Free Republic

Chinese officials have summoned top American tech executives to Seattle for a forum on Wednesday in a show of force that could make the Obama administration’s standing in Silicon Valley appear weak by comparison. Beijing moved up the date of the annual event to coincide with President Xi Jinping’s U.S. visit and reportedly pressured major Silicon Valley players to send their chief executives to what is normally an annual summit for midlevel management, threatening regulatory scrutiny if they didn’t comply. “It’s not really voluntary,” said Atlantic Council Senior Fellow Jason Healey, a former director of cyber infrastructure protection at the...

Amazon and Microsoft are quickly becoming the king and queen of cloud computing. Here's another case in point: the two of them just won a huge contract with the FAA, led by IT consultant CSC. This contract will consolidate the FCC's data centers, moving data to both Amazon's cloud Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft's cloud, Azure. CSC says the contract is worth $108 million out of the gate, and because its a long-term contract, could be worth as much as $1 billion over the next 10 years. The FAA isn't getting rid of its data centers altogether to run...

I saw a huge Delta Air Lines digital sign full of rainbows and "love" nonsense going into Atlanta yesterday morning. I am putting them #1 on my boycott list. Anyone care to add to the list?

The world's largest chip maker just made its largest acquisition ever. Intel is buying programmable chip maker Altera Corporation in a $16.7 billion cash deal with stockholders taking home $54 per share. The merger comes amidst a lag in the personal-computer market, one that Intel's been able to stay above. Intel's first-quarter earnings report in April showed a 3 percent rise in income compared to the same quarter last year. And Intel likely wants to continue keeping its head above water. That's where Altera should help out. A joint press release said Intel's products and manufacturing process will join with...

IBM's supercomputer Watson will be used to make decisions about cancer care in 14 hospitals in the US and Canada, it has been announced. Using computers to trawl through vast amounts of medical data speeds up the diagnosis process. (excerpt) It also recently teamed up with IBM to allow the software that helps gather health data from iPhones to be used by Watson.

The Navy needs new servers for its upgraded Aegis Combat System after the current IBM line was sold to Chinese computer maker Lenovo. The $2.1 billion sale closed in October and made Lenovo the number three server maker in the world. IBM shedding its server business creates a security concern for the U.S. Navy, which included the company’s x86 BladeCenter HT server in its Aegis Technical Insertion (TI) 12. The TI-12 hardware upgrades, along with Advanced Capability Build (ACB) 12 software upgrades, compose the Aegis Baseline 9 combat system upgrade that combines a ballistic missile defense capability with anti-air warfare...

Apple can’t grow like this forever. No company can. In a few short years, Apple has become the biggest company on the planet by market value — so big that it dwarfs every other one on the stock market. It dominates the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index as no other company has in 30 years. Apple’s market capitalization — the value of all of the shares of its stock — is more than $758 billion, greater than any other company’s. Yet the Wall Street consensus is that Apple is still having a growth spurt. In fact, if Apple’s watches, phones,...

IBM Warns Louisiana Over 'Religious Freedom' Bill By Charles Riley IBM has sent a letter to the governor of Louisiana warning that a pending religious freedom bill would create a hostile environment for the tech company's employees. "A bill that legally protects discrimination based on same-sex marriage status will create a hostile environment for our current and prospective employees, and is antithetical to our company's values," IBM vice president James Driesse wrote in a letter to Gov. Bobby Jindal. "IBM will find it much harder to attract talent to Louisiana if this bill is passed and enacted into law," Driesse...

Experts in health care and information technology agree on the future’s biggest opportunity: the creation of a new computational model that will link together all of the massive computers that now hold medical information. IBM is today staking its claim to be a major player in creating that cloud, and to use its Watson artificial intelligence to make sense of the flood of medical data that will result. The new effort uses new, innovative systems to keep data secure, IBM executives say, even while allowing software to use them remotely. Big Blue is certainly putting some muscle into medicine. Some...

MADISON, Wisconsin—Scott Walker loves the haters. In recent years as Wisconsin has moved further to the right, the mild-mannered preacher’s son has become in the eyes of his opponents an icon of all that is evil—and he seems to relish it. On the stump, the governor is fond of talking up the fact that he’s “the No. 1 target in America of the labor unions and many others on the left,” and the hecklers that seem willing to follow him to the ends of the Earth give him a chance to flex his conservative muscles. They feed the perception that...

The long reigning king of the desktop OS is in trouble. Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, is rapidly steering the company into the back office and service spaces, while their nascent mobile and desktop platforms are crumbling around them. Microsoft is putting on a brave face continuing to heavily advertise the 2-in-1 Surface debacle, but Nadella is only buying time, as he must surely know that Apple and Google is the two-headed beast that Microsoft can not stop. In less than a decade, Microsoft will be associated with IBM or Oracle, not Apple or Google. Apple’s iOS is poised for...

