ibm

Too busy to keep up with the tech news? Here are some of the more interesting stories from CNET for Wednesday, September 21.

• In his testimony, Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt referred to Microsoft's mistakes (without actually naming the tech firm directly). Meanwhile, Google competitors such as Yelp tell senators during an antitrust subcommittee hearing that the company "rigs" search results. CBS news reports: "The early fireworks appeared when Sen. Michael S. Lee (R-Utah) produced data showing that Google's owned and operated properties often were among the top links." Google says trust us. More … Read more

IBM has offered to provide resources to mainframe support rivals in order to put an end to a European Commission antitrust investigation into its business practices.

The company has committed to supplying spare parts and other technical information on "reasonable and non-discriminatory" terms to third-party maintainers, the Commission said today. IBM has proposed the offer would last five years.

"These commitments aim to resolve concerns that IBM may have imposed unreasonable conditions for supplying competing mainframe maintenance service providers with such inputs, in breach of European Union antitrust rules prohibiting the abuse of a dominant market position in Europe," the commission said in a statement.

Read more of "IBM offers concessions in EU antitrust probe" at ZDNet UK. … Read more

"It's so easy to stick to things that made you profitable," says IBM's chief.

IBM CEO Sam Palmisano said technology is filled with a "bone pile of enterprises" that couldn't find a second act. The problem: these companies couldn't break an emotional tie to whatever made it successful in the first place.

"It's so easy to stick to things that made you profitable," said Palmisano. "A core responsibility of leadership is understanding when it's time to change."

That leadership can equate to strategy shifts to setting … Read more

Google has acquired more than 1,000 patents from IBM, a U.S. Patent and Trademark Office posting has revealed.

According to documents on the government organization's Web site, 1,023 patents were transferred from IBM to Google on August 17. That number could be off by one: SEO by the Sea, a blog covering the search space that first reported on the August acquisition, says that Google might have actually only received 1,022 patents, since one of the numbers "appears to be wrong."

Either way, Google has acquired a boatload of new patents covering a … Read more

Amazon wants to be the Netflix of books, and we can't wait. The 9/11 Memorial uses tech to honor the victims memory. If you just use Twitter to lurk, you're not a bot, we're paging Dr. Watson and we want your Android OS name ideas!

IBM has inked a deal with health insurer WellPoint that will let the latter use the technology behind "Jeopardy"-playing computer Watson to suggest patient diagnoses and treatments.

The arrangement, which marks the first time the Watson technology will be used in a commercial application, will be announced Monday, according to The Wall Street Journal. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

WellPoint hopes the technology will help improve the quality of patient care and help reduce costs. It will be introduced next year and will initially be used by nurses who review treatment requests from … Read more

If you're getting stressed-out by your commute, you're not alone, according to an IBM survey which found more people amenable to using public transit and technology to improve their daily transportation.

IBM today published the results from its annual commuter sentiment study which found the transportation infrastructure is improving but "commuter pain" is increasing.

Why the paradox? IBM's Vinodh Swaminathan, director of business development at IBM's Intelligent Transportation Systems, says that even if there are incremental improvements to the transportation system, a lousy commute is still a lousy commute.

"If you cut someone'… Read more

IBM and 3M today said they will develop new adhesives designed to build silicon towers that will be packaged on 3D semiconductors.

The collaboration--IBM brings the semiconductor know-how and 3M is the adhesive expert--aims to make commercial 3D chips via new materials.

According to IBM, the idea is to stack semiconductors in layers up to 100 chips. These chip stacks would allow for better integration and system-on-a-chip capability. Compute, networking, and memory could be stacked on one processor.

IBM has outlined nanoscale breakthroughs before, but one big hurdle is finding the materials to package these 3D silicon skyscrapers. New adhesives … Read more

According to an article in this week's MIT Technology Review, IBM researchers are working on a new 120 petabyte data repository made up of 200,000 conventional hard disk drives working together. The giant data container is expected to store around 1 trillion files and should provide the space needed to allow more powerful simulations of complex systems, like those used to model weather and climate.

The new system benefits from a file system known as General Parallel File System (GPFS) that was developed at IBM Almaden to enable supercomputers faster data access. It spreads individual files across multiple … Read more