Un sous-marin nucléaire "made in India"

 

Un sous-marin nucléaire "made in India"

REUTERS/Savita Kirloskar

Après avoir sous-loué ses sous-marins pendant des années, l'Inde peut compter sur son propre sous-marin nucléaire.

En mettant à l'eau l'"Arihant" dimanche, l'Inde est entrée dans le club fermé des pays ayant construit leur propre  sous-marin nucléaire (Chine, Etats-Unis, France, Grande-Bretagne, Russie). Une avancée qualifiée d' "historique" pour la défense du pays par le Premier ministre Manmohan Singh.

"Destructeur d'ennemis". En sanskrit, tel est le nom du nouveau vaisseau nucléaire de 112 mètres de long, 10 mètres de large et de 6 000 tonnes lancé hier, par la femme du premier ministre Manmohan Singh, envoyant une noix de coco en guise de bouteille de champagne sur la coque du bâtiment.

Un nom peu amical dans un contexte de relations tumultueuses depuis 1947 avec le Pakistan (au sujet de la souveraineté disputé par les deux pays de la région de Cachemire notamment), et de rivalités constantes avec la Chine voisine.

"Nous n'avons aucune visée agressive et nous ne cherchons à menacer personne, a déclaré le Premier ministre Manmohan Singh. Toutefois il nous incombe de prendre toutes les mesures nécessaires pour protéger notre pays et rester dans la course au progrès technologique dans le monde".

Des missiles balistiques dans deux ou trois ans?

Le sous-marin nucléaire, construit dans la plus grande confidentialité sous le nom de code AVT (Vaisseau de Haute Technologie) devra subir deux ans d'essais dans le golfe du Bengale avant d'être complètement opérationnel.

Selon Rahul Bedi, expert de la défense travaillant pour la revue spécialisée "Jane's Defence Weekly" il faudra également deux ou trois ans à l'Inde pour mettre au point ses propres missiles de croisière et balistiques destinés à être tirés par le sous-marin. "L'Inde ne peut pas les acheter sur le marché international car ce sont des armes interdites", a-t-il souligné, interrogé par l'Associated Press.

Jusqu'à présent,  l'Inde louait des sous-marins russes et avait bouclé, en 2005, l'achat de six submersibles franco-espagnols Scorpene pour 2,4 milliards d'euros au total.

Propulsé par un réacteur de 85 mégawatts et pouvant atteindre 44km/heure sous l'eau, le nouveau sous-marin nucléaire complète la "triade d'armes nucléaires de l'Inde", qui est désormais équipé sur terre, dans l'air et dans la mer. 

Google Mots clés : sous-marin nucléaire, inde, pakistan, chine, missiles, kashmir

IBM to Buy SPSS for $1.2 Billion to Gain Analytics

 

By Julie Alnwick and Kelly Riddell

July 28 (Bloomberg) -- International Business Machines Corp., the world’s biggest computer-services provider, agreed to buy SPSS Inc. for about $1.2 billion in cash to gain software that helps businesses analyze and predict trends.

The per-share price is $50, the companies said today in a statement. That is 42 percent more than Chicago-based SPSS’s closing stock price yesterday. The $1.2 billion price includes convertible debt, restricted share units and other items, according to IBM.

IBM, led by Chief Executive Officer Sam Palmisano, will use the purchase to bolster the software business, where profit margins are more than twice as big as in services. Palmisano pledged this year to “go on offense” in the global recession, making acquisitions and investing in research. This month, IBM raised its full-year profit forecast to at least $9.70 a share from $9.20.

“This year is going to be a down year for many IT software services -- however, SPSS’s analytics business is expecting growth,” said Andy Miedler, a St. Louis-based analyst at Edward Jones & Co. “That speaks well to the areas IBM is choosing to invest in, and it furthers their business transformation into a software leader.” He advises investors to buy IBM stock.

Armonk, New York-based IBM dropped 88 cents to $116.75 at 3:10 p.m. in New York Stock Exchange composite trading. SPSS jumped $14.25 or 41 percent, to $49.34 on the Nasdaq Stock Market. The companies expect the transaction to be completed in the second half of the year.

SPSS’s Strengths

The SPSS purchase may add about 3 cents to IBM’s earnings next year, according to Maynard Um, a New York-based analyst with UBS Securities LLC.

“Although the EPS contribution is not material, we believe actual benefits may prove greater as the deal adds to IBM’s business and predictive analytics portfolio, which will be an essential part of IBM’s smarter business systems and which the company has identified as a significant growth opportunity over the next few years,” Maynard wrote today in a note.

SPSS’s technologies help businesses assess data, forecasting demand for their products and examining patterns to detect fraud, IBM said. The global market for analytics software probably will climb to $25 billion this year, IBM said, citing data from researcher IDC.

SPSS will give IBM a foothold in predictive analytics, a market that’s both growing and the future of data analysis, said Ambuj Goyal, general manager of information management at IBM.

Changing Analytics

“The world is moving from doing the analysis of data in the background by some business-smart guy,” to getting “real-time predictive answers without being an analyst,” Goyal said today in an interview.

