software vendors

IBM is getting in the cloud. After a string of announcements over the past few weeks from Citrix, Red Hat, VMware, Cisco and Hewlett-Packard, Big Blue is launching an initiative to extend its traditional software delivery model toward a mix of on-premise and cloud-computing applications with new software, services and technical resources for clients and independent software vendors (ISVs).

If quad-core CPUs are good, six cores must be better -- especially for servers. On Tuesday, Intel announced a six-core Xeon 7400 CPU, positioning it as the premier virtualization and transaction-processing platform.

On hand with testimonial support were the industry's largest hardware and software vendors, including IBM, Dell and Microsoft.

Xeon Virtualization

Microsoft announced Wednesday that the 2008 version of SQL Server, its data-management and business-intelligence platform, has been released to manufacturing.

The company said new capabilities have been added, such as support for policy-based management, auditing, large-scale data warehousing, geospatial data, and advanced reporting and analysis. Microsoft is also touting its support for aggregation, summarization, search engines, dashboards, transactions across distributed data sources, and long-running transactions.

Applications in Development

General Motors may take a detour around Vista, the latest computer operating system from Microsoft. The automaker has encountered so many speed bumps getting Vista to work on its machines that it may just wait for the next version of Windows, due in 2010 or 2011. "We're considering bypassing Vista and going straight to Windows 7," says GM's Chief Systems & Technology Officer Fred Killeen.

General Motors may take a detour around Vista, the latest computer operating system from Microsoft. The automaker has encountered so many speed bumps getting Vista to work on its machines that it may just wait for the next version of Windows, due in 2010 or 2011. "We're considering bypassing Vista and going straight to Windows 7," says GM's Chief Systems & Technology Officer Fred Killeen.

The name PayPal is almost synonymous with phishing scams. According to anti-phishing service PhishTank statistics from last year, PayPal was the number-one target of scams -- more than twice as often as PayPal's parent, eBay, the second most popular target.

On Friday, PayPal announced it was taking an unusual step to combat phishing abuse: blocking old and insecure browsers from its site. It is "an alarming fact that there is a significant set of users who use very old and vulnerable browsers, such as Internet Explorer 4," the company said.

In case you thought you had media file formats down pat, Adobe Systems plans a new one called CinemaDNG.

Jim Guerard, Adobe's vice president of dynamic media, told news media at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) conference Monday in Las Vegas that CinemaDNG will extend "open, interchangeable formats for digital still cameras into the realm of digital cinematography." The DNG, or Digital Negative Specification, format is used by digital photographers to archive images shot in the Raw format.

Developers, start your App Engine -- Google's, that is. Google announced Monday a preview release of its App Engine, a hosting tool so developers can build scalable Web applications on the search giant's infrastructure.

Google said its App Engine will make it easier for developers to build and scale applications rather than focus on system administration and maintenance.

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