The folks at Huawei are promising to show off their Ascend D1 Q and a brand new 10-inch MediaPad at Mobile World Congress 2012. Apple supplier Pegatron is wondering when their inspection will be announced while iPad import and export has been axed in China via call from Proview. NASA have announced the end of their favorite and very last IBM Z9 mainframe. We took a peek at QuickShot for iPhone 4S.

We’ve finally got Angry Birds on Facebook – finally, finally at long last. There is now such a thing as an OLED inkjet printhead thanks to Konica Minolta. The folks at ACER will be busting their A510 tablet out in March in Europe. HP’s open webOS browser has been released with big downloads in the wings: 40k Enyo downloads to-date.

These old school mainframe computers roughly the size of a refrigerator have been replaced by smaller and cheaper Linux and UNIX systems that are also faster and easier to manage. These mainframe computers certainly served an important role in NASA’s early space exploration programs. NASA is calling the retirement of its last Z9 the end of an era.

NASA doesn’t mention what it will do with all the retired computer hardware. I would imagine the last Z9 would end up being sold off in some government auction. Apparently, the mainframe had been kept operating at NASA to support applications that NASA knew would eventually be retired. Once those applications were retired, there was no need to continue to maintain the Z9 mainframe.

Traditional storage methods apparently need millions of atoms to storage the bits and bytes that make up our data. The new IBM breakthrough can store that data with only 12 little atoms needed. The new technique uses ferromagnetism and might lead to smaller, faster, and more energy-efficient devices in the future. No one really knew how many atoms were needed to build magnetic memory structures that were reliable. IBM has now found that magic number.

The problem in the past was that using atoms to store data introduced issues with the neighboring bits affecting each other. IBM had to make a breakthrough in controlling the interaction between bits. The trick was to atomically engineer twelve atoms antiferromagnetically coupled. The atoms could store a bit of data for multiple hours at low temperatures. The tech has a long way to go before it lands in your computer, but this is a very interesting breakthrough.

[via TGDaily]

IBM landed 6,180 patents over they year, a gain of 5% from 2010 when it had 5,896 patents the second place firm for landing patents was a bit of a surprise to me, Samsung took that spot with 4,894. I wonder how many of those will be used to beat Apple up in court. Canon took the third spot with 2,821 patents, Panasonic landed 2,559, and Toshiba had 2,483.

The firms I expected to be in the top of the list are surprisingly far down. Microsoft was in sixth spot with 2,311 patents, Sony took 7th with 2,286, and Seiko Epson had 1,533 patents. One of the larger makers of computers for a variety of firms – Hon Hai Precision – had 1,514 patents. Hitachi had 1,465 patents to round out the top ten. I really thought Intel would be way up the list, but the company was in 16th with 1,244 patents.

[via PC World]

Financial details behind this most recent set of transactions have not been revealed at the moment, nor are the terms quite yet apparent. Google and IBM have kept such details to themselves in the past as well. Google has acquired several thousand patents inside the 12 months of 2011 alone, with more sure to unfold inside the early months of 2012 if I may be so bold. It’s pretty clear at this point that IBM has found Google to be a suitable place to move their patents to, perhaps (and again, this is conjecture) due to the fact that Google’s Android OS had been the subject of so many law bombs throughout the last year.

What we’re seeing here is patents for everything from “Selecting and Rendering a Section of a Web Page” to the “Transfer of Web Applications Between Devices.” Perhaps most interesting is the one by the name of Computer Phone, whose abstract reads thusly:

Computer phone

Abstract

A computer integrated cordless phone. The phone can include a cordless handset transceiver configured for coupling to an antenna shared with a wireless network adapter through a multiplexer/demultiplexer so that both of the cordless handset transceiver and the wireless network adapter transmit and receive data within a common wireless frequency spectrum. In a preferred embodiment, the cordless handset transceiver can include a further configuration for coupling to a central processing unit, audio processing circuitry and power supply within a computing device shared with the wireless network adapter. Notably, the common wireless frequency spectrum can include the ISM frequency band.

That file contains patent filings leading all the way back to April of 1987, one written up by Nishimura which calls for a “Wireless phone system communicatively combined with a computer.” Interesting stuff! Check out that filing in U.S. Patent Document 4,661,659 and the one for Computer Phone in U.S. Patent Document 7,499,726. Enjoy, and expect more soon!

[via SEO by the Sea]

The firm thus “enhanced its stature” in the market, one in which government approval of a firm can play a significant part as to which external players homegrown businesses will deal with. At the time, IBM was looking to focus on software and services and shift away from the hardware business, which was bringing in comparatively lower profits.

Suggestions of political leverage playing a greater than average role in IBM’s PC business sale began as far back as early 2005, with Wharton suggesting that the $1.75bn deal was seen “as an alliance” by the IBM and pointed out that “government relationships are key in China.” The Chinese government still holds a stake in Lenovo, thanks to an early investment by the state-owned Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Lenovo has subsequently gone on to become the second-largest PC supplier in the world, though the company is yet to achieve its top place goal from the heyday of the acquisition. “We won’t be satisfied with the number three position” new chairman Yang Yuanqing said at the time. ”We will formally challenge the other two major competitors in the global PC market.”

