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And wall street is peeved During its last fiscal quarter, Apple shipped a record 2.49 million Macs, and even if you ignore a decent chunk of its Jesus Phone sales, it nabbed a record $7.46bn in revenues. But in typically coy fashion, the company says it has low expectations for the quarter to come..

Economic weakness Vodafone, the world's largest cellco, grew revenues to £9.1bn, up by nearly 20 per cent, or 1.7 per cent organic growth, in the three months ended 30 June 2008..

Playing with the big boys now Brocade is to acquire Foundry Networks for $3bn in cash and stock. The storage networking vendor has secured a $1.5bn debt facility from bank of america and Morgan Stanley to grease the purchase..

A new IBM supercomputer will help the Naval Oceanographic Office (NAVO) with ocean modeling and weather forecasting, thereby improving maritime safety.

Visually impaired Web surfers now have an easy, collaborative way to improve Internet accessibility, thanks to IBM researchers. People with vision problems often rely on software that reads web pages to them. But the software won't work with every element on a page unless the proper information is there. New software from IBM Research allows the users to report such shortcomings so they can be remedied.

Researchers at IBM's India Research Laboratory have developed advanced data masking technology that helps call centers protect that critical data without disrupting customer service or business operations.

Scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich and the IBM Zurich Research Laboratory recently used a Blue Gene supercomputer to create the most extensive simulation real human bone structure to date. Their work gives doctors a heretofore unseen "high definition" view of the strength and fragility of bones and could mean better clinical tools for the diagnosis and treatment of osteoporosis.

More and more, IT systems have to respond almost instantaneously to an event or a collection of events. For example, the systems aboard one of the U.S. Navy's most modern warships, the DDG 1000 destroyer, must evaluate and respond to a missile attack within 10 seconds. The latest issue of the IBM Systems Journal (Volume 47, Number 2, 2008) examines the challenges of such "responsive systems" and the latest research in the field.

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