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.
Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, wants to be governor of California. At least that’s the interpretation given the fact that she’s suddenly severed all her board ties, stepping down as a director of Proctor & Gamble, Dreamworks Animation SKG and, of course, eBay. The official ex...
The reason Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been looking like a wraith is due to a mysterious new hormone imbalance that was hard to diagnose but now it has and Jobs expects to fatten up by summer. Jobs released a statement saying so Monday morning hours ahead of MacWorld opening apparently to...
Adobe and Intel plan to collaborate on porting Adobe’s Flash widgetry to Intel’s Media Processor CE 3100, a way to put Flash-enhanced web content and rich Flash applications on television. The chip is bound for cable set-top boxes, Blu-ray Disc players, digital TVs and retail-conne...
For reasons it won’t explain EMC has bought some of the assets of SourceLabs – what exactly it won’t say – and hired some of its people – who exactly it won’t comment on – for its opaque Cloud Infrastructure Business. EMC described the purchase as “very small.”
Michael Dell is going to try to turn a buck on the mortgage mess. He’s part of a consortium of seven private equity investors that signed a letter of intent with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) on New Year’s Eve to buy the failed IndyMac Bank, one of the accursed e...
New Year’s Eve, when folks in New York were bellying up to the bar to see out a really horrible year, Dell announced that it was reorganizing again in its search for an elixir for its sagging profits, depressed revenues, eroding market share and shrunken stock price in the midst of a...
Credit Suisse thinks the virtual PC market will be worth at least $1.5 billion by 2011, representing 25.6 million users or 5.7% of the professional desktop installed base.
Novell has pulled the plug on BrainShare – for 20 years its trademark user conference – which was scheduled for March in Salt Lake City. Novell chief marketing officer John Dragoon says on the company’s web site that people wouldn’t commit to coming because of cost restraints. ...
Former Intel CEO and industry demigod Andy Grove, still an Intel advisor, is pushing the company to go into the electric car battery business, according to the Wall Street Journal. There is little manufacturing capacity in the US, giving the edge to China and Japan, and effective batte...
Dell says it’s changing the way it packs its desktops and laptops for shipping to save upwards of $8 million over the next four years. It will cut out about 20 million pounds of packaging material, roughly 10% of what it uses, saving about 150,000 trees. It will also use more recycle...
The latest in a long line of Yahoo execs to hit the trail is Joseph Siino, the guy who built its IP department. He’s decided to try his hand monetizing patents, but hasn’t said where yet. In his farewell e-mail to the troops, he claimed Yahoo’s IP is worth billions of dollars.
Google has disappeared from the Top 20 list of companies trusted with privacy in TRUSTe’s fifth annual survey. American Express came in first followed by eBay (2), IBM (3), HP (6), Apple (8), Intuit (12), Yahoo (14) and Facebook (15).
Sun is going to shut its plant in Linlithgow, Scotland, its only factory outside the US, throwing about 140 people on the street. The move is part of its plan to cut 6,000 jobs, roughly 18% of its workforce.
After the curtain closes in January, Apple will be pulling out of the annual IDG-own Macworld that’s been a touchstone for the Apple-fancying press and the company’s fans. CEO Steve Jobs is not going to show up this time, leading to speculation about the state of his health. There...
Google, which made Mozilla rich supporting Firefox because Google was its default search engine, has dropped the browser as the default in its so-called Google Pack software collection in favor of its own shiny new out-of-beta Chrome browser. The freebie one-download Google Pack includ...
Google has denied it, but the Wall Street Journal hasn't retracted a reportedly documented story it ran Monday saying that Google has been chatting up cable and phone companies trying to get "a fast lane for its own content," a tactic that puts the lie to Google's publicly ostensible "...
Yahoo up and said the other day that starting next month it will anonymize any personal user data stemming from searches, page views, ad views, page clicks and ad clicks in 90 days – a broader policy than anybody else’s got although how effective the scrubbing will be is unclear. A...
Three quarters after cutting the OEM deal, Dell has started delivering PAN, Egenera’s data center virtualization and management software, in North America. The Egenera widgetry has been parlayed into a factory-integrated, turnkey solution delivered on Dell servers and storage, meant ...
The Linux Foundation has named Linux kernel developer Theodore Ts’o CTO, replacing Markus Rex, who’s gone back home to Novell. Ts’o is currently a Linux Foundation fellow, a position he’s had for the last year. He was the first North American kernel developer. Since 2001, Ts’...
