CodeWeavers moves to leverage its software givaway.

A good article worth a read to those who took part in the free giveaway of CrossOver about a year ago.  Seen at the time as a publicity stunt that backfired, the installed software base quadrupled.  Now comes the payoff.

A year later, CodeWeavers urges free CrossOver users to pay up

Now that the 1 year anniversary of the big promotion is coming up, CodeWeavers is sending out emails to the roughly 650,000 people who downloaded the free software asking them to consider paying for ongoing support. The company is also planning on releasing a new version of the software in December, meaning anyone who pays for support will get the update, while those who let their 1 year subscription expire will have to pay full price for the new version.

Save money in Enterprise Content Management

How to save your Enterprise money in tight times.  A list of fairly high level actions to take (ala Gartner)  to save money managing content of all types.  The article looked a little dry until you hit the last one (snippet below).  What’s this?  Gartner espouses killing the corporate IT sacred cow: email?

Six Ways to Save Money in Enterprise Content Management – ReadWriteEnterprise

Get Out of the Email Business

The headline for this one was just too good not to change. Countless enterprise vendors large and small are declaring how hip they are when it comes to fighting email overload and increasing efficiency. But fewer enterprises are tackling the root of the problem by killing their on-premise Exchange servers altogether.

Even if you’re not the least bit interested in “Going Google” there are now robust hosted Outlook options available. Cutting out the enormous IT overhead that email and calendaring creates is a great way to save money when it comes to enterprise content management.

Why Femtocells have GPS

Its annoying, but here are the reasons your femto has to set by the window.

Is Femto GPS a Self-Inflicted Pain? | Web 2.0 Journal

Everybody knows that getting reliable GPS lock inside buildings is very hard. The best GPS reception is at the window. But for the best Femto coverage you want it in the middle of a typical McMansion.

Speculation that HP will acquire Sun’s hardware

Even though Oracle had promised to retain the Sun hardware portfolio to make highly optimized database “appliances”, its looking like there may be a better home for them at HP.

Oracle is likely to sell sun’s hardware business to hp – The Inquirer

HP, on the other hand, wants Sun’s hardware to boost its services business. HP bought outsourcing player EDS. EDS was Sun’s best customer. By owning Sun technology, HP will improve its profit margins on many EDS deals.

IBM POWER7 architecture details

The how and why of IBM’s next power chip is over at the Inquirer.  Interestingly, they make a comparison to the Alpha, which was killed
when Compaq acquired DEC.
 
Ibm power7 details emerge – The Inquirer

Hot Chips conference saw the first serious talk about the IBM POWER7 processor, the monster square-inch sized 45nm 8-core chip with 4-thread simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) per core.

It’s coming out a whole eight years after the previous 4-thread multi-threaded general purpose CPU, the Alpha 21464 EV8, was announced but prematurely killed.

A good security review of Snow Leopard

Brief and to the point.  What you get and what you don’t. 

Snow Leopard security – The good, the bad and the missing • The Register

While Microsoft has had it implemented since the roll-out of Windows Vista, the analogous protection in Snow Leopard, which went on sale Friday, suffers from a crucial deficiency: It fails to randomize core parts of the OS, including the heap, stack and dynamic linker.

Snow Leopard benchmarks on Mac Mini

All you wanted to know about performance if you are upgrading the affordable Mac Mini to the affordable Snow Leopard.

[Phoronix] Mac OS X 10.6 Brings Serious Performance Gains

The performance improvements we encountered in Mac OS X 10.6 through our benchmarks we were quite astonishing. Thanks to the introduction of the Grand Central Dispatch, 64-bit migration, OpenCL support (to largely benefit future applications), and other refinements made “under the hood” of Snow Leopard, this is one hell of a fast operating system. We were quite amazed with multiple tests exhibiting nearly 50% performance boosts over Mac OS X 10.5.8. While that was an extreme improvement, many other tests ran 10~16% faster.

Satellite Radio comes to the iPhone

Now if you could only use those satellites to broadcast RSS Feeds as well …

Sirius Introduces SkyDock for Apple iPhone, iPod Touch | John Paczkowski | Digital Daily | AllThingsD

The rumors were true. At an invitation-only media event in New York City this morning, Sirius XM (SIRI) debuted the first-ever radio dock for the iPhone and iPod touch.

Dubbed SkyDock, the $119.99 peripheral uses iPhone OS 3’s support for third-party hardware to transform Apple (AAPL) handsets into full-fledged satellite radios.

Snow Leopard App Compatibility Chart

This link was down a couple days ago, but its running now.  Good news on Gimp and OpenOffice, bad news on NeoOffice.  But the thing you’re really going to miss is MenuMeters.

Snow Leopard Compatibility: Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard Compatibility List

Below is a list of applications and their compatibility status with Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, the most recent operating system from Apple. Please collaborate by sharing your experiences using each application and by adding applications not already listed. //Simply click EDIT at the bottom of the page to contribute.

Google Enables Download of eReader Books

The real news is that they have enabled download in the EPUB format in addition to pdf.  This will be very handy source of reading material when you buy that Macbook Touch for Christmas.  So the only stumbling block is that you cannot limit a book search to return only download-able (free) results. 

Google Opens Up Its EPUB Archive: Download 1 Million Books for Free

Google just announced that it will now allow users to download over 1 million public domain books in the EPUB format. Google had already made this archive available to some of its partners, including Sony and Barnes and Noble, but until today users weren’t able to download these free EPUB texts from Google directly. Google will continue to make PDF versions of these books available for download as well, but users with eReader’s will find the new EPUB files far more useful.