The changes, which will mostly affect IBM's European operations, will result in a charge of between $1.3 billion and $1.7 billion in the second quarter this year and "yield benefits" in the second half of the year, the company said Wednesday. The restructuring, a significant move for the company, was expected, following Big Blue's disappointing first quarter 2005 earnings. Last month, IBM Chief Financial Officer Mark, said the company would undergo a "sizable restructuring" to address weak areas, notably in Europe.
IBM said employee reductions would include both layoffs and voluntary departures. The majority of the cuts will be in Europe, where the company has initiated discussions with labour organizations. The reorganization involves the streamlining of management in Europe. IBM said it would eliminate its pan-European management layer to reduce internal bureaucracy.
"IBM will create a number of smaller, more flexible local operating units in Europe to increase direct client contact," the company said in a statement. The plan also calls for IBM to move some of its European personnel who work in its IBM Global Services division and consolidate them in fewer locations worldwide.
Loughridge will offer more details about the restructuring Thursday morning, the company said.
Historical aside: Early PCs came with only audio cassette data storage, and/or one floppy, which - being first- was called the A: drive. As data needs grew, PCs got a second floppy, B:. Much later, when hard drives arrived, it was natural to assign them the next letter, C:. Today, PCs may not have any floppies, but hard drives still usually get called C:, a vestigial remnant of the early days of computing.
Also
Note that with the latest version of Quicktime, you can hide the icon from appearing in your system tray, but the application will still be running in the background. This is stupid imo as from everything I have read on the topic, it does not appear to be needed for Quicktime to operate properly.
I hate things that insist on loading themselves at startup with a passion, so I went hunting for a solution. The solution on the above page that eventually worked for me (WinXP Pro SP2) was as follows:
1. Open up Regedit and browse to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\CurrentVersion\Run
2. Delete the "QuickTime Task" Registry Key
3. Search for all instances of qttask.exe on your system drive and rename to something like qttask2.exe (I renamed mine to "qttask.exe.disabled")
Worked like a charm. I'm now free of this annoyance with no ill effects and QuickTime continues to work perfectly.
From PC Answers
Car manufacturer Toyota believes that the growing elderly population will lead to a demand in robots, so it plans to set up a committee to develop the technology. By 2010, it wants to be selling robots that can contribute to childcare, help the elderly and even serve tea to guests.
One For The Nerds
Random Jottings are just that. As I see something I think may be of interest I add it to a master copy. The monthly items are copied from the master.
One day I went to add an item and I found that the master copy had vanished. Now, each Saturday I clean up my computer and make a copy of the C: drive to an 80 gig removable drive using Ghost. The 80 gig drive is in two 40 gig partitions with last Saturday’s and the previous Saturday’s copy on it. The master did not appear to be on either of the partitions when I did a search for the doc file. There was, however, a Random Jottings 2.wbk in the previous Saturday’s copy. It was the missing file with a wbk extension instead of a doc extension!
All I had to do was copy it over to C:\temp, change the extension to doc, and I was in business.
Can one of the group’s nerds explain it to me please?
From PC Plus Newsletter
Man flattened by machine
Chess grandmaster Michael Adams has been comprehensively beaten 5 games to 1 by IBM supercomputer Hydra, proving once and for all (until the next high profile man vs. machine match-up) the dominance of silicon over puny carbon-based life forms. Hydra can analyse an enormous 200 million moves per second, and plans its game up to 40 moves ahead, six more than IBM's Deep Blue. The next challenge, it is suggested, is a supercomputer able to compete at the game of Go. Currently even the best example to come out of Microsoft's Cambridge research facility is easily beaten by a competent human player.
From Brian Livingston
"I recently experienced an extreme slowdown of my computer. Task Manager revealed that a process named Spoolsv.exe was using between 85-99% of the CPU's time. Ultimately, I got hold of a Microsoft techie, located in India of all places, who spoke very good English and helped me solve my problem. I found him by going calling MS's group [Product Support Services] that passes out hotfixes for Windows XP problems.
"In a nutshell, the MS tech told me to look in a folder buried in c:\Windows. Its path is
c:\Windows\system32\spool\printers
In the folder were two non-descript looking filenames. He had me create another directory and move those files to the new directory. When I rebooted my computer, it ran like it was a teenager. He said when print jobs are terminated, Windows will sometimes put files of those old print jobs in the printers subfolder. When that happens, spoolsv.exe doesn't know what to do with them, so it just runs and runs and runs.
Before I implemented the fix he suggested, it took me 4 to 5 minutes to load Word. I'm running a Pentium 4, 2.80 GHz with 1 gig of DRAM. After the fix, Word loaded in 23 seconds.
I've never seen this problem talked about, but the MS tech said it was common with XP and 2000.
For more information on spoolsv.exe and other problems it can cause you, see KB articles 840371, 822834, and 257859.
What Is The Vista From Your Windows?
The next version of Windows finally has an official name: Windows Vista.
The advertising tagline for Vista is "Clear, Confident, Connected: Bringing clarity to your world," according to a video of the announcement posted by Microsoft.
The first beta, or test release, of Vista has been released. That release is targeted at developers and IT professionals, said Brad Goldberg, general manager of Windows product development. A second, broader test release aimed at consumers will likely debut ahead of Vista's final release in the second half of next year, the company said.