Seagull poo on solar cells is primary tech snag

In the Irish Sea off Wales this week, a new kind of robot is taking to the waves. For once, this is not a military kill-droid, nor a securo-pork powered surveillance machine. Instead, we are seeing the debut of the fully-autonomous sailboat, which uses its own software to navigate out at sea. For now the uninhabited windjammers will stay relatively close to home but, next year, their successors will race across the Atlantic.

San Diego -- IBM's customer training and support group SHARE is holding a week-long seminar and conference at the Manchester Grand Hyatt here this week. SHARE dates back to 1955, and the folks gathered in San Diego include programmers, sysadmins, and IT directors who have spent decades running mainframe systems for the world's largest companies and governments. Most of the classes and labs focus on "big iron" products like the mainframe operating system MVS and the CICS transaction server, but Linux is getting strong promotion as well. IBM champions Linux for its zSeries mainframes as the industrial-strength virtualization platform, and judging by the turnout at the Linux and VM program sessions, interest is high.

Filed under: Desktops, Laptops

Poor Vista, you really can't buy a break. First you've got legions of users angrily awaiting a decent update for a whole slew of problems, then there's the CEOs taking pot-shots at you, and now, Lenovo, supplier of the 2008 Olympic Games' computer systems says it's sticking with XP. Word on the street is that all vital computing tasks for the Games will be handled on XP-enabled PCs, while some internet lounges used by athletes will be equipped with Vista systems. According to Yang Yuanqing, chairman of Lenovo, "the Olympic Games require mature, stable technologies and it's not a place to try new technologies." Yang, we're pretty sure a legion of Vista users feel similarly about their desktops. You can almost hear Microsoft's sharp intake of breath from here.

[Via Slashdot]

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Office Depot Featured Gadget: Xbox 360 Platinum System Packs the power to bring games to life!