Sun says it's going to collaborate with Laszlo Systems, the original developer of OpenLaszlo, an AJAX-style open source rich Internet development platform, so that OpenLaszlo applications run on Java ME devices. OpenLaszlo is supposed to support instantaneous no-download deployments. Sun and Laszlo are contributing resources to a new OpenLaszlo project code named Orbit expecting to release the first demonstrable Orbit app running on Java ME later this year.

Transmeta Sues Intel for Patent Infringement
Negotiations reportedly having failed, Transmeta, the spoiled software-based x86 designer where Linux creator Linus Torvalds used to work, filed suit against Intel Wednesday charging patent infringement.

The suit, filed in federal court in Delaware, claims Intel tramples on 10 patents that Transmeta holds and it wants the usual injunction, treble damages and royalties.

Transmeta alleges that the Enhanced SpeedStep technology in Intel's Pentium 4, Pentium M, Core and Core 2 chips infringe a patent just issued to Transmeta at the end of August entitled "Adaptive Power Control."

Other charges, based on patents issued between 1998 and 2001, add the P6, the generation that included the Pentium Pro, Pentium II, Pentium III and Celeron.

Up against the wall, Transmeta last year decided to try monetizing its IP through licensing.

The suit doesn't put a dollar value on the alleged infringement, but Transmeta estimates the value of the chips Intel has shipped at $100 billion.

In a statement late Wednesday Transmeta said that "Intel has acknowledged that Transmeta has been an innovative spur to some of Intel's own development efforts, roadmap decisions and new product successes," implying that if Intel hadn't risen to the low-power threat that Transmeta represented the start-up would have fared better.

Intel, which of course doesn't concede the infringement and won't even confirm the negotiations, mumbled something about "always being willing to pay for fair value," suggesting that if Transmeta moderates its demands it could put this puppy to bed.

IBM Moves Global Procurement to China
IBM is moving global procurement from bucolic Somers in upstate New York to Shenzhen, China in the name of efficiency and to capitalize on emerging market opportunities. It notes that this is the first time one of its corporate-wide organizations has been located outside the US and it claims it means IBM is shifting from being multinational to a "new model - a globally integrated enterprise."

The company's chief procurement officer John Paterson is in Asia now building up internal procurement skills and reshaping the company's supply base in the region, particularly software and services.

IBM's procurement out of Asia has previously focused on hardware. The company says it needs a new set of relationships. It already sources about 30% of its $40 billion procurement spend from the Orient.

IBM has had a procurement center in Shenzhen for the last decade and it is one of its largest procurement organizations outside America.

Pickings Too Slim To Justify Investing: Sevin Rosen
Sevin Rosen, the early stage Ur-venture capital operation that in its heyday backed Compaq, Lotus and SGI, has pulled the plug on its tenth and latest fund drive and is sending back the money because the investment environment stinks.

In a letter sent to investors last Friday, the company complained that there's "too much money" around, that there's "too many deals funded in almost every conceivable space," - and here's the punch line - that there's a "terribly weak exit environment."

Worse, it figures it's gonna be like this for the next five years.

Sevin Rosen reportedly had commitments for $200 million-$300 million, was about to top the fund off and was supposed to start putting it into new companies in the next few weeks.

Sevin Rosen general partner Steve Dow told the New York Times, which broke the story, that the traditional VC model is broken and that Sevin is going to go off and have a think trying to dream up a new approach. Meanwhile, it will continue to invest the money it raised previously and manage its current crop of investments.

ESX Finally Goes 64-Bit
VMware's high-end ESX Server finally supports 64-bit operating systems, specifically Windows, Red Hat, SUSE and Solaris. The update is designated ESX 3.0.1, which is also available in German and Japanese. ESX hasn't been able to support 64-bit operating systems even if it was running on 64-bit machines.

The ESX management kit VirtualCenter 2.0 supports 64-bits now too.

The company also rolled out what it called a beta next-generation physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual conversion tool, Converter 3 that combines the functionality of two existing VMware products, P2V Assistant and Virtual Machine Importer.

The first takes a snapshot of an existing physical system and makes it into a VMware VM, saving reinstall and reconfiguring. The second VMwarizes virtual machines from other source formats like Microsoft and Symantec.

Converter 3 will be free when it becomes generally available in six months.

Meanwhile, Russian ISV Veeam Software has released FastSCP for ESX, a free tool for transferring files between ESX Server and Windows. It also makes backup copies of existing virtual machines.

Veeam says the fastest transfer method would be ftp, but ESX 3 firewalls ftp by default and anyway it's insecure because ftp transfers passwords in clear text. FastSCP is supposedly six times faster that SCP without affecting security.

Concurrent To Sell PERC VMs
Concurrent is going to sell PERC Ultra, the popular real-time embedded Java virtual machine from Aonix along with its real-time SUSE- and Red Hat-based operating systems.

MySQL Converted to RSS Feeds
NotePage, a Massachusetts communications software house, says its new PHP script, SQL2RSS, will convert MySQL databases to RSS feeds. It says the publisher has complete control over the content syndicated.

Accelerated Cluster Makes Top500
ClearSpeed Technology, the floating point co-processor acceleration house, has produced the first accelerated cluster to make the Top500, number five actually, a beast built out of 655 Sun X4600 server, each fitted with eight dual-core Opterons. ClearSpeed's boards boosted overall performance 24% to 47.38 TeraFLOPS while reportedly adding only 1% to overall power consumption. The system is the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Tsubame supercomputer.

--Copyright Client/Server News

--Copyright Client/Server News

--Copyright Client/Server News