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IBM puts its PC business up for sale - NY Times Fri Dec 3, 2004 01:40 AM ET NEW YORK, Dec 3 (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp. (IBM.N: Quote, Profile, Research) has put its personal computing business up for sale in a deal that could be worth as much as $2 billion, the New York Times reported on Friday. IBM, now the No. 3 PC maker behind Dell Inc. (DELL.O: Quote, Profile, Research) and Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , is likely to include all of its desktop, laptop and notebook computers in the sale, which could earn...

NEW YORK, Dec 03, 2004 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- International Business Machines Corp. has reportedly put its personal computer business up for sale in a deal that could fetch as much as $2 billion and close an era for an industry pioneer that long ago shifted its focus to more lucrative segments of the computer business. Its stock rose 1.6 percent in early trading in the wake of the report. The New York Times said in its Friday editions that IBM is in serious discussions with the Lenovo Group, China's biggest maker of personal computers, and at least one...

In an eyebrow-raising forecast, Gartner Inc. researchers said they believe that as many as 50 percent of the IT operational jobs in the U.S. could disappear over the next two decades because of improvements in data center technologies. Donna Scott, a Gartner analyst, said IT workers face a situation similar to that in the manufacturing field, which has lost jobs over the past several decades as automation has improved. Similarly, standardization of IT infrastructure, applications and processes will lead to productivity improvements and a major shift in skill needs, she said. "There will be more room to automate, and that...

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov 29, 2004 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- A long-awaited microprocessor developed by IBM Corp., Sony Corp. and Toshiba Corp. will go into early production next year and start appearing in video game consoles, high-definition TVs and home servers in 2006, the companies said Monday. The processor, code-named Cell, will handle vastly more memory than today's consumer chips as well as enable hardware-based copyright protection and allow multiple operating systems to run at the same time. It also will feature multiple cores, or logic engines, on a single die. It's unclear whether Cell will pose a threat...

SCO seals deal for legal expense cap Published: November 5, 2004, 10:30 AM PST By Stephen Shankland Staff Writer, CNET News.com The SCO Group has signed a previously announced agreement with two law firms that will cap legal expenses for its Linux and Unix litigation at $31 million, the company said in a legal filing Thursday. The expense cap agreement--announced Aug. 31 but signed Oct. 31--puts to rest some uncertainty about the company's abilities to pay the hefty legal fees incurred through its legal attacks against IBM, Novell, AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler and its legal defense against Red Hat. SCO's stock...

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov 04, 2004 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- A $100 million supercomputer being built to analyze the nation's nuclear stockpile has again set an unofficial performance record - the second in just over a month. IBM Corp.'s still-incomplete Blue Gene/L system, which will be installed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, achieved a sustained performance of 70.72 trillion calculations per second using a standard test program, the Department of Energy said Thursday. The world's current official leader, Japan's Earth Simulator, can sustain 35.86 trillion calculations per second using the same software. The announcement is the latest in a...

...Business executives haven't been much daunted by headlines screaming that the Bush administration has turned France into an enemy: "The U.S. is the leading investor in France, supporting almost 550,000 French jobs, while France is the second largest investor in the U.S., supporting 600,000 American jobs. Approximately $1 billion in commercial transactions take place between France and U.S. every business day." ...This competition among governing entities to make their jurisdictions good hosts to business is fostering global economic development in much the same way that it once fostered the growth of the now-robust U.S. economy. As with other organizations, governments...

BusinessWeek Online The Man Who Could Have Been Bill Gates Friday October 15, 3:58 pm ET By Steve Hamm in New York and Jay Greene in Seattle The saga of the computing industry is rich with outsize characters and surprising plot turns, but there's one story that has risen over time to mythic proportions. It's the tale of how software pioneer Gary Kildall missed out on the opportunity to supply IBM (NYSE:IBM - News) with the operating system for its first PC -- essentially handing the chance of a lifetime, and control of tech's future, to rival Bill Gates and...

After a year and a half of being flamed, dissected and dismissed on the Groklaw.net Web site, The SCO Group (Profile, Products, Articles) Inc. (SCO) has decided to set up a Web site of its own to cover the latest happenings in its many legal disputes. "We will be launching a Web site in a few weeks to tell our side of the story," said Darl McBride, SCO's president and chief executive officer (CEO), speaking at the Etre conference in Cannes Tuesday. "We think IP (intellectual property) is very important and to go back to the Wild West metaphor there...

Wednesday, September 29, 2004; Page E05 IBM Corp. plans to announce today that it has built the world's fastest supercomputer at one of its facilities in Rochester, Minn., wresting the title from a system in Japan. Dubbed the Blue Gene/L supercomputer, IBM's new system nudges past a nearly three-year-old computer speed record of 35.86 "teraflops," or trillions of calculations per second, with a working speed of 36.01 teraflops.

This is awesome.

ST. LOUIS, Sep 20, 2004 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- Boeing Co. and International Business Machines Corp. plan to develop advanced information technologies for the Defense Department and intelligence systems under a 10-year partnership the companies announced Monday. Financial terms were not disclosed. IBM and Boeing - the nation's second-largest defense contractor - said the estimated market for the systems to enhance the nation's military communications, intelligence operations and homeland security is about $200 billion. Technologies developed under the alliance will be critical for "network-centric" operations in which satellites, aircraft, ships and submarines - as well as tanks, radios and...

"SCO is chafing badly under the propaganda war it's losing to Groklaw," writes Maureen O'Gara, who describes Groklaw as "the pro-IBM Web site that's following its $5 billion case against IBM." Her controversial report continues:  SCO and its legal A-Team of Boies and Silver want the world to start seeing the case the way they see it and are going to file a motion asking the court to unseal most of the documents that are currently under seal. What it wants aired are IBM's e-mails, which they think tell a killer story about AIX, Dynix and Project Monterey. SCO says that...

Bush Air National Guard Documents Could Be Intentional Hit On Kerry Despite Dan Rather’s insistence on conducting what amounts to his last stand (he’ll be “urged” by CBS to pack it in after yet another scandal), the alleged Air national Guard documents are beginning to look like sucker bait that Rather took hook, line and sinker. And that sucker bait came from the left, it appears. The problem with the documents is that many aspects of the “facts” are too easy to disprove and may have intentionally been planted to implode Kerry’s credibility and campaign. Consider the fact that the...

FORGED OR NOT? If you're committed to vote for John Kerry or if you're consumed by an obsessive hatred of all things Bush, you will never bring yourself to admit this, though you know it in your soul. Those documents that CBS came up with last week are forgeries. Forged by who? We don't know ... yet. But forgeries they are. I've been gone for a week ... so many of you are probably more up to speed on this than I am. But here's somewhat of a recap and some of the latest info: As you know, Dan Rather...

CBS Lies. Will Dan Rather Get Away With It This Time? Written by Doc Farmer Sunday, September 12, 2004 Last week, 60 Minutes The Sequel (This Time It's Personal) ran a hard-hitting no-hold-barred investigative report trashing President George W. Bush. This is the fourth or fifth time CBS News has done this. Normally, this is done in the fashion of taking Bush-bashing books being sold by a publisher owned by the parent company of CBS News (Viacom) and doing puffball interviews with the authors. This time, however, CBS decided to raise, ad nauseum, the already discredited canard regarding Dubya's National...

To put a wooden stake in the heart of the vampire that is the IBM Selectric Composer typewriter theory, we've put-together a few graphics to illustrate one of the many reasons why this particular unit could not have produced any of the suspect CBS memos. On an IBM Selectric Composer typewriter, all characters - regardless of font or point size - have fixed "unit values" assigned to them. This means that, while the actual physical space taken-up by a character will change with font and point size, the relationships between characters within that given font and point size are always...

<p>For a couple of days now we've been talking about whether the CBS memos could have been produced using the technology available in 1972 and 1973. We've talked about two typewriters mainly, both widely used at that time: the IBM Executive series and the IBM Selectric series.</p>

Someone else mentioned a website that is dedicated tot the IBM Selectric Composer. The link above will take you to that website. Besides being around four times more expensive to purchase than a regular IBM Selectric the website had a bit of information about the IBM Selectric Composer that hasn't been mentioned in anything I've seen so far. It seems you have to type everything twice perfectly when you use the Composer. Here is that section from the ibmcomposer.org website: click here "The first IBM Composer was the IBM "Selectric" Composer announced in 1966. It was a hybrid "Selectric" typewriter...

September 11, 2004 MEMO TO: AIR FORCE OFFICE OF SPECIAL INVESTIGATIONS RE: POSSIBLE FRAUDULENT AIR FORCE (AIR NATIONAL GUARD) DOCUMENTS As an American citizen, I am requesting an investigation by the AFOSI into the production and use of documents by CBS News which appear to be probable fraudulent representations of Air Force (Air National Guard) documents. This matter is of particular concern since the contents of the documents are being used by Mr. Daniel Rather in an apparent attempt to defame the Commander-In-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States. This activity may also considered as an attempt to...