XML News Desk

Micron CEO Dies in Plane Wreck

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 17:00:00 EST

The last American DRAM maker Micron Technology named Mark Durcan CEO Saturday after long-time incumbent Steven Appleton, 51, was killed Friday morning when the small single-engine Lancair plane he was flying – one of those build-it-yourself kit things – crashed near company headquarters in Boise, Idaho. It was his second takeoff – the first only getting a five or 10 feet off the ground – and was up only a few minutes before requesting permission to land again indicating there was a problem. Durcan, 50, who was due to retire at the end of summer, was the company’s president and COO. He now intends to stay.

Resara Launches OfficeBox Appliances

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:18:00 EST

NAS devices offer an affordable compromise to investing in more expensive server solutions for small businesses. "Every small business with a network needs a server to share and secure data. NAS devices are an easy solution, but they don't provide the powerful features that would make them an ideal replacement to a server," says Warren Luebkeman, CEO of Resara LLC. "We wanted to develop a solution that would bridge the gap between NAS products and small business servers. A simple appliance that shares data, and also has advanced features like a domain controller for network management." Earlier this year, Resara LLC launched its line of OfficeBox server appliances, which offer the simplicity of a NAS solution, but pack the powerful features of a traditional small business server. "With this product, a business can configure a network with an Active Directory compatible domain controller, add users, setup DNS and DHCP, and create file shares and drive maps in just a few minutes," says Mr. Luebkeman, "There is nothing else like it on the market."

Book Review: Decision Management Systems

Tue, 03 Jan 2012 05:45:00 EST

If you are in IT, I highly recommend reading this book. There are not too many systems being created today that I would consider more than interfaces to a data structure. Meaning most systems today rely on people to provide the intelligence behind them. The systems themselves are viewed as a necessary evil by the people who use them. I find this to be especially true in organizations with a long history. Their attitude is they were built by people, and people will continue to be their most valuable asset. The author of this book challenges us to take our systems to the new level of existence. One where they are responsive partners in the company along with the people who use them. Responding in real-time to customers and users of the system. Decision Management Systems are intended to be active participants in optimizing your business.

Service Design Patterns: Fundamental Design Solutions for SOAP/WSDL

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 10:00:00 EST

I have been a fan of the Martin Fowler Signature Series for a long time. This book fit into the series great and filled in a missing link in the series. One of the things I liked seeing was that the author does not think web services are a silver bullet. Right off the bat he warns that web services should be reserved for situations which out-of-process and cross-machine calls "make sense". The book is broken down into seven chapters, an appendix, and a nice glossary. The chapters include From Objects to Web Services, Web Service API Styles, Client-Service Interactions, Request and Response Management, Web Service Implementation Styles, Web Service Infrastructures, Web Service Evolution, and an appendix Reference to External Patterns.

IDC and Gartner Trim PC Expectations

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 08:00:00 EDT

IDC has joined Gartner in clipping its projections for global PC growth this year. It figures the number of widgets shipped will only be up 2.8%, down from a previous forecast of 4.2%, citing tablet cannibalization, cautious spending by SMBs and consumers and saturated mature markets coupled with the lack of sexy new features and the uncertainty HP’s proposed spin-off of its PC business has inflicted on the market. IDC also cut its 2012 growth guidance from 10.2% to 9.3%. It still thinks 2013-2015 is good for growth of 11% a year because of replacements and rising penetration in emerging markets.

RPost Goes Cloud, Calls It a ‘Cloud Processing Platform’

Tue, 06 Sep 2011 05:45:00 EDT

RPost, the Registered Email outfit, has gone into the cloud business, calling its new widgetry the “new global standard for legal electronic messaging.” The RPost Cloud, for that is its name, is targeted at software applications, service providers, developers, IT departments, ye olde postal services and John Q public. The platform will let any of these users, regardless of stripe, lease the RPost infrastructure and transform data into a product, reconcile transactions and return reports to the sender or sending system. It’s supposed to cost pennies and can be done on a message-by-message or user-by-user basis. Its cloud can be used to give data and e-mail messages any of the company’s many services, which roughly fall into four buckets: legally valid proof of delivery and non-repudiation; security, encryption and compliance; secure electronic signatures, contract e-signing and authentication; and collaboration and deliverability.

Build an Awesome Application Using the InfiniteGraph API

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 12:09:09 EDT

From now through September 30, 2011, developers are invited to build a cool software application, web or mobile service around social, game and/or location-based networks, using InfiniteGraph to traverse the objects and relationships in their data. You could win up to $12,000 worth of Apple products, gear and tech! InfiniteGraph, a commercial, distributed and scalable graph database, is challenging developers to create next-gen social and information network analysis applications. Do you think you can create a better social network? Have you wanted to create a solution for more relevant advertising and location-aware services? Do you have a big data problem that can only be solved by finding deeper and more complex relationships within your data? Take a shot at developing something unique, cool, new and exciting on InfiniteGraph, and you could win $12,000 in Apple computer and entertainment products, in addition to all the free promotion you will receive throughout the contest! Register online to enter the contest and to access the full version of InfiniteGraph. We're making sure there are no limitations to your creating the next big thing!

KonaKart v5.5.0.0 - New Release

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 15:20:00 EDT

DS Data Systems UK Ltd. is pleased to announce the release of KonaKart v5.5.0.0, a Java-based eCommerce shopping cart application that provides an extensive set of features to enable retailers to successfully sell their products over the internet. KonaKart is a Java / JSP / XML based solution with comprehensive easy to use Java, SOAP, RMI and JSON APIs that allow you to quickly integrate eCommerce functionality into your existing systems. The customizable parts of KonaKart are Open Source and available under the GNU LGPL.

Citrix Buys RingCube

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 09:15:00 EDT

Citrix has bought RingCube Technologies and its user personalization technology for virtual desktops. Price was not disclosed but the six-year-old company has raised about $26 million. RingCube is supposed to eliminate the tradeoff between user personalization and centralized IT management by making it easier for IT to give each user a personalized virtual desktop. It’s kinda a halfway house between the “dedicated VDI” model and the “pooled VDI” model. Dedicated VDI is expensive. It requires a lot of storage for IT to house a unique, fully assembled desktop for each user in its datacenter. Pooled VDI is cheaper but is limited to a single image of Windows and each app. Not everybody can fit into that particular shoe.

Software Product Line Engineering Resource Kit

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 07:15:00 EDT

Product Line Engineering Resource Kit is a kit of reusable assets made for use with SPARX EA on Software Product Line projects. I recently decided to update the Product Line Engineering Assets I reuse from project to project. In the past I reused a baseline project that contained a folder structure and the UML stereotypes needed to do Use Cases, Feature, and Static Modeling. For those of you who are not familiar with PLE, below is a context diagram I use to explain it and some links. I also put some of the better books on the topic at the end of this post.

Ten Principles for Building an Effective Human Capital Plan

Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:15:00 EDT

Almost every business leader will say that people are their most important asset, but few do anything about it. If you are going to take this principle seriously, then human capital planning is crucial. The Human Capital Plan is an important tool that organizations use to drive focused actions that can ensure goal achievement and business success. It allows organizations to assess, plan for, and respond proactively to its human capital challenges and needs. It helps shape the organization by building a plan to develop the workforce and practices needed to meet an organization’s vision, mission, and goals. Read on to learn about 10 principles to follow in order to build an effective human capital plan for your organization.

Top Five HR Compliance Concerns for Small Business

Thu, 28 Jul 2011 05:30:00 EDT

As the economic horizon continues to shift and belts tighten, small and medium-sized companies – that typically have between 10 to 500 employees and represent 99.7 percent of all employer firms according to the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) – may wind up being so focused on core business issues that they overlook one of their most potentially serious and costly issues – human resource compliance. Unlike their large-company counterparts, they lack the time and resources to build infrastructure and processes that are beyond core business objectives.

Five Ways to Manage the Rising Costs of Benefits

Wed, 27 Jul 2011 05:00:00 EDT

A robust benefits package can be the difference between a talented superstar choosing to work with you versus a larger, more established competitor. But with the cost of benefits rising each year, providing a benefits package that helps you attract, retain and motivate talented people gets harder all the time. With knowledge and planning, you can create a win-win situation for yourself and your employees. You can use benefits to meet the needs of your workforce and successfully compete for top talent. As a business owner, it’s important to be aware of the ways you can manage costs and attract top hires.

An Introduction to the PEO Model

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 11:15:00 EDT

As an entrepreneur, you did not enter into business to become a human resources manager. You have no interest in contending with payroll twice a month, negotiating benefits for your employees, or worrying about how to comply with a litany of government regulations. You entered into business in order to sell a product or provide a service, and generate revenue doing what you do best. But HR is a necessity when you have employees. And what could be better than taking a piece of your business – which although a necessity, is also a distraction – off your plate, and making it somebody else’s problem? This is what a PEO can provide and in this white paper you’ll learn about all its benefits.

An Executive’s Guide to Cutting HR Costs

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 08:15:00 EDT

Entrepreneurial execs know that they need to follow the rules, but they may not realize what decisions may lead to the two vital components that keep HR costs lower: 1. Increasing productivity 2. Minimizing human capital expenses The following white paper will focus on minimizing human capital expenses in four areas: 1. Hiring the right person for the right seat on the right bus 2. Improving performance with motivational yet balanced total compensation 3. Complying with the law 4. Offering competitive benefits, communicated effectively

Integrated HR Outsourcing: A Look at Three Small Companies

Fri, 22 Jul 2011 11:45:00 EDT

Picking through the white noise about outsourcing can be time-consuming and tedious. And while you’re busy doing all that research, your company’s payroll and benefits problems aren’t going anywhere. You need to outsource – but you’re not clear on the alternatives available to you. If you’re in this position, this whitepaper is written for you. It provides a research tool for smaller companies by describing the reasons why three companies, all under 100 employees, decided to outsource their human resources to an HR service provider. It presents a picture of what other companies have done when faced with the challenge of wading through a crowded vendor landscape, evaluating their alternatives, and making a final decision.

Moses-Like, Intel Points to the Promised Land of Exascale Computing

Mon, 27 Jun 2011 07:00:00 EDT

Intel is lacing up its jackboots to go Nvidia stomping. Seems we can expect the semiconductor giant to commercialize a better-than-50-core co-processor code named Knights Corner, a descendant of its sorta aborted Larrabee GPU adventure, in 2012-13 to compete against Nvidia’s Tesla GPU accelerators that currently own the HPC co-processor space. Intel’s cores will all be x86 apparently packed on a single ring bus and reportedly programmable with existing x86 tools that – allowing for parallelizing the code – are supposed to be easier to use than Nvidia’s proprietary CUDA platform although Tesla would probably result in faster machines.

Japan Back at the Top of the Top Supercomputers List

Sun, 26 Jun 2011 14:00:00 EDT

A K Computer built by Fujitsu out of 68,544 eight-core CPUs at a reported cost of $1.25 billion and 9.89 megawatts of power is now the fastest machine in the world according to the Top5000 Supercomputing List. It benchmarks at eight quadrillion (8,000 trillion) calculations a second on the Linpack test, dethroning China’s three times less powerful 2.6 petaflops/s Tianhe-1A. It’s hard to imagine how fast either of them is but I sure wish I had that many shoes. An American machine at Oak Ridge National Lab came in third, another Chinese machine came in fourth and a pokey 1.19 petaflops/s Japanese machine came in fifth.

A Maturity Model for Application Performance Management Process Evolution

Thu, 23 Jun 2011 10:30:00 EDT

As IT systems form the backbone of business operations, their performance plays a key role in business growth. Understanding this fact, organizations work toward obtaining best performance from the software systems to maximize ROI on IT. Now an application’s performance can be improved by tuning numerous factors like the underlying infrastructure, deployment configuration, application architecture, design, workload, etc. Yet there is another important factor driving the performance of all applications of an organization – the performance management processes adopted by an organization. The performance management process consists of activities performed to get a better understanding and control of application performance. Here we present a maturity model that will help organizations evaluate and evolve their processes on certain key dimensions. The scope of the model presented is limited to the activities that have to be carried out as part of the performance management process. In addition, as the people and technology used for process implementation are equally important to achieve the required success, equal emphasis has been given to them. The model describes a six-level evolutionary path to progressively mature performance management processes in an organized and systematic manner. With the increasing maturity of the performance management process implementation, organizations can see a positive impact of the performance engineering adoption on the business.

Ex-Massachusetts House Speaker Convicted in Cognos Bribery Case

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 08:00:00 EDT

After an six-week trial in federal court, the former Massachusetts Speaker of the House Salvatore F. DiMasi, once one of the state’s most powerful politicians, was convicted Wednesday of trading $17.5 million worth of state contracts for kickbacks from Cognos, the Canadian BI shop that now belongs to IBM. IBM and Cognos were never involved. Between 2005 and 2007, the $65,000 in bribes was secretly funneled to DiMasi by one of Cognos’ local sales VPs Joseph Lally. He turned state’s evidence in return for a lighter sentence. After the Boston Globe exposed the conspiracy and forced DiMasi to resign in 2009, IBM returned $13 million of the contract money. It was found that one of the two contracts had skirted bidding rules.

Acer’s Financial Troubles Mount

Sun, 05 Jun 2011 14:00:00 EDT

Acer, the world’s third-largest PC maker, says it’s going to write off $150 million in inventories in Europe and on accounts receivable in Spain after an internal audit found unidentified “abnormalities in terms of channel inventory.” It may be aging, unexciting widgetry. Acer chairman JT Wang says he will now dock his bonus for 2010 and other board members are reportedly prepared to cut their compensation in half. Employee bonuses will be cut 40%, but shareholders will still get their dividend. Acer figures to lay off 300 people in EMEA to cut expenses by $30 million. A second-quarter lost wouldn’t surprise anybody at this point.

Rajaratnam Wants Jury Verdict Overturned

Mon, 30 May 2011 18:00:00 EDT

Convicted hedge fund felon Raj Rajaratnam wants the presiding judge in his months-long trial on insider trading charges to throw out the verdict that could send him to jail for a very long time. On Wednesday his lawyers renewed a motion to have him acquitted and his slate wiped clean after a federal jury found him guilty of all 14 counts of conspiracy and securities fraud on May 11. The defense tried the same thing after the government rested its case and again after all the evidence was presented. This time his lawyers claim that despite the massive wiretap evidence against him the prosecution failed to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt on at least five of the 14 counts.

Cisco to Cut Jobs, Abandons Growth Projections

Mon, 16 May 2011 08:00:00 EDT

Beset by a flagging consumer business and the bottom falling out of the public sector on which it’s ever so dependent coupled with competitive pressures, market share losses and pricing challenges in its core business, industry bellwether Cisco, the overextended networking giant, said Wednesday that it’s going to lay people off. It claims it doesn’t know how many but it’s got considerable scope considering it’s got 73,408 employees. Estimates say it’ll probably work out to 4,000-5,000 terminations. The bomb dropped during Cisco’s conference call with Wall Street after the company posted a reasonably respectable fiscal third quarter but predicted that its numbers would tank this quarter, normally its strongest quarter.

Intel Redesigns the Transistor

Mon, 09 May 2011 08:15:00 EDT

Intel Wednesday disclosed that it has perfected – and will be able to mass produce – a new kind of transistor for the first time in the 50-odd years since the computer’s basic building block was invented. It said the breakthrough, which basically puts a fin-like second story on the humble transistor, promises power reduction and performance improvement in everything from the smallest handheld to the biggest cloud-based servers. Intel is going to use the newfangled 3D transistors, dubbed Tri-Gate after the fin’s three current-controlling gates, in making its 22nm Ivy Bridge chip, a Sandy Bridge shrink due out by the end of this year. It will also use them in its tablet- and phone-hopeful Atom chip, presumably giving it something to take up against ARM.

