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Reducing employees by more than three quarters in three years is a bold and difficult task. What will it leave behind? Who, under this plan, will still be a US IBM employee in 2015? Top management will remain, the sales organization will endure, as will employees working on US government contracts that require workers to be US citizens. Everyone else will be gone. Everyone.

Martha Burk is at it again. The director of the Corporate Accountability Project for the National Council of Women’s Organizations is demanding that Augusta National Golf Club invite ladies to join its membership. Nine years ago, Burk waged a similar campaign against Augusta National, host of this week’s Masters golf tournament. While it generated a lot of publicity, it ended unsuccessfully. Burk thought she had a better chance this year inasmuch as IBM, a major Masters sponsor, boasts a female CEO. Since Augusta National had proffered membership to previous IBM CEOs who were male, Burke argued, the golf club should...

Now it's Ecomstation TODAY MARKS the 25th birthday of OS/2, which IBM announced on 2 April, 1987.Initially intended as a protected mode successor to PC-DOS, OS/2 became the first serious PC operating system rival to Microsoft Windows. For a while, IBM and Microsoft collaborated on it, until Microsoft withdrew its support for various reasons and focused its efforts on Windows NT instead. OS/2 has never fully recovered from Microsoft's abandonment of it, nor has Windows.However, throughout most of the 1990s, OS/2 was a much more stable, secure and reliable PC operating system than Windows. It was capable of running Windows...

Cuts bit size down to 12 atoms IBM announced on Thursday that its boffins managed to cut the physical requirements for a bit of data, whereby number of required atoms has been reduced from a million to only 12. Of course, it goes without saying that this means higher density and more space. Indeed, 1TB drives would quickly become old news as 100TB or 150TB would become a common thing. For its research, IBM used antiferromagnetism to achieve 100 times denser memory. Antiferromagnetism refers to magnetic moments of atoms or molecules where they align with neighboring spins pointing in opposite...

Researchers have successfully stored a single data bit in only 12 atoms. Currently it takes about a million atoms to store a bit on a modern hard-disk, the researchers from IBM say. They believe this is the world's smallest magnetic memory bit. According to the researchers, the technique opens up the possibility of producing much denser forms of magnetic computer memory than today's hard disk drives and solid state memory chips. "Roughly every two years hard drives become denser," research lead author Sebastian Loth told the BBC. "The obvious question to ask is how long can we keep going. And...

In June 1942, Thomas Mann, who was living in exile in California, delivered a commentary on a German-language BBC radio program that decried the sanguinary actions of the Third Reich in avenging the assassination of the leading SS official Reinhard Heydrich in Prague. After Heydrich’s elaborate funeral ceremony at the new Reich Chancellery in Berlin, Hitler screamed at the Czech president, Emil Hacha, “Nothing can prevent me from deporting millions of Czechs if they do not wish for peaceful coexistence.” It wasn’t an idle threat. “Since the violent death of Heydrich,” Mann lamented, “terror is raging everywhere, in a more...

<p>The computer giant and 3M this week are announcing a collaboration to advance the practice of stacking multiple chips on top of each other, packing much greater computing and data-storage capability together into a small space. Electronics companies now routinely stack a few chips together–particularly memory chips, for use in small devices like cellphones–but IBM is talking about bonding 100 or more chips together, including high-performance microprocessors.</p>

In our increasingly smartphone-and-tablet computing-centric world, one of the computer engineers who helped design IBM's first personal computer, has made it official: The PC is dead. Thirty years ago, Mark Dean was part of the original team that helped usher in a personal computing revolution when Big Blue announced its PC. On the anniversary of that seminal announcement, Dean said it is time to move beyond the PC. (see: Today is the IBM Model 5150's 30th birthday) "My primary computer now is a tablet. When I helped design the PC, I didn't think I'd live long enough to witness its...

PCs are going the way of typewriters, vinyl records and vacuum tubes, one of the engineers who worked on the original machine has said. The claim was made in a blog post commemorating 30 years since the launch of the first IBM personal computer. No longer, said Dr Mark Dean, are PCs the leading edge of computing. No single device has taken the PC's place, he said, instead it has been replaced by the socially-mediated innovation it has fostered. While IBM was not the first to produce a personal computer, the launch of the 5150 on 12 August 1981 established...

