Comment Segways still don't kill people (Score 1) 413
Driving them around on sandstone cliffs overlooking a fast flowing river does that. As sad as it is, it's definitely a contender for the Darwin Awards.
Comment IBM have left the desktop (Score 1) 366
Can't see if this is mentioned anywhere, but IBM got out of the desktop business a few years ago if you recall. ThinkPads are made by Lenovo now, who are a completely different company, based in China.
In addition, yes, AIX is moribund. IBM have abandoned that for z/OS on mainframes and SUSE everywhere else. I worked on a migration to an IBM datacentre a few years ago where, despite the original intention of virtualising SUSE on a z-Series mainframe, we ended with a bunch of p-Series servers running AIX. IBM couldn't even schedule a permanent member of staff to build the machines and had to get a contractor in to install their own OS on their own machines.
Having said that, I knew someone at the time who had a PowerPC ThinkPad, which was a peculiar beast indeed. It ran AIX with CDE but even in 2004 it seemed like an anachronism with very few of the things you needed to make a desktop machine useful: I think OpenOffice 1 had been ported.
Comment Re:Mod this up (Score 1) 419
Actually, to be pedantic, the Fujitsu-Siemens that the government deals with is British - it's the stub of what used to be Ferranti, which is why they still have preferred supplier status.
It's entirely correct though. The national identity database project was only started after a study by Schlumberger-Sema (a US-French organisation and yet another IT supplier to uk.gov) confirmed that it was viable. The British government, both the elected and unelected part, seems remarkably naive when gathering advice on matters of IT policy, along the lines of 'do you, Fujitsu Siemens, providers of computer hardware, believe that we need to update (insert government department)'s IT infrastructure?'. The majority of EDS's UK income comes from its government business, despite frequent project overruns and outright failures, and yet it continues to gain work in the public sector. I'm sure it's no different in other countries but the UK seems to be more blatant about it.
Google Honors Veterans Day, Finally 693
theodp writes "It took nearly a decade, but Google has done a turnabout and is honoring Veterans Day with a special holiday design for its famous logo. Users who log onto Google's home page are greeted with three World War I-era helmets capping the letters 'o' and 'e' in Google's name. The decoration is a marked departure for the company, which has come under fire from veterans' groups for ignoring American holidays such as Veterans Day and Memorial Day since Google's inception in 1999."
Ballmer Calls Android a "Press Release" 270
Bergkamp10 writes "Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer tried to shoot down Google's new mobile platform at a press conference in Tokyo. Ballmer called Android a mere 'press release' at present, and said the mobile platform market is 'Microsoft's world.' Ballmer dodged requests to comment on specifics of the Android software platform, preferring instead to highlight the successes of the Windows Mobile platform which he said is on 150 different handsets and is available from over 100 different mobile operators. 'Well of course their efforts are just some words on paper right now, it's hard to do a very clear comparison [with Windows Mobile],' Ballmer said. 'Right now they have a press release, we have many, many millions of customers, great software, many hardware devices and they're welcome in our world,' he added."
Too Many Linux Distros Make For Open Source Mess 554
AlexGr writes "Remember the 1980s worries about how the "forking" of Unix could hurt that operating system's chances for adoption? That was nothing compared to the mess we've got today with Linux, where upwards of 300 distributions vie for the attention of computer users seeking an alternative to Windows."
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