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Patents a virtue for IBM By John G. SpoonerStaff Writer, CNET News.comJanuary 12, 2003, 9:00 PM PT IBM will announce on Monday that it was the top recipient of U.S. patents in 2002.Big Blue was awarded 3,288 patents during the past year, making it the top recipient among private sector companies for the 10th year in a row, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Canon ranked second during in 2002 with 1,893 patents. IBM has generated just over 22,000 patents during the last 10 years, but those patents have changed with the times, IBM researchers said. Many of...

<p>When Microsoft released Office XP and Windows XP with product activation embedded in both products, consumers and pundits alike responded with a gigantic hue and cry. Many Windows users were angry and felt betrayed by Microsoft. Others were uneasy and wondered whether product activation in Microsoft's products was a grim harbinger of things to come in the software industry.</p>

The author is a writer and consultant; he can be reached at www.thephotofinishes.com. As any one who has substantial technology investments in the stock market knows, IT spending has followed the dot.com bubble burst and is in the doldrums. North American shipments of PCs and servers were down by 5 per cent in 2001 and it looks like this year will barely scratch out 1- to 2-per-cent growth.The basic problem is that processing power is quickly approaching the point where it's an almost free resource as Moore's Law continues to deliver a doubling in computing power every 18 months; and...

When Fei Ye showed up at San Francisco International Airport on Nov. 23, 2001, holding a ticket for United Airlines Flight 857 to Shanghai, he may have appeared to be just another flyer heading to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Only a week before, Ye, a naturalized U.S. citizen originally from China, had requested family leave from his job at Transmeta in Santa Clara, Calif. His parents were ill, he told his boss, and he wanted to return home to care for them.The managers at Transmeta might have taken Ye’s planned China trip at face value—but one of Ye’s...

Friday, January 10, 2003 ©2003 Associated Press URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2003/01/10/financial1337EST0154.DTL (01-10) 10:37 PST (AP) -- LEXINGTON, Ky. (Dow Jones/AP) -- Lexmark International Inc. said a court issued a temporary order requiring Static Control Components Inc. to stop making and selling microchips that enable the use of off-brand toner cartridges in some Lexmark laser printers. Lexmark late Thursday said the order is in effect until its motion for a preliminary injunction is heard by the federal district court in Kentucky. Lexmark's complaint alleges the Smartek microchips incorporate infringing copies of Lexmark's software and are being sold by Static Control to defeat Lexmark's...

Army SmarTruck II Ready for Action The Army’s National Automotive Center (NAC) brought a counterterrorism SmarTruck II to the Auto Show in Detroit. A modified Chevrolet Silverado platform fitted with modules of counterterrorism equipment just might be the next big thing for homeland security.“SmarTruck II is engineered to meet the nontraditional challenges of today’s military,” said Dennis Wend, executive director of the Army Tank-automotive and Armaments Command’s National Automotive Center (NAC). “It provides built-in flexibility and offensive capability [for a variety of situations].” The jet black prototype SmarTruck II unveiled at the North American International Auto Show didn’t much look...

Ever since North Korea's dictator, Kim Jong-Il, broke bad -- acknowledging cheating on his promises to forego nuclear weapons and then doing so openly and in earnest -- government officials and others have been speculating about how fast the "Dear Leader" will be able to build up his stockpile. If he has two weapons now, will he have five or ten by this time next year? Some think Kim might be able to build as many as fifty over the next few years. Lost in the discussion to date is a dirty little secret: Whatever the number Pyongyang's weaponeers can...

Rochester Institute of Technology Next-generation Solar Cells Could Put Power Stations in Space RIT scientists develop nanomaterials for NASA program Someday, large-scale solar power stations in space could beam electricity to the surface of the moon, the earth and other planets, decreasing our dependence on a dwindling fossil-fuel supply. Scientists at Rochester Institute of Technology are developing the next generation of solar cells, advancing the technology that could put a solar power system into earth's orbit. The National Science Foundation recently awarded a three-year, $200,000 grant to Ryne Raffaelle and Thomas Gennett, co-directors of RIT's NanoPower Research Laboratory, to develop...

IBM, AMD to co-develop microprocessor technologies 8 Jan 2003, 3:28pm ET - - - - - (Updates throughout with background, executive, analyst comment, changes dateline, previous SUNNYVALE, Calif./EAST FISHKILL, N.Y.) By Elinor Mills Abreu SAN FRANCISCO, Jan 8 (Reuters) - International Business Machines Corp. (NYSE:IBM) and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NYSE:AMD) on Wednesday said they would jointly develop next-generation microprocessor technologies in a bid to keep pace with market leader Intel Corp.(NASDAQ:INTC) The details of the agreement, which extends a technology-sharing arrangement the two companies have had for the past several years, were not released. But the alliance will...

