CertFX has released new practice tests for Apple, Dell, HP, Lotus, WebSphere Portal and Workplace, a 25% Discount is available until February 2, 2007, upcoming CertFX Practice Tests are scheduled for release during February, free CertFX Practice Tests are available for Notes and Domino 6/6.5 Application Development path, with CertFX Volume Packages now available via the Web.

Michael Dell is CEO again of his namesake company. Kevin Rollins is out. Why? The company is going to have another earnings miss. The company just said in a statement:

"The Board believes that Michael’s vision and leadership are critical to building Dell’s leadership in the technology industry for the long term," said Samuel A. Nunn, presiding director of Dell’s Board. "There is no better person in the world to run Dell at this time than the man who created the Direct Model and who has built this company over the last 23 years."

TLCC User Training for Sametime 7.5 is the easiest, most effective way to train thousands of Sametime users simultaneously–at an incredibly low cost-per-user. For a low one time license price (significantly less than the cost of other training options) you get two courses needed to train your users on the Sametime 7.5 Connect client and the Sametime 7.5 Meeting Room client. There are three ways to easily deliver the course to all users in an organization, a Notes client, a Web browser, or as a plug-in to the Sametime 7.5 Connect client. Users take the course at their own pace. TLCC’s Sametime user courses can be easily customized to fit the organization’s needs by simply using a Notes client.

The Coast Guard searched the waters off Northern California on Wednesday for an award-winning computer scientist missing since a weekend sailing trip to scatter his mother’s ashes at sea. A cargo plane, a helicopter and six patrol boats have been scouring the Pacific since Monday for Jim Gray, who helped develop the technology behind popular computer mapping programs like Google Earth. Gray, founder and manager of Microsoft’s Bay Area Research Center in San Francisco, won the A.M. Turing Award — the "Nobel Prize of computer science" — in 1998 for research that paved the way for automatic teller machines, computerized airline reservations and online shopping.

In an interview after he resumed the role of CEO at the company he founded, Michael Dell said he was excited about taking charge, and that we should expect to see a lot of changes in the company in the "months and quarters" ahead. While Dell didn’t directly criticize former CEO Kevin Rollins, he did say "we have a lot of hidden assets in the company that have not been coming out." He also said "Dell can execute better than it has recently." This week, the company announced it would not meet analysts’ targets for its fiscal fourth quarter.

IBM announced that it has completed the construction of two new supercomputers as part of its nine-year CRM contract with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 2002, when the federal government awarded the $224.4 million contract, it ranked as IBM’s largest contract ever. Once the two new computers go online, the primary and backup systems will rank as 36th and 37th on the top 500 list of world’s fastest supercomputers, IBM announced. The top spot on the list belongs to IBM’s Blue Gene/L system, which the company installed at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

New research indicates that enterprises will continue to grapple with long lists of dangerous software vulnerabilities during 2007, with experts at IBM predicting continued growth in the number of flaws found in popular products over the next twelve months. According to a report published by IBM’s ISS (Internet Security Systems) X-Force research team on Jan. 30, the group observed just under 7,250 vulnerabilities during calendar 2006, which breaks down to an average of 20 new software flaws being isolated every day, and represents a 40 percent increase over the number of vulnerabilities discovered during 2005.

Linspire announced that it plans to expand its CNR ("Click ‘N Run") digital download and software management service to support multiple desktop Linux distributions beyond Linspire and Freespire, initially adding Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE and Ubuntu, using both .deb and .rpm packages. And, the standard CNR service will remain free.

Want a job working in Linux? Then one of your first steps should be to get an LPIC-1 (Linux Professional Institute first level) certification. The SUNY (State University of New York) Linux Learning Collaborative, a partnership between Millard Fillmore College at the University at Buffalo and Just-in-Time Resources, is offering online Linux training leading to the LPIC-1.

IBM Jan. 29 said it has agreed to acquire privately held Softek Storage Solutions, of Vienna, Va., to bolster the offerings within its Global Technology Services group. The purchase price was not disclosed. Softek, a host-based data migration software provider founded in April 2000 as a subsidiary of the former Amdahl, provides software and services that enable enterprises to move any amount of data from one location to another outside the application layer and across any storage platform or distance, thus improving speed and quality of the delivery, the company said.