Once upon a time, people bonded with their co-workers on office softball teams and traded gossip at the watercooler. OK, so those days aren’t gone yet. But as big companies parcel Information Age work to people in widely dispersed locations, it’s getting harder for colleagues to develop the camaraderie that comes from being in the same place. Beyond making work less fun, feeling disconnected from comrades might be a drag on productivity.

You can tell just from looking at the Beehive program under development at IBM that something is different. Beehive’s color scheme is bright yellow, not IBM’s standard blue. The cheerfulness reflects the fact that Beehive is meant to encourage far-flung co-workers to like each other more.

Beehive is an online portal for employees to describe their expertise, so valuable knowledge doesn’t get lost inside the bureaucracy. Those kinds of tools are common, but Beehive adds an unusual dose of Facebook or MySpace. The 27,000 IBMers using Beehive can post pictures, video and one-sentence updates about themselves. They can share lists of "things I can’t live without." Such personal touches often are missing when people work at a distance from one another, says Joan Morris DiMicco, an IBM researcher developing Beehive. Co-workers in different locales can’t wander into each other’s offices and see family pictures on the desk. They don’t shop at the same places or have children in the same schools.

PC Magazine has launched a cyber charityauction of nine HP laptops "redesigned" by top U.S. artists to benefit the National Cristina Foundation (NCF). Bidding will run through May 19 on eBay. Part of PC Magazine’s 25th anniversary celebrations and "The Computerlicious Design Experience," the charity auction will help NCF provide computer equipment for the training of people in need. Underneath their new "outfits," the notebook PCs are the HP tx1000z, dv6500t, dv9500z and HP Dragon models. The designs range from metal, spray paint and patent leather to environmentally friendly and experimental materials.

Hewlett-Packard is in talks to buy technology outsourcing company Electronic Data Systems for $12 billion to $13 billion in a deal which would vault it to a close second to IBM in technology services.

The acquisition would be HP’s biggest since its $19 billion acquisition of Compaq in 2002. Shares of EDS rose nearly 28 percent, taking its market value to about $12 billion.

HP shares fell nearly 5 percent amid some skepticism that slow-growing EDS, still considered in turnaround mode, would provide more than a one-time boost, and might not be worth a premium of as much as 37 percent.

The first of a new generation of IBM supercomputers that use water for cooling is on its way to Colorado for use within the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

The supercomputer–Bluefire–will replace three older systems at the NCAR’s facility in Boulder in August when the machine goes online for the first time. At its peak, bluefire will offer 76 teraflops (or 76 trillion calculations per second) of performance, outpacing the three older systems, which offered a combined performance of 20 teraflops.

What makes the bluefire system important is that it’s the first time IBM is using its new Power 575 Hydro-Cluster system within a supercomputer installation. The company announced the Power 575 in April as a new way to tackle the power and cooling issues within the field of high-performance computing (HPC).

Though IT employment is at an all-time high in the U.S.–some 3.8 million employed residents in the U.S. consider themselves IT professionals according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, a record high–and is expected to climb even higher–computer and mathematical sciences jobs expected to grow faster than any other professional occupation through 2016, nearly a 25 percent increase–there are those that work in the field that no longer think it’s all it’s cracked up to be.

Salary competition from offshore outsourcing, companies posting ads that expressly favor H-1B visa holders to the exclusion of U.S. workers, the fear for job safety that comes in a recession year and the constant pressure to keep skills up to date have worn some tech professionals out to a point that they would consider alternative careers.

The Learning Continuum Company has added a new enhancement to their Notes 8 users courses. A list of lessons from the course can now appear in the Notes 8 sidebar. This lets your users easily see the topics from the course and quickly navigate to a topic and learn more. This allows for dynamic training as needed. A user can click on any lesson in the Notes 8 sidebar and then that lesson will open up in a new tab in the Notes client.

This new feature is provided by the new Widget capability in Notes 8.0.1. Administrators can easily deploy this new feature to all users by adding a Widget to the Widget catalog and then using a Desktop Settings policy to specify that the new Widget be installed for all of the users. The list of lessons will appear in the sidebar the next time the user starts their Notes client.

More than a half million computers have been infected by a Trojan spreading through bogus MP3 files on popular peer-to-peer networks in the past several days, according to researchers at McAfee’s Avert Labs.

McAfee first reported noticing a spike in the discovery of a Trojan known as Downloader-UA.h on May 6. The malware was added to the McAfee DAT files May 2.

These have not been good weeks in our cause to repair the systemic problems with White House email. This week, we have a judge who’s directing the White House to look in many of the wrong places. We have a White House CIO who claims that asset management is a new invention, so it’s tough to keep track of those pesky hard drives. We also have a White House who can’t account for any email messages at all during the months of the initial Iraq invasion. And we have a Congress who’s decided we don’t need any real form of record management for another four years. Sadly, officials in Washington are not making the situation any better. In fact, it’s getting worse.

Read this DominoPower article.

SCO chief executive Darl McBride claims that Linux is a copy of Unix, which is contradicted by the open-source community and apparently runs counter to other SCO testimony.

SCO sued IBM in 2003, claiming that the IT giant had used copyright code from the Unix operating system which SCO sold, and later extended this suit to other Linux vendors. However, last August, Judge Dale Kimball ruled that Novell, not SCO, owns Unix. A four-day court case is now determining Novell’s claim for up to $20 million in royalties from SCO, which declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy last year.

Mainsoft, a provider of .NET-Java EE interoperability software and an advanced IBM business partner, announced the release of its SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes. This add-on to IBM Lotus Notes 8, an Eclipsed-based Rich Client Platform based on Java, provides point-and-click access to Microsoft SharePoint content, including Word documents, Excel worksheets, and PowerPoint presentations, from within Notes. Mainsoft professional services can also build composite applications across SharePoint data and Java or .NET line-of-business applications. Mainsoft’s SharePoint Integrator for Lotus Notes enables organizations to implement a coexistence strategy by integrating existing Lotus Notes installations and Microsoft SharePoint sites.