naughty intel

The European Union fined Intel $1.44 billion today (well, technically they fined them in ”Europe money” but that means nothing to me.) for anti-trust violations. The violations cited are:

“[The Commission] said Intel gave rebates to computer manufacturers Acer, Dell, HP, Lenovo and NEC for buying all or almost all their x86 [processors] from Intel and paid them to stop or delay the launch of computers based on chips from AMD . . . Regulators said [Intel] also paid Germany's biggest electronics retailer, Media Saturn Holding — which owns the MediaMarkt superstores — from 2002 to 2007 to only stock Intel-based computers.
This meant workers at AMD's biggest European plant in Dresden, Germany, could not buy AMD-based personal computers at their city's main PC store.”

And
“AMD offered 1 million free chips to one manufacturer — which could not accept because that would lose it a rebate on many millions of other chips. It only took 160,000 free chips in the end, regulators said. . . . Intel's payments to manufacturers ordered the company to delay the European launch of AMD's first business desktop by six months. They were also paid to only sell the AMD line to small and medium companies and to only offer them directly to customers instead of to retailers.
Other manufacturers were paid to postpone the launch of AMD-based notebooks by several months, from September 2003 to January 2004 and from September 2006 to the end of 2006 — missing the key Christmas market.”

Intel is reported as having said: Company CEO Paul Otellini calls it "wrong" and says "there has been absolutely zero harm to consumers."

All taken from: http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/16909

I’m not really sure how you can say that selling your products at a certain price if your retailers agree to not sell any competition is not wrong…

There is an identical investigation going on in the United states:


“Well, there is an investigation . . . at the [U.S. Federal Trade Commission]; there's also one in the United States by the New York Attorney General's office. Intel is fully cooperating with both of those . . . we're producing evidence, we produce testimonies, depositions, and so forth. The FTC has had a position on anti-trust which is very much comparable, I think, to the EU's, so we're actually being looked at under the same lens today by both parties.” Quoted at http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/16912

Korea has already fined Intel $25 million in an antitrust case.

I wonder if they will get another round of slaps for their chipset bundling practices against Nvidia (who makes the ion platform for

Apple takes on the ultimate censorship role.

"Apple's just reached a whole new level of stupidity in App Store approval shenanigans: the Tweetie 1.3 update was just rejected for displaying "offensive language" in its Twitter trend search view. Right, not for offensive language in the app itself, but for offensive language on Twitter -- an insanely strict new standard that could conceivably be used to reject each and every iPhone Twitter client out there. (And if you haven't noticed, there are quite a few iPhone Twitter clients.) Hell, Apple might as well reject the next versions of Safari and Mail, since they can display dirty words too -- and let's not forget the awful things people are doing with Notes and the camera. Better lock it down."

I'm not going to say anything more...

http://www.engadget.com/2009/03/10/apple-stupidly-rejects-tweetie-1-3-for-foul-language-in-twitter/

Thank goodness

People aren't as stupid as I had feared. Here is why:

"Despite 3.79 million iPhones that Apple sold during the first quarter of the year, RIM doubled Apple’s iPhone sales"

In the fourth quarter of 2008, AMD reportedly had a 17% market share to Intel's 82.1%. But last quarter, Mercury says AMD managed to secure 20.9% of the market—and Intel's piece of the pie shrunk to 78.2%.

9.04 NEWBUNTU!

If you don't know what ubuntu is... nothing to see here, move along folks...

there is no bluetooth.... because we broke it on purpose

from dailytech http://www.dailytech.com/Apple+Reveals+It+Intentionally+Crippled+Bluetooth+in+iPod+touch+2G/article14611.htm

" Apple insisted at the time that Bluetooth was not on the iPod touch and that Nike+ didn't use Bluetooth.

Teardowns late last year, though, told a different story. The teardown revealed a Broadcom Bluetooth chipset with support for 2.1+EDR. The chipset, not listed on Apple's spec sheet, was apparently being used to implement Nike+. Some argued that there must be some hardware difference; Apple wouldn't just lock out working functionality.

Well, they were wrong -- during a Q&A session at the iPhone/iPod touch OS v3.0 press event this week, Apple let slip that Bluetooth is indeed on the iPod touch and that it intentionally crippled it.

Some are accusing Apple of intentionally crippling this key piece of iPod touch hardware as a ploy to sell its new OS. Apple is charging iPod touch customers $9.99 to upgrade and receive the complementary Bluetooth unlock.
"

AMD gets a little review love.

It's been a couple of months since a major review site let slip a generally positive comment about an entire lineup from AMD but on Techreport.com:

"Generally speaking, AMD's Phenom II X4 processors appear to be slightly better deals than the Intel Core 2 Quad equivalents. Not only are they great performers for the money, but the Socket AM2+ and AM3 platform has a better upgrade path than Intel's soon-to-be-retired LGA775 platform. The Phenom II X3 720 is more of a mixed bag, since it's the top performer neither in single-threaded tasks nor in heavily multithreaded ones. However, the 720 is still a good middle ground between cheap quad-cores and high-end dual-core CPUs."

200th post, Natural Language Engine

Don't know what a natural language engine is? Natural language means nothing more than the way we speak to one another. When you ask a person what there maiden name was. That person parses that question into its ideas: I the subject's, last name prior to name changes associated with marriage. It sounds simple but its a hard thing for computers to do.

"Wolfram Alpha actually computes the answers to a wide range of questions -- like questions that have factual answers such as "What is the location of Timbuktu?" or "How many protons are in a hydrogen atom?," "What was the average rainfall in Boston last year?," "What is the 307th digit of Pi?," "where is the ISS?" or "When was GOOG worth more than $300?"

Think about that for a minute. It computes the answers. Wolfram Alpha doesn't simply contain huge amounts of manually entered pairs of questions and answers, nor does it search for answers in a database of facts. Instead, it understands and then computes answers to certain kinds of questions."

see: http://www.techreport.com/discussions.x/16550 for more.