Business Tech

Spansion, Kodak file patent suits against Samsung

Spansion and Kodak slammed Samsung with two separate patent infringement lawsuits Monday.

Spansion, one of the world's largest suppliers of flash memory chips, on Monday announced it has filed two patent infringement complaints against Samsung with the International Trade Commission and in the U.S. District Court in Delaware.

Spansion is seeking the exclusion from the U.S. market of more than 100 million MP3 players, cell phones, digital cameras, and other consumer electronics devices containing Samsung's allegedly infringing flash memory components.

The complaint also seeks an injunction and treble damages for alleged patent violations relating to Samsung … Read more

Transmeta finds a buyer

Transmeta, a company that once hoped to rival Intel and Advanced Micro Devices to power portable computers, announced Monday that it would sell itself to Novafora for $255.6 million in cash.

Novafora said it hopes to use Transmeta's people and technology in its video processing chips.

"Transmeta's innovative technology and the expertise of its employees are valuable additions to Novafora," Novafora CEO Zaki Rakib said in a statement.

For their part, shareholders are expected to receive between $18.70 and $19 for each Transmeta share they own. The deal was unanimously approved by Transmeta's … Read more

Adobe bringing full-fledged Flash to phones

SAN FRANCISCO--Inspired by a new generation of smartphones, Adobe Systems has begun a new, higher-power effort to spread its Flash technology to mobile devices.

The company has worked for years on a lightweight incarnation of its Flash technology for mobile phones, but it now is working to bring the full-fledged Flash Player 10 to higher-end smartphones, Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch said at Adobe's Max conference here.

"We are in the midst of evolving Flash Player 10 for mobile," Lynch said. "We're taking the full Flash Player and making that run on the higher end … Read more

Gartner: 85 percent of companies using open source

Eighty-five percent of companies are already using open-source software, with most of the remaining 15 percent expecting to do so within the next year, according to analysts at Gartner.

However, only 31 percent of companies surveyed by the analyst house had formal policies for evaluating and procuring open-source software (OSS). Gartner conducted its survey of 274 end-user organizations across the Asia/Pacific, Europe, and North American markets in May and June, and announced the results on Monday.

Respondents to the survey consistently pointed to cost as a prime motivator for their adoption of open source, with some also suggesting OSS … Read more

Finalized speedy USB 3.0 spec debuts

25GB in 70 seconds. That's the torrid transfer rate consumers can expect with devices based on the USB 3.0 specification, which debuted Monday.

As reported previously, the USB Promoter Group finalized the "SuperSpeed" USB 3.0 specification today and is doing a "comprehensive review" of the technology at a conference in San Jose, Calif.

Intel, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, and NEC are the leading players in the group.

Among the initial devices, external solid-state (flash) drives and hard drives are expected to be popular. "The first SuperSpeed USB devices will likely include data storage devices such as flash (solid-state drives), external hard drives, digital music players, and digitial cameras," the group said.

Products aren't coming until 2010, however. "It is anticipated that initial SuperSpeed USB discrete controllers will appear in the second half of 2009 and consumer products will appear in 2010," according to the group.

"The USB 3.0 Promoter Group is now accepting adopters of the USB 3.0 specification, which has been finalized at the 1.0 level," the group added.

As its name (SuperSpeed) implies, USB 3.0 is all about speed. About 10 times more speed, to be exact, than the 2.0 specification. … Read more

Roadrunner outraces supercomputer rivals

Correction, 10:38 a.m. PST: This story misidentified the maker of the Power processor. The maker is IBM.

Jaguar vs. Roadrunner. It could be a new Saturday morning cartoon, or a Hollywood franchise to replace an Alien vs. Predator series that surely must have run its course by now.

But no. It is instead a shorthand for the two fastest supercomputers in the world, as reported in the latest Top500 listing, released Monday in conjunction with the SC08 conference in Austin, Texas.

First place went to Roadrunner, an IBM supercomputer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Its performance in … Read more

Adobe answers cries for 64-bit Flash on Linux

Starting to answer the clamorous demand from open-source fans, Adobe Systems plans to release an alpha version of its Flash Player technology on Monday for those using 64-bit Linux software.

Linux has moved more rapidly than Windows or Mac OS X to support 64-bit processors, in part because the developer-friendly compile-your-own-software ethos that prevails makes it easier for the technically savvy to make the switch. But one of the obstacles in the switch is that people could only use the 32-bit Flash plug-in, which meant that they only could use the 32-bit version of Firefox.

The company plans to release … Read more

Adobe wants to bridge gap between PCs and cloud

Adobe Systems wants to have it both ways.

Microsoft's power with programmers is tethered to desktops and laptops, the vast majority of which run Windows. Google is trying to dominate what it believes is the new frontier, cloud computing, where applications run on the Web. Adobe, though, is trying to run down the middle with a strategy that touches on both domains.

"It's a balance of the client and cloud together that makes for the most effective applications and the best development," said Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch, who's planning to speak on the subject in a keynote speech Monday at the company's Max conference in San Francisco.

Since Adobe's $3.4 billion Macromedia acquisition in 2005, programming technology has been rising in importance within a company that got its start with publishing software such as Photoshop. The technology that brought the two companies together, Flash, will hog the spotlight at the conference.

Flash got its start as a way to give Web pages animations and basic applications such as games, but it's grown up since then. The Flex technology has given developers a more mature programming model, and the addition of video-streaming abilities to the Flash Player that's plugged into the vast majority of Web browsers has given Adobe's technology incumbent status. Who can live online without YouTube?

Adobe is still working on Flash, releasing Flash Player 10, aka Astro, in October. At Max, though, a Flash cousin called AIR--the Adobe Integrated Runtime--will share the stage with the release of version 1.5.

Flash and AIR are key to bridging the cloud-PC gap. For example, Adobe has launched an online Photoshop.com service, where members can upload, edit, and share photos. The site uses Flash to run the processing-intensive editing software on people's own computers, not Adobe's servers, Lynch said.

"Our operational costs for hosting that application are much lower than if we had server-side processing," and users get better performance, Lynch said.

But Flash still lives largely within the browser. Adobe hopes to uproot it with AIR, a "runtime" foundation for housing applications. AIR runs Flash programs but also has a built-in engine for showing Web pages and for running programs written in JavaScript, which is widely used for Web-based applications. And AIR is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and programmers who write AIR applications don't have to worry about what operating system is on a person's computer. … Read more

Intel Core i7 chip launches in Tokyo

Irasshaimase! Stores in Tokyo districts such as Akihabara have launched sales of Intel's Core i7 processor, due to be officially rolled out at U.S. resellers on Monday.

Computerworld reported that "several hundred people crowded stores" that opened around 10 p.m. Saturday. The top-of-the-line 965 chip sold out, according to one retailer.

The Core i7 represents the vanguard of Intel's new Nehalem microarchitecture. The i7 is a desktop processor targeted initially at gaming boxes.

(See CNET review of Falcon Northwest Mach V tower system based on Core i7-965 processor.)

Sofmap, a large Japanese computer reseller, … Read more