The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has ordered the first petaflop supercomputing system from Cray and, separately, an upgrade to its Blue Gene system and an upgrade of its Blue Gene.
DOE’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced the $200 million arrangement last week, with plans for completion of the new supercomputer in 2008. The new system […]

IBM reportedly plans to integrate its instant messaging (IM) and collaboration product, Lotus Sametime v. 7.5, with Microsoft Outlook, Office, and SharePoint applications. Sametime 7.5 will also connect directly to Research in Motion, Nokia, and Windows mobile devices. The Sametime technology will let users move an e-mail into IM and into a voice over Internet […]

Microsoft reportedly will combine desktop computers with office and mobile phones in a strategy called “unified communications” through a line of products scheduled for the first half of 2007. The products will connect the company’s Exchange Server e-mail system to advanced Internet-based PBX and traditional phone systems and link desktop and cellular phones to desktop […]

The U.S. Navy has become the latest in a series of federal organizations to disclose that it suffered a security breach that put personal information at risk. Following incidents at the Veterans Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the Navy said five spreadsheets with sensitive information on about 28,000 Navy […]

Springer, a publisher of scientific, technical, and medical books, announced it will offer its complete list of publications online, on a single integrated platform. The company announced its e-book initiative at the American Library Association annual conference. The initial collection includes 3,000 titles from 2005, with 10,000 titles planned for 2006 and another 3,000 new […]

According to the DSL Forum, DSL subscriptions have grown by 39 percent over the past year, with the most users in China (29.4 million, with 10 million added just in the past year) and the United States (22.2 million). Europe claims the largest share of DSL subscribers with 34 percent of the global market. The […]

The French Senate has softened language of a copyright bill drafted by the country’s lower house, the Assembly, in March. As originally written, the bill would have required Apple Computer to share its technology for iTunes music and the iPod player so that music formats and devices would be interoperable with other vendors’ products. The […]

Two computers belonging to employees of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) were stolen from a locked car last week, putting personal information on about 110 individuals at risk. An FTC official said the laptops, which belonged to two FTC attorneys, were password protected, but she noted that the computers contained names, Social Security numbers, addresses, […]

A computer system at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) was compromised earlier this month, possibly exposing personal information on 26,000 current and former employees, including some contractors.
Initially, computer experts believed that although a hacker had gained unauthorized access to the system, the sensitive information–including names, Social Security numbers, and employee photos–had been protected. Further […]

A new initiative called AlouetteCanada is designed to bring together disparate digitization efforts from around Canada into a single online location. Many universities and museums in the country maintain small-scale digitization efforts of material relevant to the history and culture of Canada. Much of this content is inaccessible to most people, however, according to Carole […]