A developers’ version of Firefox 2.0 targeted for release Tuesday evening aims to test the back-end infrastructure supporting the browser’s new bookmarks, or Places, functionality.

Firefox 2.0 Bon Echo Alpha 1, designed to serve as a developer’s and tester’s preview, focuses on improving access and ease of use for Web site history and bookmarks, according to the Mozilla wiki.

The Places functionality aims to consolidate user data formats, as well as improve the capabilities of Live Bookmarks.

“The BonEcho Alpha 1 milestone is the first of many developer milestones on the path to Firefox 2,” Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering for Mozilla, said in a statement. “We do not recommend that anyone other than developers and testers download Alpha 1, as it is intended for testing purposes only.”

The final release of Firefox 2.0 is expected in the third quarter of this year. Its debut would come roughly two years after Firefox 1.0 was released in November 2004 amid much fanfare.

Hewlett-Packard plans to begin selling a third generation of midrange and high-end Unix servers on Monday, in the first of two performance kicks it will give this year to the systems.

The systems’ Itanium processors are connected to memory, networking and other processors using HP’s sx2000 “Arches” chipset. Arches boosts performance about 30 percent over the prior sx1000 “Pinnacles”-based servers, according to the Palo Alto, Calif., company.

The Arches chipset is used in the eight-processor Integrity rx7640, the 16-processor rx8640, and the 32-processor or 64-processor Superdome. Those models will be available with the PA-8900 chip by the end of the year, after testing and qualification work is completed, said Manuel Martull, the worldwide marketing manager for HP’s Business Critical Servers group. “We gave priority to Itanium,” he said.

The second boost to the Unix systems is expected in the third quarter, when HP plans to upgrade them with Intel’s “Montecito” chip. Montecito is the first version of Itanium to employ dual processing engines, called cores.

In addition, HP will upgrade the lower end of its Integrity line later this year, after Intel releases Montecito. It will replace the earlier zx1 chipset for these machines with a new zx2 chipset. “As soon as Intel announces it, we will be releasing a few weeks after the volume systems with zx2,” Martull said.

Switching over
HP is partway through a years-long transition from its own PA-RISC processors to Itanium chips. The PA line ran only HP-UX, the company’s version of the Unix operating system, while Itanium can run Windows, Linux and HP’s OpenVMS as well. Though HP dominates the Itanium server market, customers also can purchase machines from second-tier server makers, including Unisys, NEC and Fujitsu.

But delays, software incompatibilities and poor initial performance have hobbled the arrival of the Itanium family. That has led IBM and Dell to scrap their Itanium products and has made HP’s transition slower than anticipated. The Arches systems were initially designed to debut with Montecito’s release, but Intel pushed that date back from late 2005 to the second quarter of 2006.

IBM took over leadership of the $17.5 billion Unix market in 2005, according to research firm IDC. It took in 31.8 percent of revenue, compared with 29.8 percent for HP and 26.2 percent for Sun.

Although Itanium systems don’t ship in large quantities compared with models with x86 chips or even with Sun’s Sparc processor, the products are steadily maturing. For example, HP-UX on Itanium is now more advanced than on PA-RISC, with the ability to carve out operating systems partitions that use only a fraction of one processor’s power, said Nick Van der Zweep, the director of virtualization and Integrity server software.

HP is trying to blur boundaries between machines so that administrators can deal more with a pool of computing power than with several individual machines. In consequence, HP plans to make a significant change to its per-processor server pricing strategy in the third quarter.

Currently, HP sells its servers on the basis of how many processors each has. However, customers can order machines with unused chips and pay only when those extra ones are activated, either temporarily or permanently. In the third quarter, with a feature called Global Instant Capacity, customers will be able to shuffle computing capacity from one server to another and so adjust to changing work requirements without paying a price penalty.

Suppose a customer has two servers, each with 16 active, paid-for processors. “You can turn a CPU off in one machine and on in the other. As long as you stay at 32 CPUs or below, we don’t care,” Van der Zweep said.

The rx7640 has a starting price of $43,500 for a bare-bones model with two processors and 4GB of memory. The rx8640 starts at $76,500 for a similar configuration.

The new Superdome models are available immediately, but HP wasn’t able to supply prices.

The founder of Mandrake Linux has been let go from the company he helped to create.

Since 2005, Mandrake, has been known as Mandriva following its $2.3 million dollar purchase of Conectiva.

Gael Duval has confirmed rumors first posted on a Mandriva forum posting that he is no longer with Mandriva.

