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IBM is threatening to leave organizations that set standards for software interoperability because of concerns that their processes are not always fair. ... IBM was one of the most vocal opponents of a file format created by Microsoft and approved by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as an international standard earlier this year. ... Microsoft has long been accused of dominating the market for office productivity programs due to its use of closed file formats. Microsoft changed course, however, and submitted its OOXML format to become an international standard, which means other vendors could implement OOXML in their products....

WASHINGTON - A former vice president of imaging and printing services at the Hewlett Packard Company (HP) pleaded guilty today to stealing trade secrets, announced Acting Assistant Attorney General Matthew Friedrich of the Criminal Division and U.S. Attorney Joseph P. Russoniello for the Northern District of California. Atul Malhotra, 42, of Santa Barbara, Calif., was charged on June 27, 2007, in a one count information with theft of trade secrets. According to court documents, from Nov. 17, 1997, to April 28, 2006, Malhotra was employed by International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) as director of sales and business development in output...

Portland, Maine - An adult adoption involving lesbian partners and a claim to a share of a family fortune built on IBM has been annulled, bouncing the case to Maine's highest court. At issue is whether it was legal for a judge to allow Olive Watson to adopt Patricia Spado in 1991 in Knox County, where the longtime partners spent several weeks each summer on an island in Penobscot Bay. Watson was a daughter of Thomas Watson Jnr, who took International Business Machines Corp from punch cards into electronic computing. The relationship between Spado and Watson ended a year after...

IBM has obliterated the competition in the supercomputing stakes with the top 10 of the top 500 supercomputers in the world, but Microsoft has surprisingly scraped in at number 23 with its Windows HPC Server system. While Microsoft is an unlucky 13 numbers away from the top 10, does the wow start now? Microsoft can’t claim any particular ‘wow’ with its results until it can wrest a top 10 position, let alone the No.1 position away from IBM, but 23 isn’t too bad when we’re talking about a list of 500. But the real news isn’t about Microsoft, it’s about...

Intel Corp. disclosed that an internal team has been working on technology for use in solar panels, and now is spinning off that effort to form a new company. The chip maker said the company, SpectraWatt Inc., will make photovoltaic cells, the primary component in solar panels that use sunlight to generate electricity. It will receive $50 million in initial funding from a consortium including Intel's venture capital arm, Goldman Sach's Cogentrix Energy subsidiary, PCG Clean Energy and Technology Fund, and Solon AG, a German solar-panel maker. Intel's move is the latest in a scramble among Silicon Valley companies to...

"Liquid Metal" at the Center of IBM Innovation to Significantly Reduce Cost of Concentrator Photovoltaic Cells ARMONK, NY, May 15, 2008 IBM today announced a research breakthrough in photovoltaics technology that could significantly reduce the cost of harnessing the Sun's power for electricity. By mimicking the antics of a child using a magnifying glass to burn a leaf or a camper to start a fire, IBM scientists are using a large lens to concentrate the Sun's power, capturing a record 230 watts onto a centimeter square solar cell, in a technology known as concentrator photovoltaics, or CPV. That energy is...

Preventing the conflict of interest is one of the main goals of the American system of checks and balances. The scandal that erupts when Americans find out about conflict of interest is one of our national guilty pleasures. And it’s so much more gratifying when it’s the ones you least expected that get caught with their fingers in the cookie jar. Hooker or Saudi royal family photo album – we’re a nation of great diversity after all, you never know where you’ll find those sneaky politicians next. Maybe that’s why it’s so interesting that the Supreme Court will not hear...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - IBM is under investigation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over an $80 million bid it made in 2006 to modernize EPA financial systems and has been suspended from seeking new contracts with all U.S. agencies, the company said on Monday.

International Business Machines Corp. has been temporarily banned from new business with the federal government and is being investigated by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia over a contract awarded by the Environmental Protection Agency, the company said Monday.

In this photo provided by IBM Corp. of their new System z10 mainframe computer taken earlier this month at IBM's manufacturing plant in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. IBM announced their new mainframe computer has a 50 percent performance boost and dramatically lower energy costs than its predecessor, reflecting the company's focus on lowering the price tag for running its storied line of data-crunching workhorses. (AP Photo/IBM) (AP) -- IBM Corp. rolls out a new mainframe computer Tuesday boasting a 50 percent performance boost and dramatically lower energy costs than its predecessor. The new System z10, with a starting price at about...

Doug Friedman, an analyst with American Technology Research, said that graphics chip maker Nvidia Corp. could well acquire x86 microprocessor maker Advanced Micro Devices in order to "re-architect it". The acquisition is considered to be useful due to the fact that roadmaps of AMD and Intel Corp. threat Nvidia. The only problem for the graphics giant is that AMD's x86 license is a non-transferable one... Indeed, shareholders of AMD are hardly pleased with the company's performance in the recent quarters as well as issues with the launch of quad-core microprocessors and the release of DirectX 10 graphics processing units. Nevertheless,...