Sun has put out its promised UltraSparc T2 Reference Design Kit (RDK), meant to accelerate the design, development and testing of T2 processor-based embedded systems designs. T2 has eight cores and eight threads per core, and boasts one of the industry’s highest energy efficiencies p...
Red Hat has started a new software maintenance service called Extended Update Support (EUS) that’s supposed to save bigger customers money if they standardize on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment, like, say, RHEL 5.2, for up to 18 months, which, Red Hat says, is three times long...
The openSUSE Project has hit release 11.1, the latest version of its free open source Linux distribution and the widgetry that the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 will be based on. This time there's a new license that eliminates the EULA. The project has removed proprietary so...
Ah, the Christmas spirit of “peace on earth, goodwill to men” must be wafting over Redmond, Washington. Microsoft said Tuesday that to – wait, lemme quote – “help foster interoperability among office productivity applications,” it’s gone and published documentation detail...
Novell has made Roger Levy, the head of its Open Platform Solutions (OPS) unit, SVP of strategic development and told him to focus on a cross-business strategy and the data center, end-user computing, and identity and security management markets. Meanwhile, Markus Rex, who used to be t...
The possibility of Lenovo acquiring Brazil’s biggest PC maker Positivo Informatica SA has come naught. Lenovo told Reuters that the companies “agree that given the current economic turmoil and uncertainties, it is not feasible to reach an agreement on a transaction at this time.”...
The Indian Express Group, one of subcontinent’s better known media firms, says it’s migrated from Novell Netware 3.12 operating system to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to scale while keeping costs in line. It’s now using SAP on Red Hat using Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) 10...
The strengthening dollar played havoc with Oracle’s fiscal second quarter, which spanned the ugly months of September through November when the recession took hold. Oracle said that if the dollar hadn’t strengthened GAPP earnings would have been up 11%, software revenues would have...
Adobe’s AIR for Linux, the runtime engine that supports rich Internet apps (RIAs), has caught up with its Windows and Mac siblings. The company has released AIR 1.5 for Linux, the first time the Linux desktop variant has made it as a production-grade, Adobe-supported release. And now...
Sun’s unsung Services unit, while not an EDS or IBM Global Services, is a $5.2 billion-a-year business and profitable, a word that rarely appears in the same sentence with Sun. Anyway, it’s packaged up a trio of so-called go-to-market Rapid Solutions targeted at Web 2.0 build-out, ...
It’s hired Mark Beckford, the architect and original driver of Intel’s “World Ahead” program that championed the Classmate PC laptop, as VP, global business development. Beckford contends that schools in developing nations aren’t ready for 1:1 computer education, and the kids...
Zoho says that web apps created using its Creator widgetry can be automatically turned into programs that will run on Google’s Python-constricted App Engine. App Engine, remember, only supports code written in Python and a particular species of Python at that. Now Zoho is saying you ...
Sun Wednesday updated its free desktop virtualization software, xVM VirtualBox, to rev 2.1. The new cut is supposed to significantly improve graphics and network performance, configuration is supposed to be easier, and it supports the latest Intel processors. VirtualBox lets users crea...
On Sunday Radio Shack started dangling a $99.99 Atom-based netbook from Acer in front of the American consumer, becoming the first major US retailer to cut that deep. To qualify for that price, customers have to sign a two-year AT&T DataConnect mobile broadband service agreement. Said ...
Red Hat is on its way to supporting Google Web Toolkit (GWT) as part of its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform subscription. GWT is the open source project that helps Java developers build AJAX web applications for any browser, something traditional UI technologies for Java EE can't...
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has sued Cisco for copyright infringement. It says Cisco’s Linksys division uses GNU code and won’t honor the GPL 2 and LGPL 2 and 2.1 licenses that the GNU software’s distributed under and give customers the source code to the Cisco-modified em...
EMC Tuesday tapped Harel Kodesh to be president of its cloud infrastructure and services business, reporting to EMC capo Joe Tucci. Kodesh will also serve as the CEO of Decho, the subsidiary EMC recently created to focus on personal information management in the cloud. Decho includes M...
Only a month ago Gartner predicted that chip sales would be up 0.2% this year and drop 2.2% next year. Now it’s looked in its crystal ball again and foresees two years of back-to-back revenue decline, something that’s never happened before in the semiconductor industry, where year-...
Last week the name of Arun Sarin, the former head of Vodafone, was being bandied about as a possible replacement for Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang. However, according to the Financial Times, Sarin has decided he doesn’t want the job. The paper said, “It is understood that one reason for his...
