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Wall Street advanced sharply Monday, with solid preliminary results from IBM encouraging investors to go back into the stock market after last week's rout.International Business Machines Corp., one of the 30 Dow Jones industrials, released preliminary earnings estimates for the fourth quarter that were 24 percent above year-earlier levels. The results also beat the forecast of analysts surveyed by Thomson Financial.After falling nearly 250 points on Friday, the Dow rose more than 170 points Monday."The market was pretty oversold," said Richard E. Cripps, chief market strategist for Stifel Nicolaus. "We were due to bounce back, and the IBM news didn't...

BOSTON - IBM Corp.'s expansion in developing countries shows no sign of relenting. The technology company revealed Friday that it now has 73,000 employees in India, almost a 40 percent leap from last year. IBM did not provide updated figures for its work force in the U.S., which has held steady around 125,000 people in recent years. Nor did IBM project its total head count. It had 355,766 employees worldwide at the end of 2006. If the total has risen by the same rate as in 2006, almost one in five IBM workers now is in India, its second-largest center....

IBM on Thursday unveiled a technical advancement related to the use of light to carry large amounts of data quickly among cores within a microprocessor, taking the company closer to developing a chip that may one day run notebooks with the horsepower of today's supercomputers. The breakthrough revolves around a device used to transform electrical impulses into beams of light. The device, called a modulator, is similar to what's used today in optical networks built by telecommunication companies. IBM scientists say they have found a way to shrink the modulator to a size where it can fit within a multi-core...

Supercomputers may soon be the same size as a laptop if IBM brings to market research detailed on Thursday, in which pulses of light replace electricity to make data transfer between processor cores on a chip up to one-hundred times faster. The technology, called silicon nanophotonics, replaces some of the wires on a chip with pulses of light on tiny optical fibers for quicker and more power-efficient data transfers between cores on a chip, said Will Green, research scientist at IBM. The technology, which can transfers data up to a distance of a few centimeters, is about 100 times faster...

Already new materials are creeping into modern chips. As components have shrunk critical elements of the transistors, known as gate dielectrics, do not perform as well allowing currents passing through the transistors to leak, reducing the effectiveness of the chip. To overcome this, companies have replaced the gate dielectrics, previously made from silicon dioxide, with an oxide based on the metal hafnium. The material's development and integration into working components has been described by Dr Moore as "the biggest change in transistor technology" since the late 1960s. But IBM researchers are working on materials that they believe offer even bigger...

ARMONK, N.Y., Aug. 30 (UPI) -- IBM announced two major scientific achievements Thursday, both in the field of nanotechnology. Researchers said the breakthroughs will enable scientists to further explore the building of structures and devices out of ultra-tiny components as small as a few atoms or molecules. In the first report, scientists at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif., describe major progress in identifying a property called magnetic anisotropy, which determines an atom’s ability to store information. That research, said IBM, could lead to storage of as many as 30,000 movies in a device the size of an...

Japan's Toshiba Corp. and NEC Electronics Corp. said on Tuesday they would jointly develop 32-nanometre chips to better keep up with rivals. The companies will continue talks about jointly producing the chips, and aim to reach a decision in 2008, they said. The two had also approached Fujitsu Ltd, but spokesman Etsuro Yamada declined to comment on whether or not Fujitsu would join the group, only saying that "Fujitsu was considering various options." Chip makers are racing to halve the production cost per function of a chip every year or two. Samsung Electronics Co., IBM, Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd., Infineon...

IBM Corp. and Intel Corp. (INTC) improved their standings Monday in the newest tally of the world's fastest 500 computers, a closely watched measure of progress in the industry. The list, published twice a year by academic researchers, once again was topped by an IBM Corp. supercomputer in the Lawrence Livermore national nuclear lab. The BlueGene/L system, as it is known, was recently upgraded and showed the ability to perform at 478 teraflops - 478 trillion calculations per second. That's tens of thousands of times faster than your average desktop PC today. The No. 2 performer was an IBM supercomputer...

The SCO Group, working to emerge from Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, hopes to sell its Unix assets to York Capital Management for up to $36 million, the company said this week in regulatory and bankruptcy court filings. Through the deal, York would provide SCO with $10 million in cash; up to $10 million in credit to fund its Linux-related legal fight and to get 20 percent of revenue from that action; $10 million for a 20 percent stake in the company; and $6 million to license the Hipcheck products from SCO's Me mobile device software effort and to share revenue...

Sweden has long been at the forefront of brain research, but what is happening in this field today? And is it really possible to train the brain, as Professor Torkel Klingberg claims?

