ShadowRAM: IT industry rallies for sick kids; The Shadow not on poor Paris’ list

Word’s out that Lenovo is already looking to hire employees for the ‘new’ company once the IBM deal closes. But Taiwan-based publication DigiTimes reports that Lenovo has tapped contract manufacturer Foxconn to build a series of Lenovo-branded, Sonoma-based notebooks.

More Sun pink slips

Sun pink-slipped a number of employees in its software group last month, an extension of the 3500 layoffs the vendor announced last March. The current tally of layoffs at Sun in the past year is now 3600.

Insider sources told CRN that those who lost their jobs were the entire UK Solaris team, as well as the US Solaris testing team and other people in the software organisation, which is run by
Sun Executive vice-president of Software John Loiacono.

Insiders said the UK team was working on the Linux compatibility project that makes Solaris 10 binary compatible with Linux, a much-touted feature of Solaris 10.

Winners and losers for 2005

Gartner analyst Bob Hayward set the cat among the pigeons at ITJourno’s KickStart 2005 conference. His keynote address sounded like an obituary for technologies we thought were faring well.

Hayward was clearly not a fan of biometric technology, claiming that the number of false positives were too much of a security compromise. Tablet PCs were next in Hayward’s sights. With just 1.1 percent of the portable market, tablets remain firmly in ‘flying car’ territory for usefulness versus real world practicality.

Hayward was upbeat about VoIP. But who isn’t these days? Large corporations – that’s who, according to Hayward. The difficulty of converting from PSTN to VoIP scales into the very hard basket.

In consumer-land, wireless home networks will grow and grow, fuelled by the success of the MP3 format. Blu-Ray DVD and Sony’s PSP will be riding the same wave of success. Hayward referred to the blinding success of the iPod. Oh really?

Last, we can all stop adding an ‘e’ to the start of buzzwords. Thank e-God.

The ubiquitous e-word will be replaced by none other than u for ubiquitous --
‘U-Japan’ being where it will all begin, said Hayward. U-heard-it-here-first.