by Will Dalton

Dell is in “buyout talks” with private investors, according to a report published by Bloomberg Monday that sent the struggling computer maker’s shares surging.

Citing unnamed sources, the report suggested that Dell was in “preliminary” discussions with “at least two” private equity firms. It was the asserted that going private could help Dell “accelerate efforts to revive growth and cope with competition without quarter-by-quarter scrutiny from public shareholders.”

A separate Bloomberg report noted that Dell CEO Michael Dell told analysts and investors back in 2010 that he had considered taking the company private. Dell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Dell’s PC business has been in decline in recent quarters, putting pressure on the company’s stock price. Though Dell has been growing its enterprise IT and services business, it isn’t enough to offset the company’s struggles in other areas.

“Going private could take away the pressure and get Dell focused on more long-term goals. But the downside is that he cost of capital is more expensive than when you’re public and you miss out on all the free promotion of being a public company,” explained Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy.

Over the last several years, Dell’s acquisitions of such companies as EqualLogic, Perot Systems, Force10, and Quest have put in a position to compete with the likes of IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Cisco for big enterprise IT contracts tying in a portfolio of servers, storage and networking equipment, software, and services.

There have been a few examples of large publicly held tech firms going private in recent years, particularly during the so-called “mega-buyout” period of the mid-2000s, but none involving a company as large as Dell, the world’s third-largest computer manufacturer, Moorhead said.

Damon Poeter

The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters posted on a message board earlier in the week, threatening to target the websites of JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, US Bancorp, PNC Financial Services and SunTrust Banks.

“In a new phase, the wideness and the number of attacks will increase explicitly; and offenders and subsequently their governmental supporters will not be able to imagine and forecast the widespread and greatness of these attacks,” wrote al-Qassam.

The group has previously claimed responsibility for similar attack on US banks made earlier in the year.

A spokesperson for Bank of America is said to be “aware of the reports of possible cyber-attacks” and is monitoring its systems which it claims are “fully operational”. However, there have been reports that the bank’s website was intermittently offline earlier in the week.

PNC is also said to be aware of the proposed attack, while JP Morgan and SunTrust have declined to comment.

The proposed cyber campaign is thought to be further punishment for the anti-Muslim video, “The Innocence of Muslims”, which was posted on YouTube in September and sparked widespread protests across the Middle East.

In recent months, al-Qassam has launched a spate of cyber-attacks against a slew of US banks. The attacks have generally involved a denial-of-service making website intermittently inaccessible. Others have involved so-called ‘botnet’, compromised web servers, carrying out high-level attacks.

Although the identities of the members of al-Qassam have not yet been revealed, there is speculation that the group is linked to Palestinian government organisation, Hamas.
by Monira Matin,

Virgin Media has extended its London Underground Wi-Fi network to 20 more stations, and announced pay-as-you-go pricing that will come into force when it starts charging commuters for the service at the start of next year.

Stations added to Virgin Media’s London Underground Wi-Fi network on Tuesday include Notting Hill Gate, Russell Square, Balham and Finsbury Park. (The full list of the 20 stations is available on the next page.)

A further 28 stations are due to get Wi-Fi in early 2013, bringing the total up to 120, according to Virgin Media. However, the company has previously said it expected to hit the 120 stations milestone by the end of this year.

The delay has not been cause by technical issues, a Virgin Media spokeswoman told ZDNet. “We were hoping to have them all done in 2012,” she said. ”It’s been an understandably busy year so we’ve looked at the rollout alongside TfL. Having taken a look at it, we’re focusing on 92 stations this year and we’ll continue that rollout in 2013 to reach 120.”

The Wi-Fi service is currently available to all commuters for free. From early next year, Virgin Media will begin charging some commuters for access to the service, announcing on Tuesday the pay-as-you-go options that will be available: a daily pass costing £2, a weekly pass for £5 and monthly passes at £15.

Virgin Media mobile or broadband customers will still be able to use the service for free next year, as will Vodafone, Orange, T-Mobile and EE mobile customers, after the operators struck a deal with Virgin. As a result, Wi-Fi will be free to 76 percent of the Greater London population, Virgin Media said.

Passengers who do not wish to pay will still be able to access a homepage with travel information on, it added.

