Chip makers seek new technology (AP)

Industry leaders say it must be retired within 10 years and replaced with something better, if computer technology is to continue advancing at the current pace.

It’s not clear what that new microprocessor technology will be, but some candidates are starting to emerge.

“We’re at the stage now where we’re sorting out the options,” George Scalise, president of the Semiconductor Industry Association, said during a panel discussion Friday that gathered representatives of some of the industry’s largest companies with their partners in the academic world.

It generally takes the computer industry about 10 years to move a technology from the laboratory to commercial applications, so the successor to current silicon microprocessors probably already has been shown to work — somewhere — on a small scale.

“We have all of these alternatives,” said John Kelly, a senior vice president at IBM Corp.’s research division. “If we only had one, I’d be extremely worried.”

One promising avenue is “spintronics,” which looks at the “spin” status of electrons rather than their charge. The research is not quite as exotic as it sounds: Spin is related to magnetism and already is exploited by some memory chips.

Logic gates — the basic building blocks of microprocessors — that use spin technology can be made out of the same materials as current chips but consume very little power.

Increased power consumption — and the waste heat it generates — is a showstopping problem for current technology, said Professor Alain Kaloyeros of the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering. The latest chips produce more heat per unit of area than old-fashioned steam irons do, he said.

“Given that we’re not in the business of making steam irons, and we don’t want to use our laptops to iron our pants,” it is imperative to find an alternative, Kaloyeros said.

One possible logic gate using nanotechnology — similar to current technology in that it uses electric charge — comprises a single metal atom suspended between two carbon-based molecules. Moving the atom one way or the other either blocks or lets through an electric charge.

Another application of nanotechnology, the manipulation of matter on an extremely small scale, is the carbon nanotube, essentially a sheet of carbon atoms rolled up into a tube. Researchers have been able for a few years to make logic gates out of nanotubes in different configurations.

It’s not clear, however, whether it’s possible to cluster enough nanotube logic gates to make a processor. The technology needed to accurately arrange millions of them would bear little resemblance to the semiconductor manufacturing of today, and it does not exist.

Other technologies that have shown promise — but which Friday’s panelists thought would not be ready to take over from silicon within 10 years — include quantum computing, which seeks to take advantage of the seemingly bizarre way electrons interact with one another at the very smallest scales of matter.

“We do not think quantum computing is doable in our lifetime,” Kelly said.

Another technology unlikely to be commercialized in the near future is photonic processing, where the computation is performed by particles of light rather than electrons. However, light is likely to become a dominant way to send information between chips, Kelly said.

Whatever new technology comes to dominate, it’s likely that it will stand the semiconductor industry on its head. Companies like RCA that in 1950 were making vacuum tubes, the first electronic logic gate, did not evolve to become the ones making microprocessors in 1970. Intel Corp., Texas Instruments Inc. and others appeared to fill that need.

Paolo Gargini, director of technology strategy at Intel, noted that it’s quite possible that whatever new technology is adopted will be easier to manufacture without the huge, multibillion dollar plants his company needs.

IBM earlier this year announced that its chip plants were going to start using a “self-assembling” process, in which material forms a nanoscale structure by itself, rather than being shaped with expensive lithography.

“If indeed these new options turn out to be easier … maybe we’ll have another type of industry,” Gargini said.

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Semiconductor Industry Association:

EU court to deliver Microsoft ruling (AP)

Experts say an affirmation of the European Commission’s 2004 order and record 497 million euro ($613 million) fine could embolden regulators as they pursue probes of Intel Corp., Rambus Inc. and Qualcomm Inc., among others.

But a major victory for Microsoft could turn the regulatory landscape upside down, curbing the ambitions of European officials who have recently taken a more aggressive stance against alleged monopolists than regulators in the United States.

The 13 judges on the Luxembourg-based Court have been considering Microsoft’s appeal for 15 months. Judge Bo Vesterdorf — on his last day on the job — will read the order that could change how the world’s most powerful corporations are regulated by Europe.

The case started in the 1990s with complaints from Microsoft rivals about how the software giant used its presence on most desktop computers to elbow into new markets and block competitors. It’s also always been about something more — nothing less than the role of Europeans in the regulation of U.S. companies.

If the Commission’s tougher approach is upheld, that means U.S. companies with a global presence will have to conform to Europe’s rules, said Keith Hylton, a professor at Boston University School of Law.

“The end result is, the EU ends up being the global regulator of dominant firms,” he said.

Both sides can appeal the decision Monday to Europe’s highest court.

The case, which originated from a 1998 complaint by U.S.-based server maker Sun Microsystems Inc., has become a classic David and Goliath tale. Here, however, both sides claim the role of David.

