IBM Archive

IBM has unveiled a major upgrade to its flagship platform with the launch of Lotus Notes and Domino 7. Lotus D7 includes new collaboration features and tools designed to improve productivity for IT administrators and corporate developers, as well as new productivity enhancements to help Lotus Notes users work more efficiently. They are available for multiple platforms including AIX, Solaris and Linux.

Researchers at IBM are testing software that would let you tote your home or office desktop around on an iPod or similar portable device so that you could run it on any PC. The virtual computer user environment setup is called SoulPad, and consumers install it from a x86-based home or office PC. SoulPad uses a USB or FireWire connection to access the network cards for connecting to the Internet, the computer's display, the keyboard, the main processor and the memory, but not the hard disk.

The release of the IBM PC proved revolutionary for the then tiny microcomputer industry, and for IBM itself. Read about the birth of the IBM PC 5150 at Braeburn.

Big Blue has realised that a product that long disappeared from its catalogue is a rave from the grave that still has life in it yet. You would probably be surprised to learn just how many AS/400s are still about, and how many COBOL programmers for that matter.

DeveloperWorks has released updates to two downloads: Version 1.05 of the 970FX Evaluation Kit, also known as PIBS (PowerPC Initialization Boot Software); register to download here. As well, part 2 of the SLOF download has been released: JS20 low-level firmware provides the base functionality to run Slimline Open Firmware (SLOF) on a JS20 server.

New, super-concentrated format for all the PowerPC news that's fit to print. This issue: Supercomputing, Power.org, Apple, Cell, and more. In events: no-fee Web-based education: WebSeries webcasts and developerWorks tutorials, introducing "Solaris to Linux Migration," and more.

Maybe you've read the announcements of the 90- and 65-nanometer platform, but what does it all mean? Is IBM opening its process technology to outside companies? Chartered's Walter Ng puts it into perspective -- including where Samsung and Infineon fit in.

LCD supplier AU Optronics has signed an agreement with IBM to acquire 170 global patents for TFT LCD technology.

Is open source changing the way that software is made? It is at IBM. BetaNews sat down with Doug Heintzman, IBM Software Group's VP of Strategy and Technology, to discuss the adoption of a hybrid development model called Community Source that combines the best elements of the open source model with decades of IBM programming practice - avoiding a top down approach that IBM says could make Microsoft's Longhorn obsolete upon arrival.

According to this Computerworld report, industry hype surrounding Microsoft's decision to go with IBM's Power processors over Intel for its next generation Xbox, won't translate into Windows for Power servers in the near future, despite a pledge by IBM to support the operating system.

Interested in tuning your C/C++ applications for Linux on POWER? This article compares the optimization options for both Linux on POWER C/C++ compilers: GCC and IBM XL C/C++. This paper also reviews tactics, such as Interprocedural Analysis, Profile Directed Feedback, and High Order Transformations, which are used by one or both of the compilers to extract higher performance from the Power architecture.

IBM is planning to introduce what could be the largest corporate blogging initiative so far, in a bid to encourage its 320,000 staff to become more active in online tech communities. While other companies are frantically trying to prevent their employees from maintaining blogs, IBM seems to have realized the potential benefit that thousands of in-house bloggers could bring to promoting its products and services.

Learn about binary compatibility as it relates to the different operating environments that run on Linux on POWER. Learn about new technologies that can provide performance enhancements for a Linux on POWER apps, and follow steps to ensure binary compatibility across multiple distributions in the future.

The IBM Performance Simulator for Linux on POWER is a suite of performance models based on IBM's POWER series of processors. Users of Linux on POWER will be able to examine how their code executes on various IBM POWER processors so that they can identify and avoid common performance hazards on these processors.