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IBM announced last week that it would freeze the old-style pension plans it provides to more than 100,000 employees and instead offer an improved version of its 401(k) plan. This is no run-of-the-mill accounting change or cut-costing measure. It is a major philosophical and economic shift for a bellwether corporation. It means, in short, that International Business Machines is moving away from paternalism and giving workers more control over their own retirements. The U.S. government should do the same in reforming Social Security. The IBM decision is good news as well for taxpayers, who ultimately could be left holding the...

IBM is expected to announce Tuesday that it won more U.S. patents than any other company and that it will participate in three initiatives to improve patent quality. For the thirteenth consecutive year, IBM was awarded the most patents--more than 2,900--by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, according to the company. IBM is also expected to detail three multiparty efforts to increase review of patent applications, in part by tapping open-source developers and collaborative software. Partners include the Patent Office and the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), an industry consortium that launched a "patent commons" for open-source communities in November...

What does IBM know that most New York lawmakers don't? Judging by Big Blue's recent announcement that it is shifting to a defined-contribution pension plan, it knows that these plans are the only way forward for any company that hopes to stay on this side of bankruptcy court. Defined contributions have been the norm among small companies for years, but old industrial giants have been slow on the draw. Some, like General Motors, are still grappling with defined benefit pension programs ... There's a lesson here for New Yorkers faced with troubled pension systems. The logic becoming so catastrophically clear...

< Years into case, SCO asserts copyright infringement By Stephen Shankland http://news.com.com/Years+into+case%2C+SCO+asserts+copyright+infringement/2100-1016_3-6022453.html Story last modified Fri Jan 06 15:49:00 PST 2006 < After three years of accusations, SCO Group has finally begun aiming a legal charge of copyright infringement toward a Linux supplier. The claim is in an amendment SCO proposes to make to its lawsuit against Novell, whose sales of Linux, SCO argues, violate SCO's purported Unix copyrights. SCO filed its request to add the claim on Dec. 30, nearly two years after it first filed its suit against Novell. In the proposed claim, the Lindon, Utah-based SCO...

The Rush to Shut Down Pensions When a well-funded giant like IBM joins the move to end defined-benefit plans in favor of 401(k)s, even more companies are likely follow What a difference a year makes. Back in December, 2004, when IBM (IBM ) announced its intention to close its traditional pension plan to new employees, offering them the 401(k) plan instead, the company made it clear it did not wish to become a poster child for the broader demise of these old-fashioned retirement plans. Pensions already had been a painful public-relations black eye for Big Blue, which had been battling...

IBM signalled the accelerating demise of guaranteed pensions on Thursday by freezing its defined benefit scheme and forcing all 125,000 US employees into a system based on defined contributions.

Bill Gates has played down the threat posed to Microsoft by competition from internet search giant Google. Google's meteoric rise and rivalry with Microsoft has increasingly become a fixation of the press, Mr Gates said. "People tend to get over focused on one of our competitors. We've always seen that," the Microsoft chairman said. Speaking before a keynote speech at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas, Mr Gates said computer giant IBM posed a greater threat to Microsoft. "IBM has always been our biggest competitor. The press just don't like to write about IBM," he told the Reuters news...

As fireworks boomed across nearby New Delhi and families lit candles and incense and prayed late into the evening, thousands of call-center agents reported to work at a gleaming office tower here. Donning headsets and fake American names, they placed and fielded phone calls to and from the United States, collecting bills, selling products and raising credit limits. For a few minutes each shift, though, the workers hurried outside to take part in their own celebration * * * In India, call centers are part of a burgeoning industry known as "business process outsourcing," or BPO -- a new world...

'IBM is recruiting. Hop on,' says a large hoarding mounted on a van as it tours various parts of Bangalore city, reflecting the mad rush to secure talent as the IT outsourcing wave reaches a new high. To explain this phenomenon, industry experts are debating what has been the definitive shift in the software industry over the past year and trying to gaze ahead for this sector. The lesson emerging from the experience of 2005 is that India has the opportunity to maintain its dominance of the outsourcing space if it can sustain the massive growth needed in the global-ready...

Researchers tracked three browsers (MSIE, Firefox, Opera) in 2004 and counted which days they were "known unsafe." Their definition of "known unsafe": a remotely exploitable security vulnerability had been publicly announced and no patch was yet available. MSIE was 98% unsafe. There were only 7 days in 2004 without an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. Firefox was 15% unsafe. There were 56 days with an unpatched publicly disclosed security hole. 30 of those days were a Mac hole that only affected Mac users. Windows Firefox was 7% unsafe. Opera was 17% unsafe: 65 days. That number is accidentally a little...