[via Slashdot]

Researchers at IBM are working on ways to connect the human mind to computers and smartphones, such that phone calls can be placed by simply thinking. IBM has been working on bioinformatics headsets that can read electrical brain activity and recognize facial expressions and see this technology applied first in gaming and entertainment within the next five years.

The company also sees recycling kinetic energy, such as capturing heat from a computer, walking, jogging, or cycling to be able to help power homes, cities, and workplaces. It believes that passwords will be a thing of the past, with computers being able to use eye-sensing or voice recognition technology to authenticate biometric data.

Additionally, it believes that 80 percent of the global population will have a mobile device by 2017 as both the poor and rich will have more access to mobile technology. And lastly, IBM predicts the end of junk mail because ads will become so personalized to users that they will no longer be considered spam.

[via IBM]

Taking the number one spot is the sugar-water giant Coca-Cola, which has an estimated brand value of $71 billion. Following close behind is IBM at $70 billion, then Microsoft at $59 billion and Google at $55 billion. GE and McDonald’s take the next two slots ahead of Intel at $35 billion and finally Apple at $33 billion.

The ranking is based on three criteria, including the financial performance of the branded products, the degree to which the brand influences customer decisions in purchasing the company’s products, and the brands ability to meet future earnings expectations.

The top 10 is dominated by tech companies, but Interbands says that the positions are always at risk of a major flop or a more innovative competitor. Google has remained at the number 4 spot since the year before, but Apple has shot up from number 17 to number 8.

[via Daily Finance]

The “scrollback patent – number 7,469,381 - details the distinctive chequerboard background seen when you pan beyond the currently rendered extent of a webpage in a browser. The same patent has been used in Apple’s subsequent legal cases against Samsung’s Galaxy range of devices, and was part of the case the Cupertino company’s lawyers had presented in an attempt to secure a preliminary injunction in the US. That sales ban request was rejected last week, with the judge claiming Apple hadn’t sufficiently demonstrated that Samsung would not be able to overturn one or more of the patents it was said to have infringed.

It’s suggested that Apple licensed the “scrollback” concept to Nokia back in July, when the two companies settled their ongoing legal action with a cross-licensing deal along with Apple paying its Finnish rivals unspecified royalties.

As to why Samsung failed to license the technology back in late 2010, that’s currently unclear. Steve Jobs himself is said to have opened negotiations between the two companies, but talks broke down despite the two being deeply reliant on each other in the component supply chain. It’s possible Apple simply demanded too much money in return for use of the “scrollback” tech, or Samsung balked at other concessions insisted on as part of the deal, such as Apple continuing to allegedly ignore the Korean firm’s 3G patents.

IBM will be buying back another $7 billion worth of its stock and has declared a dividend. That $7 billion in additional buyback is on top of the $5.2 billion that IBM had announced it would buy back at the end of September. Apparently IBM still isn’t done gathering its own stock back up.

The technology giant is expected to ask its board for permission to buy back more stock in a board meeting set for next April. The quarterly dividend that was announced is 75 cents and will be paid to shareholders on December 10 that were on record as of November 10.

[via Business Week]

Rometty has a degree in computer science from Northwestern University and joined IBM in 1981 as a simple systems engineer. In between there and here she had a series of management jobs, these including working with clients in everything from manufacturing to telecommunications and back down to banking. Rometty worked on the purchase of firm PricewaterhouseCooper Consulting for $3.5 billion back in 2002, and in 2009 she became the senior vice president and group executive for sales, marketing and strategy.

Certainly she’ll welcome the title change as it’ll certainly save on ink for business cards. Rometty is known for finding opportunities for using science coming from IBM’s labs effectively in new products as well as services, including a push to expand the group’s analytics unit. This unit uses software to find its way through vast amounts of data put out by companies to work with clients on cost-cutting opportunities as well as sales.

While under Palmisano’s reign, IBM sold its personal computer line as well as several hardware lines while it turned to focus on services and software. As you should well know, this strategy has proven itself to be rather successful, this leading us to note that yes, this man was a rather good head for the job. We hope Rometty is ready to fill those shoes!

[via NYT]

Neither company is saying exactly how much Google paid for the IP, though it’s unlikely to have come cheap. Although CEO Larry Page has previously insisted that the Android patent situation is “not critical” - and that the company would rather concentrate on developing its own technologies instead of acquiring the rights to others – the search giant has nonetheless stepped up its patent shopping game.

The Motorola Mobility acquisition, costing Google $12.5bn, will net the company in excess of 17,000 new patents. Recently Google sold a selection of patents to HTC – some of which it had previously acquired from Motorola – which the handset company then used to sue Apple.

HTC is one of a number of firms using Android in its line-up which has come under legal attack from the Cupertino company, with numerous lawsuits ongoing in various countries. Google chairman Eric Schmidt has accused Android’s attackers of jealousy and a shortfall in innovation.

[via Bloomberg]

Some applications benefit from a huge amount of storage space. Things like climate modeling, and things having to do with genetic research, weather modeling, and the gas/petroleum industry can benefit from lots of storage. The 120-petabyte array is made up of 200,000 standard HDDs in a single massive pile of storage.

IBM has tweaked the array so that when a disc goes down the data is slowly written back to the new disc to allow the supercomputer to continue operating normally. If you are wondering 120 petabytes could store about 24 billion 5MB MP3′s and more video than you could watch. In fact, the massive storage space could store 60 copies of the 150 billion page WayBack Machine.

