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Jobs to be bundled on a plane and flown to lower labour cost countries ... He highlighted a $1bn Japanese tax gain Big Blue has received, and pointed out that in the past the company had matched the proceeds from dispositions or IP sales with workforce restructuring expense.

WASHINGTON, D.C., November 12, 2015 (LifeSiteNews) – President Obama says he backs "The Equality Act," which would add gender identity and sexual orientation to the 1964 Civil Rights Act. "Upon that review it is now clear that the administration strongly supports the Equality Act,” White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest announced on Tuesday. “That bill is historic legislation that would advance the cause of equality for millions of Americans. “We look forward to working with Congress to ensure that the legislative process produces a result that balances both the bedrock principles of civil rights...with the religious liberty that we hold...

We're gonna need a bigger buyback... As if "old tech" IBM was not in enough trouble, the worrying admission from Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway's earnings of around $2 billion (though careful to note he is not about to sell) has seemingly prompted further weakness. IBM is down almost 2% to fresh May 2010 lows... As Berkshire Hathaway detailked... As of September 30, 2015 and December 31, 2014, we concluded that there were no unrealized losses that were other than temporary. Our conclusions were based on: (a) our ability and intent to hold the securities to recovery; (b) our assessment that the...

Above: IBM's carbon nanotubes have tiny circuits that are fractions of a meter apart.Image Credit: IBM Carbon nanotubes are the leading candidate to replace silicon in semiconductor chips after the decades-long run of silicon electronics runs out. And IBM is hoping to usher along that transition with a new breakthrough being announced today.In the October 2 issue of the journal Science, IBM researchers say they have overcome one of the most daunting challenges around carbon nanotube transistors, which are the building blocks of electronic circuits with dimensions that are measured in billionths of a meter. Carbon nanotubes may be...

IBM boffins have been given a tidy $3bn cash pile to solve a problem that lurks not too far in our future. That problem is the imminent breakdown in conventional chip operation and chip materials as we shrink transistor gates from today's 14nm process size to 10nm and 7nm. At around 7nm, which most industry observers expect we will hit in the early 2020s, things start to get really unpleasant. More and more jostling electrons jump in and out of gates against processor designers' wishes, leading to a frustrating problem known as gate current leakage. ... These investment areas include:...

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...