Three accused eco-terrorists went on trial under heavy security in Switzerland's highest criminal court Tuesday for an alleged plot to blow up an IBM nanotech research center near Zurich. The trial in the Federal Criminal Court for an Italian couple and Swiss man living in Italy opened after a one-hour delay because of the extraordinary security taken by Swiss police, who cordoned off the area with metal barriers. The three defendants — 35-year-old Costantino Alfonso Ragusa, his 29-year-old wife Silvia Ragusa Guerini and their 26-year-old Swiss friend Luca "Billy" Cristos Bernasconi — had been detained after being arrested last year...

IBM researchers have made a breakthrough in a new kind of memory chip that can record data 100 times faster than today’s flash memory chips. That means scientists are one step closer to creating a universal memory chip that is fast, permanent, and has lots of capacity. If they really work as billed, these multi-bit phase-change memory chips could transform enterprise computing and storage by around 2016, according to IBM. The technology could lead to chips that are lower cost, faster, and more durable in storing applications for consumer devices, including mobile phones and cloud storage. It could also benefit...

Link and headline onlyClick Here~

Watching Intel now is a little like Michael Jordan’s second comeback. It’s hard to explain to younger folks that the sluggish, behind-the-curve tech giant was a dynamo back in the 1980s and 1990s. Intel has struggled to expand into mobile chips. Now smartphones and tablets are slashing demand for traditional PCs. Can the PC king respond?

The CEO of IBM offered the Obama administration a free software program that would have cut Medicare and Medicaid fraud by almost a trillion dollars, but he was turned down – twice. "We could have improved the quality and reduced the cost of the healthcare system by $900 billion...I said we would do it for free to prove that it works. They turned us down, "IBM chairman and CEO Samuel Palmisano said during a Sept. 14, 2010 taping of the Wall Street Journal’s Viewpoints program. FOX News confirmed that a second meeting between Palmisano and Obama administration officials yielded the...

This should be sent to every American to show them what this President really thinks and that he is anti-capitalist, anti-private-sector and cannot be trusted in telling the truth. ------------------------------- ----- This message has links at the bottom to verify it's content. IBM offered to help reduce Medicare fraud for free... What if I told you that the Chairman and CEO of IBM, Samuel J. Palmisano, approached President Obama and members of his, before the healthcare bill debates, with a plan that would reduce healthcare expenditures by $900 billion? Given the Obama Administration's adamancy that the United States of America...

155 billion cycles which is more than Bejing IBM has been showing off its latest graphene transistor that can execute 155 billion cycles per second. It is about 50 percent faster than previous experimental transistors. The new transistor has a cut-off frequency of 155GHz. The previous one could manage 100GHz  and it was shown off last year. Top Big Blue boffin Yu-Ming Lin said that the research also shows that high-performance, graphene-based transistors can be produced at low cost using standard semiconductor manufacturing processes. In other words commercial production of graphene chips is not far away. Graphene is a...

Language is arguably what makes us most human. Even the smartest and chattiest of the animal kingdom have nothing on our lingual cognition.In computer science, the Holy Grail has long been to build software that understands — and can interact with — natural human language. But dreams of a real-life Johnny 5 or C-3PO have always been dashed on the great gulf between raw processing power and the architecture of the human mind. Computers are great at crunching large sets of numbers. The mind excels at assumption and nuance.Enter Watson, an artificial intelligence project from IBM that’s over five years...

It was just a few weeks ago that President Obama was kvetching in his State of the Union address that China “has the fastest computer.” He was referring to the Tianhe-1A system at the National Supercomputer Center in Tianjin. With a peak performance of 2.57 petaflops, it muscled out the U.S. Department of Energy’s Cray XT5 Jaguar system for the No. 1 spot on the Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.Worry no more, Mr. President. Your government is on the case. The U.S. Department of Energy announced today that it has cut a deal with IBM to...

Pentagon Reports Billions of Dollars in Contractor Fraud The Pentagon paid hundreds of billions of dollars to defense contractors engaged in criminal or civil fraud -- in some cases paying the companies after they were convicted, according to a new Defense Department report. At least 91 contractors holding contracts worth $270 billion were the subjects of civil fraud judgments -- and in some cases CRIMINAL FRAUD convictions as well, many of which resulted in fines, suspensions or debarments. Even so, Defense Department contracting officers still assigned $4.9 billion worth of work with these companies after the fraud was uncovered, the...