EU regulators say they’re battling a corporate bully that stifled competition and used its Windows monopoly to muscle in on new markets — media players and servers. A similar U.S. Department of Justice case against Microsoft was settled in 2002.

Microsoft counters that it’s the one being bullied by regulators who imposed heavy fines and buried the software maker under reams of criticism without suggesting specific remedies for their complaints.

On March 24, 2004, the European Commission found Microsoft guilty, ordering it to share the code that would help rivals’ servers work well with Windows and make a version of its operating system available without its media player software. It also levied the record-setting fine.

How much Microsoft has complied with the code-sharing order is still up to debate. Last year, it was fined an additional 280.5 million euros ($357 million) for failing to supply the “complete and accurate” interoperability information. Microsoft has said it will appeal that decision.

The company also offered a version of Windows without its Media Player — a year and a half after the initial ruling. The software designed by EU lawyers was a total failure. No computer makers bothered to ship it with new PCs.

The case is about “whether or not the state can force a company to provide its research and development to its direct competitors at little or no cost,” said Microsoft lawyer Erich Andersen.

EU spokesman Jonathan Todd said Microsoft does not have the right to exclude competitors “without constraint.” By selecting who gets to play in the market, “Microsoft wants to make those choices for the consumer,” he said

But a ruling in favor of Microsoft would have implications far beyond the current case, said Ted Henneberry, a lawyer in Heller Ehrman’s London and Washington, D.C. offices and a former member of the Irish competition authority.

“There is an issue as to what the Commission’s abilities are to restructure markets,” he said. “This will set the bounds” for how aggressive the EC can be in regulating technology companies.

It’s a question that applies to many more companies than just Microsoft.

In July, EU regulators charged Intel Corp. with monopoly abuse for allegedly offering customer rebates and below-cost pricing. They said Intel’s actions undercut smaller rival computer chip-maker Advanced Micro Devices Inc.

Last month, the Commission charged Rambus Inc. with antitrust abuse, alleging the memory chip designer demanded “unreasonable” royalties for its patents that it said were fraudulently set as industry standards.

And it’s also pondering further moves on Microsoft and its new Windows Vista operating system as well as investigating complaints about Qualcomm Inc.’s licensing fees for cell phone chip patents.

Ultimately, though, Microsoft isn’t the same company it was in the 1990s, said Matt Rosoff of independent consultancy Directions on Microsoft. Today, it’s an aging octopus struggling to match Google Inc. on Internet search and Apple Inc. on music players.

“Microsoft is not perceived as the all-powerful giant it was ten years ago,” he said. “It’s a combination of rapid change in the technology industry, the natural life cycle of any company growing and maturing.”

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AP Technology Writer Jessica Mintz in Seattle and Christopher S. Rugaber in Washington contributed to this report.

SCO seeks bankruptcy protection (InfoWorld)

The Lindon, Utah, company made the announcement in a news release issued Friday afternoon. "The Board of Directors of The SCO Group unanimously determined that Chapter 11 reorganization is in the best long-term interest of SCO and its subsidiaries as well as its customers, shareholders, and employees," the statement said.

SCO expects to "maintain all normal business operations throughout the bankruptcy proceedings."

Once a respected vendor of the Unix operating system, SCO is now best known as the plaintiff in  related to the computer giant's support of the Linux operating system. SCO has claimed that IBM inappropriately contributed to the development of Linux, but SCO's critics say that the lawsuit was simply a desperate attempt to reach a financial settlement from IBM, which has invested heavily in Linux over the years.

The lawsuit had proved to be a costly one. SCO has been losing money for years as it has racked up millions of dollars in legal fees and seen its core Unix software business decline.

Last month, it suffered a major legal setback as .

The case is due back in court on Monday, when a judge is to begin evaluating how much SCO has to pay Novell. It was unclear Friday how the Chapter 11 filing might affect Monday's proceeding.

Linux Foundation executive director Jim Zemlin said of the news, "I have to say we weren't surprised by this bankruptcy filing. Their legal strategy was ill-conceived and misguided. Companies like Red Hat, IBM, and many others have proven that it's far smarter to build a business around Linux than it is to attack it in the courts."

SCO's stock has been hammered since March of 2003, when it first filed suit against IBM. On Friday it closed at $0.37, down 43 percent on the bankruptcy news.

This story was updated on September 14, 2007

SCO Group files for bankruptcy (AP)

The Lindon, Utah, company said it is seeking protection from creditors under Chapter 11 as it continues to license and improve Unix for corporate servers.

“We want to assure our customers and partners that they can continue to rely on SCO products, support and services for their critical business operations,” Darl McBride, president and chief executive, said in a statement Friday.

McBride has blamed competition from Linux for operating losses and the ongoing slide in company revenues. The company said its operating loss in the quarter ending April 30 was $1.1 million. A year earlier, it lost $3.9 million.