Intel introduces the Centrino family By John G. Spooner January 8, 2003, 7:46 AM PT Intel on Tuesday announced a new brand name for its next-generation mobile processor technology: Centrino. The new chip family, which includes the processor formerly known by the code name Banias, was designed to help manufacturers build notebooks that use less power and offer extended battery life, along with better wireless networking capabilities. Instead of just giving Banias a variation on the company's well-known Pentium moniker, Intel decided to set the family of chips apart with a completely new name. A few insiders at Intel had...

Manufacturers are forbidden by antitrust law to compel consumers to buy unwanted operating systems. At the outset, consumers should realize that manufacturers are forbidden by law to compel their customers to purchase an unwanted operating system as a prerequisite to buying a computer. This is because antitrust law makes illegal a practice known as "tying." Findlaw.com defines tying as "an arrangement or agreement in which a seller will sell a product to a buyer only if the buyer will also buy another product." Findlaw.com further discusses tying: Sellers with more than one product may seek to tie the sale of...

Red Hat beats Microsoft on TCO, and reaches profitability. What's next? After years of losses, Red Hat, Inc. announced its first quarterly profit ever last month. The company looks at a bright future, while others are struggling to survive. For Mark de Visser, Vice President of marketing with Red Hat, who sees an irreversible change in the market, this is no surprise. De Visser talks about the industry, the struggles in the company, the future of the industry, the community and the road ahead. The bottom line is clear the prospects for Free Software are good. Red Hat is anything...

Despite the recent strong rally in semiconductor stocks, some pundits continue to predict the demise of the technology industry as it has been known for the past half-decade. The good news is that many managers in the technology sector generally, and the semiconductor industry in particular, see demand for chips picking up in the first half of 2003. Such demand is driven mostly by consumer products rather than sales of personal computers (PCs), and thus tracks a recovering economy. The bad news is that the manufacturing capacity needed to make the latest types of microprocessors, including memory chips and processors...

Water way to run a network By Rene Millman [02-01-2003] Artist makes waves with H20/IP Streaming media has taken on a literal meaning, after an artist worked out a way of sending images between computers using water. Jonah Brucker-Cohen explained that the core technology behind the idea is a new internet protocol he has developed called H2O/IP. "H20/IP functions in a similar way as TCP/IP but focuses on the inherent viscous properties of water that are not present in traditional packet networks," he said. "These properties include fluidity, heat index, tri-state properties, density difference depending on state, and surface...

Combining concepts from electromagnetic radiation research and fiber optics, researchers have created an extreme-ultraviolet, laser-like beam capable of producing tightly-focused light in a region of the electromagnetic spectrum not previously accessible to scientists. Between 10-100 times shorter than visible light waves, the extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) wavelengths will allow researchers to "see" tiny features and carve miniature patterns, with applications in such fields as microscopy, lithography and nanotechnology. The achievement is based on a new structure called a "waveguide," a hollow glass tube with internal humps that coax light waves into traveling along at the same speed and help the waves reinforce...

IBM ASIC Technology Helps Power New Cray X1 Supercomputer 2 Jan 2003, 09:07am ET - - - - - 800 IBM ASIC Chips Feature Total Gate Count of 7.5 Billion IBM today announced that it is the sole application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology provider for the new Cray (NASDAQ: CRAY) X1 supercomputer, which is now being shipped to customers. The Cray supercomputer contains 800 IBM ASIC chips, designed by Cray exclusively for the X1 and manufactured by IBM. The chips feature gate counts as high as 14.2 million, an average gate count of about 9.5 million, and a...

Apple Files For Patent On Color Changing Cases, Geeks Freak Out [Updated] by Bryan Chaffin [Update: We'd like to thank Observer Daniel Koskinen for sending us a working link to the patent, which he found at MacFora.com. - Editor] This story comes to you via a circuitous route: We noted it on Slashdot, which cited MacDailyNews -- which, having been slashdotted, is inaccessible for the nonce -- who we think noted it from Ars Technica's forums, as that site's thread on the subject was started on Saturday. The story itself is that Apple has apparently filed for a new...

<p>A self-willed, 6-pound Frisbee on wheels probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you think of vacuuming the house, but that could change. Which shows that robots may be better if they're, well, sort of dumb.</p> <p>Roomba (www.roombavac.com/) is an automatic, battery-powered vacuum cleaner. You put it on the floor and go away. It earnestly rushes about, cleaning. When it has finished, it stops.</p>

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) . The Supreme Court has temporarily intervened in a fight over DVD copying, and the justices could eventually use the case to decide how easy it will be for people to post software on the Internet that helps others copy movies.</p>

For many in the northern hemisphere, the appearance of icicles adds a little sparkle to the holiday season and makes the fire seem that little bit warmer. But when ice storms strike as they did in Canada and the American north-east in 1998, power lines can become so encrusted with ice that they collapse, leaving millions without electricity. Surrounding every power line with a heating element is one option. But Victor Petrenko, at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, thinks he has a smarter idea - use the ice itself as the element. Working with a consortium of US and Canadian...