http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlbindex.html Description The great and wonderful thing about big government-sponsored supercomputing projects is not just the exotic technology that such massive projects cook up, but also the fact that people like to brag about what they are up to inside the small circle of supercomputing centers in academia and governments. Eventually, some of the information about future HPC projects and the products they will be based on leaks out to the rest of the world, giving us a glimpse into the technologies that might be deployed in some modified form in commercial servers. http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb072208-story01.html If chip maker Intel were an economic barometer for the various economies of the world--and particularly the skittish economy of the United States--no one would be talking about a recession, but rather a slight slowdown that had occurred in the past and a situation that is clearly on the mend. Unfortunately for those of us in the developed economies of the world, Intel is not much of a barometer of the economies at large, even if it is a big player in many economies. And hopefully, rival Advanced Micro Devices, which is struggling to right itself, isn't either. http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb072208-story02.html When Sun Microsystems debuted the idea of putting working data centers inside standard shipping containers in October 2006, it was not intuitively obvious that this idea would take off in the market. Sun, and then Rackable Systems and Verari Systems, who both jumped in an offered their own data centers in containers last year, believe enough in the idea to put engineering and sales resources into the concept. And now HP is following suit. http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb072208-story03.html Ever since I have been in the information technology publishing business, the publishers who I have worked for as well as the companies that I have run myself have all toyed with the idea of launching what is called in the lingo a C-level publication. Something for chief executive officers, chief financial officers, and chief information officers. The reason why publishers think about doing this is simple: They believe that they could charge a premium for either the content or the advertising that supports it--or a mix, if they use a mixed model--because these are the people who either cut the checks or approve the cutting. http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb072208-story04.html This is one of those situations where you can look at a bit of data as a pessimist or an optimist, depending on how you want to feel about the job situation in the information technology area. The National Association of Computer Consultant Businesses, an organization based in Alexandria, Virginia, that represents over 400 IT services companies with combined sales of $15 billion, released its June 2008 IT employment index recently, and the news is good. http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb072208-story05.html Not everyone agrees with a lot of things I say in my articles, much less everything, which is a good thing because I am sure I am not always right. It takes a lot of ideas thrashing around to come up with correct responses to any situation, which is why I have always believed that if you let democracy work--I mean really let it work, without trying to twist and turn and bend and warp it--it actually does work. Anyway, I like the give and take of feedback, and here is an interesting bit that came in last week in the wake of our coverage of VMware's founder, Diane Greene, being pushed out of the company. http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb072208-story06.html Commercial Linux distributor Novell created a build service for putting together custom distros over two years ago, and has been adding features to it for that time. And last week, the company finally put out the 1.0 release of the service, which means it is ready for production-level use. http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb072208-story07.html When you get to be a company the size of IBM, attaining 5 percent or 6 percent revenue growth in a quarter in the local economies where you operate is pretty good. To do it two years in a row, across many geographies where the economies are not all doing so hot, is something of a feat. But that is just what Big Blue did in the second quarter ended June 30, posting sales of $26.8 billion, up 13 percent as reported and up 6 percent when reckoned in the local currencies where the deals were done. http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb072208-story08.html Citrix Systems last week unveiled plans to allow users and ISVs to create 'virtual appliances' based on the Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) draft standard that can be deployed to most hypervisors. 'Project Kensho,' as the development effort is called, will result in a virtual appliance tool that supports the three main X64 hypervisors on the market--Microsoft's Hyper-V, VMware's ESX Server, and Citrix's own Xen. A preview of the tool is due by September. http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb072208-story09.html Newly in charge New York state governor David Paterson announced last week that the state is putting up $140 million in economic development grants to bolster IBM's chip process development and manufacturing capabilities in the Empire State. New York is, of course, IBM's birthing and stomping grounds, and while Big Blue does not employ anywhere near as many employees in the state as it once did (even when it was a much smaller company), the Paterson administration does not want to lose a single IBMer if avoidable. http://www.itjungle.com/tlb/tlb072208-story10.html