SPSS had planned to report second-quarter results on Aug. 4. In the previous period, sales dropped 7.8 percent to $72.1 million, hurt by the global economic slump.

In July, IBM reported second-quarter earnings that exceeded analysts’ estimates, squeezing more out of declining sales after reducing jobs and managing projects more efficiently. Sales fell 13 percent as customers pared technology budgets to cope with the lengthening recession.

IBM has made about 80 acquisitions in hardware, software and services since Palmisano took the reins in 2002. Most of the deals, including the $4.5 billion purchase of Cognos Inc., have bolstered the software business. IBM had sought computer-server and program maker Sun Microsystems Inc., according to a person familiar with the matter. That bid dissolved after the companies disagreed on the price. Oracle Corp. later agreed to buy Sun for about $7.4 billion.

The SPSS purchase terms include a termination fee of $23.5 million that SPSS would pay should the merger fail.

IBM also said today it will buy Ounce Labs Inc., a Waltham, Massachusetts-based software maker.

(SPSS will hold a conference call at 10 a.m. New York time today to discuss the transaction. To listen, go to http://www.spss.com/invest.)

Google Mots clés : SPSS, IBM

Live from Mozilla: Firefox for iPhone? No

 

 

Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla VP of engineering

(Credit: Rafe Needleman / CNET)

I'm at a Mozilla "open house" sitting around a table with about 10 other bloggers. Lots of history is being discussed here; the 10th anniversary of Mozilla will be celebrated on Monday (Firefox 1 came out two years after Mozilla started). Check back on this post for practical tidbits from this meeting.

Mike Schroepfer, VP of engineering: Next beta of Firefox 3 will be beta 5. It comes out next week. Will be the last beta before release candidate 1, which is due for May. Firefox 3 should ship for real in June (or before, if possible).

Feature of Firefox 3: Will look like a native app on each platform: Windows, Mac, Linux. Less of the "Firefox look," more native. Of couse, will support skins so you can pick your favorite look. Most everything is in the same place, but the back button is about twice as big.

The "awesome bar:" This is what they call the new address entry field. It has very useful autofill and search, since "people are moving to search as a modality" of how they use the browser. It combines search with your history, and it's adaptive, based on what you historically click on. Tries to divine what you want even if the search term is ambiguous.

New history/bookmark technology: Stored in a local relational database, replacing the old-school tech from previous version. New tech is more reliable and higher performance. What it means to users: more browser history is stored by default (instead of just 14 days), and will be instantly accessible and searchable.

"Better, faster, safer" is a focus. Firefox 3 will scan for malware (Firefox 2 already checks for phishing). Actively checks sites. Updates internal pattern database every 30 minutes. Compare to IE, which uploads site URLs to Microsoft to check. Mozilla says its version offers more privacy, but at Mozilla's expense to push the pattern database over the Net. In early beta, this technology found that the site supporting a popular extension (Firebug) had been compromised.

Address bar also checks for phishing exploits, lets users pull info from certification authorities.

New password manager: doesn't pop up and interrupt, but does give you the opportunity to save the password after you see if you've successfully logged in. Won't sync passwords across systems yet, but a new Mozilla project, Weave, will make this possible in the future.

Performance/memory improvements: Hundreds of fixes, reflected in benchmarks. Maybe three times faster than Firefox 2. Testing on Gmail: it's two to four times faster than Firefox 2. Much faster on SSL sites (like banking), too.

Faster is good.

Regarding the complaint, "You're eating all the RAM in my machine:" They say they've made it better, "better than anything out there." Firefox 3 uses less memory than other browsers, and more importantly, releases that memory when tabs close. Also, during an extended browser session test, Firefox 3 is much better behaved and doesn't chew up memory and slow down. Schroepfer says IE 8 can't pass the test they've written, and neither can Safari 3.1. They both crash.

Mozilla claims better memory management in Firefox 3.

That's it for the demo.

Regarding Microsoft: The company's stated support for open standards (like CSS 2.1) is "a huge win for the Web." But "I wouldn't call it 'vigorously embrace,'" Schroepfer says. Still lots of old standards not used.

On offline access: Firefox will support HTML 5, which has a spec for offline access. This will make Google Gears obsolete.

Question from my Twitter followers: What about Firefox on the iPhone? Response: "Apple has not written a license that allows it to happen. We've got other places we're paying attention to, but that's not one of them." We note that Schroepfer, as well as Mozilla CEO John Lilly, both have iPhones sitting on the table in front of them. Still, they say, both iPhone and Android are closed platforms. What they are interested in is a truly open platform, they maintain. "That's coming," they say. Look at the Nokia N810.

After the roundtable discussion, I had a good talk with Chris Beard, Mozilla's director of labs. A post on that is forthcoming.

For another CNET perspective on this meeting, see a post from News.com's Charles Cooper: With Firefox 3, Microsoft has reason to worry.

Google Mots clés : Iphone, Apple, Mozilla, Firefox, IE8, safari