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Watson, IBM’s next-gen Supercomputer to appear on Jeopardy

2 Comments / Computers, News / By Khalid Hosein / July 21, 2010

IBM’s next supercomputer, named Watson after their founder, Thomas J Watson, is the next step in attempting to have computers come closer to the human’s mind ability to reason and understand meaning(s) in words.

Watson is advanced enough that it is scheduled to appear on Jeopardy as early as this Fall.

A successful Watson could mean a future 2nd place for Google should someone else (IBM?) implement a search engine based on its technology.

Watch the IBM-produced video for some more insight, although it focuses on how it might perform on Jeopardy.
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IBM may buy Sun Microsystems

Computers, Networking & Internet, Software / By Khalid Hosein / March 19, 2009

IBM may buy Sun Microsystems in what may be a $7 billion deal. Apparently, IBM is offering $10/share which at the time the news came out was more than twice Sun’s then stock price.

IBM would be purchasing a fellow hardware and software vendor, and there is a decent amount of discussion and speculation as to what they are primarily after. After all, IBM has invested a fair amount into Java development, tools and solutions. Further speculation is that IBM does not care for the hardware component, but Sun has considerable high-end mainframe-type hardware in its repertoire.

Of further concern is how the industry will react and in particular, Sun customers and users. As a former Solaris sys admin, I know that Solaris shops & admins are fiercely loyal to the OS; and so are many of the Java developers.

I for one, will miss Sun should this come to pass, as I felt that Sun was very much there from the very beginning of the growth of the public Internet and World Wide Web.