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Moscow - Russia's new intercontinental ballistic missile, which was test fired on Tuesday, can break through any missile shield, Itar-Tass news agency reported First Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov as saying. When asked about the launch, Ivanov said Russia's "new tactical and strategic complexes are able to overcome any existing or future missile defence system", Itar-Tass reported. "So from the point of view of defence and security Russians can feel safe," Ivanov said.

Excerpt - Arguably two of America's best run companies are Apple Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL) and International Business Machines (NYSE: IBM). Both have achieved high levels of success and shareholders have been rewarded along the way. However, both are treading in different waters and Apple is emerging as the winner going forward. In fact, I'm sure Apple will overtake IBM in value over the next two years. Bottom line: Apple will be bigger than IBM. Apple will be a bigger company than IBM in terms of market capitalization. As of this writing Apple is just about to hit $100 billion in...

SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP) - Delivering on its promise of a superfast server chip, IBM Corp. said Monday that its new Power6 microprocessor will go on sale next month, boasting twice the clock speed of the previous generation while consuming roughly the same amount of power. The dramatic performance boost comes as the semiconductor industry has largely shifted its focus away from pure performance measurements—overheating becomes a major problem as transistors shrink and operate at breakneck speeds—and instead has become more concerned with a balance of performance and power consumption. While other chipmakers are dialing down clock speeds and adding...

NYSE undertakes IBM mainframe migration to Unix and Linux The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is migrating off a 1,600 millions of instructions per second (MIPS) mainframe to IBM System p servers running AIX and x86 Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) servers running Linux, with the first part of the move going live today... ...(SIAC), the NYSE's technology arm, said the bottom line for the migration was the bottom line. He estimates the move will halve the cost of transactions, and though he wouldn't detail how much that would mean on a yearly basis, he said it is "serious financial savings, very...

Last year I wrote a series of columns on management problems at IBM Global Services, explaining how the executive ranks from CEO Sam Palmisano on down were losing touch with reality, bidding contracts too low to make a profit then mismanaging them in an attempt to make a profit anyway, often to the detriment of IBM customers. Those columns and the reaction they created within the ranks at IBM showed just how bad things had become. Well they just got worse. This is according to my many friends at Big Blue, who believe they are about to undergo the biggest...

NEW YORK (AP) - Computer chips, it seems, work better if they're more like Swiss cheese than American cheese. Chips with minuscule holes in them can run faster or use less energy, IBM Corp. said in announcing Thursday a novel way to create them - potentially one of the most significant advances in chip manufacturing in years. To create these tiny holes, the computer company has harnessed a plastic-like material that spontaneously forms into a sieve-like structure. The holes have a width of 20 nanometers, or billionths of a meter, placing the method in the much-vaunted field of nanotechnology. "To...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - IBM has developed a way to make microchips run up to one-third faster or use 15 percent less power by using an exotic material that "self-assembles" in a similar way to a seashell or snowflake. The computer services and technology company said the new process allows the wiring on a chip to be insulated with vacuum, replacing the glass-like substances used for decades but which have become less effective as chips steadily shrink.A cross section of a microprocessor shows empty space in between the chip's copper wiring in this undated handout photograph. REUTERS/IBM/Handout

Well folks, it looks like the U.S. Census Bureau is finally getting high-tech for their 2010 census. With $600 million poured into the Field Data Collection Automation (FDCA) project, half a million (500,000) field enumerators will be getting hooked up with a HTC Census smartphone. Armed with an EVDO data-only Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC, and integrated GPS, the enumerator's job of collecting absentee census information will get nice and streamlined. As a high-tech plus, the built-in GPS unit also keeps the enumerator honest.Back in 2000, I was actually a census enumerator. My job consisted of driving to households to...

This is a sorry tale for those of you who think the First Amendment to the US Constitution and freedom of the press actually mean something important. It's a story that I've just learned about myself. But it's a true story. SCO tried to gag Groklaw back in 2004. It wanted Groklaw placed under a gag order, so it couldn't cover the SCO litigation any more. It also wanted Linus Torvalds, Eben Moglen, and Eric Raymond to be prevented from commenting publicly about the litigation. I just found out because IBM has just filed its opposition [PDF] to SCO's motion...

The powerful "Cell" microprocessor that fuels Sony Corp.'s PlayStation 3 video game console will be available in IBM mainframe computers so those high-performance machines can run complex online games and virtual worlds. Jointly developed by IBM, Sony and Toshiba Corp., Cell is touted as a "supercomputer on a chip" because of its design, which includes one central processing unit helped by eight additional processors working on specific tasks. Because of that unusual architecture, Cell's use outside of PlayStations has been limited to specialized hardware for graphics-intensive functions such as military or medical applications.