[via Technology Review]

Tim Cook is a name you really should recognize. He’s already served as interim CEO for Apple several times, each of them while Jobs took health-related leaves. These periods of Cook as Apple CEO took place in 2004, in the first half of 2009, and since Jobs took a leave of absence this past January, a period where Cook has handled day-to-day CEO duties daily. Jobs’ letter of resignation referred to a succession plan that included Cook already laid out well before today came around. As a former VP for Corporate Materials at Compaq, Chief Operating Officer of the computer reseller division of Intelligent Electronics, and having spent 12 years as director of North American Fulfillment at IBM, Cook would have been a qualified candidate for a high position in the business even before you consider his exemplary service with Apple since 1998.

During his years with Apple he rose from senior vice president of operations to his current position of COO starting in 2005. His several accolades include reinventing Apple’s approach to inventory supply chains, managing perfectly timed releases of new products, and keeping in-demand products in stock, each of these puzzle pieces essential to the current success of Apple. In fact, his contributions to the success of Apple can literally be counted in dollars and cents during his 2009 stint as acting CEO as Apple’s stock rose 67 percent according to CNN’s profile of Cook.

As a 2009 profile of Tim Cook with Wired notes, Michael Janes, the first general manager of Apple’s online store gives one look at Cook as the guy who turns all the fabulous designs Apple is set to release into “a big pile of cash for the company.” The profile goes on to note:

In some ways, Cook and Jobs are poles apart. Cook is the yin to Jobs’ yang. A quiet, soft-spoken, low-key executive, he couldn’t be more different from Jobs’ sarcastic, fearsome, larger-than-life personality. But that’s exactly what makes him perfect for the job, say people who have worked with Cook.

On the other hand, a profile of Cook from Fortune calls him a much less feeling sort of fellow – and that’s a good thing:

Tim cook arrived at Apple in 1998 from Compaq Computer. He was a 16-year computer-industry veteran – he’d worked for IBM (IBM, Fortune 500) for 12 of those years – with a mandate to clean up the atrocious state of Apple’s manufacturing, distribution, and supply apparatus. One day back then, he convened a meeting with his team, and the discussion turned to a particular problem in Asia.

“This is really bad,” Cook told the group. “Someone should be in China driving this.” Thirty minutes into that meeting Cook looked at Sabih Khan, a key operations executive, and abruptly asked, without a trace of emotion, “Why are you still here?”

Khan, who remains one of Cook’s top lieutenants to this day, immediately stood up, drove to San Francisco International Airport, and, without a change of clothes, booked a flight to China with no return date, according to people familiar with the episode. The story is vintage Cook: demanding and unemotional.

As Lex Friedman notes in the Macworld profile of Cook, the known Apple share holder puts down on paper the thoughts many people in such a position had in early 2011 when the article was written and what we’re sure many people are feeling now:

Should Steve Jobs by choice or necessity ever need a full-time replacement at Apple, it will of course be the board’s decision to decide who should fill his black turtleneck. But with Tim Cook taking over now for the third time in seven years—and his consistent track record when called upon thus far—one might expect that Apple’s future is already in safe hands.

As I noted back in February, Apple’s legacy and future is safe, doubly so now that Jobs is confirmed to still be a part of the company and Cook is at the helm.

Also note that you can read the official press release on this event in the post Steve Jobs Resigns as CEO of Apple from earlier today.

Now one of two main things I want to talk about here is this fun fact: the Microsoft Kin, aka KIN, being a family of mobile phones made by Microsoft running an operating system called KIN OS, lasted a grand total of 48 days, at which point Microsoft announced they’d be discontinuing the entire line, OS, hardware, and all. This compares very readily with HP’s announcement today that they’d be stopping production on the TouchPad tablet and all webOS-based handsets as well as deciding soon what they’d be doing with the webOS mobile operating software. Does the near-50-day mark signify some sort of unspoken “it’d better work by then” cutoff date for newly owned or created mobile operating systems?

Next regarding the PC business, I should remind you, if you were somehow unaware, that IBM had a computer unit for a number of years leading up to its selling of said unit to Lenovo, a Chinese company, in the year 2005. IBM has since stayed very much alive in the tech world, not popping up just a whole heck of a lot here in the consumer-based part of the environment, but still very much a force in the business enterprise and odd things like a computer chip that works like a brain. Lenovo is also still doing very well for themselves, currently holding the number five spot in top five mobile PC manufacturers by units shipped – at the end of this list behind, Apple, HP, Dell, and Acer, but still very far from the bottom.

HP is currently considering doing something very similar to what IBM did in 2005, moving their main bulk away from the personal computer and dropping a lot of bank on working with data instead. Today HP announced their plans to acquire Autonomy, one of the biggest technology firms in Britain in an obvious move toward enterprise software. Since all the way back in March of 2011, HP had been planning to “expand beyond” its PC business to focus more on cloud computing, connectivity, and software. Should it make all the right moves, this largest PC vendor on the planet Earth will soon cease to manufacture PCs and be all the better for it.

The goal is to one day simulate the activity of the brain to sense, perceive, interact, and recognize, as the human brain is able to do. These are all things that people can do much better than computers today. The principal investigator for the project is Dharmendra Modha, a researcher at IBM’s Almaden Research Center. The project is called Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics, or SyNAPSE.

