Small Form Factor Disks Go Mainstream, the System i Has Gone Fishin'
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

I am not that old, but I am old enough to remember a time when the AS/400 was always at the cutting-edge of storage technology innovations, whether one was talking about cache memory, main memory, disk drives, or tape drives. Those were the days, when IBM's Rochester labs were at the forefront of memory and disk technology, inventing the most dense memory chips and the most capacious disk drives in the IT sector. READ MORE >

Project Costs Tell the VoIP Story
by Dan Burger

Technology is the sizzle, but it's the bottom-line savings that puts the meat on the table. For voice over IP (VoIP), the starting point for asking questions comes from one angle: How can it save money? Budgets are tighter than a rusted lug nut on a '51 Mercury. Projects are prioritized by how much money they can either make or save. And generally it's easier to pinpoint how money will be saved rather than how it will be made. READ MORE >

IBM to Break Petaflops Barrier with Blue Gene/P
by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The race is on to build the first supercomputer that can break 1 petaflops of aggregate number-crunching power, and IBM is hoping to be the first company to do it with its future Blue Gene/P massively parallel supercomputer. Blue Gene was conceived in 1999 by IBM Research as a project to test out a minimalist, vastly expansive parallel supercomputer design that would gang up a very large number of fairly simple dual-core PowerPC processors to create an energy efficient Linux box capable of breaking through the 1 petaflops barrier using as many as 1 million processors. READ MORE >

As I See It: The All-American Exhausting Vacation
by Victor Rozek

If you can overlook the mosquitos and the natural grandeur, spending a day in Yosemite is a lot like spending a day at Disney's It's a Small World attraction. In both locations you will find crowds, long lines, and examples of people who wear exotic clothing and don't speak English. They come from all points of the compass, speaking a Babel of languages from melodic to staccato, and although their history and customs are as varied as wild flowers, they have at least one thing in common: They get more vacation time than the locals. READ MORE >