“Since the information has leaked, I will post a message in the next few days on this Web site (or mirror) about why this is the end of the Mandriva story for me, and what’s next,” Duval wrote in a blog posting.

Duval originally created Mandrake Linux in 1998. Mandrake in its various corporate incarnations has not always had an easy go of it. Mandrakesoft which was co-founded by Duval filed for bankruptcy protection in 2003 after not having reporting a profit since 1999. The company emerged from bankruptcy in 2004.

Paris-based Mandriva has since made plays in the enterprise space and the US market.

Mandriva though continues to struggle in 2006.

Its first quarter fiscal 2006 (period of Oct 2005-Dec 2005) report shows a net negative result of 590,000 euros down from just over a million euros for the same period last year.

Mozilla’s Web browser applications have been downloaded over a hundred million times for free. But that doesn’t mean the spawn of AOL isn’t turning a profit.

Thanks to Google, Mozilla is raking in millions of dollars of revenue, which is used to pay the employees of the recently formed Mozilla Corporation and fund project and infrastructure development.

Google, which makes its share of philanthropic and open source donations, also directly employs a few Firefox developers, including lead developer Ben Goodger.

Google isn’t just paying Mozilla “millions” out of the kindness of its heart. It’s more so based on the same basic principle which it pays other partners and affiliates, namely search.

The default start page for Firefox includes a Google search dialogue box. It also defaults to Google search in its engine option on the Search Bar within the browser navigational toolbar. Mozilla gets paid a publicly undisclosed amount for each Google search query made from Firefox by a user.

That Google pays content and search partners, as well as AdSense participants, is not new. What is interesting, however, is the amount that Mozilla earns from its users’ Google queries.

“We are very fortunate in that the search feature in Firefox is both appreciated by our users and generates revenue in the tens of millions of dollars,” Mozilla head Mitchell Baker wrote in a recent blog post.

One blogger has speculated that the figure is as high as $72 million in fact.

Mozilla Corporation board member Chris Blizzard said that the $72 million figure is not correct, “though not off by an order of magnitude.”

The Mozilla Corporation uses the fund to pay its employees which currently number 40 full-time equivalents (FTE) according to Baker. Most of those FTE’s reside in either Mountain View, Calif., or in and around Toronto, Canada.

Browsers have not historically really been a money-making standalone business.

Mozilla’s predecessor, Netscape, was also available for free and did not have the benefit (at the time) of a paying search partnership. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is a “free” inclusion for its Windows users and is not sold as a standalone product.

It’s unclear whether Mozilla has another revenue-generating option from within the browser itself.

“People sometimes ask if there are other features from which we could make money. The short answer is: We don’t know,” Baker wrote. “Perhaps search is the only feature that will both benefit users and generate this kind of revenue.”

The first public baby steps of the effort to create a new framework for PHP application deployment are now live for all to see. The effort may well prove to put PHP on the same level as J2EE and .NET for application server deployments.

Version 0.1.1 of the framework is now available for download as a preview, and it has already racked up 15,000 downloads during its first weekend of existence.

Last October, Zend Technologies, one of the lead backers of PHP, announced the PHP Collaboration Project. One of the goals of the project is to build a PHP Web application development and deployment environment, now known as the Zend Framework.

The first public preview release introduces a number of framework components that will enable an enterprise-class PHP application deployment.

Zend_Search_Lucene adds the Apache Lucene search engine’s capabilities to PHP and allows PHP-driven sites to take advantage of new search capabilities. The binary file format used is claimed to be fully compatible with Apache’s Java version of Lucene.

Web Services are also a key focus of the framework. According to the Zend Framework Web site, the project is working on engaging more API vendors directly to make PHP the premier platform for consuming Web services.

PHP 5, which first debuted in 2004, introduced new XML capabilities to PHP. Those capabilities are being expanded in the framework with the Zend_XmlRpc module.

RSS is part of the mix thanks to Zend_Feed, which consumes and discovers RSS and Atom feed data. AJAX-enabled applications will benefit from the Json module, which enables conversions of PHP structures into the AJAX-friendly format.

E-mail is also addressed with the Mail and Mime module, which creates and sends e-mail, as well as includes support for attachments. The PDF module gives the framework the ability to generate PDFs on the fly without the need for additionally compiled PHP extensions, as is typically the case for PHP deployments.

The InputFilter module will make it clear to Zend Framework users to invoke input validation schemes to ensure that end-user data is filtered and validated.

