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This article reports that the second Stony Brook Conference on Advances in Computing was held on the campus of the State University of New York at Stony Brook, New York on Friday, June 10, 1966. The Long Island Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery joined with the University to sponsor the conference which was partially supported by International Business Machines Corp. The first technical presentation was a thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion of "Feasible Large-Scale Computer Models" by C. West Churchman of the University of California at Berkeley. He pointed to the very large models that can now be built, and the very much larger models that we will soon be able to build, and stated that the models are not realistic because the quality of information is not adequate and because the right questions remain unasked. Walter F. Bauer, president of Informatics Inc., discussed "On-Line Systems, Past, Present and Future."A talk by Oscar L. Morgenstern of the Mitre Corp. on the Air Traffic Control Subsystem of the Airspace System concluded the morning program.

The article features information technology services provider International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) of Armonk, New York. The company made it to the 2008 20 Best Companies for Multicultural Women in the United States, a diversity initiative created by Working Mother Media. Around 8% of the company's 128,794 employees are women of color and 3% are women of color executives/managers.

International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) has made available a handful of new enablement templates and some midyear metrics to bolster its Small and Medium Business (SMBs) Advantage program for partners that develop software for SMBs. The six new Solution Builder Express Portfolio templates, or Starting Points, are designed to help partners figure out how to configure their software and services to fit with IBM's WebSphere middleware offerings. The six Starting Points unveiled last week add to the Armonk, New York-based vendor's current 12 Starting Points. IBM announced its SMB Business Advantage program in January as a sort of onestop technical support and networking arena for IBM's SMB software partners. The Express templates have helped Kevin Jinx, senior vice president of sales and recruiting at Dynax Solutions Inc., better sell his company's IT services. The company said it acquired 10,000 new SMB customers in the first half of this year, twice as many as it did in the same period last year and more than it garnered for the entire year. Of those new SMB customers, about 25 percent are Express middleware users.

OEMs lead by International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) are trying to spark interest in blade servers by expanding the capabilities of their respective systems. IBM is seen as a market leader in blade systems, servers that can fit book like into chassis and share resources such as power supplies and networking infrastructures. The Armonk, New York-based company, through partnerships with Nortel Networks Ltd. and Cisco Systems Inc., has integrated Ethernet networking switch modules into its BladeCenter systems over the last two months. IBM also will ship its Powerbased JS20 blade server and the four-way HS40, powered by Intel Corp.'s Xeon processors, with Fibre Channel switch blades, management controllers and Fibre Down host bus adapters from QLogic Corp., of Aliso Viejo, California. Other OEMs are also preparing new systems. Dell Computer Corp., of Round Rock, Texas, is working on a new generation of blades, according to officials. At the same time, a separate effort is under way in the industry to develop software for blade servers to make them easier to manage and enable them to interoperate.

IBM Corp.'s scaled-down version of its Blue Gene/L doesn't look like much of a supercomputer. About the size of a dishwasher, the Linux-based prototype is now the 73rd-fastest computer in the world and is just a sample of what's ahead, according to its chief architect. This version of Blue Gene/L is about 1/128th the size of the full Blue Gerie/L supercomputer that IBM is building for the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, and the first part of a two-pronged IBM project to create the fastest computers in the world. The Blue Gene/L system being built for the Livermore lab, run by the University of California for the U.S. Department of Energy, is expected to be completed by the end of next year or in early 2005, said Al Gara, chief architect for the project, being run by IBM Research, in Yorktown Heights, New York.

BEA Systems Inc. and IBM Corp. are developing three new specifications that will improve portability across the companies' competing application servers as well as other Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition application servers that comply with the specifications. BEA, of San Jose, California, and IBM of Armonk, New York, plan to publish the specifications on a royalty-free basis and will submit them to the Java Community Process for approval as standards. The specifications include Service Data Objects (SDO), which delivers a programming model for data and varied data sources. SDO supports the use of standard tools and frameworks.

Focuses on the postponement of the conference party sponsored by International Business Machines at LinuxWorld in New York, New York. Lay off and cost cuts as reasons for postponement; Update on True Campaign by Business Software Alliance; Responses of the consumers regarding the performance of several products in the computer industry.

Highlights the 1989 PC Expo in New York. Launch of personal computer based on Intel's 486 chip by International Business Machines Corp.; Release of a 14-inch liquid crystal display by Toshiba; Shipment of flagship spreadsheet software by Lotus Development Corp.