AMD to Raise $2 Billion in Debt to Pay for ATI
Last week, during its quarterly analysts' conference call, AMD announced it would undergo perhaps the most sizable restructuring in the company's history, and may take drastic measures along the way to heal the wounds to its financial structure.
Executives said we'd learn what some of those measures would be soon after they decided themselves. Today, we know one thing more than we knew last week: The company plans to raise about $2 billion in debt through the offering of convertible notes.
HP Lawsuit Against Acer Cites 1994 Compaq EISA Patent
A patent granted in 1994 to Compaq for an adaptation of its 16-bit EISA system bus architecture -- which Compaq co-created, but which was already becoming outmoded by 1994 -- is among four patents amended last Thursday to Hewlett-Packard's list of alleged infringement subjects, in its ongoing patent battle against oncoming competitor Acer.
Patent #5,353,415, for "Method and apparatus for concurrency of bus operations," explains how a computer's cache interface logic can be used to make posting cycles that would normally wait for one another in sequence, make room for one another in alternating concurrency. The technology is an outgrowth of Compaq's early work in pioneering the first 16-bit expansion busses.
Viacom Changes Video Takedown Policy, Prompting Lawsuit Dismissal
Claiming victory on behalf of fair use provisions of US Copyright Law, the Electronic Frontier Foundation - which had served as a mediator - announced this afternoon that documentary filmmaker Brave New Films and political activist group MoveOn.org have dismissed their lawsuit against Viacom. This after the content provider giant conceded that demands it had made for YouTube and other video sharing services to remove a promotional parody film the groups co-produced, featuring clips from "The Colbert Report" from Viacom's Comedy Central, was ill-advised and in error.
Letters from Viacom counsel in recent weeks to EFF attorney Fred von Lohmann, posted on EFF's Web site, reveal amendments to Viacom's stated policy for notifying YouTube and others of allegedly infringing video. "Viacom recognizes that the 'fair use' doctrine may permit some use of limited amounts of copyrighted material for specific purposes such as criticism, commentary, teaching or parody."
BlackBerry for Windows: Secure E-mail Coming to WM6
While less-than-technical observers have opined in recent months about the sudden ubiquitousness of the BlackBerry device, the truth is, only recently has it begun tapping into the power of the integrated handset. It has indeed proven the power of secure, portable e-mail (as well as how quickly it's missed when it goes down for a few hours), but manufacturer Research in Motion has decided it's time to penetrate the cell phone form factor.
RIM's forthcoming BlackBerry services for Windows Mobile 6 devices, announced this morning, appears designed to shore up defenses against an all-out assault from competitor Good Technology. When WM6 was announced a few months ago, Microsoft directly compared the appearance of its Mobile Outlook to that of BlackBerry's native applications, in order to attract customers who are expecting a more PC-like experience on their palmtops.
Apple Challenged Over Old Xerox UI Patent
AppleInsider's Aidan Malley broke the story over the weekend that portfolio licensing company IP Innovation, LLC has filed suit against Apple, Inc. in (where else?) Marshall, Texas, claiming to defend a graphical technique where multiple workspaces are divided into frames, between which the user can switch devices like tabs.
[Editor's Note: IP Innovation, LLC is not to be confused with IP Innovations, LLC (plural), a patent search services firm for prospective patent filers, based in Washington, DC.]
Anatomy of a Resurgence: IDC's Daoud on HP's Leap-frog Over Dell
Certain Dell PR managers must be infuriated. Last year, for Hewlett-Packard, it was the process of recovery from a costly CEO ouster that led to a boardroom scandal where members allegedly hired professional spies to break US terrorism laws to gain electronic access not only to other members but to the reporters they talked to.
For Dell, it was the outsourcing of its customer support center, a late product delivery on account of overheating, some public pictures of smoldering laptop batteries, and the matter of those stock option grants, the dynamics of which most people shouldn’t understand anyway. It should have been Watergate versus a batch of traffic tickets.
Payoff Time for Google as Juggernaut Business Model Rolls Ahead
Rarely in the history of American industry has such a young company been able to amass the company to potentially acquire two multi-billion dollar businesses in as many years' time. But the unparalleled Google business model showed every sign yesterday, in its quarterly earnings report, of being able to support what for others would be an impossible dream.
The beauty of it, from an analyst's perspective, is this: A billion dollars of profit for the quarter, on under $3.7 billion in revenue. Google doesn't really make a lot of money, but it earns a lot. Compare this to another player in the online search space, Yahoo, whose numbers earlier this week spoke volumes: $142 million in profit - less than the same quarter last year - on higher revenue of $1.67 billion.
