Business, Financial & Legal - Page 293

Microsoft Chairman and co-founder, Bill Gates, has donned his suit, put his hands on his hips and walked into court on Monday in a billion-dollar antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft over Windows 95. Yes, Windows 95.

Microsoft did attempt to get the billion-dollar antitrust case dismissed by a federal court, but failed. Bill Gates was forced to take the witness stand on Monday to defend Microsoft. Novell filed the antitrust lawsuit and are attacking Microsoft over Word Perfect. Novell originally sued Microsoft in 2004, claiming that Microsoft violated U.S. antitrust laws and harmed Novell's range of software products.

Novell has provided an Exhibit of an e-mail from 1994, which was from former Microsoft CEO and chairman Bill Gates to his software development teams. Gates started his testimony with a history of Microsoft (or a commercial) by saying "We thought everybody would have a personal computer on every desk and in every home."

I found this video on my stumbles through the [sometimes] strange corners of the Internet, where YouTube user 'n0w1kn0w' posted a video with the title "You have 30 days to pay me $5,000,000...", the video is below, watch it first and then read more below:

Now, it starts off all boring - at one point I thought he was building a mobile bomb that he was going to place in some Government building and then keep it there for 30 days waiting for his $5,000,000, but then the video gets quite serious with n0w1kn0w visiting a pyramid in Egypt, and rolling his remote control car into it.

The video is quite well done and I like the music (usually YouTube videos like this have really bad music tracks). But, lets think of it logically. Let's say he found something secret that The Powers That Be didn't want us to see, proof of aliens? A scroll? A device? Let's assume he found something, that YouTube video would be ripped off the Internet and he'd be thrown in the biggest, darkest hole you could imagine.

The on-going flooding problem in Thailand is only getting worse for the technology industry, with hard drive pricing skyrocketing past what most people would have been able to dream of two weeks ago. People are expecting pricing to rebound soon, but they are wrong, very wrong.

Seagate CEO Stephen Luczo was talking to Bloomberg, where he labels "nonsense" estimates that drive production will return to "pre-flood levels" by next summer. He adds:

This is going to take a lot longer than people are assuming, until the end of 2012 at least. And by then, demand will have gone up.

Well, it's finally settled. Rambus was dealt with a pretty big defeat on Wednesday, as a San Francisco jury rejected its claim in a $4 billion antitrust lawsuit against Micron Technology and Hynix Semiconductor. The IP licensing company lost more than 60-percent of its market value following the ruling, where investors' fear that the company won't be able to sustain its business model.

If you didn't know, the case revolved around allegations that Micron, Hynix and others had engaged in price-fixing to keep Rambus' RDRAM memory technology from gaining widespread adoption. If you remember, Intel used RDRAM with the Pentium III and 820 chipset, as well as the Pentium 4 and 850 chipset. If you remember that, you'll also remember how it was quite expensive at the time and DDR ram was just too much of a bully for RDRAM to take off.

According to Rambus, Micron and Hynix conspired to ensure Rambus memory would be more expensive, and therefore a less attractive option to OEMs. The defendants maintained that it was "design flaws, higher manufacturing costs and other drawbacks associated with RDRAM along with Rambus' business practices" that prevented RDRAM from succeeding.

The Australian retail market has always been a funny thing, something available online for say $19.99 (like the t-shirt I'm wearing) is $49.99 here in stores, if not more. It's ridiculous and it seems that even a powerhouse retailer like JB Hi-Fi is feeling that pinch.

Today they very quietly launched an online-only direct sales model, at first just selling DSLR cameras and accessories. These prices won't be offered in-store, with only the online store the only way to take advantage of the super-cheap pricing. The store is dubbed "direct import" and offers DSLR camera, lenses, flashes and grips. Funnily enough, it's undercutting its own bricks and mortar JB Hi-Fi stores in the process.

For example, a Nikon D3100 with a single lens through JB Hi-Fi's online store is $777. The direct import price? $596. This kind of pricing really shows how much price-gouging is done at a wholesale level in Australia.

Now, if I had to fly somewhere in the world to do a story, it would be Google X. Most large enterprises like Google have something similar, Apple has reportedly had their room where Steve Jobs would tinker with unreleased, or fantasy products, but Google X... wow.

Only a handful of people even know where this secret facility is located, and even less is known about the lab itself, or the people involved. Google will no doubt be working on some super secret and mind-blowing creations and concepts behind its closed, air-locked, arm-guarded doors. The New York Times reports that when Google employees were asked about the project, very few knew anything at all about it.

Sergey Brin is rumored to be involved with the project, and when Larry Page was announced as CEO, Sergey was appointed as "head of special projects". Internally, Sergey is known as the "Head of Google X", sources close to Google told the Business Insider. Both Larry Page and Eric Schmidt are also known to participate, having contributed many of the current 100 ideas found on Google X's research and development list.

On Thursday last week, a US judge ruled that Twitter must release the details of Icelandic MP and former WikiLeaks volunteer Birgitta Jonsdottir's Twitter account and those of two other Twitter users linked to WikiLeaks.

Jonsdottir learned that in January of 2011, her Twitter account was being watched by the Justice Department because of her involvement last year with WikiLeaks' release of a view showing a US military helicopter shooting two Reuters reporters in Iraq. Jonsdottir believes the US authorities want to use her information to try and build a solid case against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

Jonsdottir says:

British research firm Ovum has forecasted that digital game revenues worldwide are sit to break $24 billion for 2011, an increase of 16-percent from 2010. Ovum predict that overall revenues will continue to climb, reaching $53 billion in 2016 as more casual, social and mobile games flood the market, as well as the increasing popularity of the free-to-play (F2P) business model.

Telecommunications companies are going to have to play catch-up with bandwidth demands set to skyrocket with the increasing use of constant connections and data streaming with services such as OnLive. Games will only get bigger as time goes on, which is another factor.

Ovum has noted certain trends that contribute to their forecast such as the "casualization" of hardcore games. Their example uses Kinect, which they feel helped make games such as Forza 4 more accessible to casual games and helped Xbox Live revenues grow 19-percent from last year. Ovum also credits casual games for fueling the growth of mobile games, and they expect mobile gaming revenues to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 26-percent between 2011 and 2016.

Apple are now required to provide Samsung with contracts to Australian mobile phone carriers Telstra, Optus and Vodafone as ruled by Judge Annabel Bennet. The ruling is in relation to an assertion in Samsung's patent lawsuit against Apple carriers are obliged by the terms of the contract to subsidize iPhone sales.

Samsung are still waiting for the source code for the iPhone 4S firmware, which will support its case that Apple are infringing on their patents for wireless transmissions. Apple has handed in over 220 pages of documents in relation to the source code but Samsung have said that the source code disclosure wasn't enough because a single file was missing.

Samsung's lawyer Cynthia Cochrane has said that "someone out there is attempting to obfuscate," and I would agree. One page missing from 220 could be the key to the entire argument, and this would give Apple time to think of something else to throw in Samsung's face.

I wonder if you look under the latest Jet, Rocket Launcher or M16 if it would say "Made in China", because at the end of the day - a lot of the parts that go into the high-end military arms are built in China. A story has come about that the US Senate Armed Services Committee said its researchers had uncovered 1,800 cases in which the Pentagon had been sold electronics that may be counterfeit.

In total, the committee has said that they found more than a million fake parts that have made their way into warplanes such as the Boeing C-17 transport jet and the Lockheed Martin C-130J "Super Hercules." The problem with this is, it could be everywhere without the US military knowing, as they also found fake components in Boeing's CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter as well as the Theatre High-Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) missile defence system.

Senator Carl Levin has said: