8 February 2006 Technology News

last SG · 2006-02-09T09:55:45+00:00

Lost an IPod or Wallet? Look for It Online BOSTON - Maureen Silliman felt her empty pocket and gulped: Her new $300 iPod must have bounced out as she ran t...

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How to value ratings with DVR delay?

Would the opening greeting on "Saturday Night Live" sound as compelling if it began "Live plus 24 hours from New York" or "Live plus seven days from New York"?

That is the multibillion-dollar question being asked on Madison Avenue as agencies and advertisers consider the implications of new data from Nielsen Media Research on television viewing in households with TiVos and other types of digital video recorders.

Late in December, Nielsen, part of VNU, started distributing its ratings information in three versions: live, the traditional way television is watched; live plus 24 hours, counting how many people who own DVR's played back shows within a day of recording them; and live plus seven days, counting playback within a week of recording.

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Bill Graham's rock archives stream online

Some of rock's most intriguing content is now in cyberspace via the Wolfgang's Vault Web site. The memorabilia seller offers treasures from the stash of promoter Bill Graham, programmer of San Francisco's legendary Fillmore, who died in 1991.

A 75-song playlist culled from 7,000 to 8,000 vintage audio and video concert recordings made between 1966 and 1999 began streaming on the Wolfgang's Vault Web site Feb. 8, at no cost to consumers. The owner of the Graham archive is optimistic that some of the seminal performances will make it to retailers' shelves as CDs and DVDs by year's end.

San Francisco-based Wolfgang's Vault sells authentic Graham concert memorabilia from such acts as Johnny Cash, Miles Davis, Santana, Jefferson Airplane, the Rolling Stones, U2, Tom Petty, Jimi Hendrix and the Who.

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You've got (certified) mail!

Saying they want to cut down on the glut of spam and phishing attacks aimed at their millions of users, America Online and Yahoo are turning to a controversial service offered by a company called Goodmail Systems, which has been likened to an electronic postage stamp provider.

The service gives preferential treatment to companies that pay a fraction of a cent per e-mail to ensure that their messages bypass spam filters and get through to the intended recipients. The companies agree to send e-mail only to recipients who are willing to accept the e-mail.

The business model not only challenges the notion of free flow of information upon which e-mail has thrived for more than a decade, but is prompting criticism from advertisers and antispam groups who say it amounts to extortion and poses a threat to legitimate e-mail messages from senders who don't agree to pay, without really decreasing spam.

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HP phases out group for emerging markets

Hewlett-Packard has disbanded a group dedicated to creating technology for emerging nations, though the company says it will continue to develop products for this market.

The Emerging Markets Solutions Group began in 2002, when many multinational companies were beginning to state that their growth in the coming decades would have to come from places like India, China and Africa. In these regions, the penetration of PCs and other IT technologies is low, but the potential demand is high.

Selling technology into these regions, however, remains a challenge because of low per-capita income, comparatively lower education levels and inadequate electrical infrastructure.

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Maker of unconventional desktops calls it quits

Orion Multisystems, which marketed workstations with up to 96 processors, has closed its doors.

The company had actually been experiencing increasing sales, according to founder and CEO Colin Hunter in an interview. The company, however, ran out of money. As a result, Orion executed an arrangement, for the benefit of creditors, to sell its intellectual property and assets.

"We hit a tree on takeoff. We didn't plow into the ground," he said.

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CSFB invests in Azul, buys Java product

Financial services powerhouse Credit Suisse has invested an undisclosed amount in Azul Systems and purchased its specialized computing systems that create a centralized pool of computing power for Java server software. The Mountain View, Calif.-based start-up, which announced the move Tuesday, sells hardware that unburdens large numbers of systems running Java application server.

"The fact that Credit Suisse led a significant investment round in Azul Systems demonstrates our belief in, and support of, the kinds of solutions that Azul is bringing to Wall Street," said Alan Freudenstein, a Credit Suisse managing director, in a press release.

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Hardware market awaits HP, Dell quarterly earnings

Back-to-back earnings releases from PC industry titans Dell and Hewlett-Packard this week will help provide a clearer picture of the health of the PC and server markets.

