:41 -0400

Federal Circuit To Hear Case That Could Stem Software Patents Tomorrow

mog — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:33:01 -0400

The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit en banc will hear 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...

Rackspace To Compete with Amazon’s S3

mog — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:49:43 -0400

Rackspace Hosting is going into competition with Amazon’s S3 Simple Storage Service through its Mosso unit, which just started privately beta testing its Internet-based storage scheme, CloudFS. CloudFS is aimed at developers and described as “infinitely scalable.”

Sun Flogs JavaFX at JavaOne

mog — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:07:52 -0400

Another Start-up, Another Desktop Virtualization Scheme

mog — Mon, 05 May 2008 14:13:22 -0400

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...

Yahoo Pays the Piper

mog — Mon, 05 May 2008 10:21:20 -0400

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...

Yahoo's Press Release

mog — Sat, 03 May 2008 22:55:43 -0400

Below is the press release Yahoo issued this evening after it rejected Microsoft's sweetened offer. Its stock, which was up Friday to close to $30 on the theory that the pair would agree on a friendly deal this weekend, is expected to be crushed Monday morning.

Microsoft Walks

mog — Sat, 03 May 2008 22:36:54 -0400

Microsoft has abandoned its pursuit of Yahoo after raising its bid by $5 billion to $33. Yahoo wanted $37 a share. Below is its press release, issued this evening, and a copy of the letter Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent to Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang.

Gluecode Creator Thinks He Can Take Google’s App Engine

mog — Fri, 02 May 2008 18:01:40 -0400

A Philippines-based Web 2.0 start-up called Morph Labs Inc 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.

Sun’s Quarter Sucked; Layoffs Planned

mog — Thu, 01 May 2008 18:42:21 -0400

Sun’s back in the red again after five profitable quarter and five years in the red after 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 trend that spread to its end-user business as the month progressed.

No Decision Yet: Ballmer

mog — Thu, 01 May 2008 15:51:37 -0400

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 find a way around his problem. His problem is money. He simply doesn’t want to pay what Yahoo wants.

Adobe Makes Flash & AIR Free for Mobile Widgets

mog — Thu, 01 May 2008 01:07:49 -0400

HP Labs Finds Way To Make Computers That Don’t Forget

mog — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 20:53:24 -0400

HP Labs says it’s found the missing link that would create computers that have memories that don’t forget, don’t need to boot up, consumer less power and associate information like a human brain. It says it’s proven the existence of a previously only theorized fourth fundamental circuit element in electrical engineering called a “memristor,” a combination of “memory...

Microsoft Willing To Sweeten the Deal

mog — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 17:36:15 -0400

Microsoft May Shattered the Silence Today: WSJ

mog — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 01:00:26 -0400