PC and Components

Mobility and the proliferation of mobile devices are changing and will further change the way people work, according to Citrix Labs vice-president and office chair chief technology officer, Martin Duursma.

Looking at historical trends and performance benchmarks, a team of researchers in Spain have concluded that smartphone chips could one day replace the more expensive and power-hungry x86 processors used in most of the world's top supercomputers.

The hot air levels rose dramatically in the iOSphere this week on the strength of one laconic, six-paragraph posting about the expected weight of iPad 5.

It's been a busy week in the cloud. Dell ditched plans to build its own cloud and instead will work with partners, while focusing on private clouds. In an opposite move, VMware revealed its plans for how it will compete in the public cloud market.

Apple's lowest-priced MacBook Air was out of stock on Amazon.com as of Friday, hinting that rumors of a refresh in two weeks are on target.

Columnist Mike Elgan spent three weeks using only Google products -- the Chromebook Pixel laptop, the Nexus 10 tablet and the Nexus 4 smartphone. Here's what he discovered.

Like the tablet market, Google Glass may currently be viewed as a consumer product but it will soon be seen on the faces of IT and mobile employees.

Just a month after a top Google executive said Glass wouldn't be officially released for another year, sources say the computerized eyeglasses actually should ship by the end of this year.

The Red Cross is using apps to help warn people about potential weather calamities. One of its more popular efforts is its new Tornado app.

Michelle McKenna-Doyle, CIO for the National Football League, is driving innovation with analytics, using sensors to track players on the field and monitoring player health and safety with lab analysis of helmets.

When HP first announced it was retrenching more than 25,000 staff worldwide and the depth of its financial problems, Nermin Bajric spoke exclusively to the HP PPS South Pacific vice-president, Robert Mesaros. Now, six months later, he and Mesaros met again to discuss what has happened at HP since.

Saar Gillai, named head of Hewlett-Packard's Cloud operations in January, is on the hot seat.

John Swainson has one of the more challenging jobs in the tech industry right now. As president of Dell's software division, he's charged with sorting through all the software Dell has acquired and organizing it into coherent offerings that can further its effort to become a more profitable, software- and services-driven company.

As co-president of Oracle, Mark Hurd is tasked with selling an ever-increasing array of new software and hardware products, such as the Exadata database machine and Fusion Applications, while figuring out how to keep the company's vast installed base happy and fending off competition from the likes of SAP.

For Dell Software CIO Carol Fawcett, "BYOD" is not about being an expert on every mobile device in the world; it's about giving workers secure access to the apps and data they need on whatever device they are using.

Vendors are rebuilding the mainframe with converged infrastructure, collapsed kit or integrated compute platforms -- whatever you want to call it. And customers are loving it.

As long as a problem seems present, gnarly and intractable, we enjoy following the process that solves it. But once the problem has been solved, it's not so interesting to us anymore.

IT's problems can draw unwanted notice now that Sarbanes-Oxley requires them to appear in 10-K reports as 'material weaknesses.'

There are jobs that robots might be able to do in the near future. Gibbs has ten that they're unlikely to steal from meat machines.

For decades the leading network companies have been tightly coupling their software to complex, custom-built chips. Besides leaving IT buyers with a staggering array of appliances, the reliance on custom silicon has chilled industry startup activity. But with software defined networking, that is beginning to change.

Windows 8 has changed the way we navigate the desktop, so it's not surprising that Microsoft has a pair of new wireless mice designed specifically for Windows 8.

Google's new Android development environment pairs rich layout and build capabilities with IntelliJ IDEA's famous ease

Toshiba's new KiraBook ultrabook offers a sleek, rich look along with high-end components, including a fine display and great speakers. The question is: Can you afford it?

Acer got a few things right and a number of things wrong with the Predator (specifically, Predator model AG3620-UR12). On the "right" side of the ledger, it has one of Intel's better processors - a 3.4GHz Core i7-3770--and 32GB of DDR3/1600 memory. With those components, the asking price of $US1299 is very reasonable.

Lenovo's Atom-based Windows 8 tablet-laptop hybrid is lightweight and usable, but build quality doesn't cut it