N.Y. AG in 'witch hunt' for Intel, says think tank

An advocacy group today slammed the New York Attorney General's office for filing a federal antitrust lawsuit against chip giant Intel Corp. Intel quickly received some vocal support from the Competitive Enterprise Institute , a Washington, D.C.-based think tank that advocates for free enterprise and a limited government. New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday filed the suit which alleges that Intel threatened computer makers, made payoffs and engaged in a "worldwide, systematic campaign of illegal conduct." The suit's charges resemble those listed in a 2005 federal lawsuit filed against Intel by AMD that's expected to go to trial this coming spring. Calling New York's lawsuit a "witch hunt," the group noted in an e-mail statement that "few markets are as vibrant and innovative as the processor market." "Mr. Cuomo's suit is just the latest example of the New York Attorney General using his authority to make headlines at consumers' expense.

By objective measures, the performance of the processor market has been nothing short of spectacular," he added. This baseless attack against Intel will only delay innovation in the computer chip market," said Ryan Radia, associate director of Technology Studies at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, in a statement. "During the very period that Mr. Cuomo alleges Intel was engaged in 'anti-competitive' behavior, desktop computer processors more than doubled in performance per dollar every two years. The New York suit isn't the only set of antitrust charges leveled at Intel - just the latest. Intel is facing similar charges in Korea, Europe and Japan, as well as class-action cases and the lawsuit leveled by AMD. But Radia contends that the New York attorney general is simply off base in this suit. "Mr. Cuomo's suit rests on the fundamentally flawed assumption that Intel's high market share is indicative of market control," he added. "In fact, Intel and archrival AMD have been competing fiercely for over a decade, and both firms continue to invest billions of dollars each year in researching and developing faster, more efficient chips."

Lenovo founder shares slogans, tells tales of 1980s China

The chairman of Lenovo, the world's number four PC maker, shared Chinese revolution-spirited slogans and the unlikely story of his company's growth out of a government-managed economy in a motivational speech to Chinese small business owners on Friday. Lenovo faced tough odds even though its founders were from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a Chinese state-controlled institute for national research projects. Liu Chuanzhi, one of 11 former government researchers who founded the predecessor to Lenovo in 1984, recalled how the company fought through trade barriers, high component prices and domination by foreign brands in a talk that highlighted how fast China's economy has grown in the last three decades. "In 1993 almost the whole market was foreign-branded computers," Liu said at the forum for small and medium businesses in Hangzhou, a scenic city in eastern China.

The academy gave the company founding capital of 200,000 yuan, or about US$30,000 today. Things only grew worse when the company was scammed out of two-thirds of the money, he said. "When we came out, we not only lacked funds but also had no idea what to do," Liu said. That sum, far from enough, would not have been enough to buy three computers in China in the 1980s, Liu said. Lenovo, formerly called Legend Group, was founded early in China's process of market economic reforms and had to work in a tightly regulated environment. The low quality of components such as hard drives in China also hindered the company, he said. China tried to protect domestic PC makers in the 1980s by charging a massive 200 percent tariff on foreign computers, said Liu. "The result of this protection was that foreign computers were very difficult to get into China and could only be smuggled, but China also could not make its own computers very well," he said.

Lenovo's first PC did not reach the market until 1990. Lenovo struggled with low margins even as it built market share against foreign brands like IBM and Compaq in the 1990s. Government regulation also continued to slow the industry's growth. Lenovo's global presence gained a huge boost when it bought IBM's PC unit in 2005. The company's sales in developed markets have since slumped in the global economic recession and it has restructured to bring its focus back to China and other emerging markets. Chinese residents had to register with the government to become Internet users even late in the decade, said Liu. Lenovo today is the top PC vendor in China. Liu also emphasized the importance of company culture, describing Lenovo's as an example. "Make the company's interests the top priority, seek truth in forging ahead, take the people as the base," Liu said. To succeed like Lenovo, companies must "love to battle, know how to battle, and conduct campaigns with order," Liu said, using language reminiscent of "The Art of War," an ancient Chinese book on military strategy by Sun Tzu.

Chinese president Hu Jintao has promoted the slogan "take the people as the base" as a part of socialist theory. Liu attended a Chinese military college in the 1960s and worked on a Chinese farm during the Cultural Revolution, a chaotic period when many graduates were sent to the countryside for re-education.

