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It's back! Scrabulous, the impostor Scrabble game on Facebook which was shut down after a lawsuit filed by Hasbro, which owns the U.S. and Canadian rights to the original Scrabble board game, came back to life Thursday as Wordscraper.

Its return follows a drawn-out battle between the copyright holder, gamers and developers.

The popular Scrabulous, created by Indian brothers Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla, had a following of nearly 80,000 players since 2005. For months Hasbro warned Facebook and the Agarwallas about copyright infringement, and last week it sued the Agarwallas in the Southern District Court of New York and demanded that the game be shut down. Hasbro owns the rights to Scrabble in North America, while rival toymaker Mattel owns the rights in the rest of the world.

The creators complied and posted this message to fans on the Scrabulous Web site: "In deference to Facebook's concerns and without prejudice to our legal rights, we have had to restrict our fans in the USA and Canada from accessing the Scrabulous application on Facebook until further notice."

Users in the Middle

Hasbro did not want to leave users hanging so, thanks to a licensing deal with game maker Electric Arts, an approved version of Scrabble was added to Facebook for users in the U.S. and Canada. Hasbro said the game was the first Hasbro-licensed property to go live on a social-networking site and added that others are in development. Scrabulous fans rebelled by boycotting Scrabble.

Scrabble did not last long. It's not clear what happened, but Scrabble went down on Wednesday, leaving users wondering if the beta application had problems or if angry hackers had attacked the application.

Facebook apologized for the inconvenience and the application was back on Thursday. Facebook said the finished version will be launched in mid-August.

The Same, Yet Different

The Agarwallas said they contacted Hasbro...

To spur the adoption of virtualization, VMware is offering its stand-alone ESXi hypervisor for free. ESXi was built to run virtual machines, minimizing configuration requirements and simplifying deployment, according to the company.

Leading server manufacturers have all embedded ESXi, including Dell, Fujitsu-Siemens, Hitachi, HP, IBM and NEC.

"Virtualization is one of the most impactful trends in computing," said Gartner Vice President Distinguished Analyst Tom Bittman. "The availability of free hypervisors will undoubtedly grow the market and provide a compelling reason for companies that have not virtualized their environment to begin doing so. This is especially true for small to medium business customers and customers in emerging markets."

Making Virtualization Ubiquitous

More than 800 virtual appliances have been created for the VMware hypervisor on the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace, and ESXi now incorporates a direct integration with the Virtual Appliance Marketplace to allow users to download and run virtual appliances.

"VMware has always believed that virtualization needs to be ubiquitous. We want to accelerate the day that x86 servers and desktops are fully virtualized," said Raghu Raghuram, vice president of products and solutions for VMware. "With the explosive growth of multi-core capacity, improvements in virtualization-aware hardware, and performance improvements in our virtualization software, we believe that no technical hurdles remain for 100 percent virtualization."

Built on the mature technology of the ESX hypervisor, ESXi offers an operating system with independent architecture that minimizes attack surface area, according to the company. ESXi offers features, such as four virtual CPUs, 256GB hosts, and memory deduplication, for running resource-intensive applications. The features work with leading operating systems, including Windows, Linux, Netware, and Solaris.

Is VMware's Real Motive Competitive?

VMware clearly leads the x86 virtualization market in both share and revenues. But significant challenges have arisen during the past year. First, Citrix acquired XenSource and its solutions based on the Open...

In a sign that it may be finally turning its fortunes around, Motorola Inc. posted a small surprise profit for its second quarter and shipped more cell phones than in the first quarter.

The Schaumburg, Illinois-based cell phone company said Thursday that it earned $4 million, or less than 1 cent per share, in the three months ended June 30. That includes charges of 2 cents per share.

Analysts polled by Thomson Financial had been expecting a loss of 3 cents per share.

In the same quarter a year ago, Motorola lost $28 million, or 2 cents per share.

Its sales fell 7.4 percent to $8.1 billion versus $8.7 billion a year ago. Analysts had been expecting sales of $7.69 billion.

Motorola shares were up 83 cents, or 11 percent, at $8.50 in pre-market trading.

The company shipped 28.1 million cell phones, up from 27 million in the first quarter, and said it maintained its share of the global handset market.

According to research firm IDC, Motorola's market share actually slipped slightly from 9.4 percent of the global market in the first quarter to 9.2 percent in the second, but the company narrowly maintained its third-place ranking, just above South Korea's LG Electronics Inc.. with 9.1 percent. Nokia Corp. is the largest maker of cell phones, followed by Samsung Electronics Co.

Motorola rode high a few years ago on sales of its Razr phone, but has failed to come up with follow-up of equal popularity. Facing increasing investor discontent, Motorola said in March that it plans to spin the handset business off into a separate publicly traded company. The split should be complete next year.

The cell-phone unit, Motorola's largest by sales, posted an operating loss of $346 million, but the other two units, which together make up more than half the revenue, made up for that loss.

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