Betcha IBM is worried that Amazon is gonna wind up owning the cloud. Betcha other companies are worried about that too. Amazon said Wednesday that it has extended EC2, its Elastic Compute Cloud, to Europe. European developers and businesses can now run their EC2 instances in what Amazo...
Google just did a very un-Googley thing. It pushed Chrome out of the beta nest. Chrome's only been in beta since September 2, something like a hundred days. And Google is famous for keeping widgetry in beta until the beta label turns yellow with age. Gmail, for instance, has been in be...
Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, wants to be governor of California. At least that’s the interpretation given the fact that she’s suddenly severed all her board ties, stepping down as a director of Proctor & Gamble, Dreamworks Animation SKG and, of course, eBay. The official ex...
The reason Apple CEO Steve Jobs has been looking like a wraith is due to a mysterious new hormone imbalance that was hard to diagnose but now it has and Jobs expects to fatten up by summer. Jobs released a statement saying so Monday morning hours ahead of MacWorld opening apparently to...
Adobe and Intel plan to collaborate on porting Adobe’s Flash widgetry to Intel’s Media Processor CE 3100, a way to put Flash-enhanced web content and rich Flash applications on television. The chip is bound for cable set-top boxes, Blu-ray Disc players, digital TVs and retail-conne...
For reasons it won’t explain EMC has bought some of the assets of SourceLabs – what exactly it won’t say – and hired some of its people – who exactly it won’t comment on – for its opaque Cloud Infrastructure Business. EMC described the purchase as “very small.” 
Michael Dell is going to try to turn a buck on the mortgage mess. He’s part of a consortium of seven private equity investors that signed a letter of intent with the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) on New Year’s Eve to buy the failed IndyMac Bank, one of the accursed e...
New Year’s Eve, when folks in New York were bellying up to the bar to see out a really horrible year, Dell announced that it was reorganizing again in its search for an elixir for its sagging profits, depressed revenues, eroding market share and shrunken stock price in the midst of a...
Credit Suisse thinks the virtual PC market will be worth at least $1.5 billion by 2011, representing 25.6 million users or 5.7% of the professional desktop installed base.
Novell has pulled the plug on BrainShare – for 20 years its trademark user conference – which was scheduled for March in Salt Lake City. Novell chief marketing officer John Dragoon says on the company’s web site that people wouldn’t commit to coming because of cost restraints. ...
Former Intel CEO and industry demigod Andy Grove, still an Intel advisor, is pushing the company to go into the electric car battery business, according to the Wall Street Journal. There is little manufacturing capacity in the US, giving the edge to China and Japan, and effective batte...
Dell says it’s changing the way it packs its desktops and laptops for shipping to save upwards of $8 million over the next four years. It will cut out about 20 million pounds of packaging material, roughly 10% of what it uses, saving about 150,000 trees. It will also use more recycle...
The latest in a long line of Yahoo execs to hit the trail is Joseph Siino, the guy who built its IP department. He’s decided to try his hand monetizing patents, but hasn’t said where yet. In his farewell e-mail to the troops, he claimed Yahoo’s IP is worth billions of dollars.
Google has disappeared from the Top 20 list of companies trusted with privacy in TRUSTe’s fifth annual survey. American Express came in first followed by eBay (2), IBM (3), HP (6), Apple (8), Intuit (12), Yahoo (14) and Facebook (15).
Sun is going to shut its plant in Linlithgow, Scotland, its only factory outside the US, throwing about 140 people on the street. The move is part of its plan to cut 6,000 jobs, roughly 18% of its workforce.
After the curtain closes in January, Apple will be pulling out of the annual IDG-own Macworld that’s been a touchstone for the Apple-fancying press and the company’s fans. CEO Steve Jobs is not going to show up this time, leading to speculation about the state of his health. There...
Google, which made Mozilla rich supporting Firefox because Google was its default search engine, has dropped the browser as the default in its so-called Google Pack software collection in favor of its own shiny new out-of-beta Chrome browser. The freebie one-download Google Pack includ...
Google has denied it, but the Wall Street Journal hasn't retracted a reportedly documented story it ran Monday saying that Google has been chatting up cable and phone companies trying to get "a fast lane for its own content," a tactic that puts the lie to Google's publicly ostensible "...
Yahoo up and said the other day that starting next month it will anonymize any personal user data stemming from searches, page views, ad views, page clicks and ad clicks in 90 days – a broader policy than anybody else’s got although how effective the scrubbing will be is unclear. A...