In August, U.S. District Court Dale Kimball ruled that Novell Inc., not SCO, owns the copyrights covering the Unix operating system. SCO licenses the Unix software for corporate servers.

The case could leave SCO with a bigger liability: Kimball said SCO may owe Novell software royalties.

Kimball’s ruling was relief for IBM Corp., the target of one lawsuit by SCO claiming Big Blue dumped Unix code in Linux.

Separately, Novell is countersuing SCO for damages in a trial that was to begin next week but is now on hold because of the bankruptcy filing.

Chapter 11 frees a company from lawsuits by creditors while it reorganizes its finances.

McBride didn’t immediately return a message relayed Friday through a public-relations firm.

Apple posts iPhone credit instructions (AP)

The company said the credit would be available for people who bought either the $599 8-gigabyte, iPhone or the $499, 4-gigabyte model before Aug. 22. People who bought the phones more recently are eligible for refunds.

Those early buyers must fill out a form on Apple’s Web site to have the retail or online store credit delivered to them electronically.

The credit can be redeemed only inside the United States, and cannot be used inside the iTunes store or for Apple store gift cards, according to terms listed on the company’s Web site.

Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs announced the credits a day after irking early iPhone buyers Sept. 5, when he cut the price of the expensive model by $200 and said the cheaper device would be discontinued. The price cut came less than 10 weeks after the hybrid cell phone-iPod’s highly anticipated June 29 launch.

The credit claim form on Apple’s Web site requires users to enter the phone number and serial number of their iPhones. They then get a text message with an access code that’s needed to generate the store credit in the form of a credit number and PIN. The deadline to submit a claim for the $100 is Nov. 30.

The deadline for people who purchased iPhones between Aug. 22 and Sept. 4 to submit refund claims is Sept. 19.

Apple shares dropped 5 percent the day Jobs announced the price cut, which the company said would boost holiday sales. The stock regained some of the ground lost on Monday, when Apple announced it had sold its one-millionth iPhone.

Apple’s stock rose $1.02 to $138.22 in midday trading Friday.

Badware hunters tame wild Webmasters, hosts (InfoWorld)

After publishing a list of rogue Web site hosting companies and launching they can find on the Internet, an effort that has filtered out more than 600,000 nefarious applications thus far, the StopBadware team says that people are responding. 

The project currently counts less than 250,000 Web sites that it classifies as distributors of programs that qualify as badware — any application that either tries to hide itself or any of its intentions, based on the parameters of the effort. StopBadware also announced that Internet mainstays PayPal and VeriSign have joined its .

By inserting warnings into Google's search results that steer end-users away from malware and adware sources, while communicating with those responsible for creating or handing out the suspicious programs, progress is being made, according to StopBadware's lead researchers.

"The interstitials delivered with Google search results are working, and we've been able to communicate with a lot of Webmasters. It's having a neighborhood effect," said Prof. John Palfrey, executive director of Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for the Internet and Society. "We're reaching out to hosting companies and Webmasters and filtering the complaints where it seems useful, and we've seen many people change their behavior."

In addition to all the people who have no idea that their sites are being used to pass out malicious programs and those who misunderstand the nature of the applications they're distributing, StopBadware researchers say that even those who create many of the programs are engaging in the give and take.

For those who can be reached, the debate over whether or not a particular program qualifies as badware typically can be resolved, with very few of those who agree to modify their applications going on to repeat their behavior, said Jason Callina, one of the StopBadware researchers.

"We're seeing a low recurrence of people coming back on the lists once we've gone through the testing and communications process. People are actually helping each other move off the lists," Callina said. "When there's ever any serious disagreement, it's always an argument of our definition of spyware versus theirs."

Most Webmasters complain about the interstitials on Google — which they are notified of 24 hours in advance and given the opportunity to appeal. But the immediate drop in search-driven traffic that the warnings produce quickly convinces people to either take any questionable applications offline or kill their sites altogether, Callina said.

Meanwhile, StopBadware's list of hosting companies responsible for supporting the largest number of malware sites resulted in at least one leading culprit — iPower Technologies — changing its ways, while two others have disappeared completely. Others have also begun to modify their behavior, Palfrey said.

"The best measure of our success is when any of these companies change their business process and we're seeing them adjusting," said Palfrey. "At the same time, we're trying to enable [end-users] to make better choices with their using habits."

So many of the people who end up on StopBadware's list need help understanding what it is that they're doing wrong that the team feels its ability to mete out advice is being overwhelmed, he said.

At the same time, StopBadware admits that sophisticated hackers are still advancing their efforts at an alarming pace and the organization can't keep up with the ever-growing volume of online malware programs.