The project members hope that this will eventually lead to computer chips that function like the brain. Applications for a chip that works like the brain could have a huge impact on all sorts of areas from medicine to science and government use. The design uses parts that are analogous to the brain and its parts. The design for the computer chip has digital processors as neurons. The synapses are the foundation for learning and memory, and the axons connect the parts of the computer. Right now experimental processors in cognitive computing operate at 10 hertz, which is much slower than normal processors of today.

[via Venturebeat]

What we ask you here today is to think about where we are today, the environment we’re living in as far as competition and “welcoming” competition in via advertisements, off-market talks, and good ol’ fashioned innovation. Would this type of ad be published today? It certainly could be, if you ask me. It wouldn’t be published in the same font, the layout wouldn’t be centered, certainly there’d be a few logo placements different from what’s going on here, but the message could be the same – would it be taken differently by the market? You bet.

The message from Apple sent to IBM in the Wall Street Journal is as follows:

Welcome, IBM. Seriously. Welcome to the most exciting and important marketplace since the computer revolution began 35 years ago. And congratulations on your first personal computer. Putting real computer power in the hands of the individual is already improving the way people work, think, learn, communicate, and spend their leisure hours. Computer literacy is fast becoming as fundamental a skill as reading or writing. When we invented the first personal computer system, we estimated that over 140,000,000 people worldwide could justify the purchase of one, if only they understood its benefits. Next year alone, we project that well over 1,000,000 will come to that understanding. Over the next decade, the growth of the personal computer will continue in logarithmic leaps. We look forward to responsible competition in the massive effort to distribute this American technology to the world. And we appreciate the magnitude of your commitment. Because what we are doing is increasing social capital by enhancing individual productivity. Welcome to the task. Apple.

The personal computer industry is now gigantic, it’s at its apex – it’s even fading away already, depending on who you ask, moving on to mobile personal computing. Who would Apple welcome to the task today? Have they stuck to their guns as far as “increasing social capital by enhancing individual productivity?” You bet. From the Apple I to the iPad 2 to the newest MacBook Air – personal computers.

Also in response to comments yesterday on the fact that I’d missed several personal computers that’d been released before the IBM PC, here’s the rest of the list, plus the few I’d already listed:

• 1975
MITS’s Altair 8080
• 1976
IMSAI’s IMSAI 8080
The Apple I
Processor Technology’s SOL
• 1977
SWTPC’s M6800
The Apple II
Radio Shack’s TRS-80 (later known as the TRS-80 Model I)
Commodore’s PET
• 1978
The Atari 400/800
• 1980
Radio Shack’s TRS-80 models II and III
Commodore’s VIC-20
Sinclair’s ZX-80 (before it was bought by Timex.)
• 1981
Texas Instruments’s TI 99/4A
IBM PC model 5150

Special thanks to shamino for the extended list.

Let us know what you think!

The first IBM trumped the 8-bit processors the competition was toting with its then-monstrous 16-bit processor. It utilized a 160k floppy disk drive, had a monochrome adapter for a graphics card, it’s display showed green on black, and ran PC-DOS. This system PC-DOS was later to be known as MS-DOS of course once Microsoft had it licensed to 3rd party vendors. Memory inside this first IBM PC was fabulous at 40K ROM, 64K RAM expandable to 256K with the cost of each 64K being $495 USD.

The total cost of a full IMB PC at launch was $3,005, and in the entirety of 1981, exactly 671,537 units were sold. All of this is according to Michael Miller’s 20th anniversary post on PCMag back in 2001. This $3,005 unit included memory of 64,000 bytes, a single diskette drive and its own display. You could also buy a bare-bones unit for home use attached to an audio tape cassette player and a television set would sell for approximately $1,565.

C.B. Rogers, Jr., IBM vice president and group executive, General Business Group said of the IMB PC at launch:

“This is the computer for just about everyone who has ever wanted a personal system at the office, on the university campus, or at home. We believe its performance, reliability, and ease of use make it the most advanced, affordable personal computer in the marketplace.”

What a blockbuster! What was your first computer? Mine was certainly the lovely Macintosh Color Classic, a fully color console/display in one unit, starting with 4 MB memory and having a sweet Motorola 16 MHz processor running System 7.1 – Mac OS 7.6.1. Of course I quickly got wise in those days as to what having a Mac VS having a PC really meant – artwork and design OR games. By the time Diablo II came out I couldn’t stand it anymore – PC it certainly was. Were there any IBM components in my first PC? I haven’t a clue. Did I look like the little guy in the photo above? You bet!

Technology pundits such as Rick Doherty (of Envisioneering Group) are thus far seeming to focus on the fact that IBM will be returning the money they’ve recieved from the project up to this point while the NCSA will be returning all IBM equipment, while both groups have promised to work on future petascale computing projects together.

“It’s not often you hear of contract money being returned, especially with government contracts. IBM was putting a lot of resources into the contract [but] It wasn’t a profitable direction for IBM.” – Rick Doherty

If the project’s end-product computer had indeed been built, it would have been one of the top most powerful supercomuters in the world according to top500.org. The University of Illinois and the National Science Foundation funded the project, planning then to allow researchers to use the computer for all manner of advanced simulation, data-crunching, and modeling.

In addition to mounting costs and new complexities in the project, the fact that new techniques with potential for less cost and less complexity in their execution have been cropping up since 2008 may have something to do with the abandonment of the project as it existed up until two days ago.