[Update] Juror Pulls Out of Rajaratnam Case

Thu, 05 May 2011 07:15:00 EDT

One of the jurors in the high-profile Rajaratnam case has dropped out for medical reasons and has been replaced by one of the alternates, CNBC reported Wednesday morning. It will pretty much mean starting over again. The jury is already a week into deliberations over whether hedge fund founder Raj Rajaratnam is guilty of using inside information to make repeated killings in the stock market mostly on brand name high-tech stock. Last week it asked for a bunch of the telltale government wiretaps to be replayed. Rajaratnam is charged with 14 counts of securities fraud and conspiracy. Twenty-six other people have been charged in the case and most of them have pleaded guilty.

Rajaratnam Jury Still Out

Mon, 02 May 2011 07:45:00 EDT

A New York federal jury got the Raj Rajaratnam insider trading case Monday around noon and so far no decision. It did ask for a bunch of the government wiretaps to be replayed on Tuesday and Wednesday and it’s supposed to deliberate for a few hours on Friday, then resume again Monday full-time if it hasn’t reached a verdict yet. The judge denied the jury transcripts of the recorded conversations and witness testimony. The replayed taps included calls between Rajaratnam and former Intel executive Rajiv Goel and former McKinsey consultant Anil Kumar. Both men testified against him at the trial after pleading guilty themselves in the case. The Goel tap revolved around an Intel-backed Clearwire-Sprint Nextel venture and the Kumar tap about the Abu Dhabi investment in AMD.

Lawson Takes Infor Deal, Can’t Do Any Better

Mon, 02 May 2011 05:00:00 EDT

Lawson Software suckered the punters who had bid its stock up over 13 bucks a share in the last six weeks in anticipation of a bidding war or a sweetener after privately held Infor – now run by former Oracle president Chuck Phillips – put $11.25 a share on the table late at night the Friday the earthquake and tsunami hit Japan. This Tuesday Lawson accepted Infor’s original $1.84 billion offer, forcing gamblers to dump their positions. Lawson said in the announcement that it had “contacted other potential acquirers including competing global providers of enterprise applications and financial buyers, a process that did not result in a superior proposal.”

Rajaratnam Case Goes to Jury

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 08:00:00 EDT

A New York federal jury got the Raj Rajaratnam insider trading case Monday around noon. The alleged ringleader of a virtual syndicate using inside information to make illegal trades in a litany of high-tech stocks, the billionaire founder of the Galleon hedge fund is the only one of 26 people charged in the case, including the former head of IBM’s server operation Robert Moffat, to plead not guilty to charges of conspiracy and securities fraud. The jury has been hearing the case since March 8 and now has to choose between the damning evidence it heard on the government’s secret wiretaps and Rajaratnam’s thin defense that he was being fed public information and that the prosecution’s key witnesses all lied to save their own skins. Moffat, for one, has been in prison since November, with expectations of being released next month. Attorney Jason Goldfarb pleaded guilty Monday morning to charges he leaked information on 3Com acquisition in 2007 and 2008. He is expected to serve 37–46 months in jail.

Supremes Hear Microsoft-i4i Case

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 08:15:00 EDT

Whether Microsoft has to pay little i4i what must now be about $300 million on interest alone for infringing its XML patent is now in the lap of the eight Supreme Court justices who heard oral arguments in the closely watched case Monday. As the Seattle Times says, it “could potentially wipe out billions of dollars of value from existing US patents.” Microsoft and many of its fair-weather friends in Silicon Valley like Apple, Google, Cisco and Intel – not to mention folks like Wal-Mart and MasterCard – want the Supremes to overturn the jury verdict in favor of the Canadian company on the grounds that it should be easier to invalidate a patent. Established rules say Microsoft needed to offer “clear and convincing evidence” to knock i4i out of the box.

Acer Reorgs to Meet Crisis

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 07:00:00 EDT

Less than three weeks after Acer’s CEO and president Gianfranco Lanci quit in a disagreement with the board over what to do about the company’s flagging PC business, it has named Jim Wong president and also made him responsible for developing the mobile devices Acer needs to ward off Apple’s cannibal iPads. The effort will be housed in a new Touch Business Group (TBG) dedicated to smartphones and tablets. Its existing smartphone operation will be melded into the new unit. Acer was hoping to sell six million tablets this year, starting with the unit it put out in February. Acer chairman JT Wang will remain CEO, the job he picked up when Lanci left. Campbell Kan gets to run what now becomes Acer’s PC Global Operations (PCGO) and struggle with the fact that the world’s second-largest PC maker after HP just cut its Q2 delivery forecast from flat to down another 10% quarter-on-quarter drop because of the slow season, the reorg and necessary inventory adjustments.

Upstart to Challenge FedEx, UPS & USPS

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 13:00:00 EDT

Serial entrepreneur Ron Wiener, whose Venture Mechanics venture arm incubated Swiss Post’s digitized postal mail partner Earth Class Mail, has spent the last couple of years putting together a new parcel carrier meant to challenge FedEx, UPS and the USPS in delivering B2C packages from the scads of SMBs that don’t qualify for FedEx and UPS discounts and are basically stuck subsidizing the unprofitable volumes of the FedEx and UPS mega-shippers. Called EquaShip, the start-up – just-out-of-stealth-mode and not yet up and running – is promising to be the cheapest game in town, offering to deliver even single pieces for 10%-30% less than UPS and FedEx, maybe more.

Intel Calls Tales of PC Contraction Bunk

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 11:00:00 EDT

Intel emerged from the first quarter whole, intact and justifiably giddy – despite the Sandy Bridge chipset recall, the supposed drop in PC shipments, the mobile challenge and the supply chain crisis in Japan – bragging Tuesday of record sales and earnings in a historically soft quarter. During the conference call CEO Paul Otellini called Gartner and IDC’s claims last week of a nasty, unexpected contraction in the PC market baloney. He said their researchers didn’t have visibility into the emerging markets, the white boxes moving there and the demand for laptops, and even desktops. Intel, he said, has focused on getting its glasses propped clearly on its nose the last few years and so far its predictions have only been off a point and that was back in ’09.

Samsung Sells Its Hard Drive Unit to Seagate

Thu, 21 Apr 2011 10:00:00 EDT

Samsung is selling its money-losing hard drive business to Seagate Technology for about $1.375 billion, half stock, half cash, with Samsung winding up with about 9.6% of Seagate and a seat on the board. The sector is said to be another victim of the flash-bearing iPad and its ilk, which are contracting HDD demand. Price wars have further impacted margins. Western Digital recently agreed to take Hitachi’s hard disk business for ~$4.3 billion in cash and stock, giving it half the market. Seagate is supposed to have 32% and with Samsung would have around 40%. Toshiba and Fujitsu are the other HDD players. Samsung reportedly wants the cash, which will amount to $687.5 million, to reinvest in new growth areas like solar cells.

PC Market Unexpectedly Contracts

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 08:15:00 EDT

PC shipments unexpectedly went down rather than up in the first quarter. Both Gartner and IDC promised they would be up as the economy improved. They were both fooled. IDC promised a modest 1.5% gain. Instead its data said demand dropped 3.2% to 80.5 million units worldwide. Gartner, on the other hand, which thought the market would be up 3%, found demand was down 1.1% to 84.3 million units. That seems further apart than the two usually are. Both blame the iPad, but that doesn’t explain how come Mac sales were up 18.9% to 1.49 million boxes according to Gartner or 9.6% to 1.25 million according to IDC. Of course the MacBook Pro refresh at the end of February didn’t hurt.

