IBM STG System x™ Technical University

BM (NYSE: IBM) is opening new offshore outsourcing centers in India.
But it may face the challenge of finding qualified people to staff them. It's
not a problem unique to IBM in a country where finding and retaining quality IT
talent has become more difficult in recent months.

The OpenID Foundation, which oversees the OpenID online identity management system, scored a major coup today. The foundation announced that representatives from Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo have all joined its board.

Between Yahoo, AOL, LiveJournal and other sites providing their users with an OpenID, there are, according to the OpenID Foundation, “over a quarter of a billion OpenIDs and well over 10,000 websites to accept them.” If those numbers sound overly optimistic to you, consider that everyone who’s ever created an AOL chat account has an OpenID. And that everyone who’s ever logged into Yahoo has an OpenID. Those two services alone probably account for the bulk of the above numbers.

IBM unveiled an expanded business strategy and roadmap bolstered by the company's aquisition of Cognos-to help clients unlock the business value of information and use it for competitive advantage to address emerging, industry- specific business opportunities.

Thursday's announcement features and array of new and enhanced joint IBM-Cognos solutions, products and services from across the company that enable organisations of all sizes to gain better insights from their data, improve decision-making, and optimize business performance, including: 10 new and enhanced IBM solutions for bankng, retail, healthcare, government, life sciences and manufacturing industries.

Recently two news on economic times caught my attention. First one is “IBM has dismissed 700 freshers” and the other “TCS will cut salaries of his employees”. So now the big question is what is happening in software field, is software boom over? The honeymoon for software professionals has ended. I am also worried as I am part of this big community of computer science graduates. Now let’s discuss the pros and cons of both the news.

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.

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 modeling 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.

The world's most powerful supercomputer is a Blue Gene device owned by the U.S. Department of Energy and used at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory to model the ageing of the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile and predict potential problems.

IBM said the supercomputer sold to Moscow University would be among the 50 most powerful supercomputers in the world but had received an export license from U.S. authorities and would be used “purely for scientific research”.

The Department of Computational Mathematics at the Moscow University paid around $5 million for two racks of the supercomputer, which can run 2,600 times faster than the fastest home PC and should be operational by April 2008.

Because of advances in technology, each rack of the supercomputer is about the size of a U.S. domestic fridge and additional racks can be added as requirements grow.

The Blue Gene version used by the U.S. government is almost 20 times more powerful than the one bought by Moscow.

In an era where technology is changing fast every day, computers too have been bitten by the change-bug, by becoming more of a lifestyle statement rather than a machine for everyday use. Computers have now become an inseparable part of human life as they have become portable

In the fast-track life computers and laptops come handy when one needs to communicate with anyone in any part of the world, perform multiple functions – watch videos, listen to music and play games.

Neighbours of a former IBM plant in New York state sued the company on Thursday, saying it released chemicals into the air, ground and water for nearly 80 years that caused birth defects and cancer.

Some 90 residents of the upstate New York towns of Endicott and Union say that from 1924 to 2002, IBM dumped chemicals including trichloroethylene and tetrachloroethylene near the Endicott plant where the computer giant was born.

They seek unspecified damages, according to the suit filed in Broome County Superior Court.

"IBM will defend itself vigorously against these claims that have no merit in science," company spokesman Michael Maloney said.

The lawsuit is the first of several planned against IBM by nearly 1,000 people who say they have been harmed by the chemicals, lawyers for the plaintiffs said.

IBM began at Endicott, where it built everything from typewriters to mainframe computers. It sold the plant in 2002.