Maureen O'Gara is the Virtualization News Desk editor of SYS-CON Media. She is the publisher of famous "Billygrams" and the editor-in-chief of "Client/Server News" for more than a decade. One of the most respected technology reporters in the business, Maureen can be reached by email at maureen(at)sys-con.com or paperboy(at)g2news.com, and by phone at 516 759-7025.
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 ...
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 g...
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 ...
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 ...
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.
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...
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 gu...
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-com...
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 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 mach...
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 Int...
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 department...
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.
While everybody is really waiting for Dell to push into the small and cheap market and go mano a mano with the Asus Eee, Dell unveiled the strategic redesign of its Latitude and Precision business laptops, a move that has to prove Dell’s back in the game or its heralded turnaround wi...
Yahoo has opened up its Fire Eagle platform – in private beta since March – to all and sundry. It gives users a place to store and manage information about their location, and offers developers protocols for updating or accessing that information.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Wednesday overturned a year-old San Francisco district court decision that deprived the aggrieved plaintiff in a dispute over open source software governed by the Artistic License of the right to sue for copyright infringement ...
Rackspace Hosting, the rare high-tech IPO these days and a chi-chi cloud purveyor at that, failed to hold up its end after it debuted Friday in a Dutch auction and dropped 20% to $10.01 from its offering price of $12.50, the low end of its $12-$16 range. Fifteen million shares were sol...
Speculation is making the rounds again that AMD’s long-promised asset lite strategy will see the company split in two: a chip development operation under AMD’s new CEO Dirk Meyer and a manufacturing entity.
Google has waded into the encryption business with an open source cross-platform toolkit called Keyczar that’s supposed to make it easier for ISVs to put cryptography in their applications. It says Keyczar supports both encryption and authentication with both symmetric and asymmetric...
Google’s Gmail fell over and died Monday, serving up only a temporary 502 error message to both free and paid accounts and bringing life as they know it to a grinding halt for a lot of people – including Google corporate.
Nvidia fiscal Q2 revenues were down and that’s why it lost $120.9 million, 22 cents a share, in the second quarter.
Well, that and the $198 million one-time charge it took to cover costs stemming from those previously admitted defective notebook chips coupled with – its CEO sai...
Elastra, a 40-customer SMB-directed start-up that provides a legacy-embracing configuration management service for Amazon Web Services (AWS) – your basic in-a-click virtual deployment, monitoring and accounting beginning with RDBMSes like MySQL, Postgres and EnterpriseDB – has pick...
A time bomb reportedly left over from the beta of VMware’s two-week-old update to ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 (Update 2) caused product licenses to expire yesterday. It also happened with a patch to ESX 3.5 or ESXi 3.5 Update 2.
Google has told the SEC that its billion-dollar acquisition of 5% of AOL, made in 2005 to prevent Microsoft from doing it and giving AOL a $20 billion over-the-top valuation, “may be impaired,” accounting-speak for it ain’t worth what it was (if it ever was).
VMware, which seems to be as far from open source as you can get these days, has joined the Linux Foundation, promising to make more contributions to the Linux community. It's cultivating the Linux crowd as adoption of Linux expands as a result of its position as a platform for cloud c...
Rackable Systems is going to include IBM’s BladeCenter servers in its ICE Cube modular data center offering, its idea of what you can do with a shipping container. Under its deal with IBM, BladeCenter T or HT systems will be the only blade server platforms available for custom ICE Cu...
Starting with a clean piece of paper, Microsoft is having a go at building a non-Windows operating system. Code named Midori, it may never be released but if Midori isn’t heir to Windows Microsoft better have something else like it up its sleeve.
AT&T broke into the cloud business Tuesday with the “global launch” of what it calls AT&T Synaptic Hosting and describes as a next-generation utility computing service with managed networking, security and storage for businesses. It’s talking about a complete pay-as-you-go turnke...
Yahoo, HP and Intel are going to do cloud research together using a global, multi-data center, open source Cloud Computing Test Bed bigger than anything put together for such a purpose before, they said. The whole testbed could potentially scale to 24,000 cores, 18 terabytes of memory ...
