The company describes the offering as 'an important step in combating the perception that taking Linux security to the next level is a long and complicated process.' See, this security stuff really is complicated and people need all the help they can get or else they'll run machines unsecured, HP says. It's supposed to mean a one-stop shop for end-to-end solution delivery, rapid deployment and lower cost.

FiveRuns Corporation, a pioneer of monitoring products for Ruby on Rails, described by some as the new Java, has gotten $6.2 million in funding from Austin Ventures. The money is earmarked for acceleration product development, sales and marketing and the company's partnership efforts. Since it kicked off a year ago August, FiveRuns has secured $9.2 million in funding. It claims a customer base of 65 organizations or so that it says are monitoring hundreds of servers, with 'hundreds' in evaluation.

Now that Leopard is out and everyone is, I suspect, feverishly reformatting their laptops and desktops to install the retail copy of Leopard, developers can finally start sharing their Leopard code samples. Rather than me sitting around making up stupid reasons why such-and-such code sample might be useful to you, I figured I would ask what code you want to see written in Leopard. Keep in mind that I will not write code samples that do not use garbage collection or the new property syntax, so you'll just have to suffer through that.

Let's consider the pages of a traditional corporate Website. They include an 'about me' page, a contact page, a careers section, and probably a page with news and press releases. The words look good on paper, and, more than likely, a committee gave the final sign-off on the site's content. Visitors frequent these pages because they want to learn about the company's products and services, contact the company by phone to request more information, or find a job.

The Nigerian government recently chose the Intel Classmate PC and Mandriva for an educational project, selecting it in spite of a competitive offer by Microsoft. But now it seems the Nigerian government is replacing Linux by Windows on the Classmate PC, although they paid for the Mandriva software and Mandriva CEO François Bancilhon has written an open letter to Steve Ballmer complaining of Microsoft's 'unethical' behavior.

What I am going to do in this regular column is feed my habit by highlighting some of the books I am reading, and (mostly) enjoying. (I will only rarely write negative reviews; it's a rare book that I 'do not put down gently but throw across the room with great force' after all.) Geeks like to read - and not only programming books. Most of us read incessantly. Whether it's popular science, sci-fi or fantasy, a good thriller or an occasional popular history book or biography, it's a rare geek who isn't in love with books. And I am no exception, although I have to confess I am rather an extreme case since my love of books and eclectic tastes borders on the 'gentle madness' aka bibliomania.

Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don't work. In this case it's Google trying to undermine Facebook. And I don't think it's going to work. What would be exciting and uplifting, a real game-changer -- Internet companies giving users full control of their data.

In the run-up to its numbers Thursday there was chatter on Wall Street about Rackable maybe being an acquisition target. CNBC linked it to IBM. Such rumors have been in the air on and off since Rackable caved under competitive pressure.

There's an earlier agreement between the two companies involving Turbo with the Open XML format and the use of the Windows Media Format. Under the new deal, Turbolinux desktops will include Live Search. According to Turbolinux CEO Yano Koichi, 'When strong Microsoft customers are evaluating Linux, we want them to see Turbolinux as the distribution that works best with their existing Microsoft investments.'

SCO Group asked for approval from Judge Gross of the bankruptcy court last week to sell off Unix to the highest bidder, which means York Capital Management, a financial firm. If SCO does receive $36 million, Novell and IBM (and perhaps others) will certainly be hoping that the money will in turn come to them.

SCO has gotten a $16 million bid from York Capital for its Unix business. Coupled with the $10M line of credit York is ready to provide, it's money enough to keep SCO's litigation against Novell and IBM going and to underwrite its budding mobile interests, the company says. SCO's lawyers will be filing papers related to the bid this afternoon with the bankruptcy court in Delaware.

Ballmer then went on to say: 'There are plenty of other people who may also have intellectual property. And every time an Eolas comes to Microsoft and says 'Pay us,' I suspect they also would like to eventually go to the open source world. So getting what I'll call an intellectual property interoperability framework between the two worlds I think is important.' Ballmer also said, 'I would love to see all open source innovation happen on top of Windows.'

Red Hat is looking for middleware partners but says that JBoss requires an 'integrated' consultative pitch - rather than a product approach - to higher-ups in the enterprise, which translates into a longer selling cycle that Red Hat claims will mean bigger deals. It is unclear whether JBoss is hobbled by the shift from the Java programming language to Ruby on Rail noticeable even at Sun, the author of Java. During the conference call Szulik said that JBoss was the subject of at least one million-dollar deal in each of the last four quarters. Red Hat said in its efforts to become a billion-dollar company, a vision it's been working on for 18 months, it's moving to a decentralized line-of-business model that would see the creation of infrastructure, middleware and online services units run by general managers who would own product marketing, explaining why Red Hat has set up a corporate marketing function run by newly installed marketing chief Michael Chen.