In addition to tracking down the programs, StopBadware is also charting regional trends, and the researchers contend that a growing number of suspicious applications are . The level of interaction between malware authors in the region and their Western counterparts is also becoming more prevalent, with a fair share of distribution still emanating from former Soviet-bloc regions as well, the team said.

The key for legitimate businesses to steer clear of the entire problem is to be careful with the companies they partner with, said Palfrey, who served as host of an held at Harvard in June. The security consortium is backed by influential industry players, including AOL, Dell, Google, McAfee, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

"The biggest concern for legitimate businesses at this point is related primarily to software bundling," said Palfrey. "There's often a complicated chain between the original purveyor of a program and the consumer, so companies need to be explicit about what they would qualify for badware-type behavior themselves and hold their partners to that."

Nonprofit group delays "$100 laptop," hikes cost (Reuters)

The One Laptop per Child Foundation's XO laptop will sell for about $188, up from the $176 the group announced in May, said foundation spokesman George Snell.

That's almost double the original goal of the foundation's founder, Nicholas Negroponte, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher and the brother of U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte.

Negroponte, who founded the MIT Media Lab, often refers to the product as the "$100 laptop."

Production, which was slated to begin this month, has been postponed to November so that the group can work out bugs in the final beta version of the green-and-white laptops, said foundation spokesman George Snell.

Some 40,000 units will be produced in November, then about 80,000 the following month, he said.

"We are testing it. We are making sure all the software works," he said. "We are making all the corrections on it that need to be made before the product comes out."

The foundation plans to sell the computers directly to governments, which will provide the laptops to grammar school children at no cost.

It has yet to announce any customers.

"We are not disclosing any orders until we have a final computer," Snell said. "We are in talks with dozens of countries."

The foundation has said it may sell the laptop on the commercial market as well, though at a higher price.

If the project is a success, it could pressure the rest of the computer industry to start offering similar machines.

The XO laptop uses a microprocessor from Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.N) and Linux software developed by Red Hat Inc (RHT.N).

Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O) has said that it is testing the machines to determine whether they are capable of running its Windows operating system.

Chipmaker Intel Corp (INTC.O) recently teamed up with the foundation saying the two might collaborate on a second generation version of the XO laptop.

Icahn calls for sale of BEA Systems: SEC filing (Reuters)

Icahn reported in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission that he holds a 8.53 percent stake in BEA, or about 33.43 million shares.

He said he intends to meet with BEA's management to discuss a potential sale, as well as meet with other large shareholders.

BEA shares jumped as much as 5 percent on the Icahn news, reaching $13.40. However, that was still below their 52-week high of $16.77, reached on October 31, 2006.

Icahn had previously reported that he held 7.94 million shares, or about a 2 percent stake, as of June 30.

He said in the filing on Friday that his funds "believe that a strategic acquirer could utilize greater resources and market presence than the Issuer to advantage the Issuer's innovative technology and thereby profit from higher revenue growth and the elimination of duplicative costs."

Icahn also said he believes that consolidation in the technology industry is leading to increased competition that may place independent software vendors at a competitive disadvantage.

He said he may seek to have BEA Systems hold an annual shareholder meeting, as one has not been held since July 2006, and may seek to nominate directors.

(Reporting by Karey Wutkowski)

Online Brokerage’s Customer Data Stolen

Famed `$100 laptop’ now $188 (AP)

Leaders of the nonprofit One Laptop Per Child that was spun out of MIT acknowledged Friday that the devices are now slated to cost $188 when mass production begins this fall. The last price the nonprofit announced was $176; it described $100 as a long-term goal.

Spokesman George Snell blamed the increase on a variety of factors, including currency fluctuations and rising costs of such components as nickel and silicon. He said the project was committed to keeping the price from rising above $190.

While less than $200 for an innovative, wireless-enabled, hand-powered laptop is a relative bargain, a price nearly twice what the project’s memorable nickname promised could make it harder for One Laptop Per Child to sign up international governments as customers. Those governments are expected to give the computers to children for them to keep and tinker with, which the project’s founders believe will cause critical thinking and creativity to blossom.

“Where does it end? It started out at $130, then it was $148, then it was $176, now it’s $188 — what’s next? $200?” said Wayan Vota, the former director of the Geekcorps international tech-development organization and current editor of the OLPCNews blog. “You have these governments who were looking at this original, fanciful $100-per-child figure, now we’re going up towards or maybe past $200.”

One Laptop Per Child says it has commitments for at least 3 million of its rugged “XO” computers, though it won’t disclose which countries are first in line. Among the nations that have shown interest are Brazil, Libya, Thailand and Uruguay.

The “XO” machines feature an open-source interface designed to be intuitive for children; a sunlight-readable display; very low power consumption; built-in wireless networking; and a pull cord for recharging by hand. The laptops are being made by Taiwan’s Quanta Computer Inc., the world’s leading manufacturer of portable computers.

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