By Sam Shead

From 2008 to 2010 the group was quite active, with a number of presentations and papers on multi-core and many-core processing, thread synchronisation, transaction locks, and various improvements to AMD’s hardware virtualisation support. Public disclosure on these initiatives appears to have ended in 2010; it’s unclear if the company was still pursuing these lines of research under the radar.

Obviously AMD has to make cuts somewhere, and having just fired some 1,500 people last year, it’s safe to assume the company has long since trimmed the easy fat. Nonetheless, these types of choices make us uneasy. True, they fit with Read’s declaration that the company’s future is in reusable IP and semi-custom work, but that attitude doesn’t give us much reason to think AMD will continue to offer a unique value proposition.

Consider x86-64 (aka AMD64). It’s a poster child for how AMD was able to build a standard that now dominates the x86 computing industry, but it didn’t happen overnight. AMD64 began as an alternative to Intel’s IA-64 (Itanium) instruction set. It was announced in 1999, the full specification was finished in 2000, and the first CPU that could use it arrived in 2003.

In July 2010, Microsoft announced that the number of PCs using a 64-bit version of Windows had finally broken the 50 per cent barrier. That means it took a decade for AMD64 to go from an idea to the status quo. In 2009/10, AMD was clearly working on some of the same concepts that Intel plans to debut in Haswell next year, like transactional extensions and lock-free programming. I’m not saying Read personally killed those initiatives – the company stopped publishing its work on them long before he was hired – but it’s an example of an area where AMD was doing cutting-edge work, and apparently isn’t anymore.

New communication strategy needed

AMD’s stock price is stuck at $2.00 in part because investors aren’t satisfied with vague promises about semi-custom SoCs, a more agile AMD, and future viability. Instead of trying to bury doubters in an avalanche of optimism, Read and his executive team need to stand up, acknowledge the real impact their changes will have on AMD, and take a page from Dirk Meyer’s playbook.

Meyer, in retrospect, clearly made mistakes with Bulldozer’s design, but his tenure at AMD was marked by a return to fundamentally timely roadmap execution. Phenom II, Thuban, the Radeon 4000 and 5000 family, and the various server updates all dropped when he said they would. The one exception to this was Llano, which was pushed back due to manufacturing problems at GlobalFoundries. Even in that case, Meyer was able to soften the impact by bringing Brazos forward. Llano ultimately did meet its revised launch period, though supplies remained tightly constricted through 2011.

AMD’s current roadmap is a shambles. Kabini is set to launch in the first half of next year, but the follow-up APU to Trinity, codenamed Kaveri, hasn’t taped out yet. AMD still won’t admit that it’s manufacturing Kabini at TSMC. There’s no information on whether or not Socket AM3+ has a future beyond the recently launched Piledriver CPUs, or if the company will bring Kaveri’s CPU (Steamroller) to market as a standalone server/enthusiast part.

That’s not to say that every development is negative. In the past six months, AMD has bought itself a server vendor, a new mesh fabric, launched an interesting mobile compatibility initiative, announced plans for 64-bit ARM servers, and begun working more closely with game publishers to promote AMD hardware.

The problem here is that, devoid of an overarching explanation, AMD looks like it’s flailing. The only way for Read & Co to stabilise analyst perceptions of the company is to explain, in detail, why certain departments are being closed, explain what products are being prioritised, and which are not, and when the new products are going to ship. Then ship them, on time.

If the computer market was healthy, AMD might have more room to manoeuvre, but Q3 system sales fell a whopping 9 per cent year-on-year. That’s the biggest decline in over a decade and it’s not expected to reverse in the fourth quarter. Macroeconomic indicators remain weak and Read’s own forecasts don’t predict a return to profitability until late 2013 or early 2014. A clear, well-executed roadmap is one of the few cards AMD could play.

If AMD executives don’t step forward to pre-emptively own the layoff narrative, it’ll be written piecemeal. Since the only people left at AMD are the ones working in key areas, layoffs that affect those areas will be seen as crippling to the company’s chances of recovery. Once that stone starts rolling, it won’t matter if Read had a tenable plan or not.

by Joel Hruska

The new technology works on MiMo – multiple in, multiple out – technology to bombard your terminal with data rates up to 56Mbps. A bit like satellite reception on a GPS unit, HSPA+ with MiMo will combine the data rates of several base station antennae and increase overall throughput to and from your Huawei kit.

