IBM's the next 5 in 5 "forecasts the five innovations that will change the way that we live, work and play in the next five years."
posted on May 19, 2008 - View this thread

"Third Reich to Fortune 500: Five Popular Brands the Nazis Gave Us." There are pictures and videos of kittens to soften the blow.
posted on Jan 8, 2008 - View this thread

Some people care about their keyboards. The Northgate OmniKey (now resurrected) was once legendary. There are those who mourn the passing of the space cadet keyboard and its successors, and those who campaign for its revival. The late, lamented (though not by everyone) Apple Extended Keyboard was finally recreated.

But, for the purist, there is only one true keyboard, the best ever made: the IBM Model M.
posted on Nov 3, 2007 - View this thread

It's called the Giant Magnetoresistive effect and it could one day allow electronic devices to hold 10 to 100 times the data in the same amount of space. "That means the iPod that today can hold up to 200 hours of video could store every single TV program broadcast during a week on 120 channels." [nyt]
posted on Sep 12, 2007 - View this thread

As it builds a presence and invests in virtual worlds, IBM is hoping to avoid potentially embarrassing incidents by establishing official guidelines for its more than 5,000 employees who inhabit "Second Life," Entropia Universe," "Forterra," "There" and other virtual worlds. "IBM, whose 20th century employees were parodied as corporate cogs in matching navy suits, doesn't have an avatar dress code. But guidelines suggest being 'especially sensitive to the appropriateness of your avatar or persona's appearance when you are meeting with IBM clients or conducting IBM business.'" Other directives: "Don't discuss intellectual property with unauthorized people." "Don't discriminate or harass" and by all means, "Be a good 3D Netizen."
posted on Jul 26, 2007 - View this thread

Is anyone really surprised to hear that our happy little friends at SCO just got a a delisting notice from Nasdaq? If you own SCO stock, this might be a good time to look at a timeshare instead. (winky winky) (via)
posted on Apr 28, 2007 - View this thread

"The church of global free trade, which rules American politics with infallible pretensions, may have finally met its Martin Luther." A thorough summary in The Nation of the brilliant but ignored Global Trade and Conflicting National Interests by Ralph Gomory, former IBM Senior Vice President for Science and winner of the National Medal of Science. His heresy? Arguing, with supporting technical and economic data, that multinational corporations and their home countries have divergent interests in shipping skilled labor and advanced technologies overseas, and that this "divergence" is a net negative for the American economy and the American public. Globalization, he argues, has its losers, the United States paramount among them.
posted on Apr 20, 2007 - View this thread

IBM Research and Technical Journals. Complete recent issues of IBM Research and Development Journal and Systems Journal as well as searchable archives.
posted on Mar 6, 2007 - View this thread

Microsoft has been caught paying for Wikipedia edits. But wasn't this inevitable? Now that Wikipedia has become the de facto online reference, wasn't it inevitable that it would attract governments, corporates and other groups to create their own version of events. Is this an inherent and fatal flaw in open source knowledge?
posted on Jan 24, 2007 - View this thread

The world is not flat Like open source/content? Like youtube? You have a choice. According to IBM, the future is open, and according to Linux, this future is inevitable.
posted on Dec 30, 2006 - View this thread

Ballmer: Linux Users Owe Microsoft. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer stated at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle yesterday, that Linux infringes upon his company's intellectual property. Does this signal preparations for all out war against the open source community? Microsoft's recent acquisition of Novell was seen as an ominous sign. Or perhaps it's a sign that user friendly versions of linux such as Ubuntu threaten sales of Microsoft's problematic new VISTA OS, scheduled for release Nov. 30th for businesses and Jan. 30, 2007 for consumers?
posted on Nov 17, 2006 - View this thread

IBM is laying off people in Burlington, Endicott, Rochester and Austin today. The presumptive reason is Indian outsourcing — some employees have posted that they were asked to train their replacements. Why hasn't this made the news?
posted on Sep 8, 2006 - View this thread

IBM raises lowers the bar. Apparently 1.5 nanometers is all that is needed for a 0 or a 1. This advance in data storage technology is a ways off from making an impact in chip construction, but allows for storage that is 1/8 the size of CMOS's wildest dreams. Neat. via ZDNet
posted on Aug 14, 2006 - View this thread

The Information Machine, [YouTube]. This short animated film was written, produced and directed by Charles and Ray Eames for the IBM Pavillion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair [embedded sound]. Animation by Dolores Cannata. The topic is the computer in the context of human development.
posted on Jul 1, 2006 - View this thread

Blue Gene bears Blue Brain beats Deep Blue. Dr. Henry Markram answers questions in the FAQ. Neurons are beautiful. Blue Gene/L is now the fastest supercomputer in the world. IBM Research rocks. Deep Blue beat Kasparov almost a decade ago. Feeling Blue?
posted on Jan 29, 2006 - View this thread

Ponder This. 'You are cordially invited to match wits with some of the best minds in IBM Research.' Monthly puzzles, with solutions, going back to 1998.
posted on Mar 7, 2005 - View this thread

