Software Patent Summit
The Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT) and the Software Freedom Law Center created by GPL lawyer Eben Moglen on the industry's dime are going to sponsor a conference to discuss the impact of software patents on software development, innovation and competition on Friday, November 17 at Boston University. eBay, Red Hat, W3C and the Electronic Frontier Foundation will be speaking and co-organizers include the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology, Boston University Law School, the Computer & Communications Industry Association and MIT Sloan School of Management. See http://www.researchoninnovation.org/swconf/home.htm.

Quad Watch
Intel's first quad chips - and Intel's already quietly selling quads - are supposed to be officially announced in mid-November.

The two due are the Conroe-based 2.66GHz desktop Kentsfield, to be called the Core 2 Extreme QX6700, and the Woodcrest-based two-way server chip Clovertown.

Clovertown will officially be called the Xeon DP 5300 and run at 1.6GHz-2.33GHz with 4MB of L2 cache shared among the four cores. Its front-side bus is supposed to be worth 1,066MHz or 1,333MHz. Intel will ship the slower bus in volume first.

The mainstream desktop Core 2 Quad, running at 2.8GHz, is due in January. Intel is also supposed to create a uniprocessors Xeon chip out of Kentsfield early next year and a low-power 50W part out of Clovertown, which will otherwise usually run at 80W.

Meanwhile, Intel is reportedly about to trot out Tigerton, its quad-core Xeon MP chip, a version of the Clovertown DP chip, for the benefit of the press. The thing isn't due until 2H07, reportedly Q3.

HP Gets Utility Contracts
HP has gotten two utility computing contracts from the US Defense Information Systems Agency that could be worth a total of $440 million over eight years if the three-year extension kicks in. One, capped at $190 million, calls for it to provide Windows and Red Hat/SUSE operating environments. The other, capped at $250 million, is an HP-UX deal. HP will deliver both Integrity and ProLiant servers and OpenView. HP will design, install and maintain the infrastructure.

Ready for Another Power Shift?
With Oracle's OpenWorld gathering set to kick off Sunday in San Francisco speculation is rife that Larry Ellison might actually try that Linux distribution play he's been threatening. There's talk of an appliance based on Debian or Ubuntu. Or if not that then Jefferies & Co thinks Larry might trot out an Ubuntu stack to rot out Red Hat and Novell - which might then force Red Hat to go and try to buy MySQL.

Dell Should Make Macs
Proving that Gartner has a sense of humor, it's circulating a position paper that says Apple should quit the hardware business, concentrate on writing software and license the Mac to Dell so that Apple benefits from wider distribution, Dell gets an differentiating product and Intel gets heightened chip sales. Between Jobs administrations, Apple of course flirted with clones, but when Steve returned he pulled the plug on the contracts. Gartner reckons that boxes running the Mac OS could get 20% of the PC market if properly handled but on its own Apple faces increasing price pressures. Intel, it said, can't continue to subsidize Apple since HP forced Intel to give it comparable pricing. At last count, Macs were supposed to have about 4.6% of the market.

Sun's Xen Intentions
Sun intends to deliver fully supported Xen functionality in a Solaris 10 update next year so users can run Solaris 10, Linux and Windows concurrently as guests and extend Solaris widgetry like Predictive Self-Healing, DTrace, Solaris ZFS and Solaris Trusted Extensions to applications that aren't running on Solaris.


Massive Battery Recall Burns Sony
Because of what it will cost to replace what Sony now estimates will be 9.6 million laptop batteries coupled with the losses in its PlayStation unit, which has been plagued by product delays and price cuts, Sony lowered its fiscal year earnings projections by 62% Thursday. This after earnings in its September quarter plunged 93% year-over-year.

The company had been expecting to earn $1.1 billion. Now it's set aside roughly $430 million to cover the recall and the number could escalate.

Even Sony is recalling its batteries now. It's put out a call to return about 90,000 batteries used in its Vaio notebooks sold in Japan and China and may expand the recall to other markets.

Fujitsu said Friday that it would recall another 51,000 Sony-made laptop batteries on top of the 287,000 it's already recalled and Sharp joined the lists for the first time saying it would recall 28,000 Sony batteries. Dell, Apple, Lenovo, IBM, Toshiba and Hitachi have already recalled over seven million Sony batteries.

Toshiba, Hitachi and Fujitsu may seek damages from Sony over the recall for hurting their brand image. Sony said its earnings recalculation doesn't cover the potential cost of any legal action.

eMachines Co-Founder Back in the Game
eMachines co-founder John Hui, who sold eMachines to Gateway, is back in the game.

When last spotted some weeks ago, Hui was trying to buy Gateway's retail business for $450 million and got the back of Gateway's hand.

Now he's gone and bought NEC's consumer PC business, the old Packard Bell BV.

The unit's revenues are put at around a billion and change. It sells notebooks, desktops, MP3 players and DVD players in EMEA and South America.

It has been on the block for pretty much the last year. Terms were not disclosed but reportedly it went for around $87 million.

--Copyright Client/Server News