Three quarters after cutting the OEM deal, Dell has started delivering PAN, Egenera’s data center virtualization and management software, in North America. The Egenera widgetry has been parlayed into a factory-integrated, turnkey solution delivered on Dell servers and storage, meant ...
The Linux Foundation has named Linux kernel developer Theodore Ts’o CTO, replacing Markus Rex, who’s gone back home to Novell. Ts’o is currently a Linux Foundation fellow, a position he’s had for the last year. He was the first North American kernel developer. Since 2001, Ts’...
Sun has put out its promised UltraSparc T2 Reference Design Kit (RDK), meant to accelerate the design, development and testing of T2 processor-based embedded systems designs. T2 has eight cores and eight threads per core, and boasts one of the industry’s highest energy efficiencies p...
Red Hat has started a new software maintenance service called Extended Update Support (EUS) that’s supposed to save bigger customers money if they standardize on a Red Hat Enterprise Linux environment, like, say, RHEL 5.2, for up to 18 months, which, Red Hat says, is three times long...
The openSUSE Project has hit release 11.1, the latest version of its free open source Linux distribution and the widgetry that the upcoming SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 will be based on. This time there's a new license that eliminates the EULA. The project has removed proprietary so...
Ah, the Christmas spirit of “peace on earth, goodwill to men” must be wafting over Redmond, Washington. Microsoft said Tuesday that to – wait, lemme quote – “help foster interoperability among office productivity applications,” it’s gone and published documentation detail...
Novell has made Roger Levy, the head of its Open Platform Solutions (OPS) unit, SVP of strategic development and told him to focus on a cross-business strategy and the data center, end-user computing, and identity and security management markets. Meanwhile, Markus Rex, who used to be t...
The possibility of Lenovo acquiring Brazil’s biggest PC maker Positivo Informatica SA has come naught. Lenovo told Reuters that the companies “agree that given the current economic turmoil and uncertainties, it is not feasible to reach an agreement on a transaction at this time.”...
The Indian Express Group, one of subcontinent’s better known media firms, says it’s migrated from Novell Netware 3.12 operating system to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 to scale while keeping costs in line. It’s now using SAP on Red Hat using Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) 10...
The strengthening dollar played havoc with Oracle’s fiscal second quarter, which spanned the ugly months of September through November when the recession took hold. Oracle said that if the dollar hadn’t strengthened GAPP earnings would have been up 11%, software revenues would have...
Adobe’s AIR for Linux, the runtime engine that supports rich Internet apps (RIAs), has caught up with its Windows and Mac siblings. The company has released AIR 1.5 for Linux, the first time the Linux desktop variant has made it as a production-grade, Adobe-supported release. And now...
Zoho says that web apps created using its Creator widgetry can be automatically turned into programs that will run on Google’s Python-constricted App Engine. App Engine, remember, only supports code written in Python and a particular species of Python at that. Now Zoho is saying you ...
On Sunday Radio Shack started dangling a $99.99 Atom-based netbook from Acer in front of the American consumer, becoming the first major US retailer to cut that deep. To qualify for that price, customers have to sign a two-year AT&T DataConnect mobile broadband service agreement. Said ...
Red Hat is on its way to supporting Google Web Toolkit (GWT) as part of its JBoss Enterprise Application Platform subscription. GWT is the open source project that helps Java developers build AJAX web applications for any browser, something traditional UI technologies for Java EE can't...
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has sued Cisco for copyright infringement. It says Cisco’s Linksys division uses GNU code and won’t honor the GPL 2 and LGPL 2 and 2.1 licenses that the GNU software’s distributed under and give customers the source code to the Cisco-modified em...
EMC Tuesday tapped Harel Kodesh to be president of its cloud infrastructure and services business, reporting to EMC capo Joe Tucci. Kodesh will also serve as the CEO of Decho, the subsidiary EMC recently created to focus on personal information management in the cloud. Decho includes M...
Only a month ago Gartner predicted that chip sales would be up 0.2% this year and drop 2.2% next year. Now it’s looked in its crystal ball again and foresees two years of back-to-back revenue decline, something that’s never happened before in the semiconductor industry, where year-...
Betcha IBM is worried that Amazon is gonna wind up owning the cloud. Betcha other companies are worried about that too. Amazon said Wednesday that it has extended EC2, its Elastic Compute Cloud, to Europe. European developers and businesses can now run their EC2 instances in what Amazo...
Google just did a very un-Googley thing. It pushed Chrome out of the beta nest. Chrome's only been in beta since September 2, something like a hundred days. And Google is famous for keeping widgetry in beta until the beta label turns yellow with age. Gmail, for instance, has been in be...