Apple and IBM are planning on partnering on a dozen new enterprise apps this quarter, and 100 this year. The first of them, aimed at utility workers, will be announced next week. VentureBeat has learned that the app, which the two huge corporations developed for a major U.S. utility company, was built for crew workers, like those that service electricity lines. It’s designed to give those workers a wide range of data, such as maps and weather notifications. The app is the result of the partnership between Apple and IBM, announced last summer, under which the two technology giants are...

The VAR Guy reported last week that IBM's massive layoffs would begin this week — and this seems to be the case. Word surfaced last weekend that IBM is prepping to layoff up to 26 percent of its global workforce, or some 100,000 workers.Many of these layoffs come on the heels of Lance Crosby's resignation. Crosby, the founder of SoftLayer, a company IBM acquired for around $2 billion in July 2013, said in a statement that he was taking some time off before pursuing his "next challenge."Here's what you need to know about IBM's most recent round of layoffs....

Research Triangle Park, N.C. — A "resource action," or layoffs, are underway at IBM (NYSE: IBM) under the name "Project Chrome," workers are telling the Alliance@IBM Union. "Bloodbath today," wrote an IBMer in Columbia, Mo. "Me? Yes, RA'd." “At a time when IBM is aggressively transforming, the company continues to rebalance its workforce to meet the changing requirements of its clients and to lead in new, high value segments of the IT industry, including cloud, analytics, mobile, security, social and cognitive computing. This is not new news," IBM said in a statement. "IBM announced a $600 million workforce rebalancing charge...

IBM denies the rumor about the layoffs of more than 100,000 IBM employees. The company says that only “several thousand” IBM employees will be affected by the layoffs. In an email statement from IBM to Reuters, IBM officially denied the rumor concerning as many as 112,000 employees. According to the Jan. 26 Reuters report, “IBM is in the process of layoffs, as disclosed in its latest earnings report last week, but it will affect ‘several thousand’ employees only.” The layoffs of as many as 112,000 of the company’s employees would affect 26 percent of its global workforce. Robert Cringely, a...

Biggest corporate lay-off in history is expected within days, with IBM believed to be scrapping 110,000 of its 430,000 workforce around the world IBM is preparing to scrap 110,000 of its global 430,000 workforce in the biggest corporate cull in the computer giant's history, a report has revealed. The company will make the job cuts this week under a plan known internally as 'project chrome', according to US technology blogger Robert Cringely on Forbes website. IBM is in the process of layoffs, as disclosed in its latest earnings report last week but said the number of job losses was significantly...

It's every parent's nightmare, but true: Major U.S. corporations are funding a campaign of sophisticated, psychologically intrusive "gay" indoctrination programs targeting very young children in elementary schools across America. It’s part of a very well-planned and well-funded effort to reach children as young as possible without their parents’ intervention. The national program, called “Welcoming Schools”, skillfully works on the minds of young children in three ways: (1) Introducing the concept of homosexuality to children. (2) Telling them that homosexuality is normal and natural. (3) Telling them that their parents or friends who portray homosexuality in a less than positive way...

Password guessing The U.S. intelligence community has launched a multi-year research project to develop a superconducting computer, awarding its first contracts to three major technology companies.IBM, Raytheon BBN and Northrop Grumman won the contracts, the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity said Wednesday, without disclosing financial details.If it works, the Cryogenic Computer Complexity (C3) program could lead to a new generation of superconducting supercomputers."The energy demands of today's high-performance computers have become a critical challenge for the Intelligence Community that the C3 program aims to address," IARPA said in a statement. Such computers use massive amounts of energy.Competition from Europe, Japan...

We saw a marked slowdown in September in client buying behavior, and our results also point to the unprecedented pace of change in our industry."CEO Ginni Rometty said this in IBM's Q3 earnings announcement, which revealed tumbling revenue and profits at the company.The statement is troubling because as a global provider of business software and services, IBM is a bellwether of business spending. And a boom in business spending is central to the bullish outlooks of many economists and market strategists.IBM reported declines in all markets: Americas revenue fell 2%, Europe/Middle East/Africa revenue fell 2%, and Asia-Pacific revenue dropped 9%....

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Belgian prosecutors said on Thursday they had detained a man of Iraqi nationality after a series of letters containing a nerve gas ingredient were sent to the prime minister's office and the U.S. and British embassies. A spokeswoman for the federal prosecutor's office told a news conference the 45-year-old man was arrested late on Wednesday in the western Belgian town of Deinze. Two postal workers were taken to hospital after being exposed to the chemicals in the letters at mail depots. No one else was hurt by the 10 letters sent to a variety of targets, including...