Riverbed looks to speed cloud applications, storage

Riverbed Technology has a plan to help companies accelerate access to applications and storage resources that are located in a cloud computing environment and delivered over the Internet to private data centers, distributed branch offices and mobile end users. 10 cloud computing companies to watch The vendor says it will deliver new products and capabilities in 2010, beginning with a software version of its flagship Steelhead WAN optimization controller. When enterprises consolidate and virtualize IT infrastructure and applications in their own data centers and deliver applications over the WAN to remote offices and employees, Riverbed's WAN optimization gear plays a role in speeding applications and data transfers. Dubbed "virtual Steelhead for the cloud," this software appliance can run on servers located at a public cloud computing facility.

But installing a traditional hardware appliance isn't an option in most public cloud environments. "As customers move from their private cloud environments into either public environments or hybrid public/private environments, we want our technology to move with them. Riverbed is hosting a cloud launch event Tuesday in New York City, where it plans to show how the virtual Steelhead appliance works, including a demonstration of how to install it on the Amazon Web Services platform. But there's a bit of a problem because you can't get a physical box into that public cloud," says Eric Wolford, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Riverbed. "Virtual Steelhead for the cloud enables us to move our acceleration technology into that cloud environment." What customers will wind up with is "a three-way type of acceleration, with a Steelhead box at the remote site, a Steelhead box in their data center in the private cloud, and now the virtual Steelhead in their public cloud," he says. In addition, Riverbed plans to preview new technology for the acceleration of cloud storage. But concerns about latency issues, the need to rewrite applications and the possibility of getting locked into a particular cloud provider's platform are http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/101509-snw-storage-cloud-concerns.... hindering adoption.

Enterprises are interested in the potential cost savings and operational benefits of using cloud storage. Cloud storage raises tricky performance issues, Wolford says. Now Riverbed says it has addressed some of those protocol inefficiencies, specifically for iSCSI, and can boost performance enough to allow enterprises to move their storage assets to sites anywhere in the world - even thousands of miles away from associated computing resources, Wolford says. There are fundamental inefficiencies in block storage protocols that restrict enterprises from running these protocols over the WAN. "If you try to run a block protocol over the WAN, performance will grind to a halt," he says. It's similar to the way Riverbed's technology deals with application latency, by slashing the number of roundtrips over the WAN that a chatty protocol such as CIFS requires. Classic unstructured data workloads such as these lend themselves well to this technology, Wolford says.

Now Riverbed is tackling server-to-disk chattiness by cutting roundtrip block requests, Wolford says. "It's very correct to say the high-level pattern is just like we did with applications, making them feel LAN-like over the WAN. We will make storage protocols over the WAN feel SAN-like." Initially Riverbed plans to focus its cloud storage technology on unstructured data, such as files, mail and Microsoft SharePoint storage. If Riverbed can solve the performance issues associated with cloud storage in the way the vendor did for applications and data transfers on the WAN, it will open up the entire market, according to Steve Duplessie, senior analyst at the Enterprise Strategy Group. "High latency alone will limit the types of applications that can find a home in the cloud. Forcing new interfaces or rewriting applications to take advantage of the cloud will be another deal breaker for a lot of folks," Duplessie said in a statement. "If I can think of the cloud the way I think about a disk drive today, the possibilities become truly endless."

Novell, SAP bring together security, compliance wares

Novell and SAP Tuesday announced a partnership to integrate, certify and support their respective security and identity technology and governance, risk and compliance software. In the next 30 days, that certification will extend to the other two applications in SAP's Business Objects governance, risk and compliance (GRC) suite - Process Control and Risk Management. "We cover the entire stack of GRC from applications to IT controls," says Ranga Bodla, senior director for governance, risk and compliance for SAP. The Novell software provides user provisioning, access control and security event monitoring, while the SAP tools address risk and access management, data monitoring and compliance management and reporting. Novell has integrated and certified its Novell Compliance Management Platform extension for SAP, Novell Identity Manager and Novell Sentinel to work with SAP's Business Objects GRC Access Control.

The two vendors hope the integration lets IT reduce costs and infrastructure by combining IT access controls and business process controls in a single integrated system. The companies also said they would optimize Novell's operating system for SAP's data center infrastructure. In essence, the two are creating a hub for defining security, identity and GRC across a network. "Users can synchronize across not only SAP applications but across all applications," says Jim Ebzery, senior vice president and general manager for identity and security at Novell. "So processes and policies in SAP Access Control can be mapped to another enterprise application with the same access controls tightly linked."The partnership between the two vendors http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/031708-novell-modular-infrastructu... ">began early last year when Novell also announced a partnership to optimize SAP on SuSE Linux Enterprise and with Novell's virtualization and identity platforms. Follow John on Twitter: http://twitter.com/johnfontana

Online test helps you self-diagnose H1N1 flu

Feeling sick? Face it, your doctor may not be able to squeeze you right in. Wondering if it's the H1N1 flu or just a regular old go-away-don't-come-near-me, flu?

