Features

HP Tuesday announced its plans to acquire EDS for US$13.9 billion in a deal that would double HP's services business and revive EDS' position as a leader in global technology services. The acquisition will catapult HP's annual revenue for services from less than $20 billion to nearly $40 billion and position HP as the second largest services provider in the world. Here is a look at what is happening and why now.

A long-term battle is brewing between two emerging high-speed wireless technologies, WiMax and Long Term Evolution (LTE). Each would more than quadruple existing wireless wide-area access speeds for users.

When Gordon Moore made his prediction in a 1965 issue of Electronic Magazine (download PDF) that the number of transistors on a chip would double every year (eventually updated by Moore to two years and then updated again by Intel to 18 months), it was just a "lucky guess" based on a few points of data, he recalled in an interview in 2006. But the idea, which has grown to encompass ever cheaper, ever smaller, ever more powerful components, has so captivated the IT industry that you can't attend a technology conference without seeing at least one PowerPoint presentation displaying the Moore's Law graph.

If you're a fan of particle physics (and really, aren't we all?), by now you know scientists are on the verge of opening the Large Hadron Collider, which will use ultra-powerful magnets to race proton beams around a 17-mile circular underground tunnel and smash them into each other 40 million times a second.

Intrusion prevention systems (IPS) have been touted for a couple of years now as a way of stopping organisations getting hit. However, although there have been some major deployments in Australia to date, they are still far from ubiquitous.

Since the public release of its earliest version last year, Silverlight has been touted as Microsoft's Flash killer. This relatively new Web development platform aims to challenge Adobe's venerable Flash (and associated Flex development tools) in the online multimedia space.

iPhones, broadband and gamers give reason for economic hope.

It took no more than a few cases of miniature, toy flying pigs being handed out at Microsoft's annual management conference in April to dramatize how significantly the company's strategy for building a management platform has changed in the past five years.

One of the challenges in mobile computing is battery life. It's hard to be productive with a dead battery, so IT personnel and users alike need to think about maximising run time between charges.

Corporate executives have long created IT plans to cope with major disasters, but now they're increasingly taking steps to prevent the brief shutdowns that can cost companies hundreds of thousands of dollars or more in their own right.

Microsoft's plan to fill its mammoth Chicago data center with servers housed in 40-foot shipping containers has experts wondering whether the strategy will succeed. In Microsoft's plan, each container in the data center, still being built, will be filled with several thousand servers.

When it comes to backing up virtual servers, IT administrators have a lot of choices. But increasingly, they're finding one method of backup isn't enough to satisfy all the demands of a virtual environment.

For the past year, WiMAX has been a technology under siege.

When the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputing Applications set out to build a machine with more than 200,000 server cores, the key wasn't simply shelling out cash for newer, faster silicon chips. The trick was harnessing the power of a substance that comes right out of your kitchen sink: water.