But as the U.S. economy sputters and companies transfer their IT needs from the desktop to virtualized data centers and to the Web, one computer giant is moving its enterprise products in a new direction: slimmer and cheaper.

FORBES: Magazine Article

The whole personal computer era can be seen as one giant triumph of dis-integration, as IBM's circuit-boards-to-boxes-to-software mainframe business gave way to the layered computer industry we see today: Intel making the electronics, Dell the boxes and Microsoft the software.

FORBES: Ghost cars, ghost brands

The problems this week involve one piece of the giant ongoing overhaul, the new dispatch computer system, rolled out Wednesday on the first hot day of the year, when emergency calls usually spike.

WSJ: Glitches in new NYC 911 system

But what is possible is to build many smaller dishes spaced a long way from one another, and to link them with clever computer algorithms so that they behave as if they were a single giant telescope.

ECONOMIST: The Square Kilometre Array: Divide and rule | The