The Nasdaq is willing to let Dell stock continue to trade provided the company explains a few things to the exchange about that completely opaque audit committee investigation that's been going on internally seemingly interminably by March 1 and file its delinquent financial reports with SEC by March 14. In response, Dell, which hasn't filed a quarterly report with the SEC since last spring, said it will have to beg more time to get its financial reports filed. It should be able to provide the investigation information by the deadline.

Lenovo Americas Chief Resigns
Lenovo Americas president Scott Smith, an IBM legacy, has resigned "to pursue other interests." Another IBM legacy Rory Read, senior VP, operations, will take over temporarily. Lenovo is battling serious headwinds in the US, up against HP and Dell, as well as supply chain problems and since the ThinkPad's traditional business customers aren't bellying up to the bar, Lenovo is trying to push the widgets to small business and consumers.

Politically Incorrect Patent Top 10 a Thing of the Past
Adopting the new political correctness, the US Patents and Trademark Office said Monday that it will cease to release its annual Top 10 list of companies that got the most patents after the 2006 list comes out in April. Seems the agency wants to emphasize "quality over quantity by discouraging any perception that we believe more is better." It claims the quality of patents last year was the best in over 20 years and it approved fewer patents than it had in more than 30 years. IBM has usually dominated the Top 10 list.

HP Labs To Open Russian Center
HP Labs will be opening an R&D center in St. Petersburg to go along aside the ones it has in India and China. The Russian lab is to pursue advanced information management technologies, working on new methods for extracting, analyzing and organizing useful data from the web and other sources. It's looking for a full-time director and research staff.

Transitive in Luxembourg
Transitive, which turned its hand to translating Solaris-on-Sparc applications into Linux-on-x64 at Intel's behest - a pre-Sun accord Intel, that is - says the Luxembourg Stock Exchange is using QuickTransit-ported apps in a VMware virtualized environment and reportedly its funds management application now runs faster.

My, Those Are Big Shoes You're Filling
Now it's official. Revenue-wise HP is the biggest computer company on the face of the earth raking in $91.66 billion in the year ended October 31 to IBM's $91.4 billion. According to the Wall Street Journal, that's the first time in more than 50 years that's happened.

Sun Shines
Could Jonathan Schwartz be Sun's Mark Hurd in miniature? At press time Thursday, Sun stock had grazed $6.42, its highest point in FOUR, count 'em, FOUR years and closed at $6.34. It was the most heavily traded stock on the Nasdaq, with more than 88 million shares changing hands.