Information Technology

It's not only Julius Caesar who should take note of the Ides of March. So should every business with a dot-com address, since that was the date of the first dot-com address -- 25 years ago Monday.

On that date in 1985, a Cambridge, Mass., company named Symbolics became the first to register a dot-com domain. But the Internet at that time was still primarily a network devoted to research and academic use, and Symbolics' move didn't exactly start a land rush. By the end of the year, only five other companies had dot-com addresses, and it was nearly two years before there were a hundred.

by Sara Firisen

Google Inc.'s CEO said Wednesday the Internet search company is in active negotiations with the Chinese government and expects some resolution in its dispute with Beijing soon.

Speaking at a media conference in the Middle East, Eric Schmidt declined to provide specifics or predict how long the discussions would last, saying that the company has decided not to publicize details of the talks.

More than half of the people in the developing world are now cell phone subscribers, a U.N. report said Tuesday, highlighting strong global growth in telecommunications.

There were an estimated 4.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions at the end of last year, compared with about 1 billion in 2002, the International Telecommunication Union said in a report. In developing nations, 57 percent of people were signed up.

"The rate of progress remains remarkable," the U.N. agency said.

Late in January, just hours after SAP reported its fourth-consecutive quarterly drop in sales, executive board member Bill McDermott said that he'd heard the customers' complaints about price increases imposed during a recession and that the world's largest supplier of business software was responding. "I'm not deaf," McDermott said in an interview. He also pointed to signs of a stronger 2010: After two years of belt-tightening, customers were starting to buy software. "CEOs need to grow their businesses again," he said.

IBM on Monday unveiled high-capacity servers that are the first to be based on its new, multi-core POWER7 chip. The company said the new product line is designed "to manage the most demanding emerging applications," including high-capacity smart electrical grids and real-time analytics for financial markets.

The servers are optimized for processing huge workloads of simultaneous transactions, data handling, and analysis. IBM said they offer "dramatic improvements" in price versus performance, energy savings, and server virtualization.

Energy Efficiency

IBM on Monday unveiled high-capacity servers that are the first to be based on its new, multi-core POWER7 chip. The company said the new product line is designed "to manage the most demanding emerging applications," including high-capacity smart electrical grids and real-time analytics for financial markets.

The servers are optimized for processing huge workloads of simultaneous transactions, data handling, and analysis. IBM said they offer "dramatic improvements" in price versus performance, energy savings, and server virtualization.

Energy Efficiency

Even before the Great Recession, policymakers were commonly asking, "Where are the new jobs going to come from?" Now with U.S. unemployment at 10 percent, that question has taken on a new urgency. And today's Mr. McGuire-like advice is as succinct as it was in The Graduate in 1967: "Green." Everyone from President Barack Obama to mayors of small towns are proclaiming that green industry is the savior of the U.S. economy, bringing jobs to the unemployed, needed economic activity to distressed industrial regions, and an overdue shot in the arm to U.S. industrial competitiveness.

Some owners of Windows 7 machines are complaining that the newest Microsoft operating system may be causing battery problems. Microsoft said it's investigating the issue.

On the Microsoft support site and elsewhere, there are a variety of battery-related complaints, and many commenters believe the cause is Windows 7.

'Related to System Firmware'

The problems include batteries that are prematurely drained or reported to be so, batteries unable to hold a charge, warning lights indicating a battery needs to be replaced before it should need to, and more.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. posted its first quarterly profit in three years because it got $1.25 billion in a legal settlement with its archrival.

The world's No. 2 maker of computer microprocessors said Thursday it would have lost money were it not for the payment it received from Intel Corp. to squash a long-running antitrust battle.

AMD also appeared to benefit from a lift in the overall computer market. Revenue was up 42 percent over last year, and unit sales of microprocessors and graphics chips grew, even though prices fell.