IBM to give away 500 patents. Curiouser and curiouser. Why now? And, what patents? IBM makes a great deal of money licensing their patent portfolio - is this meant to stimulate additional licensing? How does this fit in with the open source movement? In other news, IBM just received the go-ahead to sell off their PC unit to a firm that just won a rather large contract to provide PCs in China.
posted on Jan 11, 2005 - View this thread

The end of an era confirmed. IBM sells its PC business to China's Lenovo. Is a future Apple partnership in the works?
posted on Dec 7, 2004 - View this thread

End of an era IBM may sell its PC division to Lenovo, a Chinese company, due to its decade-long dwindling importance in comparison to powerhouses HP and Dell - in a market they helped invent in the first place. Seems like a good enough reason to reminisce about the old bastard.
posted on Dec 3, 2004 - View this thread

Copy your iPod contents to your PC! Mac users have been swearing by such products as iPodRip or iPod Access but now we in the majority can "backup" our tunes from our lil device onto our ibm-compatibles. take that shelbyville!
posted on Nov 15, 2004 - View this thread

A history of the IBM Typewriter. When in high school (ca. 1993), a room full of these was replaced with a room full of 286s.
posted on Jun 8, 2004 - View this thread

A result of three years of cooperation between I.B.M. and Egypt's government and major museums, the country's considerable museum collections were digitized and loaded onto www.eternalegypt.org - Thousands more artifacts are to be added over time. I.B.M. expects the concept and the scanning and database technologies developed for the project to be applied at other museums and cultural collections worldwide.
posted on Mar 3, 2004 - View this thread

Electronic music buffs cite Radiohead's Kid A as their best work. How many know that Idioteque, arguably the stand-out track owes a debt to Paul Lansky, sampling as it does Lansky's Mild Und Leise [mp3 file], a track composed in 1973 on an IBM 360/91 mainframe. I didn't. Should you find your interest piqued, you might want to read an interview with Lansky. If that was then, this is now: The excellent music video to Zeal [Quicktime] by Plaid, which, although a very different beast, is an excellent indicator of how far electronic music has come. [Probably NSFW].
posted on Feb 9, 2004 - View this thread

IBM serves download of new Linux ad. IBM launched a TV ad this week featuring a nine-year-old boy named Linux. To their credit, they have enabled some computer users the ability to watch the ad as a download. Strangely, though, they don't make it easy to watch the spot on a Linux box. There's plenty of support for Closed Source operating systems and apps, but don't expect to view it with the popular Open Source movie viewer, xine.
posted on Sep 8, 2003 - View this thread

Take your hands off the GPL and back away from the keyboard... New twist in the SCO vs. IBM and the rest of the known computing universe: it appears SCO's primary argument in their case will in fact be that the GPL is invalid, trumped by US federal copyright law. (Quote redirect from via Inquirer from Wall Street Journal). And apparently, I'm not alone in beginning to think there's merit to the "Microsoft's behind all this!" conspiracy theories, since these "coincidences" are really starting to pile up...
posted on Aug 16, 2003 - View this thread

The IBM 1403 Printer (1964) playing music. This may change your life.
posted on Feb 4, 2003 - View this thread

What is Bagotronics? "At Bagotronics we are IN business FOR business. Our scientists, engineers and designers work to develop the innovations that fuel the e-business engine that drives America's economy."

Entertained by an (unfortunately not reproduced on the website) full page ad in the SJ Mercury News, promising a time machine and including an apology to old H.G., I wondered what was up. The ads, the website, all say to stay tuned until Thursday for details, but I'm not really that patient. But quick searches of MeFi, /., and Google turned up nothing, so I swerved over to my favorite lookup service and found that this is simply an advertising comeon, with the site owned by humongous advertising agency Ogilvy & Mathers.
posted on Oct 29, 2002 - View this thread

"If you like surfing the web, it is probably because you believe people are basically good." That's the Economist interpreting the results of a recent study by IBM researchers of how cultural characteristics apparently affect people's readiness to adopt new communications technologies.
posted on Oct 8, 2002 - View this thread

Introducing Monday? Apparently not. PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting, whose grand plan to change their company name to Monday were previously discussed, came to their senses and sold themselves to IBM. Goodbye new "identity". Goodbye IPO as well. They were planning on spending $110 million to promote the new name -- wonder how much of that went down the toilet?
posted on Jul 30, 2002 - View this thread

Ease of Use? IBM sends mixed message... see how complicated the instructions are to order this poster.
posted on Jun 20, 2002 - View this thread

Future Development for Sony and the PSX2 and PSX3. Now that the Game Developers Conference is over what do you think of the plans for the PSX3? It may even have an IBM architecture underneath.
posted on Mar 24, 2002 - View this thread

IBM gives Moore's Law a punch in the face by developing a 110GHz silicon germanium microchip. Only for use in ultra hi-tech environments right now (network infrastructure, military, etc.), of course. What other things could these processors be useful for? Finding vaccines? Genome mapping? SETI? And how many years before they're mass-producible and inexpensive enough for consumer use?
posted on Feb 28, 2002 - View this thread