The two bitter rivals are on an odd fiscal-year schedule that has them reporting earnings about a month after most other technology companies. On Wednesday, HP plans to report first fiscal quarter 2006 earnings, which are expected to keep Chief Executive Officer Mark Hurd's Wall Street honeymoon going for at least another quarter. Dell, on the other hand, needs solid fourth-quarter numbers Thursday to end a pattern of disappointing earnings.

Analysts surveyed by Thomson First Call expect HP to post revenue of $22.5 billion and earnings per share of 44 cents, up 5 percent and 19 percent respectively from the same period last year. Dell's targets are revenue of $14.8 billion and earnings per share of 41 cents, up 10 percent and 11 percent respectively from last year.

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Open-source chronicles: Oracle buys, Gentoo founder flies

It's a season of comings and goings. Oracle acquires one company and is said to be looking at more; Microsoft loses a Linux luminary but makes a deal with a start-up.

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HP, Novell sign new open-source agreement

Hewlett-Packard penned a new open-source agreement with Novell to offer a Linux package on HP servers. The package includes integrated open-source solutions, technical software and proactive service options that are certified on HP ProLiant servers and BladeSystem technologies, HP said in a statement.

By obtaining the Enterprise Linux 8-License Value Pack, HP becomes the only major hardware vendor to offer the Linux license package for one, two or four-process servers. The offering will lower the cost per central processing unit, the company said.

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BEA open sources Java data-access tool

Infrastructure software provider BEA Systems said Tuesday that it will release a Java data-access development tool it acquired from SolarMetric to an open-source foundation later this year.

SolarMetric, a 13-person company that BEA bought in November of last year, built development tools to make it easier to tap into relational data when writing Java programs. The software, called BEA Kodo, complies with the Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 standard, which is expected to be finalized by midyear. BEA will release a large portion of the Kodo software to a project, to be called Open JPA, under the Apache Software open-source license. BEA has not yet said where the Open JPA project will be, but the company expects to release the code and decide on a place to house the project around the time that the EJB 3.0 standard is finalized, said Neelan Choksi, senior director of product marketing at BEA and former president of SolarMetric.

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Vignette names new CEO

Vignette has named Michael A. Aviles as its new CEO, effective immediately, the company announced Tuesday. Aviles formerly served as CEO of Austin, Texas-based Activant Solutions, a software and IT services provider. He'll also serve as president of Vignette.

Aviles replaces Thomas Hogan, who left the content management company last month to oversee Hewlett-Packards' Technology Solutions Group.

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[url=http://news.com.com/Sun+releases+Sparc+specs+to+lure+Linux/2100-7344_3-6039110.html]Sun releases Sparc specs to lure Linux

SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Microsystems fulfilled a pledge Tuesday to release UltraSparc chip details in an effort to make it easier to bring Linux and versions of BSD Unix to its systems.

In addition, Sun President Jonathan Schwartz announced that the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company will use the General Public License (GPL) to govern the release of the chip design itself.

"Open source is not just about software. Freedom is not just about software. It's going to come to hardware, and we're going to drive that," Schwartz said in a speech at the Open Source Business Conference here.

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Gentoo Linux founder quits Microsoft

Daniel Robbins, the founder and former chief architect of the Gentoo Linux project, has quit his job at Microsoft after only eight months, the software giant has confirmed.

Last May, Robbins made the unusual switch from being a well-known member of the free software community to becoming a paid employee of Microsoft, which is one of free and open-source software's biggest critics. He worked under Bill Hilf, who runs Microsoft's Linux and Open Source Software Lab, and had an "educational" role within the company.

Robbins told ZDNet UK in an e-mail Monday that he decided to leave because he was not able to use all his technical skills in his role.

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Oracle snags open-source database company

Oracle said on Tuesday that it acquired open-source database company Sleepycat Software for an undisclosed sum.

The database giant said Sleepycat's open-source Berkeley DB database will complement Oracle's existing line of closed-source databases for embedding within applications. The products differ from Oracle's flagship enterprise database software used for general business systems.