IBM's Motion Granted - 1st Report from the Courthouse -UPDATED Tuesday, December 20 2005 @ 02:49 PM EST Frank Sorenson made it to the hearing, thank heaven. IBM's Motion to Compel Documents on SCO's Privilege Log was granted. Frank's full report will be arriving soon, but in the meantime, here is the brief message he sent right after the hearing: Hearing over. IBM's Mot. to Compel Prod of Docs on SCO's Priv Log GRANTED. SCO's Mot. to Compel Docs from Execs GRANTED/DENIED in PART. As soon as I have more, I'll share it with you. I hope any readers in...

A four-core chip home server system will be able to deliver one billion floating-point operations per second, apparently. Move up to a 32-core chip - in, say, a blade server module - and you'd get 32 gigaflops of processing power, while a 64-core slab of silicon inside a rack-mount unit doing graphics work would churn out two teraflops, according to Kutaragi's presentation foils... Kutaragi likened a single Cell chip to IBM's 32-node RS/6000-based chess supercomputer Deep Blue. The exponential scaling rate suggests Cell really doesn't come into its own until you use lots of them together.

Blake Stowell, SCO's PR guy, is trying to turn all the bad news about SCO around and counter the impression that they are on the skids. In an article in Information Week about the latest money transfusion, he is quoted as saying this:A SCO representative, however, said the company's legal prospects were excellent and that investors would be well-served by helping the company to persist in its offensive against IBM and others. "Any open-minded individual who has read all of the public filings and court rulings, and attended every hearing would have a difficult time [casting doubt on SCO's prospects]...

I am looking to put a new motherboard and processor in my desktop. I am looking to have the best I can get the cheapest possible of course. I have a tower, a 350 watt power sourse, dvd writer, just looking to upgrade. Need an onboard video card, or advice on how to go

The SCO Group Closes $10 Million Private Placement to Institutional Investors LINDON, Utah, Nov 30, 2005 /PRNewswire-FirstCall via COMTEX News Network/ -- The SCO Group, Inc. ("SCO") (Nasdaq: SCOX), a leading provider of UNIX(R) software technology for distributed, embedded and network-based systems, today announced the completion of a private placement of 2,852,449 shares of common stock to existing SCO institutional shareholders and a member of the company's board of directors. The shares were sold to institutional investors at $3.50 per share and to the board member at $3.92 per share. No special warrants or rights were issued in connection...

IBM has announced an agreement establishing an Indian outsourcing company, HCL Technologies, as the first design center outside IBM's own walls for its Power Architecture chips. The deal highlights India's growing role in the design of high- end chips. The country is better known as a hub for outsourcing of software development and comparatively low-end back-office work. The agreement, announced Thursday, is also in line with IBM's plan to adopt a more open strategy in its microprocessor business by setting up design centers around the world to help customers in areas like wireless technologies, consumer devices and networking by developing...

IBM is set to release 3D television technology which is nearly half the cost of current systems. 3D video has been around for a while, but one of the things that have held it back has been the steep cost. A normal system will set you back at least $1,800 and use two projectors to simulate both left and right views needed to form 3D image. Big Blue boffins have worked out a way of creating a 3D video system that works with normal DLP (Digital Light Processing) televisions and needs only one projector. It does this by adding lots...

It took more than two and a half years, but the SCO Group finally has disclosed a list of areas in which it believes IBM violated its Unix contract, allegedly by moving proprietary Unix technology into open-source Linux. In a five-page document filed Friday, SCO attorneys say they have identified 217 areas in which the company believes IBM or Sequent, a Unix server company IBM acquired, violated contracts under which SCO and its predecessors licensed the Unix operating system. However, the curious won't be able to see for themselves the details of SCO's claims: The full list of alleged abuses...

The Blue Gene/L supercomputer has broken its own record to achieve more than double the number of calculations it can do a second. It reached 280.6 teraflops - that is 280.6 trillion calculations a second. The IBM machine, at the US Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, officially became the most powerful computer on the planet in June. The fastest supercomputers in the world are ranked by experts every six months in the Top 500 list. Blue Gene's performance, while it has been under construction, has quadrupled in just 12 months. Each person in the world with a handheld calculator would still...

IBM User Group President Warns Of IT Personnel Shortage The public sector will be particularly hard-hit, he says. One increasingly popular solution, he suggests, is for ITers to retire and then return as consultants to new posts that are more interesting and less stressful. By W. David Gardner, TechWeb.com Oct. 7, 2005 Alarmed at the loss of key FEMA personnel and the looming wholesale retirement of IT specialists at other federal agencies, a federal CIO manager who heads an important IT user group is stepping up a campaign to retain and recruit specialists in the IT field. Robert Rosen, president...