AMD to Restructure, May Outsource More to IBM, Chartered
During a report of perhaps the worst quarter of performance in the company's history -- what its executives called a "perfect storm" -- AMD CEO Hector Ruiz revealed an extraordinary number of options are on the table for an unprecedented corporate restructuring.
Exploring the possibility of adopting an "asset-light" business model, AMD may go so far as to license manufacturing rights for its microprocessor designs to long-time partners IBM and Chartered Semiconductor, as well as expand its licensing relationship -- one many didn't know AMD actually had -- with Intel.
AMD Suffers 'Major Setback,' Losses of Another Half-Billion Dollars
In what AMD President and COO Dirk Meyer called a "major setback in the strategic transformation of our company," AMD posted an historic loss for a microprocessor company, admitting an "unacceptable" hemorrhage of $504 million for the first quarter of this year, on revenue of $1.23 billion - a 7% drop annually, and a 30% drop over the previous quarter.
CPU shipments were down in all segments for the quarter, very sharply, with gross margin plunging to an abysmal 31%. AMD had already reported a $529 million loss in the fourth quarter of 2006.
Visual Studio 'Orcas' Enters Beta 1; .NET Framework 3.5 Released
After two community technology previews whose purpose was to warm up developers to the new foundation-based programming models intended for use with Windows Vista (although Vista's release ended up coming first), the next edition of Microsoft Visual Studio, code-named "Orcas," officially entered Beta 1 today.
At last, developers concerned over what they saw as a reticence on Microsoft's part to support Windows Communication Foundation -- the next generation of Web services -- will be gratified to discover Orcas Beta 1 will indeed support WCF.
HP Surge Continues; Vista Credited with Spurring PC Growth
The surprise in yesterday's numbers from IDC's Quarterly PC Tracker was not so much the continued rise in global market share for the world's new #1 supplier, Hewlett-Packard. It was that PC market growth grew at an annual rate a full 2.4 points faster than what IDC had predicted, well into the double-digit range at 10.9%.
And despite recent comments from executives from both Intel and AMD, who either nicely or bluntly qualified Windows Vista's consumer launch last January as a wash for their sales numbers, IDC analyst Loren Loverde credited Vista with giving the market a boost - one which he says is likely to keep on producing double-digit growth over the next two years.
Microsoft Extends Linux Covenant to Samsung
Late yesterday, Samsung and Microsoft jointly announced they had reached a broad cross-licensing arrangement to share patented technologies, in a move which Microsoft says was part of an effort to extend licenses for its technology to hardware manufacturers that deploy Linux and UNIX in software.
Cash will apparently be exchanged between the two companies, although the amounts may never be known. But the deal could set a precedent that may raise even more questions among the Linux community, especially over whether Microsoft should be licensing its technology ostensibly so others can use not Windows, but Linux.
DNS Exploit Used to Plant Backdoor on Windows Servers
Security engineers are confirming that customers whose Windows servers were confirmed penetrated by a version of the recent DNS service exploit, were infected by any of three variants of backdoor worms identified by Sophos as W32/Delbot.
Sophos believes this to be a variant of the same worm that infected systems susceptible to vulnerabilities discovered in Symantec Anti-virus software late last year. In fact, versions of the worm that infect systems through the DNS service exploit are capable of spreading themselves via the Symantec exploit as well, along with other buffer overflow exploits.
Patent Reform Legislation Aims to End Massive Settlement Fees
In a move intended to end what so-called "counterproductive legislation" that they claim stifle US innovation and possibly drive technology development efforts overseas, congressmen from both parties and both houses simultaneously introduced equivalent bills to fundamentally change US patent law.
In a statement read into the Congressional Record this morning, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D - VT) - the patent reform bill's principal co-sponsor - introduced his legislation as a fundamental change in the nation's patent system, commensurate with patent systems around the world. It would replace current law which favors individuals who are proven to be the first inventors of a certain art, with a "first-to-file" system that awards patents to the first applicants.
Sun's McNealy Proposes Merging ODF with Chinese Counterpart
In a trade conference convened earlier this week by the Chinese Ministry of Commerce, Sun Microsystems Chairman Scott McNealy suggested that what he described as the world's #2 and #3 office document formats - OpenDocument Format (ODF) and the Chinese standard Uniform Office Format (UOF) - could go up against the #1 format from Microsoft more effectively if they were to be merged.
The news comes from Andy Updegrove, a respected Massachusetts attorney and a member of the board of directors of the Linux Foundation, who is a featured speaker at this conference and who attended McNealy's keynote speech. As Updegrove reports on his ConsortiumInfo.org blog, McNealy's suggestion appears to be the first signal made by any ODF proponent of that side's willingness to partner with one of Asia's burgeoning business standards.
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