The purchase of Sleepycat, which has been rumored for weeks, gives Oracle another open-source product to accompany its proprietary database offerings. At an investor conference last week, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison reiterated the company's strategy to generate revenue from a combination of open-source and proprietary software.

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Analyst firm offers rosy view of Itanium

The Itanium processor has had a rocky debut in the more than 11 years since Intel and Hewlett-Packard first announced the chip alliance, but a major analyst firm says things are looking up.

Itanium market awareness is high, not only among the HP server customers who would be expected to know of the processor but also among others, according to a February report from IDC based on a survey of 501 computer system managers at U.S. companies with at least 200 employees.

"Given the colorful history of product development and the slower-than-expected ramp of Itanium server sales, we had frankly expected that awareness of the platform would be spotty and that customer consideration and intent of purchase would be very low. In fact, we found just the opposite," IDC said. "The current market perceptions of Itanium-based servers are quite positive."

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IBM chip architect guns for gigahertz

The gigahertz race is back on, and IBM's Brad McCredie is lacing up his shoes.

Chipmakers have found it harder to kick up a processor's clock speed while actually getting more useful work out of a chip and avoiding inordinate electricity consumption. As a result, Intel, Sun Microsystems and Advanced Micro Devices have begun emphasizing other features--for example, squeezing multiple processing engines, called cores, onto a single slice of silicon or executing many instruction sequences, called threads, simultaneously.

But IBM announced last week at the International Solid State Circuits Convention that its forthcoming Power6 processor will run at least at 4GHz--the same speed Intel tried and failed to reach with Pentium in 2004.

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Microsoft to launch Office Live beta

Microsoft plans on Wednesday to kick off the test version of Office Live, the company's collection of Web hosting and business applications for small companies.

The company is targeting businesses with fewer than 10 employees. Although nearly nine in 10 such businesses have Web access, only about half have their own Web site, Microsoft says.

"That's a lot of small businesses without a Web site," said Dean Nicolls, senior product manager for Microsoft's information worker services group. In one sign of the demand, Nicolls said, more than 100,000 businesses have signed up for the test. All of those companies are being included in the test of Office Live, while additional companies can sign up on Microsoft's site.

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Microsoft and SugarCRM partner on open source

Microsoft and open-source enterprise applications vendor SugarCRM unveiled a technical collaboration Tuesday under which Sugar CRM will release its next customer relationship management suite under the Microsoft Community License.

The agreement is designed to bolster the interoperability between Microsoft Windows Server products and SugarCRM open-source software. The cooperation highlights the pragmatic spirit that has infused some in the open-source movement to move beyond the culture of fervent philosophical objection to proprietary software makers like Microsoft.

"Over 35 percent of our customers run Microsoft Windows Server," said SugarCRM CEO John Roberts, noting a number of his customers have been asking the open-source company to develop a closer relationship with Microsoft.

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Microsoft issues patch for WMF vulnerability

Microsoft released seven security bulletins as part of its monthly update on Tuesday, including a "critical" patch for a Windows Meta File vulnerability in Internet Explorer.

The Redmond, Wash.-based software maker also rated another patch for a vulnerability in Windows Media Player 7.1 as "critical." The five other bulletins were rated "important."

The update for Internet Explorer follows a security advisory the company issued last week after the WMF flaw was discovered. The flaw exists only in IE 5.01 with Service Pack 4 on Windows 2000 and IE 5.5 with Service Pack 2 on Windows ME, Microsoft said in the security advisory.

Exploiting the vulnerability means that someone could seize control of an affected system. Microsoft also recommended last week that users upgrade to IE6 with Service Pack 1.

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McNealy to tech firms: Clean up your security act

SAN JOSE, Calif.--The digital divide won't get any smaller until technology companies clean up their security act, according to Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy.

Not surprisingly, he offered up a remedy that involved some of Sun's pet initiatives.

Sun, which primarily sells servers that power the Internet, is aiming to arm the globe with computers that, in part, reduce the digital divide that separates roughly three out of four people in the world from accessing the Internet.

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