HSPA+ networks already deployed by some Huawei-friendly operators across Asis provide up to 28Mbps of data throughput.

The hiding-in-plain-sight detail is that this is achieved by a simple firmware update, so operators who invested in Huawei are patting themselves on the back while the ones who didn’t, well… need to find a soft enough wall to bang their heads on.

With LTE closing in, these little tweaks will extend the life of mobile infrastructure without companies having to dole out cash for new IP.

With a simple firmware upgrade, current operators using Huawei base-stations will be able to offer their customers twice the bandwidth, even though there will surely be a downside to this in the form of base station saturation in high-traffic periods.

We’ve heard no word from Huawei on whether the upgrade will be free of charge to operators or part of a technical upgrade support package. Free lunches anyone?

Source: Paul Taylor September 2009

The spam flooded email systems for just a day. Several hundred thousand messages were sent. As soon as security experts detected it and it was added to blacklists and filters, the attack stopped.

“The bad guys use this approach to beat slow-moving, reactive spam filters,” says Cisco security researcher Henry Stern. “These hit-and-run bursts are so fast that the damage is done before word can get out.”

More spam bursts are expected and indeed one exploiting the recent death of popular actor Patrick Swayze is already out there. Swayze died of cancer on Monday, and within 48hrs there was a new spam campaign offering links to his funeral. Those links led to malicious sites that pushed rogue anti-virus programs or downloaded Trojans and keyloggers to visitors computers. In a related attack, malicious links have also turned up in search engine results thanks to black hat SEO.

Source: Sue Walsh September 2009

The Office for the Harmonisation of the Internal Market (OHIM), which administers Europe-wide Community Trade Marks (CTMs), has ruled that the company should not be able to trade mark its name in relation to the provision of financial information and information services relating to financial and banking services.

“OHIM’s Cancellation Division found that the registration was partially invalid,” said a statement from OHIM. “The Office partly agreed with the applicant in that, for some services, the expression ‘lastminute.com’ was, if not directly descriptive, at least non-distinctive.”

In order to qualify for registration as a trade mark a term must not be generic or descriptive, it must be distinctive. German tour operator L’Tur Tourismus filed an application to have all lastminute.com’s trade marks revoked on the grounds that the term was not distinctive.

Ad by Net Communities “The fact that ‘last minute’ could be used in a descriptive manner and that it had become a common phrase in the English language for any action taken just in time did not preclude the term from being a distinctive trade mark for certain goods and services,” argued lastminute.com, according to OHIM.

OHIM ruled that the term was distinctive enough for protection in relation to many kinds of business including auctioneering, financial services and banking, plumbing, cleaning, telecommunications and internet and online database services. The company does not have the trade mark in relation to its main business, though, which is travel.

Lastminute.com last month won the right to block another company’s registration of ‘last minute tour’ for a trade mark. A Brussels court overturned an earlier OHIM ruling which had given the trade mark the green light. The Court said that OHIM had wrongly identified who the ‘audience’ for the trade mark

A spokesperson for Apple notified that Jobs will be working at the company’s headquarters at Cupertino, California, “a few days a week”, and partly working from home for the rest of the time.

Informing about Steve Jobs’ much anticipated come back to the company, Apple’s spokesman Steve Dowling said, “Steve is back to work. He’s currently at Apple a few days a week and working from home the remaining days. We are very glad to have him back”.

Jobs went for a six month medical leave to get his then reported hormonal imbalance cured, but reports suggested that the Apple’s iconic leader has undergone liver transplant around a couple of months back.

Health of Jobs has been the issue of endless speculation since he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2004, and he eventually opted for a leave of absence to tackle the gruesome health problems he had been reeling through.

Although in his absence, the company fared very impressively, but his comeback will surely be a big morale booster for the employees as well as investors.

Our Comments
The fact that Apple share prices did barely move shows that there was not much to be read from the return of the company’s iconic CEO. Steve Jobs has been ill and there is always a chance, albeit small, that his pancreatic cancer comes back at some point.

Source: IT Pro July 2009