But you may be able to figure it out using a Web-based self-assessment tool developed by researchers at Emory University in Atlanta. Have you been short of breath? The tool is now available on several national Web sites, including flu.gov , the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and Microsoft's H1N1 Response Center . The online test includes questions like, do you have a fever? Do you have a pain or pressure in your chest that you didn't have before? The H1N1 flu , also widely known as the swine flu, is a fairly new influenza virus that has spread around the world.

Were you feeling better and now a fever or cough is returning? The CDC reports that it first appeared in the United States this past April. With concerns about the new flu running high , health care providers expect to get slammed with a mounting wave of people rushing in to find out if they have the H1N1 virus. By June 11, the World Health Organization categorized it as a pandemic . Because its extremely contagious, hospitals and health care workers have been bracing for the H1N1 to hit hard this fall. The online test, dubbed the Strategy for Off-Site Rapid Triage, is designed to help a lot of people figure out if they need to see their doctor or go to a hospital. "This Web site is carefully designed to encourage those who are severely ill, and those at increased risk for serious illness, to contact their doctor, while reassuring large numbers of people with a mild illness that it is safe to recover at home," Arthur Kellermann, professor of emergency medicine and an associate dean at the Emory School of Medicine, said in a statement. "Hopefully, providing easy-to-understand information to the public will reduce the number of people who are needlessly exposed to H1N1 influenza in crowded clinic and ER waiting rooms, and allow America's doctors and nurses to focus their attention on those who need us most."

Microsoft opens Outlook format, gives programs access to mail, calendar, contacts

Microsoft Monday said it will provide patent- and license-free use rights to the format behind its Outlook Personal Folders opening e-mail, calendar, contacts and other information to a host of applications such as antimalware or cloud-based services. The written documentation would explain how to parse the contents of the .pst file, which houses the e-mail, calendar and contact contents of Outlook Personal Folders. Five fantastic open source tools for Windows admins7 Reasons Not to Use Microsoft Outlook for Company E-mailDocumenting and publishing the .pst format could open up entirely new feature sets for programs such as search tools for mining mailboxes for relevant corporate data, new security tools that scan .pst data for malicious software, or e-discovery tools for meeting compliance regulations, according to Microsoft officials. The documentation will detail how the data is stored, along with guidance for accessing that data from other software applications.

This would allow the cloud service developers to write code on the server so someone could upload their .pst and have it read on the server rather than needing Outlook to be running on the client and somehow get the data that way." Microsoft plans to publish in the first half of next year documentation outlining the .pst format. The effort is designed to give programs the knowledge to read Outlook data stored on user desktops. "You could also imagine this being used for data portability possibly into the cloud," said Paul Lorimer, group manager for Microsoft Office interoperability. "A user might have data on a hard drive that they would like to migrate to a cloud service. The information will be released under Microsoft's Open Specification Promise (OSP), which began in 2006. That year, Microsoft dropped intellectual-property and patent claims to 35 Web services protocols it developed mostly for use in its identity infrastructure. In 2008, Microsoft added its Interoperability Principles and promised to support data portability in its most popular "high-volume products," including SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007. Once the documentation of the .pst format is public, programmers can get into .pst files and read the contents without the need for Outlook. In 2008, Microsoft added the Office file formats to OPS even while critics said the formats were incomplete and the submission was designed to boost Office Open XML (OOXML) in the eyes of standards bodies. In fact, there will be no requirement for any Microsoft software.

Data in the .pst file is available to developers today via Microsoft's Messaging API (MAPI) and the Outlook Object Model, but Outlook needs to be installed on the desktop. Users are free to choose any platform, including Linux and any development language, such as Java or Ruby on Rails. Microsoft Monday was entertaining a number of customers and partners on its Redmond campus to help gather feedback on the documentation. Critics such as the Software Freedom Law Center have warned that inconsistencies are possible between Microsoft formats available under OPS and with the open source GPL license. The technical documentation will detail how the data is stored, along with guidance for accessing that data from other software applications.

Microsoft last year added language to OPS on patent/copyright coverage and information on how OSP interacts with GPL-based software development. Follow John on Twitter: twitter.com/johnfontana