Stuart J. Johnston

Call it “supercomputing smackdown.” Today, at the International Supercomputing Conference 2007 (ISC07) in Dresden, Germany, the Top500 groupannounced its latest list of the top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world. To say it’s a competitive list would be an understatement and few of the players can hold top spots long without constant improvements. With […]

HP (Quote) announced Monday that it has added advanced server power consumption control as well as collaborative remote administration capabilities to its Insight Control suite of infrastructure management tools for ProLiant and BladeSystem servers. The advanced power capping capabilities are designed to lower datacenter operating costs by improving server efficiency as well as by cutting […]

A large percentage of U.S. mobile phone users are waiting for the roll-out next week of Apple’s iPhone, but according to a new mini-survey conducted for research firm IDC, most of them will continue to wait well past the iPhone’s June 29 ship date. Among the survey’s findings, only 10 percent of the respondents indicated […]

Microsoft has agreed to make changes to Windows Vista’s desktop search capability in the wake of antitrust accusations by Google made public last week. The announcement came Tuesday evening in a regular six-month status report that Microsoft, (Quote) along with the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) and the 17 states and the District of Columbia […]

Microsoft (Quote) officials said they are shipping today, as planned, major new versions of two of the company’s Dynamics business management packages. The two are members of the company’s enterprise resource planning (ERP) family – Dynamics GP 10.0 and Dynamics SL 7. The updates were first announced at Microsoft’s Convergence 2007 conference in mid-March in […]

Desktop search capabilities built into Windows Vista makes it extremely difficult for users to run Google’s (Quote) desktop search instead, and that has prompted the search giant to complain that Microsoft (Quote) is once again engaging in anticompetitive behavior along the lines of earlier ploys against Netscape. However, Google’s complaints to both the U.S. Department of Justice […]

In a move intended to enable competing identity management technologies to interoperate, a new forum will hold a key meeting in San Francisco on June 26 to find out first hand what users want. In fact, all parties agree it’s a necessary move but the question is how long will it take to bear its […]

Microsoft’s (Quote) annual TechEd Conference is usually a place for the company to outline its latest vision of the IT world of the future. But this year – the 15th TechEd — perhaps sensing that IT staffers and developers may be bored with vision statements, Microsoft instead presented a lot of small details regarding actual products. […]

A report released today ranking the top 100 online retailers for customer satisfaction finds that the customer’s experience with a retailer’s Web site is a key component in determining customer loyalty and an indicator of longer-term financial success. Rating highest were movie rental firm Netflix.com and apparel vendor QVC.com, which were tied at 85 on […]

Microsoft (Quote) announced Wednesday a set of initiatives aimed at aiding interoperability between competing online identity management systems based on information card technologies. As part of the effort, the company is sponsoring four open source projects focusing on information cards. Additionally, it is making more of its Web services technologies royalty free, with the promise […]