[via PCworld; Image credit: kosheahan]

“Like many tech companies, at times we’ll acquire patents that are relevant to our business” a Google spokesperson told the WSJ, though declined to reveal the financial details of the deal with IBM.

The decision is in contrast to comments by Google CEO Larry Page earlier this month, in which the chief exec denied that the Android patent situation was serious, and argued that rather than acquiring IP, the company would focus on developing its own technologies. “We’re really committed to Android” Page suggested, “[but] we will support it in a cost-effective manner.”

What falls under the banner of “cost-effective” is unclear, though it seems likely that Page was referring to the huge $4.5bn a consortium including Microsoft and Apple collectively paid recently for a cache of Nortel patents, keeping ownership away from Google. Chairman Eric Schmidt, meanwhile, dismissed lawsuits by rivals as evidence of jealousy and a shortfall in innovation.

Next in the Google sights is believed to be InterDigital, an R&D firm that develops, patents and licenses wireless technologies. The company filed a patent infringement suit against Nokia, ZTE and Huawei earlier this week.

“To those people who said things like how we should leave more buttons on it, I think “I completely understand. But that is exactly why we need to do it this way. There can be a new gameplay standard ahead of this.” That’s how we made the Wii Remote. With the new controller this time, it has a touchscreen here, and you can see information on it at anytime that won’t appear on the TV. So, on many levels, it’s a tool that makes things easier to understand. So by taking advantage of it, we can think about designing bold, brand new games.” Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo

According to Miyamoto, Nintendo’s approach with the Wii U wasn’t just to make the controller suited to more complex gameplay – without leaving it bristling with hardware buttons – but to broaden what applications it could address and how AV equipment is used in today’s home. For instance, with the Wii Balance Board (which the Wii U can connect to), “instead of turning on the TV, just this is enough to display graphs and such while your checking your weight, so it’s handy in a way that you are able to play Wii Fit with just this and the Wii Balance Board.”

In fact, using the Wii U controller’s camera, “you can place [the controller] against something and play while the game looks at your status” without needing to use your regular TV. Alternatively, in golf games for instance, the Wii U controller could be on the floor with the display showing the “roughness” of the grass – players could use the regular Wiimote as the club, looking down at the virtual ball and green to work out how hard to hit it and at what angle.

As for the hardware involved, Nintendo hasn’t released full details but some of its hardware partners have piped up regarding their involvement. IBM is responsible for the custom 45nm multicore CPU with embedded DRAM, while AMD will be supplying the custom Radeon HD GPU with 1080p HD support. Internal storage – the amount of which is unannounced, and will probably depend on flash pricing closer to the point of manufacture – can be augmented by SD card or USB hard-drive, plugging into one of the Wii U’s four USB 2.0 ports.

Video output options will include HDMI, S-video and component, and there’ll be streaming video and downloadable game support via a network connection. No word on integrated WiFi at this stage, nor whether the optical drive will play back DVD/Blu-ray media.

More details and screenshots in our SlashGear 101: What Can the Nintendo Wii U Do? feature, and live video in our Wii U hands-on.

As you may well know, a few months ago at the launch of the iPad 2, Steve Jobs himself let the world know what they might already have guessed: that Apple now gets more revenue from non-PC devices than it does from its PCs. The iPhone, iPod and iPad, all of them running on what’s now called a “mobile OS”, for Apple called iOS. Although my colleague Chris Davies has written that Post-PC is Premature, I’d have to disagree. We’ve been Post-PC for years. I’d like to turn to Sarah Rotman Epps writing for Forbes for a few more examples of this Post-PC craze:

The phrase was also part of the public discourse in 2004, when IBM sold its PC unit and former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz told The New York Times that “We’ve been in the post-PC era for four years now,” noting that wireless mobile handset sales had already far surpassed PC sales around the world. In fact, the “post-PC” concept is more than a decade old: In 1999, MIT research scientist David Clark gave a talk called “The Post PC Internet,” describing a future point at which objects like wristwatches and eyeglasses would be Internet-connected computing devices.

Lets not lose sight for a moment the fact that Post-PC means whatever you believe it means, not simply that the Personal Computer is no longer a fighting force in our society. It would be absolutely daft to say that PCs were dead at this moment, it’d even be foolish to decide that PCs are on their way out, if you ask me. But why would I say such a thing on the advent of the $20 rental fee for a Chromebook, the purchasing of Skype by Microsoft, the collapse of society as we know it when the PlayStation Network goes down? Does it make sense to hold on to the personal computer when the real value is in the internet it interacts with?

In a report put out today by Forrester Research, the following items are listed as the main switches in computing: Stationary to ubiquitous, Formal to casual, Arms-length to intimate, and Abstract to physical. Let’s take each of these apart and note how they’re affecting the way we work day to day:

• Abstract to physical - the future of computing is in reducing the amount of devices, cords, screens, and materials it takes for you to interact with digital content. The most important transition of this century in computing was when it became more common to use your fingers on a trackpad than on a mouse, then just as natural to use a touchscreen as it was to use any other means of working with your media.

• Arms-length to intimate - where when I was but a little man living in the basement of my parents house (because that’s where the computer was) the norm was for me to have a single computer in that single place, it’s now more expected that I’m able to access my work, my play, and my connecting content from any device with a display wherever I happen to be. If a family member is visiting my wife and I’s new baby, every other member of the family and our friends know what we’re up to via the photos I take with my cellphone’s connection to my blog or Facebook. They don’t even have to go to their homes to attain such content, they’ve got access via their own cellphones which they carry with them all the time.

