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Network admin guilty of felony
Terry Childs, the San Francisco network administrator who refused to hand over passwords to his boss, was guilty of one felony count of denying computer services, a jury found Tuesday. As jury members reiterated the verdict, one by one, to judge Judge Teri Jackson, Childs sat motionless before the judge, his head slumping slightly at times. The verdict ends a chapter in the long-running saga that started in July 2008, when Childs made national headlines by refusing to hand over administrative control to the City of San Francisco’s FiberWAN network, which he had spent years helping to create. Childs now faces a maximum of five years in prison.
VMware and Salesforce.com team up for cloud service
VMware and Salesforce.com are jointly developing a cloud computing service called VMforce designed for hosting Java applications, executives from the two companies said Tuesday. Set to be rolled out during the second half of this year in a developer preview, VMforce will make it easier for companies to deploy and manage Java applications in the cloud, said Andrew Dutton, general manager of Asia-Pacific and Japan for VMware, during a conference call with reporters. Based on the Spring development framework, which VMware acquired last year when it bought SpringSource, VMforce combines Salesforce.com’s cloud-computing infrastructure with VMware’s vSphere virtualization software
Microsoft fixes buggy update
Microsoft has re-released a buggy update that didn’t properly protect some of its Windows 2000 users from a security flaw. The security update, released on April 13, was for Windows 2000 users who were also running Windows Media Services. This software — used to stream multimedia over the Internet — had a buggy component called the Windows Media Unicast Service that could be exploited to run unauthorized software on the PC. Microsoft pulled the buggy update late last week. On Tuesday, the company re-issued the patch with the underlying bug finally fixed.
Apple buys iPad cpu maker
Apple has bought the firm widely believed to be responsible for the design of the engine behind the A4 CPU that powers the iPad. Austin, Texas-based Intrinsity does not directly make microprocessosrs; instead, it specializes in designing and licensing high-performance chips for mobile applications. In fact, its primary product is a set of design tools, called Fast14, which implement a number of sophisticated algorithms and techniques to improve the efficiency of CPUs based on a number of different architectures, including the ARM family that’s at the core of many of Apple’s mobile devices.