NYPD commissioner Ray Kelly appeared in an IBM ad for free, and now "watchdog groups" are upset because IBM "reaps untold benefits from the reputations of Kelly and the NYPD." Uh, the price is probably right. [NYP]

"Energy-efficient computers powered by sunshine. This will be an instant hit," grouses chief bitterness officer Ted Dziuba in his latest opinion column for The Register. "There will be greenhouse gas output dashboards with neat little Ajax widgets." Mystery contributor theodp points out that IBM already sells it.

In a post showing slides from IBM's 1975 presentation, commenter mrfomoco deftly explains the genius behind Big Blue's marketing, complete with visual aides:

One foot in the future, one planted squarely in the '70s. These slides from an IBM presentation — 17 years before anyone bothered to plug the projector into a laptop — prove how little has changed. Except now the office workers behind the narrator have YouTube to watch whenever he turns his back.

European regulators are looking into whether IBM is unfairly dominating the mainframe market. What, is this 1968? IBM's purchase of Platform Solutions, a 36-person rival which made cheaper versions of IBM's mainframes, would normally be too small to rouse antitrust inquiries. But, amid accusations that IBM bought the firm to quash a rival, regulators are looking into it nonetheless. I'm actually disinclined to believe the conspiracy theories. IBM, under official antitrust oversight for decades, surely doesn't want to invite government officials back in.

Tech companies like to babble about openness and transparency. But try finding an engineer's phone number. Standard procedure is to hide company telephone and email directories from external eyeballs, lest a recruiter — or, more annoyingly, a reporter — use the phone list to cold-call staffers. One shining exception: IBM, the world's largest IT employer, with nearly 400,000 people on board in at least 90 countries. Why would the company publish its entire directory and risk attack from headhunters and snoops? Because in 2008 IBM doesn't sell servers, it leases brains. Customers don't want to submit a request to a faceless feedback form and hope the right person at the world's biggest, sprawlingest tech company sees it. I'm sure there was a fight over the decision. But they finally faced the truth: We already hunt their employees down on Blogger and LinkedIn.

The Economist tidily sums up billg's career this week, now that Microsoft's Rain Man (see video) has walked away from the company after 33 years. I've whittled the piece down to its talking points.

Tired of fielding lawsuits from patent trolls and scared of court injunctions like that faced by RIM which nearly shut down the company's BlackBerry service, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, Verizon and Ericsson are among the companies rumored to be behind the formation of the Allied Security Trust. Ponying up $250,000 down payments and $5 million in escrow to make purchases, the trust seeks to buy patents before they fall into the hands of patent trolls. (That's the polite name the group's founders use for companies which seek to make money litigating infringers rather than by create products.) But the real bogeyman here is the rise of a possible patent troll to rule all patent trolls, Intellectual Ventures, which has close ties to Microsoft.

Putting media naysayers in their place, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates continued his farewell tour by pointing to old press accounts of companies like Ashton Tate and Lotus as worthy competitors into the perspective only the ultimate winner can enjoy. When asked by CNET's Ina Fried about the early presumptions that IBM would eat Microsoft's lunch and how that turned out, Gates used the opportunity to challenge those who would similarly presume that Google will eventually destroy Team Redmond.

"You could say I was too lazy to calculate, so I invented the computer." The whole documentary is a lot of fun to watch — famed British thespian David Jacobi even makes an appearance in a dramatization as the legendary Alan Turing. Zuse and Turing were on opposite sides of World War II, with Zuse's machine mostly used to crunch numbers for the Nazis' rocket projects. Helping to keep track of the undesirables intended for slaughter in the concentration camps? That was IBM's job.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Hewlett-Packard is nearing a deal to buy EDS for $12 billion to $13 billion. Having set Dell back on its heels in PC sales, HP is now moving to challenge IBM. As computers become commodities, the money is in installing and maintaining them, not marking up Intel's microprocessors and Microsoft's operating system for a thin margin. One wonders if Michael Dell is gutsy enough to launch a rival bid — or, with HP now worth three times as much as Dell, if he can really afford to.

At last, an explanation of the Bush Administration's misbehavior that will resonate in Silicon Valley: It's all Microsoft's fault. Ars Technica details how switching from an IBM Lotus email system installed under Clinton to a Microsoft Exchange server made it impossible to store White House emails systematically. The archiving system was operated manually, and Bush appointees nixed efforts to upgrade it. CIO Theresa Payton says that the White House is now working on a new system, but knowing the ways of both Washington and enterprise software, what are the chances it will be done before we have a new president?

It's only a matter of time before the inanimate home of inventor Andy Stanford-Clark somehow pisses off TechCrunch publisher Michael Arrington and feels the wrath of "@andy_house blocked." [Earth2Tech]

Big Blue raised the company's dividend 25 percent to $0.50 per share, as union employees and retirees picked outside headquarters to protest outsourcing and pension problems. [AP]

Worried about the next "episode of profound chaos" headed our way? Don't be! Your friendly International Business Machines Corporation is on the job. In 2006, IBM filed a patent for "computer usable program code" designed to optimize skills and resources during "episodes of profound chaos during hurricanes, earthquakes, tidal waves, solar flares, flooding, terrorism, war, and pandemics to name a few." As "human beings," IBM explains, we are "generally very ill prepared at a mental level for planning for and dealing with chaotic events." Which is true, but can we call it off if the program starts to get too good at chess?.

IBM's board authorized $15 billion in additional stock buybacks for 2008 and raised its future outlook. The company spent $18.8 billion on buybacks last year and has repurchased $94 billion in the past 13 years. Why, that's two Yahoos! [AP]

Gadget battles are won and lost on the price of components. In that regard, Sony has had poor luck with its latest PlayStation console. Its hulking size, exorbitant price, and dearth of interesting titles left it vulnerable to the Wii's unexpected rise. Gamers were more interested in the Wii's casual fun than the PS3's sophisticated Cell processor, especially since the available games hardly made much use of the expensive piece of gear. But the Cell is about to get cheaper. Manufacturer IBM has reduced the size of the chip to 45 nanometers, a technological leap which will at once make the processor cheaper and easier to cool, requiring a smaller case. Good news, at long last, for Sony.

IBM tech-support workers believe they are eligible for overtime pay. And IBM agrees. It's just going to cut their salary by 15 percent to make up for it. After hearing the news, "I was so angry I could hardly speak, and it takes a lot to make me angry," one IBM employee told the AP. "I just don't know how IBM expects us to take this and just run with it." Here's my guess: They don't. If any of the 7,600 employees affected leave, it might just help IBM hike its recently raised 2008 earnings outlook even more.