'We have put everything into this latest commercial release to make it our most complete offering to date,' said Larry Kettler, President and CEO of Linspire, Inc., as Linspire yesterday announced the immediate availability of Linspire 6.0 - the latest commercial release of the desktop Linux operating system. Linspire 6.0 adds licensed proprietary drivers, codecs, and software in its core distribution.

A developer of advanced label and packaging materials for consumer products has eliminated 'server sprawl' in its corporate data center with SWsoft Virtuozzo operating system virtualization software. On typical a day, AET Films runs approximately 45 Virtuozzo virtual environments on three IBM blade servers with dual-core, 2GHz processors and 8GB of memory. All are running Windows and are connected to a storage area network.

Novell's free community source code, openSUSE, moved to rev 10.3 Thursday. The widgetry includes a Linux-Windows dual-boot configuration, an improved user interface, enhanced multimedia support and Microsoft Office file compatibility with the latest OpenOffice 2.3 software. Novell says it's the first Linux distribution to take full advantage of the '1-Click Install' option for access to software on the openSUSE Build Service. The project claims 54,000 registered members. Novell sells the code with documentation and 90-days support for $60.

HP says it's going to stop hiding its light under a bushel and advertise the fact that it upgrades its 20-year-old Unix operating system roughly every six months - and has done so for the last three years. It's so taken with the idea that it's even going to start giving the things human names like Vitality, Vibrancy and Versatility.

With the arrival of Yahoo! and its Yahoo! Go Mobile 2.0 product, another A-list brand has entered the market. Yahoo!'s presence, like Apple's, expands the number of ODP (On-Device Portal) choices available to consumers, offering data services that are embedded directly onto the devices that people carry with them every day, similar to the desktop applications that people have downloaded on their PCs.

SYS-CON's Readers' Choice Awards program, widely considered to be the most prestigious award program in the software industry, is a community-driven process in which the products participating in the program are nominated by the industry's vendors, customers, and users, as well as by the readers of SYS-CON Media's industry-leading i-technology publications.

Scalix, a Linux e-mail, calendaring and messaging company, has released Scalix 11.2, with new features to support hosted multi-tenant environments, the latest Linux servers, and enhanced Microsoft Outlook facilities for mobile devices. Scalix 11.2 allows application service providers (ASPs) to host multiple customers on a single Scalix server.

Concurrent's NightStar LX debugging and analysis toolkit is now available for two additional Linux distributions - Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and openSUSE 10.2 from Novell. NightStar is an integrated Qt-based GUI tool set for developing and tuning time-critical 32-bit and 64-bit applications on x86 systems. NightStar tools reduce test time, increase productivity and lower development costs.

MySQL AB has announced that the Swedish National Police are implementing an enterprise-wide project for building all future IT systems on an open source software (OSS) infrastructure based upon Linux, MySQL, and JBoss. Several existing systems are currently being migrated and all future projects will be developed on this OSS foundation.

An international development team has announced the first official release of ProjectPier. Based on widely accepted technologies like PHP and MySQL, ProjectPier offers an open source collaboration solution that can be installed on any shared hosting server within minutes.

Those swinging doors that grace the office of the head of marketing at Red Hat have slapped another exiting executive in the fanny. Old-time Unix veteran Tim Yeaton, senior VP of marketing, has been replaced by Michael Chen, seconded over from Red Hat China, where he was general manager, to be VP of corporate marketing. He reports to CEO Matthew Szulik and will work out of Red Hat's headquarters in North Carolina.

I will be attending the Ajax World Conference next week in Santa Clara. I will also be at the opening reception on Monday and the conference party on Tuesday. Over the weekend Jesse Liberty blogged about this as well 'If you are going to be at AJAXWorld, look for me on Twitter, and let's see if we can set up a meeting or a lunch.' Other faculty members, according to the Ajax World website, who will be at these parties include...

While these experts differ on issues like the importance of SOA ROI, how to calculate SOA ROI (if at all), and why we don't have more/better of it, they all seem to agree on one thing: 'Enterprise-wide support for SOA hinges on the ability to demonstrate value to the business at large - more growth, revenue opportunities, and all that good stuff.' (Joe's words, not mine.) And that's where your job is at stake. Or, at least, the long-term support of your SOA efforts.

'Chapter 11 reorganization provides the company with an opportunity to protect its assets during this time while focusing on building our future plans,' said Darl McBride, president and CEO of Lindon, Utah-based SCO Group in a statement accompanying the company's voluntary petition for reorganization under Chapter 11 of the United States Bankruptcy Code.

AMD has announced that they will be working on a strategy to open source drivers for their ATI hardware including their X1000 series and HD2000 series. It's been a long time coming as any Linux desktop guy knew to go for the nVidia graphics card because they support open source. I am still puzzled by hardware company's protectiveness of their drivers are they really that big of a competitive advantage?

