Tag: IBM

Watson, an artificial intelligence powered by IBM's latest, disgustingly-powerful POWER7 processors and the DeepQA natural language parser, will play Jeopardy against flesh-and-blood humans in February, for a $1,000,000 grand prize. Accurate, computerized natural language processing is a killer technology, and perhaps the last cornerstone in the creation of a Skynet-like entity. Search ...

It is with dubiously raised eyebrows that we bring you this gem: using accelerometers in hard disks to detect seismic activity, IBM can divine a wealth of natural disaster-related information. These hard disk sensors are so sensitive that they can detect the tiniest of vibrations. The seismic data, along with the sensor's geographical location, are then sent to a mainframe computer to be ...

If you love data visualization, this one's going to blow your mind: I just found an incredible IBM demo, called World Factbook Dashboard. It basically takes a ton of demographic and economic data (from the CIA World Factbook, I presume) and presents it in several beautiful ways that (mostly) make instant sense. This is one of those rare cases where screenshots simply would not do, so I rolled up ...

digg_url = 'http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2010/07/01/nearly-half-a-million-ibm-employees-get-firefox-as-their-default'; Like it or not, Internet Explorer is still the browser to beat in terms of market share -- and that's especially true in enterprise settings. One major corporation, however, has just announced a network-wide jump to an alternative browser. IBM's Bob Sutor has big news ...

Proper writing -- you know, novels and stuff -- shares a few common traits with blogging. The most common is 'writers' block' or THE WALL. You simply run out of things to write. It can either creep up on you slowly, or just suddenly emerge before you like a big... brick thing... but either way, it's a problem. And IBM has a solution! In true, researchers-are-not-very-good-at-naming-things fashion, ...

My first computer was a used IBM 80286 with 640k RAM, a 10MB hard drive, running MS-DOS 3.0, and a sporting stylish 5.25" floppy drive on top of a 3.5" drive. The computer was brought home by my father, from work, when I was 6 years old. He'd bought it from the company when they upgraded to 386s that were brand new that year. When he carried the massive box into the living room that evening, I ...

When I was getting ready to head to high school in 1983 I begged my father to get me a computer. I really wanted an IBM PC, but on the middle class living we made do with IBM's newest model: the IBM PCjr It was a cute little computer with a "chiclet" keyboard, 128K of RAM and two cartridge slots. Nope, it didn't have a hard drive and the floppy drive was 180k. It took a couple of minutes to ...

Do you ever think about the family lineage of your hard drive? Heck, do you ever think about the history of your hard drive at all? Of course you don't. Hard disk storage has become so ubiquitous, so reliable, and so inexpensive that most of us never give it a second thought. But where would Download Squad be if you didn't have all that cheap, seemingly endless space to download your prize finds ...

If your company uses Lotus Notes, and has been considering switching to Google Apps, you're in luck. Google has just launched an easy migration tool that allows you to bring all of your Notes data over to the equivalent Google Apps. In a blog post, Google explains that the migration tool is simple and complete enough for enterprise use, and that a 30,000-person company has already used it to ...

You may not have read much about Lotus Symphony - OpenOffice.Org casts a pretty big shadow over other free Office competitors. Like OpenOffice, IBM's cross-platform office suite is based on the Open Document format and is a very capable alternative to Micorosoft Office. Symphony doesn't provide the same number of tools as Office or OpenOffice, but it does handle word processing, spreadsheet, and ...

In our last installment the XForce was busy keeping you safe on the Internet. In this episode it's XForce versus the evil spam. Spam, as we all know, is a pain in the rear. The XForce report covers a lot of ground on spam and phishing. Some of the things the report covers (that I won't): What happened to image-based spam? How much spam is phishing? How much spam is PDF spam? Where are ...

The XForce won't save you from a burning building but, they just might make your surfing safer. The XForce is IBM's team of Internet Security Systems researchers and they've just released the midyear report for 2008, listing all kinds of facts and figures on internet security. If you're really into data, go read the report for yourself. It might also be good for insomnia. I'll give you the quick ...

There are thousands of free and commercial applications for PalmOS. But some of the best applications for Palm devices, like Opera Mini, don't actually run on PalmOS. They're Java midlets that run on a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). For the past few years, Palm has offered a free download of IBM's WebSphere EveryPlace Micro Environment JVM. But for some unexplained reason, Palm will stop offering a ...

Remember Lotus Symphony? A few months ago IBM launched its open source MS Office competitor based on OpenOffice.org code. We downloaded it, installed it, weren't particularly impressed, unloaded it and forgot about it. Now IBM is back with a second beta release of Lotus Symphony. The application still runs pretty slow on our Windows Vista test system. There are versions available for Windows XP, ...

IBM workers went on strike this morning in Second Life marking perhaps the biggest (if not the first) virtual strike in history. Italian workers are upset over a new contract deal that canceled their performance bonus costing them each 1000 Euros (close to$1400) a year. The pay cut came at a time of big profits for IBM, and right after the workers asked for a small pay increase. Workers took their ...