Littler & Littler
VIA, the other x86 player, has produced a 10cm-by-7.2cm board fitted with one its one-watt 500MHz Eden ULV chips, its contribution to the MIDs race. The fan-less widget includes both LVDS/DVI and VGA support, integrated 5.1 channel audio, fast 100/10 Ethernet, both IDE and SATA drive support, a COM port and up to six USB ports. It supports up to 1GB of DDR2 system memory and there’s 3D/2D graphics with MPEG-2/4 and WMV9 hardware decoding acceleration. It supports a PS/2 keyboard and mouse.

Duffield Start-up Signs Big SaaS Deal
Workday, PeopleSoft founder Dave Duffield’s new start-up, has in hand what is believed to be the one of the largest SaaS deals to date, a 200,000-seat contract from contract manufacturer Flextronics to replace a reported 80 different legacy HR systems in 30 countries. Meanwhile, Salesforce, the CRM on-demand pioneer, went live the other day with Workday as its system of record for HR.

Google Passes Yahoo Traffic
Among Yahoo’s other problems, Google has just shot past it to become the most trafficked web site in the US, according to comScore. Still Google is only ahead by a nose – 466,000 unique monthly visitors. In April Google’s traffic was up 18% to 141.1 million, comScore says, versus Yahoo’s 140.6 million, up 7%. Microsoft was third with 121 million. Yahoo’s still ahead in page views, meaning its visitors tarry, while Google’s are a quick in and out for a search. Yahoo had 33.6 billion page views to Google’s 28.7 billion.

Another Dell Exec Goes
Martin Garvin, the head of procurement at Dell – on which much of the company’s earlier success rested – has retired. Dell of course is cutting jobs and Garvin hasn’t been a top dog since Michael Dell brought in Michael Cannon last year as operations chief running both manufacturing and procurement.

More Barcelonas Out
AMD Monday started selling five low-power 55W versions of its quad-core Barcelona chips. They are for two-, four- and eight-way rack and blade servers, especially ones with virtualization in mind.

CBS To Buy CNet
CBS is buying CNet Networks for $1.8 billion, or $11.50 a share, a 45% premium and a number CNet’s never seen before. The deal gets CNet out of a proxy fight for its board with the Jana Partners hedge fund, which owns, oh, upwards of 10% of its stock, over the direction of the company and its slowdown in growth. Jana faulted CNet for not adapting to the “changing industry environment” and said it needed “comprehensive change.”

Novell To Repurchase Stock
Novell, whose stock price remains in the proverbial commode, says its board has authorized it to repurchase up to $100 million shares.

Microsoft Inks Another Patent Cross-License
Microsoft has signed another one of those patent cross-licenses that so annoy some people. This one’s with Hoya’s Pentax Imaging Systems Division and covers its digital cameras and a “broad range” of each other’s consumer products but Microsoft is making the money. One can only assume it includes Microsoft’s Linux pretensions.

Novell gets New Chairman
Novell has switched chairmen. VC Rick Crandell, the founding managing director of Arbor Partners, will now ramrod its board instead of ex-Pan Am CEO Thomas Plaskett, who remains a director. Crandall started Comshare way back when.

XP SP3 Bewitched
Apparently installing the new XP SP3 sends some PCs – AMD ones, it looks like – into an endless reboot loop. The delayed service pack was just released the other day after being held up by a late-appearing incompatibility with Microsoft’s Dynamic Retail Management System. Microsoft blames OEMs for using the same OS image for AMD boxes as for Intel and says it told them not to do that.

First Sight of Moonlight
Novell has released the source code for Moonlight, the Linux implementation of Microsoft’s Silverlight RIA widgetry for developers to try out.

I’m Greener. No, I’m Greener
Dell is going to try to cut the energy consumption of its laptops and desktops by up to 25% between now and 2010 to avoid millions of tons of CO2 emissions, comparing its pledge to HP’s, which is supposed to cut relative its 2005 levels. It says Dell OptiPlex desktop are down nearly 50% since 2005 and Latitude laptops are down 16% since 2006.

Google Buys into Solar Power Start-up
Google.org is one of a clutch of new and existing investors including BP and Chevron putting a $115 million C round into solar power start-up BrightSource, which uses heat from the sun to create steam for generating electricity. The new round brings total investment to $160 million. BrightSource has a 900 megawatt power-purchase agreement with PG&E but first the start-up has to build a plant.