The Americas' SAP Users' Group (ASUG) is forming a new global community for customers of Business Objects, the business intelligence vendor that SAP bought earlier this year, the organization announced this week.

Membership in the Global BusinessObjects Network will be free until 2010. The organization is hoping to get existing user groups to join and serve as local chapters, while the GBN provides marketing and operational support.

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The GBN will officially launch at the Business Objects User Conference in Dallas in October. Starting on Oct. 20, users can sign up at the conference or through the Web site www.gogbn.org.

ASUG officials were not immediately available for comment Thursday.

Dave Rathbun, a member of the group's initial steering committee, said in a recent blog post that the new group is a rebranding of the Business Objects Community Alliance.

"There are various reasons for the change, some of which have to do with naming conflicts but mostly having to do with the desire to emphasize the independence from anything run by SAP," said Rathbun, who works for Integra Solutions, a Dallas consulting firm.

Rathbun expects the group to sponsor user conferences in Europe and Asia-Pacific next year, as well as one in the United States.

He added that because GBN wishes to emphasize its independence from SAP, he expects shows won't be held in conjunction with the vendor's SAPPHIRE events.

In an interview Thursday, steering committee member Jamie Oswald also emphasized the need for user groups to have independence from vendors.

Years ago, Oswald said, he couldn't get endorsement from his employer to attend local user group events because they contained too much input from Business Objects' marketing department and not enough educational content.

"The groups were run typically by people who cared a lot, but a lot of their support ... came from Business Objects," said Oswald, who now works as a senior business intelligence developer with Sisters of Mercy Health System in Chesterfield, Missouri. "That's how [Business Objects] got a lot of their content pushed in."

"I think it's gotten better over time, but now that this new independent group is in charge, it's going to shift even further into the educational side" at both local events and user conferences, he added.

This story was updated on September 4, 2008

Sun Microsystems planned to push out a significant update to Java today, but a last-minute snag has made its date of arrival uncertain.…

Dell Thursday started selling a mini-notebook with Microsoft's Windows XP Home preinstalled, the first time that the world's largest computer maker has had a PC to sell with that operating system since Microsoft retired XP from general service in June.

The 2.28-pound Inspiron Mini 9 starts at $399 when equipped with XP Home, and sports an 8.9-inch display, 512MB of memory, an 8GB solid-state drive (SSD) composed of flash RAM and 802.11g wireless capability. A pricier $499 configuration boosts memory to 1GB and the SSD to 16GB.

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Dell is also selling a $349 model with 512MB of memory and a 4GB SSD that comes with Ubuntu, a popular Linux distribution, in place of Windows XP.

All Mini 9 configurations are powered by a 1.6GHz Atom processor that Intel debuted in early June.

The Inspiron Mini 9 is Dell's first system to pack Windows XP Home since June, when the Round Rock, Texas-based computer maker yanked the operating system from its lines. Microsoft had set June 30 as the retirement deadline for Windows XP -- it would stop shipping copies to large computer manufacturers and cease selling to retail -- and Dell complied by ending sales June 26.

However, in early April Microsoft announced that it would let makers of small, inexpensive laptops -- which it labeled as ULCPCs, short for "ultra-low-cost PCs," a name that never stuck -- install XP Home through June 2010, possibly longer.

At the time, Microsoft maintained that it offered the loophole not to stymie Linux, which was the only available OS for the tiny, cheap computer, but because users and hardware vendors alike had demanded XP.

"One thing we've heard loud and clear, from both our customers and our partners, is the desire for Windows on this new class of devices," said Michael Dix, general manager of Windows client product management, in a Q&A posted on Microsoft's Web site.

Dell and other big-brand computer sellers, including Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo, have continued to preinstall Windows XP Professional on business-oriented machines by taking advantage of Windows Vista's downgrade rights. According to data from PC metrics vendor Devil Mountain Software, a third of new PCs are downgraded from Vista to XP Professional, either at the factory or by users after they buy.

The Inspiron Mini 9 can be purchased from Dell's online store. Dell is also running a special beginning Friday for U.S. customers only; people who purchase a Studio 15, XPS M1530 or XPS M1330 laptop through early Tuesday, Sept. 9, can also buy a Mini 9 for $99.

Comcast, the second-largest broadband provider in the United States, has filed a court appeal of a U.S. Federal Communications Commission ruling last month saying the company couldn't delay some peer-to-peer traffic on its network.

The FCC, on Aug. 1, voted 3-2 to prohibit Comcast from slowing BitTorrent p-to-p traffic in an effort to reduce network congestion. Commissioners voting against Comcast said the traffic throttling violated FCC net neutrality principles.

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Comcast on Thursday asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to review the FCC decision, saying the commission had no hard rules against the company's network management practices. The FCC's net neutrality principles, adopted in 2005, set out general guidelines, but no specific prohibitions, Comcast said.

Comcast filed the appeal to protect its legal rights and to "challenge the basis on which the commission found that Comcast violated federal policy in the absence of pre-existing legally enforceable standards or rules," David Cohen, Comcast's executive vice president, said in a statement. "We are compelled to appeal because we strongly believe that, in this particular case, the Commission's action was legally inappropriate and its findings were not justified by the record."

However, Comcast will abide by the FCC's order during the appeal, and it will continue with plans to move toward other network management techniques by the end of the year, Cohen added. "We will follow through on our long-standing commitment to transition to protocol-agnostic network congestion management practices by the end of this year," he said. "We also remain committed to bringing our customers a superior Internet experience."

Last week, Comcast announced it would put a 250GB-per-month bandwidth cap on residential customers. Customers may get a warning if they go over the monthly cap, and after their first warning, Comcast will suspend their service for a year if they go over the cap a second time.

That cap, which goes into effect Oct. 1, received mixed reactions, with some Internet users saying a cap is preferable to blocking or slowing specific applications. Some critics complained, however, that the cap could penalize certain types of subscribers, such as those who download movies frequently. The average Comcast user uses less than 3GB per month, Comcast said.

A spokesman for Public Knowledge, among the three organizations that asked the FCC to investigate the Comcast BitTorrent traffic throttling, said he was not surprised by the appeal. "We expected that they'd appeal," said Art Brodsky.

Comcast's traffic management was unveiled by press reports in late 2007. The company didn't tell its subscribers that it was slowing BitTorrent and other p-to-P traffic until the press reports. Comcast later said it was slowing p-to-p traffic only during times of network congestion, but FCC chairman Kevin Martin and some independent tests suggested Comcast was slowing that traffic around the clock.

Reuters - Top U.S. defense officials gave President George W. Bush their views this week on the pace and size of future U.S. troop cuts in Iraq after a substantial drop in violence there, officials said on Thursday.