• Formal to casual - It’s now more expected that a device will be on at the flick of a switch or the press of a button than it is to wait for a computer to boot up over a span of minutes. This advancement is moving at an exponential rate: where when we heard about the 5 second boot of the MacBook Air that’s now sitting on my desk back in November-December of 2010, it’s now expected that a laptop computer start up in that amount of time. Maybe not by the general public just yet, but for early adopters, speed is necessity rather than charming bonus feature.

• Stationary to ubiquitous - Where stationary gaming still exists, for example, it’s now normal to be able to access whatever game you’d otherwise play only on your home PC from your handheld device. World of Warcraft has a slew of OK apps that allow you to bring your character with you when you are forced to leave the house. Windows Phone 7 phones take your Xbox Live character with you in the same manner. Where working on the internet while driving around town was simply not heard of a small amount of years ago, the smartphone explosion in the very recent past made it so it was odd that you weren’t constantly connected.

Change comes quickly when it comes to the technological social world, exponentially so when it comes to this new mobile environment we live in. Is this the Post-PC world? Sure it is. Does that mean that PCs are literally gone from being an element that matters in our work and play-filled society? Far from it. Much in the same way that Globalization is both a buzz word and a reality that came upon us in such a rush that we didn’t realize we were connected to our friends in Japan and India until we had invited them to our Facebook groups, we’re already Post-PC.

Where do we go from here?

It’s a place we’re already in, this Post-PC era. There will be no winners in the race for the perfect computer because it’s us. The perfect accessory? I don’t think that exists either. How about the greatest marketing effort of the day, the one that tells you that this device, the one in front of you, is the one that’ll bring us into the future? That’s a fight we can win every day. Apple does it, Android is doing it, and everyone else in the industry is doing their darndest to figure out what “it” is. That’s where we are now. There are no such thing as a stationary “PC” because it’s already outdated. We’re in the Post-PC era because we just threw out our last one to purchase a new one along with all the tablets, handsets, headsets, chips, and online intangibles that go with it.

Many of you can relate to your first gaming expereince, whether it be with the Commodore, Atari, NES or even the Playstation or Xbox. It was mesmerizing, captivating and seriously addicting. I couldn’t get enough, the escape that video games presents was more immersive and emotional than books or movies could ever were, for me at least.

I wish I had more time to play video games today but with a family and more work than I have time to do, it gets a little tough. We play as a family frequently on the Wii or the Kinect but I miss the days of 4-5 hours sessions all by myself. Plus my wife really dislikes how I yell at the TV, to quote Brody from Mallrats “hell hath no fury like a woman’s scorn for Sega.”

It also most likely contributed to by ADD.

IBM PS/2
DIR/W. Ah the memories of DOS. The PS/2 was the first computer I remember using. We had many others before it but I simply don’t remember them. I learned to use DOS on the PS/2 which instantly made me the go-to for tech support in computer lab in the 5th grade.

Computers and computing are a big part of many of our lives. I highlight this one because it was the one I spent the most time with and to which many of my first experiences with computing are tied to.

Long live the Oregon Trail.

Compaq iPaq 3630 w/ PCMCIA sleeve and Ricochet Wireless Card
I had a difficult time choosing between the iPaq and the first Palm Pilot. I was at the Palm Pilot launch event when Jeff Hawkins first publically demonstrated the device. I remember thinking at the time how ground breaking this pocket computer was.

The primary reason I chose the iPaq was because of the Ricochet wireless card, provided by Metricom. Although the original Palm Pilot represented and cast a vision for a true pocket computer, the iPaq with the Ricochet Wireless card brought me the internet in my pocket for the fist time and that was what was so significant for me.

I remember pulling the huge brick out of my pocket, connecting to the internet in Starbucks and broadcasting to everyone in there that I was on the internet on my PDA.

My first HDTV – Mitsubishi 55” Rear Projection
Since I am an early adopter, I bought my first HDTV the second I could possibly afford one and that happened to be in 2003. That was also the year my first daughter was born so I positioned it a birthday present for her, which obviously no one believed.

I remember the first time I saw an HD picture on this beast. I nearly cried. I stared at it for hours and watched the most random things simply because HD content was limited and I just wanted to watch HD shows. I remember telling my wife it was like looking out a window or like actually being at the football or baseball game.

She didn’t think so but I did and that was all that mattered.

The Apple iPad
I chose the iPad for a number of reasons. Mainly because, in the 13+ years I have been working in the technology industry, I always dreamed of a product like this (a tablet) and this was the first to really deliver. I used nearly every pen-computing tablet that came to market prior; yes, there are a number of good tablets on the market, and they will all continue to get better, for me the iPad bought touch computing to the mass market.

The first true usable touch OS and touch experience obviously started with the iPhone but a screen 4-inches and smaller is only capable of some elements of touch computing. The iPad represents a much more holistic touch computing platform and has cast a vision of where touch computing will go with future innovations.

So those are my 5 defining experiences with technology. What technologies impacted your life?

IBM has a new abstract that outlines a system that would put a system of monitoring a child and giving them voice commands to teach them to play nicely. The system would apparently be stuffed inside a stuffed bear, a knit hat, or some other thing that can be kept close to the kids and monitor them.

