AMD gaining more of the server's share

IBM's top server executive is warming to Advanced Micro Devices' Opteron, eyeing the processor's business advantages and the successes Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems have had with it.

Bill Zeitler, senior vice president of IBM's systems and technology group, wouldn't comment on whether Big Blue plans to offer mainstream Opteron chips, but he indicated in an interview this week that the move would make sense.

"I don't want to speculate when and if we would expand our activities here, but there's no question HP and Sun have benefited by having a broader Opteron portfolio than we've had," Zeitler said. "There are a whole bunch of business considerations that would say we would have done better had we had a four-(processor) Opteron product."

Big Blue was the first of the four top-tier server makers to sell Opteron servers, but its models were geared only for the technical-computing niche. Later, it added blade servers that are better-suited to mainstream business computing. Zeitler said IBM was surprised by the demand for those products in the fourth quarter of 2005 but then had "very robust sales" of the blades in the first quarter of 2006.

IBM's warmer attitude puts more pressure on Dell, the lone top-tier server maker selling only Intel-based x86 servers. "Opteron's a great horse to ride. Sun and HP have done very well with it, and it's gotten the attention of IBM," said TechKnowledge Strategies analyst Mike Feibus. "You've got to wonder how long Dell can stay on the sidelines and watch."

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US says world safer, despite 11,000 attacks in '05

The U.S. war on terrorism has made the world safer, the State Department's counterterrorism chief said on Friday, despite more than 11,000 terrorist attacks worldwide last year that killed 14,600 people. The U.S. State Department said the numbers, listed in its annual Country Reports on Terrorism released on Friday, were based on a broader definition of terrorism and could not be compared to the 3,129 international attacks listed the previous year. But the new 2005 figures, which showed attacks in Iraq jumped and accounted for about a third of the world's total, may fuel criticism of the Bush administration's assertion that it is winning the fight against terrorism. Asked if the world was safer than the previous year, U.S. State Department Counterterrorism Coordinator Henry Crumpton told a news conference, "I think so. But I think that (if) you look at the ups and downs of this battle, it's going to take us a long time to win this. You can't measure this month ...

Al-Qaeda number two in new video

Al-Qaeda's number two Ayman al-Zawahiri has appeared in a video saying that Iraqi insurgents have "broken the back" of the US military. He praised "martyrdom operations" carried out by al-Qaeda in Iraq in the video, posted on an Islamist website. And he called on the people and army of Pakistan to fight against President Musharraf's administration. This is the third message from prominent al-Qaeda leaders to emerge within a week. A tape from Osama Bin Laden was broadcast on 23 April, followed two days later by a message from Iraqi insurgent Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Pakistan focus Zawahiri, who wore a black turban and a white robe in the video, described the leaders of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq as traitors, and urged Muslims to "confront them". He praised Iraqi militants, saying that the US, Britain and allies had "achieved nothing but losses, disasters and misfortunes" in Iraq. "Al-Qaeda in Iraq alone has carried out 800 ma...

Does light have mass?

The short answer is "no", but it is a qualified "no" because there are odd ways of interpreting the question which could justify the answer "yes". Light is composed of photons so we could ask if the photon has mass. The answer is then definitely "no": The photon is a massless particle. According to theory it has energy and momentum but no mass and this is confirmed by experiment to within strict limits. Even before it was known that light is composed of photons it was known that light carries momentum and will exert a pressure on a surface. This is not evidence that it has mass since momentum can exist without mass. [ For details see the Physics FAQ article What is the mass of the photon? ]. Sometimes people like to say that the photon does have mass because a photon has energy E = hf where h is Planck's constant and f is the frequency of the photon. Energy, they say, is equivalent to mass according to Einstein's famous formula E = m...

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