Fastest processor in the world. A million bucks a pop!! Some are calling it a Datacenter-in-a-box.

IBM has announced its fifth annual Next Five in Five – a list of five technologies that the company believes “have the potential to change the way people work, live and play over the next five years.” While there are no flying cars or robot servants on the list, there are holographic friends, air-powered batteries, personal environmental sensors, customized commutes and building-heating computers.3D telepresence It may not be a flying car, but it’s definitely one we’ve seen in sci-fi movies before – the ability to converse with a life-size holographic image of another person in real time. The futurists at...

Here’s why Cisco Systems’ bad financial news last week should (maybe) scare the hell out of you.

Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM's CEO and Chairman of the Board, offered to give the White House ways to curb healthcare fraud and abuse. Mr. Palmisano said, “We could've improved quality and reduced the cost of the healthcare system by $900 billion . . . I said we would do it for free, to prove that it works. They turned us down.”

SAN FRANCISCO — I.B.M. scientists have modified a scanning-tunneling microscope, making it possible to observe dynamic processes inside individual atoms on a time scale one million times faster than has previously been possible. The researchers have perfected a measurement technique in which they use an extremely short voltage pulse to excite an individual atom and then follow with a lower voltage to read the atom’s magnetic state, or spin, shortly afterward. The resulting data produces the equivalent of a high-resolution, high-speed movie of the atom’s behavior. The advance, reported Thursday in the journal Science, has potential applications in fields including...

BANGALORE: Tata Consultancy Services is the largest private sector employer in the country. It had 163,700 employees as on June 30. But guess who's number 2? The honour goes to -- surprise, surprise -- IBM. That's right. Not to any Tata or Ambani company, or to Infosys or Wipro. The fact that IBM has over 100,000 people on its rolls in this country is one of India Inc's best-kept secrets. No one in US-headquartered IBM will admit that it employs such a large number of people in India -- for fear of a backlash at home. There's been rising anger...

This is the quintessential sort of clue you hear on the TV game show “Jeopardy!” It’s witty (the clue’s category is “Postcards From the Edge”), demands a large store of trivia and requires contestants to make confident, split-second decisions. This particular clue appeared in a mock version of the game in December, held in Hawthorne, N.Y. at one of I.B.M.’s research labs. Two contestants — Dorothy Gilmartin, a health teacher with her hair tied back in a ponytail, and Alison Kolani, a copy editor — furrowed their brows in concentration. Who would be the first to answer?

IBM patent goes Big BrotherRunning red lights and failure to stop leads to untold numbers of traffic accidents around the world. Sitting at a red light with cars idling also burns fuel that really isn’t needed. IBM has filed a patent application that outlines a system that would turn the motors of a car off at a traffic light to conserve fuel. Few will take issue with green technology that conserves fuel, saves them money, and reduces pollution. However, there is a dark side to the patent application that privacy advocates will not like. The system IBM is proposing has...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - New York state could glean considerable sums from UBS clients who have evaded taxes by hiding money in offshore accounts once the federal government starts handing over its data to the states, a New York state tax official said. "That's really a deep well and I expect we'll be digging in that well for some time," William Comiskey, New York State Tax Department's Deputy Commissioner for enforcement, told Reuters by telephone on Friday. The state, unlike the U.S. government, has an open-ended program for people who voluntarily reveal their misdeeds and some have already turned to...

Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Mark Hurd likes things big and simple. His boardroom has a big empty table and a big videoconferencing screen. A large tablet of blank paper leans on a tripod, allowing him to sketch big numbers to seal a point. The room's sole decoration is an outsize cylinder bursting apart with springs. Its label reads, "big can of whup ass." Hurd has done his share of whuppin' since he took over HP in April 2005. The company had pulled in $80 billion of revenue for the Oct. 31, 2004 fiscal year, a figure scarcely changed over the four...