Industry gadfly John Dvorak is advancing a theory culled from the blogosphere that Microsoft wants Yahoo for some all-important patent or another that would give it an edge in cloud computing, SaaS and portable search advertising.
Microsoft hugger Carl Icahn is now officially on the Yahoo board. Under the deal that ended his proxy fight, two more directors from Icahn's original "oust-the-incumbents" proxy slate are supposed to be elected by mid-month. The list was supposed to include ex-AOL CEO Jonathan Miller b...
Symantec is building out its endpoint virtualization widgetry by acquiring nSuite Technologies, a privately held virtual workspace management company that has specialized in hospitals and healthcare, on undisclosed terms.
The buy will give Symantec presentation virtualization and con...
In an internal e-mail leaked to Ars Technica, Apple CEO Steve Jobs admitted that MobileMe, Apple’s panned flirtation with the cloud, was launched prematurely and was “not up to Apple’s standards.” Remember? Even the Apple-loving Walt Mossberg over at the Wall Street Journal bra...
IBM, Canonical, Novell, Red Hat and the distributions’ hardware partners are ganging up on Microsoft, intending to push a Microsoft-free desktop alternative involving Linux, Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony. They think they see an auspicious constellation of stars in the sky – like P...
Ahead of Siggraph next week Intel decided to lift its skirt and pass around the paper it’ll read there describing Larrabee, its new hydra-headed x86 graphics accelerator architecture meant to take on Nvidia and AMD’s graphics arm ATI in late ’09-early 2010. The operative word tha...
Dell, it appears, put in its papers with the US Patent and Trademark Office in March of last year to trademark the buzzword “Cloud Computing.” Its application quietly passed through the Opposition Stage a few months ago unopposed and thus it is now at the point that it’s been all...
Turns out the vote that overwhelmingly returned Yahoo’s board to office last Friday by a surprise three-to-one margin was seriously miscounted. The official tabulation claimed that CEO Jerry Yang got 85.4% of the vote (14.6% withheld) and Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock got 79.5% (20.5% w...
According to Mercury Research by way of Lehman Brothers AMD lost share in both desktops and notebooks in Q2 measured in both units and revenue. Intel was up two points to 87.5% in notebook units aided and abetted by AMD's slower-than-expected Puma ramp, which took 6% off of AMD's noteb...
There hasn't been a PowerPC-based computer since Apple abandoned the dingus and bolted to Intel, a move that did wonders for Apple's volumes. Now a Mountain View start-up called CherryPal is about to introduce a $249 Debian-based desktop that's about the size of a dime store paperback ...
The surprise three-to-one margin that overwhelmingly returned Yahoo’s board to office last Friday at the shareholders meeting proved too big for Capital Research & Management to swallow. It’s demanding a recount, according to the Wall Street Journal blog All Things Digital, which h...
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 ...
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 g...
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 ...
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.
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...
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 gu...
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-com...
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 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 mach...
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 Int...
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 department...
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. 
While everybody is really waiting for Dell to push into the small and cheap market and go mano a mano with the Asus Eee, Dell unveiled the strategic redesign of its Latitude and Precision business laptops, a move that has to prove Dell’s back in the game or its heralded turnaround wi...
Yahoo has opened up its Fire Eagle platform – in private beta since March – to all and sundry. It gives users a place to store and manage information about their location, and offers developers protocols for updating or accessing that information.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit Wednesday overturned a year-old San Francisco district court decision that deprived the aggrieved plaintiff in a dispute over open source software governed by the Artistic License of the right to sue for copyright infringement ...
Rackspace Hosting, the rare high-tech IPO these days and a chi-chi cloud purveyor at that, failed to hold up its end after it debuted Friday in a Dutch auction and dropped 20% to $10.01 from its offering price of $12.50, the low end of its $12-$16 range. Fifteen million shares were sol...
Speculation is making the rounds again that AMD’s long-promised asset lite strategy will see the company split in two: a chip development operation under AMD’s new CEO Dirk Meyer and a manufacturing entity.