At least one Linux distribution has already included the framework as a download.

Gentoo Linux, which just recently launched a new milestone release, now includes the Zend Framework in its Portage package repository for Gentoo users to download into their distributions.

The framework is still far from complete, though.

“There is a lot of work still to do, but after having already seen four applications build with the framework, it is clear that it already includes some very cool and useful modules,” Zend co-founder Andi Gutmans wrote in a blog post.

It’s an interesting time to be a PHP developer, to be sure. There are three versions of PHP in various stages of active use and development, and Yahoo has recently launched an effort to court PHP developers.

Supercomputer vendor Linux Networx announced this week a new lineup of storage solutions, while also revealing that it is no longer developing its Xilo scalable clustered storage system.

Linux Networx has classified its new storage solutions under three tiers: Value, Ultimate and Premium Performance.

At press time specifications were only made available to internetnews.com for two models. The Linux Networx ST2822 and the ST6998 Storage Systems are geared specifically for supercomputer users, where storage, according to Linux Networx, is added typically as an afterthought.

The ST2822 has support for up to 122 SATA (define) drives with a sustained throughput capability of 485 MB/s.

The ST6998 Storage System, on the other end. can handle up to 224 Fibre Channel drives with sustained throughput of 1600 MB/s.

The new storage solutions will integrate with Linux Networx recently launched midrange LS-1 and LS/X systems, as well as Linux Networx Advanced Technology clusters.

“We are not trying to compete with traditional storage vendors that serve the enterprise market,” Anne Vincenti, Linux Networx director of storage, told internetnews.com.

“Our storage solutions are specifically designed to support the needs of supercomputing users who want to completely optimize their supercomputing investment through tightly integrated, optimized supercomputing-specific storage alternatives.”

As opposed to other vendors’ solutions in the HPC space, Linux Networx is not currently deploying its supercomputing storage solution with InfiniBand (define).

InfiniBand is also increasingly becoming popular as an HPC storage and enterprise storage interconnect.

Vincenti explained that Linux Networx’s integrated offerings for ultimate and premium performance delivers parallel file systems over 4Gb and 2Gb Fibre Channel.

At some point in the future, Vincenti said, the technology may embrace Infiniband.

The Value Performance offerings are available with Gigabit Ethernet or Fibre Channel attach.

The new storage solutions will not be using Linux Networx Xilo clustered file storage system, which was originally announced in November 2004.

According to Vincenti, Xilo is no longer in active development.

Instead, Linux Networx is taking advantage of an OEM agreement it signed in December to use IBM’s General Parallel File System, or GPFS.

“Linux Networx has determined that we can deliver more robust solutions more quickly by integrating Linux Networx GPFS with two performance hardware options,” Vincenti said.

The Linux supercomputing company is coming off a “super” 2005, claiming that it finished the year with a 300 percent booking backlog over 2004 and adding new customers such as BMW, DaimlerChryseler, Audi, Glaxo SmithKline and Motorola, among others.

It also recently notched its biggest order ever.

Earlier this month, Linux Networx also announced that the Department of Defense had placed the “largest single order for Linux Supercomputers in the company’s history” with a five supercomputer order.

Linux leadership in China is up for discussion again.

Novell is claiming again that it is the Linux leader in China. This time the data comes from China-based analyst firm CCID Consulting, which reported that Novell holds a 25.1 percent revenue share of the China Linux market.

In August, Novell cited data from IDC, which gave Novell a 32.9 percent market share.

Novell spokesperson Bruce Lowry commented that different analyst houses have different methodologies and different info sources, which can produce different outcomes.

“We don’t believe we’ve lost market share,” Lowry told internetnews.com. “In fact, we’ve improved in the CCID Consulting rankings. I’m told that in their last ranking (not sure of timing), we barely cracked the top five of Linux players in China.”

Novell’s success in China has come on the heels of its new research and development center, new support facility and the launch of the openSUSE.org.cn site.

OpenSUSE is Novell’s open Linux development effort and is currently on the verge of its 10.1 release.

“We certainly see China as a country of opportunity for the full range of Novell’s offerings, whether Linux, identity management or resource management,” Lowry said. “We’ve definitely made a strong commitment in China.”

Not to be outdone, Red Hat is also claiming strong growth in China.

“We have strong alliances with education, government and private enterprise and have spent a great deal of care establishing a strong relationship with the Chinese market,” Leigh Cantrell Day, Red Hat director of global corporate communications, told internetnews.com.