Messenger in Latest Insider Trading Scandal Pleads Guilty

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 08:00:00 EDT

The go-between who carried insider information about pending industry mergers between Wilson Sonsini lawyer Matthew Kluger and trader Garrett Bauer for 17 years pleaded guilty Monday to charges of securities fraud and conspiracy. He was identified as mortgage broker Kenneth Robinson, who ultimately taped compromising conversations between his friends for the FBI. Kluger and Bauer were arrested last week. The government said Kluger stole Wilson Sonsini’s M&A secrets about deals like the Intel-McAfee, HP-3Com and Oracle-Sun acquisitions and gave them to Bauer to trade on. Prosecutors said he’s been doing it since he was a summer associate at Cravath Swaine & Moore, IBM’s white glove law firm, and tipped Bauer off to Big Blue’s acquisition of Lotus and Tivoli.

Intel Moves to 10 Cores

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 07:45:00 EDT

Intel has trotted out its latest 32nm Westmere-EX or E7 Xeons, which support up to 10 cores connected by a ring bus and are supposed to deliver up to 40% better performance than the eight-core Nehalem-EX chips they replace. Amusingly the things are considered so powerful they’re pitted against competitive RISC chips like IBM’s Power chip and Oracle’s Sparc chip and by default Intel’s own Itanium, which Intel just had to defend when Oracle said it was going to stop supporting the largely HP-used part because Intel is going to discontinue it, an allegation roundly denied. Intel said of the new Xeons, “The days of IT organizations being forced to deploy expensive, closed RISC architecture for mission-critical applications are nearing an end.”

Chatting with Albert Einstein About Business Intelligence

Sun, 10 Apr 2011 11:00:00 EDT

Albert Einstein is arguably one of the most intelligent people who have ever lived. Have you ever wondered what it would be like to chat with him about business intelligence? I have. Mr. Einstein, thank you for taking the time to talk to me today. I work for a business intelligence vendor called SiSense and I would love to hear your thoughts on a subject you know more about than anyone else – intelligence. Whoever undertakes to set himself up as a judge of truth and knowledge is shipwrecked by the laughter of the gods.”

TI to Buy Nat Semi

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 08:12:00 EDT

Texas Instruments said Monday after the market closed that it’s going to buy rival National Semiconductor for about $6.5 billion cash. Chip groupie Nathan Brookwood called it simply “the passing of an era.” TI is offering 25 bucks a share for the analog chipmaker, a hefty 78% premium. The deal, more than half of which will take debt financing, should close in six-nine months. The analog chip market was worth 42 billion last year on the back of the upsurge in mobile phones whose analog chips make phone calls understandable (though not as much as the old rotary phones). Together the companies will have an analog portfolio of 42,000 products, 12,000 of them National’s, used in everything from weapons guidance systems to kidney dialysis machines.

Mentor Graphics Rebuffs Icahn’s Purchase Offer

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 11:00:00 EDT

Mentor Graphics’ board Monday unanimously rejected Carl Icahn’s month-old offer to buy the joint for $1.9 billion, which translates into $17 a share. It says it’s too little. It also said that “Icahn’s proposal that Mentor put itself up for sale to a strategic buyer entails significant commercial and regulatory risk and is therefore not in the best interest of the company and Mentor’s shareholders.” It said it updated its analysis of a combination with Cadence or Synopsis and not only are there regulatory hurdles but it figures any attempt would destabilize its customer base and its workforce if such discussions started and weren’t consummated. The company wants to be left to follow its existing strategic plan. Although the board “confirmed that it remains open to any opportunity to enhance shareholder value,” it figures now’s not the time to put the company up for sale.

Barclays Takes Down PC Projections

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 14:00:00 EDT

Trying to get its arms around the possible component shortages, postponed product launches, higher parts prices and the impact of iPad 2 on laptops, Barclays Capital has cut its PC growth projection for 2011 from 8% to 5% as a result of the disasters in Japan and weaker-than-expected demand. It expects Q1 to be down 10% sequentially, Q2 flat with Q1 and a rebound in the second half. The Japanese government calculates the March 11 earthquake and tsunami could cost $309 billion, close to three times the cost of Katrina, making it the costliest natural disaster in history.