When the system sense the child playing to rough it will use voice prompts to correct the behavior. IBM describes the system, “to help a child who plays rough with other children the interaction data can include multiple interaction operations that can be performed by the interactive device for helping the child play less rough with other children. For example, one interaction operation can include an audible warning telling the child ‘to play nice’ in a strict tone of voice, whereas another interaction operation can include an audible warning that asks the child ‘would you like someone to do that to you’ in a softer tone of voice along with a visual cue as well.” Basically, the system yells at your kid for you. The image here isn’t the system, it’s just a cute bear in a IBM shirt from Flickr.

[via SlashDot]

“Watson’s ability to analyze the meaning and context of human language, and quickly process information to find precise answers can assist decision makers, such as physicians and nurses, unlock important knowledge and facts buried within huge volumes of information, and offer answers they may not have considered to help validate their own ideas or hypotheses.”

An example of how this might work is that a doctor considering a diagnosis could speak questions about the case into the system and then the system would rapidly search through all of the releated texts, reference materials, prior cases, journals, and medical literature, and deliver back to the doctor the most likely diagnosis and treatment options.

If this is effective, it could be a huge change in the way the medical industry operates. It kind of reminds us of the “computer” on Star Trek.

IBM and Nuance expect the first commercial offerings to be available in 18-24 months.

[via IBM]

The terms of the agreement were not disclosed and exactly what patent types the agreement covers isn’t announced either. The official statement from IBM notes that the two firms have a range of patents for mobile communications, semiconductors, and software among other things.

“This licensing agreement will help both companies expedite innovation and achieve business growth by providing each company access to the other’s patents for basic technologies,” said Dr. Seungho Ahn, Executive Vice President and Head of the IP Center, Samsung Electronics. “We also hope the agreement will open new opportunities for wider collaboration between two of the leading innovators in the technology industry.”

This video is released in tangent with IBM100, a site that celebrates the past 100 years and how IBM has affected the world. This site includes Icons of Progress, an exploration of 100 IBM innovations that helped shape the past century, this section added to throughout the coming year. They’ve got “A Celebration of Service” which is an invitation to work with IBM to volunteer for causes around the world. There’s Memorobilia, a store collecting items “designed exclusively for IBMers, families, and friends.” Then of course they’ve got the film that you’re about to watch. Enjoy!

The contest is set to take place on February 14, 15, and 16 of 2011 and two matches will be played on the three consecutive days. The Watson supercomputer has been designed to compete against humans with the ability to answer questions posed in natural language with speed, accuracy, and confidence.

The IBM designers say that the Jeopardy challenge is prefect to test Watson because the game has clues involving analyzing the meanings in irony, riddles, and other complex clues that humans traditionally do well in and computers do not. The prize in the contest is $1 million for the winner, $300,000 for second, and $200,000 for third. The two human players will give half their winnings to charity and IBM will give all to charity.

The machine has broken all previous records according to IBM and hit over 10 million transactions per minute using the industry standard TPC performance benchmark. IBM reports that its machine using Power systems configuration with DB2 hit 10,366,254 tpmC.

That number is 2.5 times higher than HPs best result and shows a 69% higher performance per core for IBMs rig. IBM also claims that its score is 35% better than Oracle’s best performance with 2.7 times more performance per core. IBM now has the largest ePeen in the world.

The z196 CPU is set for the Z-series of mainframe computers out there, so don’t think you’ll be seeing this chip in your personal computer any time soon. IBM is claiming that it’s the fastest processor in the world, and with its clock speed of 5.2GHz they are probably more than right. The company is set to start shipping the super processor (we wish that’s what they called it) some time in September. The CISC chip is one of the latest remaining, which is built to support larger programs that inherently need more memory than RISC chips, like embedded ARM or PowerPC processors.

The chip itself is pretty impressive, as it measures in at only 512 square mm, which is fabricated on only 45nm PD SOI technology. On it, you’ll find upwards of 1.4 billion transistors. It also features a 64KB Level 1 instruction cache, 1.5MB private L2 cache per core, 128K Level 1 data cache, and a pair of co-processors which function for cryptographic work. With all of those features, and that clock speed, you can surely guess that the price tag would be high, and it is. It’s reported that the new chip could cost as high as the hundreds of thousands, or even up to a million.

[via Yahoo! News]

By using this hot water created from waste heat the supercomputer’s carbon footprint is reduced by up to 85%. IBM claims that the use of liquid cooling in a supercomputer is up to 50% more efficient than air-cooling.

The Aquasar supercomputer is cooled using water that is up to 60C circulated through micro-channel liquid coolers connected directly to the CPUs of the machine. The hot water cooling is able to keep the CPUs inside the supercomputer below their maximum allowed temperature of 85C. IBM claims that the water output from cooling the CPUs is up to 65C.

The Simmbook is going to be running Ubuntu Netbook Remix, along with IBM’s Client for Smart Work. That includes Lotus Symphony, along with various access points for cloud-based services. Digging deeper into the guts of the Simmbook, you’ll find an Atom N270 processor, 1GB of RAM, a 160GB hard drive, and a minimal 3-cell battery. It also has a standard 10-inch screen.