“Fedora launched in China back in November and has been downloaded by hundreds of thousands of users. We continue to have great success with the adoption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.”

Asian-based Linux distributions should not be counted out, either. Debian-based Sun Wah Linux claimed last October the largest Linux desktop rollout in China.

Sun Wah’s CEO Alex Banh last year told internetnews.com that his goal was to be the leading distribution in China.

Turbolinux is also a player to be reckoned with as well. In a recent press release, Turbolinux cited 2004 IDC data that reportedly give them a nearly 25 percent market share of the Chinese desktop OS market. In April, they signed China’s biggest bank representing over 100 million customers.

Turbolinux has also recently obtained “high-tech innovation funding” from the Chinese government and expanded availability of Linux in southwest China’s Sichuan Province.

Then there’s the Oracle-backed Asianux effort, which debuted in August, though it’s currently unclear as to how widespread its deployment has been to date.

Google Inc.’s image search service violates the copyrights of adult magazine and Web publisher Perfect 10 Inc. by displaying thumbnail-sized photographs, a federal judge has ruled.

However, Google is likely not responsible for displaying the underlying images from Perfect 10’s Web site, a judge in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California said in a ruling last week that was made public on Tuesday.

The order could effectively bar Google from featuring thumbnail pictures — small versions of photos that are linked to a bigger version of the same picture — but not limit Google from linking to actual photos which exist on other Web sites.

The judge accepted that people who click on full-size images from Perfect 10 are not viewing images that Google has stored or served up on its computers but links to other sites.

Google argued that its thumbnails constitute fair use.

U.S. District Court Judge A. Howard Matz ordered Google and Perfect 10 to develop a preliminary injunction that reflects both factors. His ruling was issued on Friday and released to the public on Tuesday.

“The court now concludes that Google’s creation and display of ‘thumbnails’ likely do directly infringe P10’s (Perfect 10’s) copyrights,” he wrote in the ruling.

Google expects to appeal an injunction if the judge issues one, the Mountain View, California-based company’s litigation counsel Michael Kwun said in a statement.

“We anticipate that any preliminary injunction will have no effect on the vast majority of image searches, and will affect only searches related to Perfect 10,” Kwun said.

Perfect 10 plans to appear at a court hearing on Wednesday to seek additional evidence to support its claims against Google, said company attorney Daniel Cooper.

“Everything that we tried to sell for a living, they were displaying for free,” Cooper said.

Cooper said Perfect 10 is considering whether to appeal the judge’s decision on Google and third-party sites.

Perfect 10 first sued Google and Amazon.com Inc., which runs the A9 Internet search engine and uses Google technology, in 2004. Matz said he would issue a separate order for Amazon.

In his ruling, the judge notes the value of Google image searches in simplifying and expediting access to information, but agrees that Google’s use of thumbnails makes it a commercial consumer of Perfect 10’s images. In particular, the Google-created thumbnails hurt Perfect 10’s efforts to sell small images to mobile phone users, the judge ruled.

Beverly Hills, California-based Perfect 10 publishes photos of nude women in a magazine that sells for $7.99 per issue and at a subscription-based Web site that costs $25.50 per month.

Swiss and Belgian police have shut down a major component of the eDonkey file-sharing network, used mainly to trade copies of copyrighted movies and music, the Motion Picture Association said on Wednesday.

Razorback 2 was the biggest server on the eDonkey peer-to-peer (P2P) network, which transfers data from user to user. Music companies have blamed P2P piracy for causing a drastic downturn in sales, and Hollywood is trying to prevent a similar impact on the movie business.

“Swiss authorities arrested the site’s operator at his residence in Switzerland this morning and searched his home,” the MPA said in a statement. “At the same time, on the authority of a local magistrate, Belgian police seized the site’s servers located at an Internet hosting center in Zaventem near Brussels.”

As of last year, eDonkey was estimated to have up to 3 million users spread over 100 to 200 servers. Razorback2 was the most popular server, used by about 1 million users.

While the music and movie industry have had a string of successes in their fight against online piracy in the last year, raiding P2P servers and winning judgements in court, in many cases users merely migrate to a different network — a pattern than has happened many times since the original Napster service was shut down.

Source-Reuters

The Mactel-Linux folks have now successfully booted Linux on a 17″ Core Duo iMac. They used the elilo bootloader, a modified kernel, and a hacked vesafb to boot from a USB drive. No GUI pictures for now, just white text on a black background. The distro of choice was Gentoo, and instructions and patches are promised this weekend.