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The new book The Race For a New Game Machine, by two IBM engineers, details how ridiculous the design process was when IBM was making Sony's PS3 cell chip. Microsoft basically got a free ride.
IBM has just released a list of five innovations it thinks we'll see in the next five years, and they're ridiculous. It's the kind of crap we laugh at when we see old Life magazine from the 40's predicting airship kitchens by the year 2000.
It's like a geek soap opera. Just last week, Cray bragged that their updated Jaguar XT supercomputer was the world's fastest. Now this week, IBM responds to the trash talk with a number one ranking of their Roadrunner system on the newly published Top500 supercomputing list.
The legal snafu regarding former IBM employee Mark Papermaster's departure for Apple took a hard right toward Lifetime TV town this week after some new information shed light on just how far IBM went to keep him on the payroll. Imploring Papermaster to remain in the Big Blue camp, an unnamed exec asked the new iPod head at Apple to "consider the effect of his decision on his family." When Papermaster declined the offer, thereby choosing free iPods over discount blade servers, IBM sued him for violation of a non-compete contract. Per a judge's emergency order, Papermaster is currently not working for Apple until this is cleared up. If nothing else comes of this, at the very least Papermaster has some interesting additions for his updated resume. [CRN]
Mark Papermaster, a former IBM executive who's replacing retiring iPod chief Tony Fadell, came to Apple with some heavy baggage—namely a one-year no-compete clause that IBM said he was violating by working at Apple. U.S. District Judge Kenneth Karashas sided with IBM for the time being in their lawsuit, ordering Papermaster to "immediately cease his employment with Apple Inc. until further order of this court."
While you might think that Apple products emerge from Steve Jobs' head, fully formed and perfect like any other offspring of gods, the inventor of the iPod was actually Tony Fadell (along with former Apple hardware chief of engineering Jon Rubinstein). Fadell, who took over the iPod division from Rubinstein in 2006, is leaving his position to take a "reduced role" as an advisor to Steve Jobs.
Whether you are a spy or a shady CEO, this laptop concept by Nicolas Lehotzky has features that will fit the bill. I'm not crazy about the giant protruding lock / finger scanner, and the USB slots hidden behind a lockable metal cap may be a bit of a nuisance—but I love the built in scanner and paper shredder to archive and / or eliminate incriminating evidence. I'm sure a product like be snatched up lightning quick by corporate America. [Coroflot via The Awesomer via Ubergizmo]
Everyone who has owned a mobile phone over the last 10 years should at some point pour one out in thanks to Cliff Kushler, one of the inventors of the T9 text entry system that knows you mean "DONKEY" when you type 366539 in an SMS. Now Cliff is smartly shifting his focus on touchscreens with Swype--a way to type blindingly fast on a touchscreen by tracing your finger or stylus over the letters you want without lifting up, connect-the-dots style. It looks frankly amazing in a demo--so amazing that we remembered we've seen it somewhere before. Thankfully, it could be heading to the iPhone and Android really, really soon.
Recently green-lit to be built at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, IBM's future Blue Waters supercomputer is peta'd all over. It'll have up to 2-petaflops processing speed, more than a petabyte of memory and a 10 petabyte disk storage system. It'll also have more than 200,000 processor cores, and cost around US$208 million, which is even more 000s. All this power is going to be used for proper hard science like simulating the Sun's coronal mass ejections, studying black holes, and molecular biology. Probably developing on IBM's previous Roadrunner supercomputer power, it should be accessible nationally, at campus-level. And you can bet someone'll program it to sing "Daisy, daisy" pretty soon after it goes online in 2011. [NetworkWorld via Slashdot]
Sure, some of us remember using the Commodore 64, but do any of us recall what the ads for it were like? Boingboing has aggregated a wonderful collection of 101 classic computer advertisements by everyone from AT&T (yeah, I forgot they tried their hand in making PCs too) to Texas Instruments. Aah, to be back in a world where everything fit inside a bulky keyboard and displays were monochromatic. [Boing boing]
