Our old Toshiba laptop recently gave up the ghost.

So after much research we narrowed the replacement choice to the $730 Asus UL80Vt-A1 14.1-inch laptop and the $290 Gateway LT2113u 10.1-inch netbook.

Since we’re cheapo desis, we finally plumped for the Windows XP-based Gateway netbook (1GB RAM, 160GB hard-drive and the Intel N450 processor). Cheaper by $440 over the Asus laptop we were eying.

Our New Gateway LT2113u Netbook

The netbook’s three USB ports should be adequate for most people.

IBM has established a security operations center in Bangalore, the information technology giant’s ninth such facility in the world.

The Bangalore center will provide managed security services, real-time analysis and early warning notification of security events to its managed security services clients worldwide.

IBM is said to have 4,000 security services clients around the world.

IBM Security Services’ operations centers are designed to ensure that mission-critical systems, electrical systems, data processing and communication links are protected from any single point of failure.

The new security operations center will leverage IBM X-Force Protection System back end managed security services infrastructure to assist analysts with the aggregation, correlation, analysis and prioritization of security logs and events.

Is this the end of an era or what?

Today, at the close of trading Apple vaulted ahead of Microsoft in market capitalization.

Here, see the below numbers to peer into the future:

By the way, it beats us as to why Steve Ballmer has not been fired yet.

Ballmer has been head honcho of Microsoft for so many years and yet Apple CEO Steve Jobs and those two Google kids Larry Page and Sergey Brin have peed all over his bald pate.

Too late to undo the damage now.

Microsoft’s Bing search engine has no hope against the Google juggernaut.

As for the Microsoft Zune music/video device, does anyone even use that junk given Apple’s hegemony in the digital entertainment arena.

The less said the better about Microsoft’s ill-fated entree into the smartphone arena.

Market Capitalization and Share Price of the three major IT/Digital Media companies at 11:38AM Eastern Time today:

* Google -  $154.98 billion; $486.63 (Business: Search, Android software for phones)

* Apple – $227.96 billion; $250.49 (Business: PCs i.e. Macs, digital media devices like iPod, iPhone, iPad et al)

* Microsoft – $229.61 billion; $26.20 (Business: Operating system and application software, game consoles like Xbox, digital media devices like Zune, search et al)

Source: Yahoo Finance

IBM today announced six employees as IBM Fellows for their contributions to the company and the IT industry.

And guess what? Two of the six are desis: Subramanian Iyer and Anant Jhingran.

IBM Fellows is the IT giant’s highest technical award. Only 217 individuals have earned this honor in the company’s history. Including the newly named Fellows, 73 are active employees.

Here are details of the two desis who received this distinction:

* An alumnus of IIT Bombay and UCLA, Dr. Subramanian (Subu) Iyer of the Systems and Technology Group at Hopewell Junction, New York is being recognized for innovations in semiconductor technology.

Subu Iyer is said to have led development and implementation of embedded DRAM technology – a dense memory that can be fabricated on high performance Logic chips – used in IBM systems ranging from high-end servers to BlueGene supercomputers to game chips. Other contributions of Iyer (and his team) include demonstrating the first SiGe heterojunction bipolar transistor used extensively in wireless communication, development of on-chip programmable electrical Fuses, a technology that allows semiconductor chips to “self-repair” and for the circuits on a chip to be reconfigured even after the chip has left fabrication facilities and development of IBM’s 45 nm CMOS technologies.

* Anant D. Jhingran of the Software Group in in San Jose, California and an alumnus of University of California, Berkeley, is being honored for contributions to IBM’s Information Management business.

When market researcher IDC puts out its quarterly server numbers you can be certain of one thing – Sun will have the worst performance of all the major server vendors.

Sun = Always the laggard.

We have IDC’s 4Q 2009 server number estimates with us and as sure as night follows day Sun is again the worst performer.

Overall server revenues declined 3.9% year over year in the quarter but Sun’s server revenues fell a whopping 17.3%.

Here take a deko at the numbers:

In other findings from the IDC survey:

* Linux server demand improved in 4Q09 with revenue growing 6.1% to $1.9 billion compared