U.S. Department of Energy scientists say they've created a computer algorithm that allows a substantially enhanced view of nuclear fission. The Argonne National Laboratory scientists said the algorithm, known as the neutron transport code, enables researchers for the first time to obtain a highly detailed description of a nuclear reactor core. "The code could prove crucial in the development of nuclear reactors that are safe, affordable and environmentally friendly," laboratory officials said in a statement. To model the complex geometry of a reactor core currently requires billions of spatial elements, hundreds of angles and thousands of energy groups -- all...

theodp writes "The USPTO has granted IBM a patent covering the Resolution of Abbreviated Text in an Electronic Communications System, lawyer-speak for translating "IMHO" to "In My Humble Opinion" and vice versa. From the patent: "One particularly useful application of the invention is to interpret the meaning of shorthand terms...For example, one database may define the shorthand term 'LOL' to mean 'laughing out loud.'" So much for Big Blue's professed aim of stopping "bad behavior" by companies who seek patents for unoriginal work!"

Windows alternative relies on Linux and the cloudIBM is trying to hit Microsoft where it hurts, with a new offering designed to lure customers away from Windows 7. < IBM takes aim at Microsoft Windows 7 with new desktop offering IBM is trying to hit Microsoft where it hurts, with a new offering designed to lure customers away from Windows 7. The top 7 roadkill victims on the journey to Windows 7 IBM Tuesday said it is teaming up with Canonical to provide cloud- and Linux-based desktop packages in the United States at half the cost of upgrading to Windows 7. It's...

IBM Corp. put a top executive on leave Monday after he was charged in an insider trading scandal for allegedly leaking secrets about IBM's earnings and financial dealings with corporate partners. The company said Robert Moffat, a senior vice president and cost-cutting maven who was considered a possible candidate to succeed CEO Sam Palmisano, no longer serves as an officer of the company.

"My co-worker, Tim, explained that our company, a major software vendor, is seeing its mainframe workforce rapidly approaching the age of retirement. Tim said IBM and most other firms whose businesses depend on mainframes are also dealing with this industry-wide problem. "Since the 1980’s, PC’s and UNIX machines were supposed to have taken over the computing world, relegating mainframes to the scrap heap alongside rotary-dial telephones, suitcase-size boom boxes, and Plymouth Reliants. Indeed, most mainframes from that era have been consigned to the scrap heap – only to be replaced by bigger and faster mainframes. "Today the number of mainframes...

IBM is taking on Google in the cloud-computing based hosted business email service with LotusLive iNotes, which will be offered beginning Monday. Software as a service is a popular option for companies that want to rent, instead of buy, software and Google has been a big player in that area.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. — A former IBM employee who was fired for visiting an adult chat room while at work is appealing a court decision against him. The worker, 60-year-old James Pacenza (Puh-SEHN'-zuh), claims combat stress from Vietnam made him a sex-and-Internet addict who should have been treated, not dismissed.

The average American citizen has a very hard time believing that a world organization - in this case the WHO – could be so evil as to plan a “pandemic” of some kind in order to further some diabolical agenda. It is no surprise that an official document indicating that the pandemic has been planned YEARS ago would turn up from within the dark sewers of IBM. IBM is no stranger to getting involve in the blackest of evils.

I'm going to leave this as link-only.

IBM said it was looking to DNA "origami" for a powerful new generation of ultra-tiny microchips. The US computer giant collaborated with California Institute of Technology researchers to develop a way to design microchips that mimic how chains of DNA molecules fold, allowing for processors far smaller and denser than any seen today. "This is a way to assemble an electronics device of the future," said Bill Hinsberg, manager of the lithography group at IBM's Almaden Research Center in California, on Monday. "It offers a potential way to construct nano-scale devices. The industry has always gone in the direction of...

International Business Machines Corp is looking to the building blocks of our bodies -- DNA -- to be the structure of next-generation microchips. As chipmakers compete to develop ever-smaller chips at cheaper prices, designers are struggling to cut costs. Artificial DNA nanostructures, or "DNA origami" may provide a cheap framework on which to build tiny microchips, according to a paper published on Sunday in the journal Nature Nanotechnology. Microchips are used in computers, cell phones and other electronic devices. "This is the first demonstration of using biological molecules to help with processing in the semiconductor industry," IBM research manager Spike...

