IBM to Unveil Major Tech Advances

mr wrote to us to point out an article on IBM in today's SF Chronicle. IBM, starting on Monday at the Internation Electron Device Meeting, will be disclosing eighteen new inventions coming out of their labs. IBM goes to so far to say that it will keep Moore's Law ^[?] around for at least another decade. The article also talks about some of IBM's recent advancements as well as describing some of the new stuff to be unveiled.

Comments

Re:Broken link yet again

[El Volio]

Extra thought: If Rob would post the latest SLASH code (even in an unorganized state) and thus bring home the benefits of Open Source (yay!), then we'd have two good results:

All the standard benefits of Open Source (bug cleaning, extra features like URL checking, &c.)

The warm fuzzy of knowing that /. is putting its money where its mouth is. IOW, as perhaps the discussion site for Open Source, /. would do well to directly and concretely support the ideals we all support as a community.


So how about it, CmdrTaco? How about letting us take a crack at it?

Ya think in 20 years Microsoft will do the same?

[dmorin]

I love the way IBM has turned itself around. People look at the 80's now and say "Big Blue's previous life ended when the government basically sat on them for 10 years and let their competition keep up." Now look at some of the stuff IBM is up to:

• Wonderful commercials with a real sense of humor. ("Can I get realtime access to my inventory and legacy systems?" "I...don't know how to do that. Look! Your logo has flames.")
• Adopting Apache.
• Alphaworks, probably the definitive resource for almost all things Java/XML.
• Invention announcements like these.
• Wearables.
• Adoption of Linux.

Now what I'm really wondering is this : at least one theory suggests that the government is in the process of doing to MS what it did to IBM back in the 80's. If that's true, and the DOJ keeps MS so tangled up over the next decade that competitors emerge, does anybody think that Microsoft will reinvent itself in a similar way? Sure, we can all hate MS as the big bad corporate enemy now, but we all did that 20 years ago, too, when it was IBM. Now we love them.

Re:Wonderful IBM Commercials

[dmorin]

"Wow. Look at the markup on miniature vegetables."

:) True. I'd probably be more worried about it if I wasn't surrounded by people who are very interested in that sort of thing. It's a fact of life that industry wants profiling information.

At least IBM is taking the right approach -- "We want profiling information so that we can help streamline the information we're providing to you." If I know you play tennis, there's two ways you can look at it. One is, "Oooo good, now I can sell him more tennis balls." Everybody hates this, of course, because nobody likes to feel like a target. But the second is, "Hey, you know what? Maybe I really am interested in knowing whose got a deal on tennis balls." Sometimes targeted messaging does actually work. It's really the same thing that the demographics have always been, only with better profiling they really know. They're not assuming "Oh, because you're in group X, there's a Y% likelihood that you play tennis."

There's a new movement in this area. That's to get away from the use of the word "targeting" and to start making use of expressions like "1:1" and "relationship". People are happier having a relationship with the businesses they use. The whole point of the IBM focusgroup commercial is a bunch of people being pissed off because the ad people don't know them.

And just in case anybody is prepared to argue that "1:1 relationship" is just new marketing hype for the same old spam, let me put it this way. When my grandfather walked into the local hardware store, the shopkeeper could say "Hello, Dan! Getting ready to send the kids off to college pretty soon, aren't ya? Got a good sale on bookcases down in aisle 3." And he would never, ever say "Have ya seen our sale on house paint?" if he knew that my dad had aluminum siding. And service like that was *appreciated*. People go on to the internet today and they ask where all the service went. The optimist in me says that all this 1:1 relationship stuff is actually a way to try and bring that *back*. If I really thought that I was just coming up with a better mousetrap (or in this case, spamtrap), I don't think I'd be working where I work.

d

IBM's Cunning Plan Revealed...

[jd]

A penguin, disguised as a Furby, managed to sneak into IBM's Managerial Bunker. With their super-secret hi-tech recording devices, they captured the following snippet of conversation:

"I'm worried. We have those press announcements on Monday, and you -know- Slashdot'll cover them. Our servers will never cope!"

"It's ok. I've just put up some web pages, pre-announcing the announcements. If the servers melt down this week, we'll still have the weekend to replace them, and Slashdot readers don't care about repeat announcements."

"That's cunning! Do you think they'll fall for it?"

"I think so. The system load was showing 490% CPU usage, and rising fast, the last time I looked."

* In the distance, the sound of a hard disk spinning out of the drive bay and colliding with a UPS unit. An IL&M techie is on-hand to supply the effects *

* Outside the building, the T1 link is glowing red, then blue, before finally exploding as the energy from the packets causes the fibre to undergo nuclear fusion. *