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in (…), then you can pick up the Simmbook right now for only $190. A very low price tag, but as you can see, there’s not much there to go on. There are some upgrades available, but we can’t really picture that helping the overall situation all that much. Simmtronics is hoping that with IBM’s and Canonical’s help, that they can bring the netbook to markets all around the world, all for a “competitive price.” We would assume that $190 is competitive in most places, so if emerging markets are indeed the destination of this little netbook, we can probably expect to see somewhere in the ballpark of $75 when the time comes.

[via Engadget]

The device is the fastest of its kind, and can receive optical information signals at 40Gbps, while just consuming 1.5V, which IBM states is 20 times less than what they’ve required in the past.  How does it work?  The “avalance photodetectors” snags a photon, which then initiates an electron chain reaction, or an “avalanche”.

Telecommunication companies already are gradually swapping traditional telephone lines with fiber optic cabling. The goal now is to shrink that capability so that the photonics can be used at the microprocessor level.

We have talked about graphene before and its promise of 1,000 GHz chips and scientists around the world are working with the material. Scientists at IBM have published a paper that demonstrates a radio-frequency graphene transistor with the highest cut-off frequency achieved so far using graphene. The transistor was able to hit 100 billion cycles per second or 100GHz.

IBM calls the accomplishment a key milestone in the Carbon Electronics for RF Applications program that is funded by DARPA with the goal of developing next generation communication devices. The 100GHz frequency was achieved with wafer-scale, epitaxially grown graphene using process tech that is compatible with what is used today in advanced silicon device fabrication.

The new Cell processor is also more frugal when it comes to power requirements, helping the PS3 Slim keep its draw down to 250W from the 280W of the first-gen design.  A collaborative effort between Sony, Toshiba and IBM, the three companies have declined to confirm what clock speed the new Cell chip runs at.

In fact Sony made no suggestion of performance increases during their press launch of the new slimmed-down PlayStation 3.  That could mean they’re holding back the power of the chip until a later date, when games will be able to take advantage of it (such as in a mid-model refresh), or it could indicate that they’ve throttled the processor back purposefully to reduce power demands and the like.  The PS3 is believed to use the same NVIDIA RSX GPU as the previous model.

That snapshot, according to Tom Rosamilia, general manager of the applications and integration middleware division at IBM, is taken when an app is running perfectly with OS, hardware and any middleware it is dependent upon.  In that way, future recalls of the virtualization have no danger of configuration error; any usage or changes are logged.

IBM say that enterprises with existing apps already running as services will find migration to the cloud straightforward.  It’s not quite ready for home use, however, unless you have particularly deep pockets.  The WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance, plus an application server, will be priced at around $45,000 when it goes on sale at the end of Q2 2009.

This new chip would be mostly used in portable devices like MIDs. What’s really great about these new chips is that they will use 20% less power yet gain 40% in performance when compared to the current 45nm chips.

What’s particularly useful about this is that those using 32nm chips will be able to transition to the 28nm ones easily, without a complete overhaul of the system. Production is expected to begin sometime next year.

As you may expected from any ultra high performance notebook-brick, the ThinkPad W700ds is bulky and power hungry; it’s super-sized at 11 pounds, and that’s not including the power brick which scales at 2.2 pound, brings the overall weight to a sum of 13.2 pound! The worst of all, the nine-cell battery only lasted 103 minutes of continued use of web surfing with WIFI. Ouch!

The 17-inch, 16:10 aspect ratio display has a resolution of 1920×1200; while the secondary, portrait mode 10-inch slide-out LCD offers 1280×768 of extra viewing estate. The main screen is probably of the industry’s best LCD panel with high color gamut output, it serves up 72 percent of NTSC color space.

The combination of both provide pretty of viewing real estate for internet surfing, gaming, emailing and should be valuable to Photoshop or any others designer apps that support dual-monitor; so one can place those extra panels and tool-set on the side. Nifty!

Nevertheless, despite the weight and size; ThinkPad W700ds is set to seriously surpass every other laptops out there – Beneath the 2-inch thickness chassis, there’s a choice of Intel Core 2 Quad processors, together with NVIDIA’s Quadro FX 3700M GPU and offers up to 8GB of RAM, 960GB of SSD or standard hard-drive based storage in an optional RAID array. It’s massively powerful and staggeringly large machine to travel but do keep in mind what it has to offer: professional-grade display with twistable sub-screen, full keyboard, Wacom tablet and built-in color calibration tool; it’s essential a complete professional-grade workstation on the go.

The ZTIC is a USB device that you can plug into your computer and it will talk to a bank’s servers by means of an SSL connection. It features a processor, a display, software and more in order to make that SSL connection.

So, as you’re making an online transaction, the little display on the device will show information that can then be compared to what you’re seeing on your web browser. If the ZTIC shows different information than what your browser is showing, someone is likely intervening in the transaction, giving you the opportunity to close it. This is really a breakthrough and could make for much securer transactions in the future.

The netbook will feature a 1.6GHz Via C7-M processor, an 80GB hard drive, 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi, a 1.6GHz Via C7-M processor and Bluetooth. It will also have a 10-inch display and will start at $610.

And though it’s only linked in name to the old Commodores, it will no doubt gain considerable attention because of it. Nostalgia wins many over and it may very well do it in this case. I mean, this one is an IBM inside, but for the Commodore name, a devoted few will shell out the cash.

[via Boing Boing Gadgets]