SourceLabs announced the availability of SASH 2 complete with a major new milestone - integrated support for Apache Tomcat. Comprised of the most widely deployed open source Java technologies used by the Global 2000, new SASH 2 is a robust platform that simplifies the development of enterprise Java Applications. SASH 2 includes Spring, Axis, Struts, Hibernate and Tomcat along with all software dependencies and patches. Combined with SourceLabs' innovative Continuous Support System (CSS), SASH 2 proactively identifies key issues that enterprise application developers face when building, testing and deploying middleware software.

SYS-CON Events announced today that 'AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West' main sponsorship opportunities are now sold-out! Limited number of expo and event sponsorship opportunities that are still available are expected to be completely sold before the end of the month. The new sponsors who joined the conference this week, and are not yet listed on the conference Website, will also be announced later in the week.

I will be teaching a one day Bootcamp course on Ajax at the AJAXWorld Conference in Santa Clara, California on September 23, 2007. Details are at http://aja xbootcamp.sys-con.com I will be expanding the Ajax construction tools section from the Ajax Bootcamp I taught in New York at the SOA World conference. I am very impressed with TIBCO GI and Sun jMaki

SYS-CON Events announced today that the AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2007 West, which will take place on September 23-26, 2007, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, in Santa Clara, California will offer a new dedicated 'iPhone Track.' Another dedicated track will offer a comparative education opportunity for conference delegates on emerging RIA tools such as Adobe Flex, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX. The world's leading Rich Internet Applications & Web 2.0 event is expected to attract more than 2,000 i-technology developers. AJAXWorld grew from a single track, one-day seminar, less than a year ago, into a four-day international conference & expo with more than 150 sessions delivered in ten simultaneous tracks, by more than 150 faculty members.

iPhone, whatever its sales, was disruptive from the moment Steve Jobs first showed it off in January. It immediately started redefining the smartphone business and focused the attention of smartphone makers on the importance of software, according to serial entrepreneur Pauline Alker, the CEO of a la Mobile, the Venrock-backed developer of what is supposed to be the first Linux software stack for smart devices ready to deliver. IPhone's pushing smartphones up the evolutionary ladder from voice-centric gadgets with limited data functions into sophisticated multimedia devices deploying a broad range of enterprise and consumer applications. But the increased use of data-rich applications leaves mobile devices vulnerable to security threats - even the loss of a phone can represent a threat to the personal and corporate data stored on it.

The inaugural iTVCon - Internet Video Conference & Expo (November 12-13, 2007) is building out its program and the Conference Advisory Board is busy sorting through the hundreds of proposals for technical and strategic sessions that have been coming in. Final deadline for proposals is September 10, 2007.

Dell reported its fiscal Q2 results Thursday, a week after it confessed that its books were manipulated to meet projections, but Wall Street had to settle for a dry press release. There was no conference call to tease out color and won't be until Dell files its missing financial statements in November. So then, preliminarily, it earned $733 million, or 32 cents a share, on revenues of $14.8 billion. Its operating income was $896 million.

Novell has now invoiced a total of $105 million since it cut its controversial deal with Microsoft in November, roughly 44% of the $240 million called for in the five-year pact. They are still 'ramping their relationship in Asia-Pacific,' CEO Ron Hovsepian said. He claimed that there would be 'no problem delivering to customers' because of the GPLv3. He is also not anticipating any problems with the Xen virtualization scheme that's included in SUSE because Citrix bought XenSource the other day simply because Xen is open source. He also said he didn't know where Citrix was going with the operation.

Dell, the world's second-largest PC maker, said late Thursday that its books were cooked by unidentified 'senior executives' to hit financial targets and that its financial reports for fiscal 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006 and the first quarter of fiscal 2007 can't be trusted. It's going to restate, and reduce cumulative net revenue by around 1% and cumulative net income by between $50 million and $150 million.

Novell Inc. added 36 cents to $6.78. The software developer owns the copyrights covering the Unix computer operating system and not SCO Group Inc., a judge ruled in a lawsuit over royalties from users of the Linux computer operating system. The ruling by U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball in Salt Lake City on Aug. 10 is a setback for SCO in its lawsuits against Novell and International Business Machines Corp.

Dell has Ubuntu and now Lenovo has gone with Novell. The world's third-largest PC maker, at least this week it's number three, IBM's hand-me-down to the Chinese, is going to factory-install SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 on some of its ThinkPad notebooks and support the operating system for its commercial customers and consumers beginning in Q4. Novell and Lenovo have a sort of hereditary relationship via IBM, which put Novell in the Linux business.

In a statement, IBM and Novell said, 'By entering into the agreement IBM gains access to Novell's SMB market leadership, providing new sales opportunities from Novell's existing customer base. In return, Novell gains a strong global partner, allowing it to tap into IBM's worldwide sales force. The partnership will provide customers with an enterprise-ready open source alternative to JBoss, while developers will have an opportunity to build on a tested platform in WebSphere Application Server Community Edition (WAS CE), with the full support of IBM, Novell and the open source community as they build their applications.'