software

Things are getting spicier in the effort to court Linux allies for networked mobile devices.

ARM on Wednesday announced a collaboration with six companies that's intended to improve Linux for the processor cores that ARM licenses to numerous other companies. It's a nice counterpoint to Intel's work to try to make a go with Linux for the x86-based mini-PCs it calls mobile internet devices (MIDs).

The companies--Marvell, MontaVista, Movial, Mozilla, Samsung, and Texas Instruments--"are all working to accelerate the enablement of truly always on, connected mobile computing (CMC) devices," ARM said in a statement … Read more

Carl Icahn is hungry.

The billionaire investor has grabbed a larger chunk of BEA Systems, upping his ownership stake to 11.05 percent, according to a Wednesday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

That move aims to bring more pressure on BEA's board, which Icahn has called upon to sell the business software company.

His beef?

A view that BEA's shares are undervalued and an acquirer, in a consolidating market, could bring greater heft to the company's "innovative technology" and transform the financial performance of these assets.

Icahn, who late last month increased his stake to 9.88 percent from 8.5 percent, … Read more

We first reported on Office Mobile 2007 in June, the same time Microsoft announced the Japanese version of Windows Mobile 6 (WM6). The company revealed then that this new version of Office Mobile will be available in Q3 2007--but looking at today's date, it has not happened.

Last week, a pre-release version was mistakenly put up for download from the Microsoft site. This has since been taken down. The reason cited was that the file was meant for internal testing and not for public consumption. The upgrade is widely reported as being Office Mobile 6.1, but Microsoft has … Read more

As part of my interview with Dean Drako of Barracuda Networks, he mentioned to me some survey work Barracuda has done. Barracuda talked to 228 enterprise customers and asked what advantages open source has over proprietary software, and vice versa.

The answers were a bit surprising:… Read more

Many people love iTunes, but installing the software on a Windows computer that you depend on is a mistake, from a Defensive Computing standpoint. I say this for two reasons. For one, iTunes is a large complex program and installing any such program is risky, Windows being what it is. In addition, iTunes includes QuickTime, which has been fraught with security bugs. And personally speaking, the fact that I must use iTunes to play music purchased from Apple, rules the whole system out for me.

So, when I heard about Amazon's new MP3 Download store selling normal, ordinary, plain … Read more

Back in the 1980s there was an expectation that when you bought a product, it would work. For example, CDs, pop one in a player and it would play. There wasn't a case of, say, a Version 2.0 CD player that refused to play a Region 9 disc. As far as I can recall, 100% of properly manufactured discs played on properly functioning machines. You pressed "play," and you heard music--no menus, no error messages, no ifs, ands, or buts.

But CD, the first truly successful consumer digital audio format, was introduced before computers sabotaged the … Read more

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Charles Simonyi--legendary Microsoft programmer, good friend of Martha Stewart and space tourist--doesn't have many good things to say about the current state of his own profession, software engineering.

He says businesses are stuck in a "poverty economy," using only the cheap and crude tools available to write programs. And he calls software development "the bottleneck on the high-tech horn of plenty."

Simonyi spoke at EmTech, the Emerging Technologies Conference at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology here Wednesday, where he described his solution to the programming problem.

Professionally, Simonyi is well-known for … Read more

Autodesk on Tuesday announced it will release as open-source software a tool that can convert geographic coordinate data from one format to another. If you're not a map nut, that's the challenge one might encounter switching, for example, from latitude and longitude to Universal Transverse Mercator--or from geocentric latitude to geodetic latitude, for that matter.

The software, acquired from Mentor Software and used within Autodesk products already, supports more than 3,000 coordinate systems, the company said. Norm Olsen, Mentor's founder and the programmer who created and supported the transformation technology, will be a senior software … Read more

Update: I added some detail about Red Hat's disappointment with JBoss revenue and executive changes.

Red Hat reported another quarter of reasonably steady financial growth on Tuesday, with net income that grew 12 percent to $18.2 million and revenue that grew 28 percent to $127.3 million.

Excluding stock-option compensation and other factors, net income was $36.9 million, or 17 cents per share, meeting the average expectation of analysts surveyed by First Call. Revenue was a smidgen above their estimate of $125.1 million, and its stock rose 77 cents, or 4 percent, to $19.66 in … Read more