A New Jersey outfit called Textscape LLC sued Adobe in a California federal court last Friday claiming that Adobe's Acrobat Reader, which must be on every computer in the universe, treads on its patent for processing text. It's asking for unspecified damages. The widgetry involved lets...Sep. 30, 2009 12:00 PM EDT Reads: 2,314
This must have been what vaudeville was like when a none-too-successful act opened for the star.
Dell unveiled a high-end anorexic laptop Tuesday that basically has Linux opening for Windows.
Windows has a bit of a problem with this instantly gratifying instant-on booting busin...
Talend, the open source data integration house, said Monday that it has acquired the rights to Amalto Technologies’ Master Data Management (MDM) widgetry, which will make it the first company to put out a commercial open source MDM product.
It figures the stuff is as good as any pr...
Microsoft’s freebie virus and spyware deterrent, Security Essentials (MSE), née Morro, is due to make it out officially Tuesday after being in limited open beta for months.
It’s not supposed to be a drag on the system the way Norton can be and it automatically stays current with th...
Xerox, which squandered the chance to bring about the PC revolution itself, has needed a growth solution for quite a while. Monday it said it found one and would spend $6.4 billion in cash and stock buying Affiliated Computer Services (ACS), whose $6.5 billion in revenues reportedly ma...
Claiming dibs on digital signature technology, RPost has sued its higher profile rival Goodmail Systems in a Los Angeles federal court saying Goodmail’s Certified E-mail Paper Suppression service infringes two of its patents.
It wants damages and an injunction and says other partie...
Taking a page out of Cisco's book - from the chapter on so-called smart cities - IBM late Thursday announced that the city of Dongying near China's second-largest oil field in the midst of the Yellow River Delta is going to build a cloud to promote e-government and support its transiti...
With the worst of the economic downturn abating, Google, which stopped buying up small companies a few months ago ostensibly because prices were too high, is back scouting deals again. Google CEO Eric Schmidt told Reuters TV that he expects to close a small acquisition a month. He desc...
Intel showed off a 300mm wafer with the company’s first working 22nm chip. It’s got 2.9 billion transistors in a space the size of a fingernail and the smallest SRAM cell ever devised. The company is still grinding out 45nm parts and will only move to 32nm Westmere widgets next quarter...
POD, Penguin Computing’s Linux-based Penguin on Demand HPC cloud, is going to get high-performance parallel storage from Panasas whose petabytes-supporting ActiveStor line is supposed to ensure against bottlenecks. POD, which doesn’t use machine virtualization, is targeted at researche...
Microsoft’s board has approved a non-binding – and so purely decorative – shareholder “say-on-pay” mechanism that kicks in at its shareholder meeting on November 19 ahead of any government instructions to do so. The Wall Street Journal thinks the U.S. is possibly headed for legislation...
The 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, which overturned the Utah district court’s summary judgment that Novell owns Unix, has given SCO until October 1 to file a retort to Novell’s motion for an en banc rehearing of the case. Apparently that’s standard operating procedure. The od...
Jahia.com, a provider of web content integration software, launched Jahia in the Cloud (www.jahia.com/cloud) on Amazon EC2 Wednesday. It’s supposed to address the needs of organizations for a preconfigured solution, without the constraints and costs of a traditional IT environment. The...
IBM is buying the business of RedPill Solutions, a privately held company in Singapore that sells advanced customer analytics services to businesses in financial services, telecommunications, technology and hospitality. Financial details were not disclosed. It should help it compete fo...
The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission, which split regulatory oversight in the United States, are planning on revamping and toughening up the 1992 rules on mergers – at least they’re going to sit down and talk about – according to Reuters, quoting FTC chairman Jon Lei...
Red Hat did slightly better than the Wall Street pundits supposed it would in its last quarter, the dreaded summer months of June through August in the midst of an awful year. Boosted by a tax benefit, earnings were up 29% to $27.5 million, or 15 cents a share or 16 cents (non-GAAP), o...
Wasn’t it curious how the European Commission up and managed to get a kinda expurgated “provisional” copy of its 500-odd page antitrust decision against Intel, which has been sitting around since May 13, the one that Intel has appealed, out and about right before Intel’s Developer Foru...
The recently reconstituted SGI Monday wheeled out the Octane III, its first personal supercomputer, basically a high-performance deskside cluster for office environments that supports distributed technical computing applications. Your typical workstation has only eight cores and a mode...
Microsoft has acquired the technology assets of Interactive Supercomputing (ISC), an MIT HPC spin-out that specializes in parallel computing on the desktop. It says the move will bring together complementary technologies that help simplify the complexity and difficulty of expressing pr...
The issue of Word’s patent purity and whether Microsoft will have to pay $290 million to a tiny Canadian company because it allegedly wasn’t so virtuous is now in the lap of three judges at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC. Microsoft had the expedited hear...