Google has waded into the encryption business with an open source cross-platform toolkit called Keyczar that’s supposed to make it easier for ISVs to put cryptography in their applications. It says Keyczar supports both encryption and authentication with both symmetric and asymmetric...
Google’s Gmail fell over and died Monday, serving up only a temporary 502 error message to both free and paid accounts and bringing life as they know it to a grinding halt for a lot of people – including Google corporate. 
Nvidia fiscal Q2 revenues were down and that’s why it lost $120.9 million, 22 cents a share, in the second quarter.
Well, that and the $198 million one-time charge it took to cover costs stemming from those previously admitted defective notebook chips coupled with – its CEO sai...
Elastra, a 40-customer SMB-directed start-up that provides a legacy-embracing configuration management service for Amazon Web Services (AWS) – your basic in-a-click virtual deployment, monitoring and accounting beginning with RDBMSes like MySQL, Postgres and EnterpriseDB – has pick...
A time bomb reportedly left over from the beta of VMware’s two-week-old update to ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5 (Update 2) caused product licenses to expire yesterday. It also happened with a patch to ESX 3.5 or ESXi 3.5 Update 2.
Google has told the SEC that its billion-dollar acquisition of 5% of AOL, made in 2005 to prevent Microsoft from doing it and giving AOL a $20 billion over-the-top valuation, “may be impaired,” accounting-speak for it ain’t worth what it was (if it ever was). 
VMware, which seems to be as far from open source as you can get these days, has joined the Linux Foundation, promising to make more contributions to the Linux community. It's cultivating the Linux crowd as adoption of Linux expands as a result of its position as a platform for cloud c...
AT&T broke into the cloud business Tuesday with the “global launch” of what it calls AT&T Synaptic Hosting and describes as a next-generation utility computing service with managed networking, security and storage for businesses. It’s talking about a complete pay-as-you-go turnke...
Yahoo, HP and Intel are going to do cloud research together using a global, multi-data center, open source Cloud Computing Test Bed bigger than anything put together for such a purpose before, they said. The whole testbed could potentially scale to 24,000 cores, 18 terabytes of memory ...
Industry gadfly John Dvorak is advancing a theory culled from the blogosphere that Microsoft wants Yahoo for some all-important patent or another that would give it an edge in cloud computing, SaaS and portable search advertising.
Microsoft hugger Carl Icahn is now officially on the Yahoo board. Under the deal that ended his proxy fight, two more directors from Icahn's original "oust-the-incumbents" proxy slate are supposed to be elected by mid-month. The list was supposed to include ex-AOL CEO Jonathan Miller b...
Symantec is building out its endpoint virtualization widgetry by acquiring nSuite Technologies, a privately held virtual workspace management company that has specialized in hospitals and healthcare, on undisclosed terms.
The buy will give Symantec presentation virtualization and con...
IBM, Canonical, Novell, Red Hat and the distributions’ hardware partners are ganging up on Microsoft, intending to push a Microsoft-free desktop alternative involving Linux, Lotus Notes and Lotus Symphony. They think they see an auspicious constellation of stars in the sky – like P...
Turns out the vote that overwhelmingly returned Yahoo’s board to office last Friday by a surprise three-to-one margin was seriously miscounted. The official tabulation claimed that CEO Jerry Yang got 85.4% of the vote (14.6% withheld) and Yahoo chairman Roy Bostock got 79.5% (20.5% w...
According to Mercury Research by way of Lehman Brothers AMD lost share in both desktops and notebooks in Q2 measured in both units and revenue. Intel was up two points to 87.5% in notebook units aided and abetted by AMD's slower-than-expected Puma ramp, which took 6% off of AMD's noteb...
There hasn't been a PowerPC-based computer since Apple abandoned the dingus and bolted to Intel, a move that did wonders for Apple's volumes. Now a Mountain View start-up called CherryPal is about to introduce a $249 Debian-based desktop that's about the size of a dime store paperback ...
The surprise three-to-one margin that overwhelmingly returned Yahoo’s board to office last Friday at the shareholders meeting proved too big for Capital Research & Management to swallow. It’s demanding a recount, according to the Wall Street Journal blog All Things Digital, which h...