LAST week's audacious $US7.4 billion ($10.2 billion) play by Oracle to acquire Sun Microsystems has drawn comparisons with General Motors' moves in the 1950s to consolidate the US car industry. Oracle has touted the bid as a game changer that will help establish it as the first company to sell software and hardware products end-to-end. Rivals are sceptical of the rhetoric and believe the real motive is to kill off Sun's competing software products, which they say has been a theme of Oracle's buying spree, which has reportedly cost $US34.5 billion since 2005. If approved, Oracle will acquire Sun's global...

Over the past 13 years, Sun Microsystems' Java language has become one of the computer industry's best known brands—and underappreciated assets. The tension wasn't lost on Sun's new owner, Oracle, which on Apr. 20 said it will purchase Silicon Valley pioneer Sun for $7.4 billion in cash. If Oracle has its way, Java will emerge not only as a strong revenue source but also a key component of plans to keep customers loyal for years to come. During a conference call with analysts Apr. 20, Oracle CEO Larry Ellison called Java "the single most important software asset we have ever...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - IBM (NYSE: IBM - news) plans to take advantage of the U.S. economic stimulus package signed earlier on Tuesday by offering Internet services over power lines to more rural consumers. IBM said its venture with International Broadband Electric Communications (IBEC), a company that provides broadband over power line (BPL) services, had begun to sign up Internet customers in rural parts of Alabama, Indiana, Michigan and Virginia and that it hoped to access more government funds. The economic stimulus law signed by President Barack Obama included $2.5 billion for the Agricultural Department to expand broadband service in...

I.B.M. withdrew its $7 billion bid for Sun Microsystems on Sunday, one day after Sun’s board balked at a reduced offer, according to three people close to the talks. The deal’s collapse after weeks of negotiations raises questions about Sun’s next step, since the I.B.M. offer was far above the value of the Silicon Valley company’s shares when news of the I.B.M. offer first surfaced last month. Sun, an innovative pioneer in computer workstations, servers and Internet-era software, has struggled in recent years and spent months trying to secure a suitor. With I.B.M. and others shying away from a deal,...

IBM and Sun broke off acquisition talks: report15 mins ago(Reuters) – International Business Machines Corp (IBM.N) and Sun Microsystems Inc (JAVA.O) broke off talks aimed at a $7 billion acquisition, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday.Talks between IBM and Sun were on the brink of collapse, threatening to undermine a potential $7 billion acquisition, according to the newspaper. 

ARMONK, N.Y., Apr 3, 2009 (UPI via COMTEX) -- U.S. technical giant IBM is close to an agreement to acquire rival Sun Microsystems for close to $7 billion, sources said. The estimated figure, $9.50 a share, is about a 100-percent premium on Sun's market value, The New York Times reported Friday.

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- International Business Machines Corp. is lowering its bid for Sun Microsystems Inc. to a range of $9 to $10 a share,

The world's largest IT services company is attempting to boost its creative cost-cutting techniques with a patent application -- number 20090083107 at the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office -- for a "method and system for strategic global resource sourcing." (Yes, "resource sourcing.") In short, IBM wants to patent its math for deciding where to offshore staff. A patented methodology for deciding where to send jobs overseas to cut costs would be a valuable tool that IBM could sell to its corporate clients. But IBM has plenty of opportunity to eat its own dog food: The company continues to slash its...

IBM Set to Cut More U.S. Jobs By WILLIAM M. BULKELEY International Business Machines Corp. is expected to inform a large number of U.S. employees in its global-business services unit that their jobs are being eliminated, with the work of many of them being transferred to IBM employees in India, according to people familiar with the situation. The planned cuts show that even companies that are successfully navigating the global recession are continuing to slash costs--some of them by taking advantage of cheaper Asian labor. IBM reported $4.42 billion in fourth-quarter earnings, a 12% gain. It has forecast profit growth...

Reports of deep job cuts at International Business Machines (IBM) come at a potentially delicate time for the company—just as it is hoping to secure money from the federal stimulus package. The company will lay off as many as 5,000 U.S. workers in its Global Business Services unit, transferring some of the work they performed to India. IBM spokesman Mike Fay declined to confirm or to comment on any job-cut plans, which were reported on Mar. 25 by The Wall Street Journal (NWS) and Bloomberg News. The cuts will affect mainly information technology and consulting work in such areas as...