IBM is proposing to score points against Microsoft, bridge the digital divide and maybe even cure piracy by teaming up with Canonical and pushing Ubuntu-based netbooks fitted with either locally run or cloud-based IBM applications in Africa, a small but growing market. It is the pair’s...
Linux creator Linus Torvalds said at LinuxCon this week that Linux is “getting bloated” and that “it’s a problem.” “I’d love to say we have a plan,” he lamented. “I mean, sometimes it’s a bit sad and we’re definitely not the streamlined hyper-efficient kernel that I had envisioned 15 y...
IBM’s paranoid defense of its mainframe monopoly is going to be tested again but this time if it blows the start-up out of the water, or denies it clearance to compete, it’ll be messing with an open source operation, and a European open source start-up to boot. The European Commission,...
Well, well, well, a little bird points to IBM as gumming up the works with the European Commission so Oracle and Sun can’t close their deal.
Oracle of course picked up Sun after IBM’s negotiations with Sun failed and Oracle made IBM the intended target of the proposed acquisition in...
Intel is pushing Atom out of netbooks and into embedded applications like Daimler and BMW infotainment systems, cell phones and other devices in search of what it calls a $15 billion opportunity.
It wants its OEMs and other friends to take a page out of Apple’s book and create app s...
Google News went down middle of the day Tuesday for a couple of hours. Google never explained why but said many were affected. Three weeks ago, Gmail went down big time because of a poorly executed server upgrade and now on Thursday users were complaining on Twitter that they couldn’t ...
Google, whose Chrome can claim all of 2.8% of the browser market, has come up with an open source plug-in that runs Chrome inside Microsoft's still dominant Internet Explorer. How's that for brass. It calls the thing Chrome Frame and says it works with IE6, 7 and 8 on Vista and XP SP2,...
Intel is pushing Atom out of netbooks and into embedded applications like Daimler and BMW infotainment systems, cell phones and other devices in search of what it calls a $15 billion opportunity. It wants its OEMs and other friends to take a page out of Apple's book and create app stor...
Half the apps on the Internet are written in PHP. That gives Zend Technologies, the PHP house, a stake in the cloud. So it’s rounded up cloud merchants Microsoft, IBM, Rackspace, GoGrid and Nirvanix and has gotten them to support its new open source drive to create a so-called Simple A...
Citrix Wednesday delivered a finished NetScaler VPX, the software-based virtual appliance version of the NetScaler MPX hardware appliance that it started previewing back in May as a publicly available tech release.
NetScaler has typically targeted large-scale, mission-critical web a...
The European Commission’s prolonged investigation of Oracle’s proposed acquisition of Sun, which isn’t expected to finish much before the agency’s mid-January deadline, is costing Sun $100 million a month in revenues, according to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison.
Ellison, who was interview...
Debra Chrapaty, Microsoft’s corporate VP of Global Foundation Services, the person responsible for the strategy and infrastructure platform under Microsoft Live, Cloud and Online Services worldwide including its physical infrastructure, security, operational management, global delivery...
Adobe has put out what it calls Flash Platform Services for Distribution, an online, hosted, pay-per-use service for advertisers and content publishers to promote, measure and monetize web applications and games across social networks, desktops and mobile devices. The widgetry is suppo...
Yahoo has evidently been rummaging through its closet looking for stuff it can sell off, especially now that it’s decided it’s a consumer company and will put $100 million into promoting that image starting Tuesday.
Anyway, that business construction reportedly means it doesn’t nee...
Dell this morning said it would buy Texas-based Perot Systems for $3.9 billion cash, a 68% premium. The money for the $30-a-share tender offer will come out of Dell’s savings, which this summer amounted to $11.7 billion. IBM turned into a services company years ago; HP bought EDS for $...
Looks like there’s a few bubbles still left in the old champagne bottle.
Twitter, which has no income to speak of, has reportedly raised another $50 million in funding and been valued at $1 billion.
That’s four times the $250 million valuation it reportedly got in February when...
Microsoft’s share of U.S. searches jumped 22.1% in August to 10.7% of the market to Google’s 64.6%, up 2.6%, and Yahoo’s 16%, according to Nielsen. Yahoo was down 4.2%. Microsoft was up from 9% in July. That’s a sequential leap of 22.1% for Microsoft’s newfangled Bing search machine, b...
The other day Sanford Bernstein analyst Toni Sacconaghi, one of the brighter bulbs on Wall Street, toyed with the idea of Oracle walking away from the Sun deal.
He figures it’s unlikely but he wondered if Oracle’s conviction level would waiver at all on its earnings call Wednesday. A...
Google’s Chrome browser claims a bit under 3% of the market right now, but Chrome engineering director Linus Upson told Reuters that it expects to be at 5% at least in a year and if it’s not at 10% at least in two years, it’ll be “exceptionally disappointed.” It just released Chrome v3...
Teradata, NCR’s discarded data warehousing operation, has been M&A poison since it floated off two years ago because any potential acquirer would have had to pay back hundreds of millions of tax credits for the privilege of taking it over. That string is soon to expire and Oracle’s mov...