Intel Corp. may release six-core microprocessors as early as in the second half of this year, according to a number of media reports. However, if those claims are correct, then it may mean not only another powerful central processing unit for Intel and a threat to chips from Advanced Micro Devices, but also a further delay in unification of Intel Itanium and Intel Xeon platforms. Intel needs a chip to update its multi-processor (MP) enterprise server platform this year as no Nehalem-based microprocessor for the MP market segment is planned for 2008... However, it seems like unified Quick Path Interconnect...

European Union antitrust regulators expanded their investigation of Intel before the world's largest chipmaker had a chance to answer pending charges, the chairman of Intel's board said on Thursday. Asked whether he was surprised that the European Commission had raided Intel in a new probe while still pursuing it on other charges, Craig Barrett said: "You have to ask the EU why they are expanding it at this stage." ...The Commission this month raided Intel offices in Munich and retailers in Germany, France and Britain, seeking evidence they acted illegally to exclude rival chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices... Also on Thursday,...

Will the building block of life become the building block of the semiconductor industry? It's possible. Scientists at IBM are conducting research into arranging carbon nanotubes--strands of carbon atoms that can conduct electricity--into arrays with DNA molecules. Once the nanotube array is meticulously constructed, the laboratory-generated DNA molecules could be removed, leaving an orderly grid of nanotubes. The nanotube grid, conceivably, could function as a data storage device or perform calculations. "These are DNA nanostructures that are self-assembled into discrete shapes. Our goal is to use these structures as bread boards on which to assemble carbon nanotubes, silicon nanowires, quantum...

IBM is not feeling the impact yet of reduced growth in IT budgets, and plans to continue hiring global services delivery staff in India by the thousands. IBM plans to continue hiring global services delivery staff in India by the thousands, adding to the 73,000 it already has in its global services and other operations in the country. A large number of Indian outsourcers and multinational services companies have set up services delivery operations from India. Their competition for the best staff is driving up salaries. Companies are however introducing quality systems that enable them to weed out low performers....

Thomas Watson, founder of IBM, is oft misquoted as stating that the world really only would need five computers. Ironically the frequently used, erroneous quotation may come to true by the very hands of the business Watson created. IBM launched an Epic project with an almost unfathomable goal -- to develop a single supercomputer capable of running the entire internet as a web application. The project, codenamed Kittyhawk (detailed in a white paper by IBM) created quite the stir in internet technology community. While the software details descend quickly into the realm of the cerebral, one number that jumps off...

We'll hand it to IBM's researchers. They think big - really big. Like holy-crap-what-have-you-done big. The Register has unearthed a research paper that shows IBM working on a computing system capable "of hosting the entire internet as an application." This mega system relies on a re-tooled version of IBM's Blue Gene supercomputers so loved by the high performance computing crowd. IBM's researchers have proposed tweaking the Blue Gene systems to run today's most popular web applications such as Linux, Apache, MySQL and Ruby on Rails. The IBM paper rightly points out that both large SMP (symmetric multi-processing) systems and clusters...

MOSCOW: A Russian university has bought one of the world's most powerful supercomputers, the first time that such sophisticated technology has been exported to the former Soviet Union, makers IBM said on Thursday. The Moscow State University has selected a Blue Gene device capable of 27.8 trillion operations per second to use in research on nanotechnology and scientific applications such as modelling the heart, an IBM spokesman said. "This agreement with IBM heralds a new era of supercomputing in Russia," said Viktor Sadovnichiy, rector of the university, in a statement. The world's most powerful supercomputer is a Blue Gene device...

IBM Riles Employees With Base Pay Cuts By BRIAN BERGSTEIN (AP Technology Writer) From Associated Press January 23, 2008 10:58 AM EST BOSTON - Even as IBM Corp. reports record profits, thousands of its U.S. employees are staring at pay cuts. It's the result of IBM's response to a lawsuit in which the company was accused of illegally withholding overtime pay from some technical employees. IBM settled the case for $65 million in 2006 and has now decided that it needs to reclassify 7,600 technical-support workers as eligible for overtime. But their underlying salary - the base pay they earn...

Stocks Set to Rebound From Huge Drop Friday January 18, 8:13 am ET By Madlen Read, AP Business Writer Stocks Head for Higher Open After Stronger-Than-Expected Outlook From IBM, but Jitters Remain NEW YORK (AP) -- Wall Street appeared headed for a sharply higher open Friday as a strong outlook from IBM encouraged investors to buy back into stocks after their huge drop this week. The market remains extremely skittish, however. The Dow Jones industrial average, having suffered its worst three-day plunge in over five years, is now at levels not seen since last March. Some companies are weathering the...