IBM gets the bill for less-than-standard advertising methods supporting Linux. The city of San Francisco yesterday quashed some of the warm, fuzzy feelings associated with the Linux operating system when it reached a settlement with IBM that calls for the vendor to pay $120,000 to compensate the city for damages caused by a "guerrilla" marketing campaign centered on Linux.
posted on Nov 29, 2001 - View this thread

U.S. Patent 6,304,886, from the fine folks at IBM. "The tool comprises a plurality of pre-stored templates, comprising HTML formatting code, text, fields and formulas." (Via Scripting News.)
posted on Oct 17, 2001 - View this thread

No more Muzak™ and classic rock? "The [IBM] interns collaborated on something called Hold Freedom, a way to ease the tedium of being on hold while waiting to talk to a human. The program enables callers placed on hold to listen to news, music of their choice, enter a chat group with other customers or even make another phone call without losing their place in the queue. The choices would be based on personal profiles that the customers had previously completed on the call center to phone company's Web site." (Also cool that the idea comes from summer interns.)
posted on Aug 27, 2001 - View this thread

Proxicom bought by Compaq, last week's purchase of Mainspring by IBM, the dissolution of MarchFirst, and the not-so-slow slide of Viant, Scient, iXL and the rest ... is there any future for the independent style of "e-consultancies" which seemed poised to revolutionize the business world only a couple of years ago?
posted on Apr 27, 2001 - View this thread

Big Blue moves into the web services arena, claiming to be the first company to provide such services. Ever hear of .NET? Seems to me that they've been rolling a framework (that's got BETA development tools already) since last summer.

i think the most poignant point in this article isn't the fact that IBM's making false claims, but this quote by Peter O'Kelly:

``It's amazing that these guys are agreeing to work with the same standards. They've finally realized it's a disservice to customers when they try and compete on the basis of proprietary formats and protocols."

Now if the browser wars could end, we'd all be in better shape.
posted on Mar 14, 2001 - View this thread

Playstation 3 chip to be designed by IBM. The three companies (Sony, IBM, and Toshiba) aim to design a "super-computer on a chip" with a wide variety of consumer applications, they said in a joint statement.

"The result will be consumer devices that are more powerful than IBM's Deep Blue super-computer, operate at low power and access the broadband internet at ultra-high speeds," the statement added

Wowzers!
posted on Mar 12, 2001 - View this thread

And you thought Microsoft was evil. There appears to be pretty significant evidence that IBM was involved in automating the persecution of Jews by the Nazis. Read more about it here, here and here.

And since we haven't even settled the question of when a nation has atoned for its sins, what exactly is the statute of limitations for a company's sins?
posted on Feb 11, 2001 - View this thread

IBM, with the latest attempt to put the genie back in the bottle. Their fatal flaw is betting on a post-napster world, though I bet their EMMS technology gets cracked before that ever happens.
posted on Jan 22, 2001 - View this thread

IBM to spend $1 billion on Linux in 2001 Look for OS/3 to hit store shelves by 4Q 2001...
posted on Dec 12, 2000 - View this thread

Lynn Conway is one of the major talents in the history of the development of computers, responsible for major advances without which computers we buy now would be much different. She's also a transsexual, born physically male. While working for IBM she had her sex-change operation, and IBM immediately fired her for it.
posted on Dec 10, 2000 - View this thread

Steal a design, win an award. Sumerset Custom Houseboats won several awards in the 2000 Inc. Magazine Web Awards 2000, including the top prize in the General Excellence category. According to a company press release, the site was chosen for its "simple, functional, yet elegant design". The only problem is, they stole the design from IBM's site.
posted on Nov 22, 2000 - View this thread

One word: Creepy. (Note that IBM doesn't actually own this patent -- they just run the patent lookup service.) Props to Victor.
posted on Oct 5, 2000 - View this thread

SmileProject. Too.
posted on Sep 25, 2000 - View this thread

All Hands On Deck. If you're an engineer for IBM OZ or Telstra, don't expect to get a day off for the next three weeks. Here comes the Olympics!
posted on Sep 9, 2000 - View this thread

Crap, don't tell me I have to upgrade again! IBM introduced a commercial version of the "ASCI White computer" today, which it claims is the world's most powerful supercomputer, able to process 12.3 trillion calculations per second. But can I play pacman on it?
posted on Jul 24, 2000 - View this thread

IBM's Linux commercial. Part of their Avery Brooks "serious software" ad campaign, which I like a lot, I have to say.
posted on Jul 22, 2000 - View this thread

15 hour batteries - Just when we thought we weren't spending enough time with our laptops, IBM comes along and does this.
posted on Jun 27, 2000 - View this thread

"If supermarkets were designed like Web sites, milk and bread would be at the front of the store." Instead, he thinks commercial web sites should put the most popular items deep so you have to "walk" past other items. If the entrance to fifty other stores was always within two steps, no matter where you were within the store, stores wouldn't be organized that way! How could someone at IBM make such a fundamental error?
posted on Feb 25, 2000 - View this thread