IBM has said it is not getting back into the PC market, despite selling "Microsoft-free" PCs running Linux and OpenOffice in Eastern Europe. "We’re not getting back into the PC business," said an IBM spokesman, after the company announced deals with system integrators in two Eastern European countries last week.

It is IBM’s intention to sell the so-called "Open Referent" systems, based on Red Hat Linux and the company’s own Lotus Symphony software, which uses the open-source OpenOffice productivity software, in Eastern Europe. IBM sold its PC division to Lenovo in 2005 for $1.75 billion, and this is the second indication of overlaps between the companies; Lenovo, having dropped the IBM brand from its ThinkPads, is now moving into servers, licensing the xServer brand and technology from IBM.

This might actually be a first for us. It’s a big story.

Think you can get away with abusing email and Intenet policies at work? A new study says, "heck no."

More than a quarter of employers have fired workers for misusing email and one-third have fired workers for misusing the Internet, according to the 2007 Electronic Monitoring & Surveillance Survey from the American Management Association and The ePolicy Institute in a survey of 304 U.S. companies.

Of the 28 percent of employers who have fired workers for email misuse, they did so because it violated company policy (64 percent), contained inappropriate or offensive language (62 percent), it was used excessively by the employee (26 percent) or breached confidentiality rules (22 percent) according the study’s results.

In a move to challenge Microsoft on the desktop, IBM has teamed up with Austrian and Polish system integrators to supply the emerging Eastern European and Russian business PC markets with Microsoft-free systems based on Red Hat Linux and open standards-based productivity software.

Under the deal, announced this week, IBM will work with Vienna-based VDEL and LX Polska, based in Poland, to sell systems based on what the companies call "Open Referent." The systems will be based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux Desktop, Lotus Notes, Lotus Sametime and Lotus Symphony.

It’s official: Daylight Saving Time is a bust. Designed (and recently extended) as a measure to save energy in a period of inflated electricity prices, an in-depth University of California study has now shown that DST doesn’t save anyone any money at all. In fact, it’s costing consumers extra, to the tune of $3.19 in extra utility bills per year.

The study was made possible because of the peculiarities of the state of Indiana, which was only partially on DST until 2006. When the whole state finally went DST (to sync with the national business day), some comparisons vs. the prior method were made apparent. The study calculated that the shift costs Indiana residents an extra $8.6 million in electricity bills in total.

If you’re preparing for a career in IT or are new to the field, many of the dirty little secrets in this list may surprise you because they’re usually not talked about out loud. But if you’re an IT veteran, you’ve probably encountered most of these issues and even have a few of your own to add.

They operate from a bare apartment on a Chinese island. They are intelligent 20-somethings who seem harmless. But they are hard-core hackers who claim to have gained access to the world’s most sensitive sites, including the Pentagon. In fact, they say they are sometimes paid secretly by the Chinese government–a claim the Beijing government denies.

"No Web site is one hundred percent safe. There are Web sites with high-level security, but there is always a weakness," says Xiao Chen, the leader of this group."Xiao Chen" is his online name. Along with his two colleagues, he does not want to reveal his true identity. The three belong to what some Western experts say is a civilian cyber militia in China, launching attacks on government and private Web sites around the world.

Last week, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held hearings into the missing White House email messages. After watching the three hours of hearings and reviewing the various supporting transcripts, Editor-in-Chief David Gewirtz’ first impression can be summarized in three words: what a mess! Editor’s note: We originally ran this article last week in OutlookPower, but due to certain editorial calendar priorities, couldn’t run it until this week in DominoPower. >. Even so, certain explosive elements of the OutlookPower article were picked up on by members of our Lotus community and a bit of a small storm ensued. Read on for the full article that started the fuss, and some updated information about what’s been happening since.

Read this DominoPower article.

Today at CeBIT, businessMart AG announced it has significantly accelerated its entry into new business markets, thanks to a new Web-based trading platform built on IBM service oriented architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0 technology. Combining a flexible infrastructure with mashup technology, businessMart empowered its marketing and IT functions to better communicate and share ideas, streamlining the traditional product development process and cutting deployment time.

businessMart used an IBM mashup prototype, called QEDWiki to create initial mashups on new markets. The mashup pulls information from businessMart backend systems and foreign internet applications to perfectly model the information and processes needed to support new lines of customers. As a result, businessMart can adapt in real-time and will be able to dramatically decrease cycle time for solutions that support these new targeted customer segments and subsequently increase their agility to rapidly enter a new market. In addition, the company takes advantage of IBM WebSphere MQ, which provides secure messaging and access into manufacturers’ systems, adding another layer of disparate information integration.

Samsung plans to double the capacity of solid state disks every 12 months. The company said it will deliver samples of 128GB SSDs by mid-year and a 256GB drive sometime in 2009, according to several reports from a Samsung press conference yesterday. At the same time, Samsung is boosting the capacity and speed of its standard hard disk drives for laptops.