IBM's Office Rival In launching a free, open-source based software suite, Big Blue hopes to compete for Microsoft's Office clients. The design incorporates user feedback with a nod to Web 2.0 by Matt Vella IBM's (IBM) recent launch of a free, full-featured suite of business software dubbed Symphony is a bold attempt to grab market share from Microsoft's (MSFT) bread-and-butter Office product. But even as early adopters buzz over Symphony's strengths and weaknesses, the release shows how IBM, much like its arch-rival, is trying to find ways to make traditional enterprise software relevant in a Web 2.0 world. For one...

What a Dramatic picture....***********************************

The week's not off to a great start for Microsoft. On Monday, a European court upheld almost $1 billion in antitrust penalties against the software maker. A day later, it's IBM that is taking aim at Microsoft with the release of a free office software suite called Lotus Symphony. IBM said Tuesday that Symphony, based on open source software from the OpenOffice.org project, will be made available as a free download essentially to whoever wants it. The package contains a word processor called Lotus Symphony Documents, as well as Lotus Symphony Spreadsheets and Lotus Symphony Presentations. IBM is calling the...

Boston - In the print edition of Forbes there's a great (albeit sometimes painful) tradition of doing "follow-through" articles where a reporter either takes a victory lap for making a good call or falls on his sword for making a bad one. Online publications don't typically ask for follow-throughs. But I need to write one. For four years, I've been covering a lawsuit for Forbes.com, and my early predictions on this case have turned out to be so profoundly wrong that I am writing this mea culpa. What can I say? I grew up Roman Catholic. The habit stays with...

SALT LAKE CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Broadcast International (OTCBB: BCST "BI") today announced that the patent for its core CodecSys video compression technology has been allowed by the U.S. patent office. CodecSys is based on breakthrough artificial intelligence technology that dramatically cuts video bandwidth requirements over satellite, cable, IP, and wireless media. The new technology will enable, for example, twelve HDTV channels to be broadcast over the same media that currently support only two - a bandwidth reduction of more than 80%. The CodecSys technology will likewise enable a new generation of bandwidth-intensive video applications such as real-time video chat and live streaming...

Sun Microsystems has managed to nurture a blade server business, only it's on a rival's hardware. IBM today has become the first major server vendor - other than Sun - to ship Solaris x86 on its mainstream systems. (Yes, we know Compaq once sold Solaris x86. Thanks for the memories.) IBM has agreed to sell Sun's operating system with its BladeCenter servers in "the coming months," according to an IBM spokesman. This is quite the surprise given IBM's contentious relationship with Sun. IBM's services organization, however, does do a large amount of business selling Sun servers and Solaris, which may...

Court Rules: Novell owns the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights! Novell has right to waive! Friday, August 10 2007 @ 04:52 PM EDT Hot off the presses: Judge Dale Kimball has issued a 102-page ruling [PDF] on the numerous summary judgment motions in SCO v. Novell. Here is what matters most: [T]he court concludes that Novell is the owner of the UNIX and UnixWare Copyrights. That's Aaaaall, Folks! The court also ruled that "SCO is obligated to recognize Novell's waiver of SCO's claims against IBM and Sequent". That's the ball game. There are a couple of loose ends, but the big...

MOSCOW (AP) - Russia successfully tested a new sea-based ballistic missile Thursday after several previous failures, a naval spokesman said. Capt. Igor Dygalo told The Associated Press that the Bulava missile hit its target on the Pacific peninsula of Kamchatka after being launched from the submarine Dmitry Donskoi in the White Sea. According to published Russian news reports, the Bulava is designed to have a range of 6,200 miles and carry six individually targeted nuclear warheads. It is expected to be placed on three new Borei-class nuclear submarines that are under construction. President Vladimir Putin has hailed Bulava as a...

<p>Copyright 2007, NewsBank. All Rights Reserved.</p> <p>IBM said it developed a system that can reach the latest holy grail of supercomputing -- it has designed a supercomputer that can surpass a sustained performance of one quadrillion operations per second, also known as a petaflop.</p>

BOSTON -- IBM Corp. laid off 1,570 people Wednesday, primarily from an ongoing overhaul of operations in its giant technology services unit. The Armonk, N.Y.-based company carried out a similar level of job cuts at the beginning of the month, for a total of 3,023 in this quarter and 3,720 for the year, according to IBM spokesman Edward Barbini. That amounts to roughly 1 percent of the company, which employed 355,000 people at the beginning of the year. But even these small numbers reflect a big project inside IBM to transform its business. Services is IBM's biggest division by revenue,...