IBM has today announced the availability of an open beta version of its virtual Linux environment to enable x86 Linux applications to run without modification on POWER processor-based IBM System p servers. Designed to reduce power, cooling and space by consolidating x86 Linux workloads on System p servers, it will eventually be released as the roles off the tongue ‘IBM System p Application Virtual Environment (System p AVE).’ With a 31.5% global revenue share during 2006, IBM hopes to build on System p UNIX success and extend firmly into the Linux marketplace. Considering there are almost 2,800 applications that already...

It's true. Hilariously true. An eagle-eyed Groklaw ninja, sk43, has spotted an ftp site where you can get binary copies of Linux libraries needed by SCO's OpenServer and UnixWare customers who use lxrun. But you can't get the source code from that sco.com ftp site. SCO directs their customers to .... sunsite.unc.edu. Why bless my stars, sunsite.unc.edu is the old name for what is now ibiblio! So here's a headline for you, and it's absolutely accurate: SCO Relies on IBM-donated Servers to Provide Support for OpenServer/UnixWare Customers Absolutely accurate and totally misleading, just like the headlines about Groklaw. Will we...

To honor an employee's son who was badly wounded in Iraq, IBM Corp. plans to give the U.S. military $45 million worth of Arabic-English translation technology that the Pentagon had been testing for possible purchase. The offer - made from the highest reaches of the company directly to President Bush - is so unusual that Defense Department and IBM lawyers have been scouring federal laws to make sure the government can accept the donation.

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) scientists plan to unveil a prototype chip Monday that uses optical connections to increase the speed of moving data among chips to eight times that of previous technologies. The chip's speed, clocked at 160 billion bits of data a second, would allow a high-definition movie to be transmitted over a short distance in a fraction of a second, compared with the half-hour it takes over home broadband connections, IBM said. The technology could pave the way for devices that almost instantly transmit a digital X-ray to a doctor's hand-held screen, a seismic analysis to an...

John W. Backus, the software pioneer who developed Fortran, died earlier this week at 82. His Fortran brainchild was an important watershed in computing because it freed programmers from the tyranny of writing machine code. Back in the Ice Age of the electronic digital computer -- the 1950s -- there were just a handful of computers. It took a few years to build a computer then, but what made them even more forbidding was the labyrinth that had to be entered to create the machine code that made them do anything of use.

Here is the transcript of the March 7th hearing in SCO v IBM, the last of the summary judgment hearings transcripts. Thanks yet again to Chris Brown for arranging to obtain the transcripts. On this day, Kimball was quite busy. He heard several motions, all the ones left over from the first two hearings on March 1 and March 5: * IBM's Motion for Summary Judgment on its Claim for Declaratory Judgment of Non-Infringement (Tenth Counterclaim) (PDF) -- asking for a judgment that the Linux kernel does not infringe copyrights owned by SCO * IBM's Motion for Summary Judgment on...

SAN FRANCISCO — Google Inc. will begin selling corporate America an online suite of software that includes e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and calendar management, escalating the Internet search leader's invasion on technological turf traditionally dominated by Microsoft and IBM. The expansion, scheduled to be unveiled Thursday, threatens to bog down Microsoft Corp.'s efforts to persuade businesses to buy the latest version of its market-leading Office suite that was developed along with its new Vista operating system. Google's software bundle, to be sold for a $50 annual fee per user, also poses a challenge to International Business Machines Corp. and its...

IBM, Intel, and AMD are finding ways around the physical problems that have hampered their efforts to make chips faster To understand the quest to build ever faster and more powerful computers, it's helpful to understand the problems that hold them back from getting faster in the first place. While chips themselves are getting faster all the time, faster is a relative term. Even though chipmakers like Intel (INTC) and IBM (IBM) are building more powerful chips every 12 to 18 months, other chips that go inside a computer haven't historically kept up in the performance race. If you think...

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 13 — I.B.M. researchers say they have set a speed record for a type of computer memory that promises a fundamental performance increase in a coming generation of microprocessors with multiple computing engines. The announcement, to be made at a conference here Wednesday, sets up a potential confrontation between I.B.M. and Intel over the design of microprocessors that will begin to be available commercially next year. While I.B.M. now appears to be planning to integrate ultrafast memory directly into its processors, Intel has been hinting that it will instead stack memory chips on top of its processors...

Microsoft is accusing rival IBM of orchestrating a campaign to block efforts to standardize Office document formats. In an open letter released Wednesday, Microsoft executives contend that IBM is trying to influence the standards process to limit choice. It also said that IBM is encouraging governments to mandate a document format that IBM favors. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) is in the process of evaluating Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML)--the default document formats in Microsoft Office 2007--as a standard. Such a ratification would be significant, particularly to governments that favor ISO certification for digital documents. IBM and other Microsoft...