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Dean Takahashi sent me an e-mail pointing to a piece he wrote on VentureBeat describing statements Wednesday by Intel's Chief Technical Officer Justin Rattner targeted at NVIDIA. CNET's own Brooke Crothers covered the same story and provides additional background here.

Intel Chief Technology Officer Justin R. Rattner

(Credit: Intel)

The technology at issue relates to 3D graphics for PCs. All current PC graphics chips use what's called polygon-order rendering. All of the polygons that make up the objects to be displayed are processed one at a time. The graphics chip figures out where each polygon should appear on the screen and how much of it will be visible or obstructed by other polygons.

Ray tracing achieves similar results by working through each pixel on the screen, firing off a "ray" (like a backward ray of light) that bounces off the polygons until it reaches a light source in the scene. Ray tracing produces natural lighting effects but takes a lot more work.

(That's the short version, anyway. For more details, you could dig up a copy of my 1997 book Beyond Conventional 3D. Alas, the book is long since out of print.)

Ray tracing is easily implemented in software on a general-purpose CPU, and indeed, most of the computer graphics you see in movies and TV commercials are generated this way, using rooms full of PCs or blade-server systems.

Naturally, Intel loves ray tracing, and there are people at Intel working to ... Read more

CBS has agreed to acquire CNET Networks in a deal valued at $1.8 billion, the companies said Thursday.

The purchase price comes to $11.50 per share, representing a 44 percent premium over Wednesday's closing price of $7.95.

The acquisition will make CBS one of the 10 most popular Internet companies in the United States, with a combined 54 million unique users per month, and about 200 million users worldwide, the companies said.

The deal is expected to close in the third quarter. CNET's board has unanimously approved the deal, the company said.

Based in San Francisco, CNET Networks-owned sites include CNET, ZDNet, GameSpot, TV.com, MP3.com, CNET News.com, UrbanBaby, CHOW, Search.com, BNET, MySimon, and TechRepublic.

CNET Networks, News.com's publisher, recently announced a partnership with Yahoo to provide technology news and reviews to the search company. The companies also agreed to allow Yahoo to sell display ads on CNET properties and for CNET to sell ads alongside the content it provides on Yahoo sites.

CNET has been involved in a fight over control of its board with Jana Partners.

CNET Networks, News.com's parent company, on Thursday announced a three-year strategic partnership with Yahoo under which CNET will be a third-party content provider of technology news and reviews.

The partnership also allows for Yahoo to sell display ads on CNET properties and for CNET to sell ads alongside the content it provides on Yahoo sites.

"Working together, we have the ability to build more robust content environments and more comprehensive programs for our marketing partners," CNET CEO Neil Ashe said in a press release.

The announcement was made as CNET reported its quarterly earnings, a net loss of $6.1 million, or 4 cents per share, compared with a net loss of $9.1 million, or 6 cents per share, in the year-ago period. Reuters said the per-share loss was in line with Wall Street estimates, but net revenue of $91.4 million fell short of analysts' average expectation for $93.4 million.

CNET has also been in the news of late because the hedge fund Jana Partners is trying to take control of its board.

Jana Partners, the hedge fund trying to take control of the board of online-media company CNET Networks, publisher of News.com, on Thursday said a court ruled that the investors have a right to nominate seven directors to the company's board and to propose expansion of the board by five members.

CNET in January said the efforts of a group of activist investors led by Jana, to nominate two directors to the company's board and expand it to 13 seats, were improper under CNET's bylaws.

Jana partnered with Sandell Asset Management, Paul Gardi of Alex Interactive Media, Spark Capital, and Velocity Interactive Group to seek changes at the company.

Jana took the matter to the Delaware Court of Chancery, challenging CNET's interpretation of its bylaws. CNET said it is reviewing the court's written opinion and considering an appeal.

Yahoo will announce that it has acquired Maven Networks, a video-hosting startup, according to a report in the blog TechCrunch.

Citing three unnamed sources, TechCrunch reported that Yahoo has paid about $150 million for the start-up and will announce the deal Thursday or Friday.

Cambridge, Mass.-based Maven Neworks helps media companies present video content on their Web sites. Among the company's customers are Fox News, CBS Sports and CNET Networks, parent company of News.com.

A Yahoo spokesperson declined to comment on "rumor and speculation." Representatives from Maven could not be reached for comment.

Rocker Trent Reznor is angry with CNET News.com.

On Monday afternoon, the leader of the band Nine Inch Nails posted a blog at NIN.com and accused me of misquoting him in a question-and-answer interview titled: "Trent Reznor: Why won't people pay $5." He suggests in his post that he did not make statements supporting a music tax on ISPs that appeared in the January 10 article. He also implies that CNET had some kind of hidden agenda when he writes in his post that the story was "written before I was involved."

It's not uncommon for celebrities and politicians to accuse the press of misquoting them. Sometimes it's true. Not here.

Below is the recording of Reznor's comments in question.

Reznor gave me permission to tape the interview and the words in the story are as he said them. I've also included what was said immediately prior and following the comments about the ISP tax so you can hear the context in which he made them.

You'll notice that I didn't quote everything he said; that's common practice. (We spoke for an hour and the final transcription of the interview was more than 4,000 words long. Normally our stories are between 1,000 and 1,200 words. We wanted to give him as much room as possible to speak and made an exception by publishing his interview at more than 1,800 words, already longer than usual.)

Reznor is a fascinating interview. He is frank and always says something controversial. He certainly was in our interview. Click the button below and listen for yourself.

Earlier this year the National Football League (NFL) announced new "security" rules requiring that all professional photographers wear NFL-issued red vests or lose their stadium access. What the photographers discovered was that these NFL-issued vests also carried the Canon logo, and that has led to outrage and protests across the professional community. Turns out that outrage was justified.

CNET Channel has announced that it is partnering with Microsoft to help consumers purchase Windows-supported products with ease and little hesitation. Just what I wanted from my unbiased, neutral news broker.

CNET Channel's high-quality, accurate and consistent product content helps over 2,100 high-technology manufacturers and channel businesses in 35 national markets drive their online businesses and increase sales effectiveness. As an aggregator of best-of-breed content and e-commerce services, CNET Channel will now deliver 'Certified for Windows Vista' and 'Works with Windows Vista' logo information ... Read more

Like so much else on the Internet, you have to be skeptical about the star ratings of software. Perhaps you suspected this, but now there is proof.

A software developer in the U.K., Andy Brice, was suspicious about the ratings assigned to his software, so he did a test--a lab experiment if you will. He started with a plain text file that said "this program does nothing at all" a few times. Then he renamed the file so that it ended with ".exe" and submitted it to 1,033 download sites. The "program," if you can call it that, won't even run.

Being as obvious as he possibly could, Andy called the program "awardmestars" and included a description of the program that said, "This software does nothing at all." He even included a screenshot that said very plainly that the software does nothing. See his blog for the full details: The software awards scam.

Andy says his nonfunctional software was listed on 218 Web sites, and some even gave him an award. "Approximately 7 percent of the sites that listed the software e-mailed me that it had won an award," he said. His submission was rejected by 421 Web sites, but since he listed it as a utility, many of these rejections were because the site didn't include that type of software. Many submissions are still pending.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, take a look at a screenshot of awardmestars version 1.0 at Topshareware.com where it was certified as having no spyware, adware or viruses. The user reviews are hilarious. PC World magazine listed it originally, but has since withdrawn their listing. As I write this, however, the listing at PC World as of August 15, 2007 at 17:01:08 GMT is still available in the Google cache.

Trustworthy software downloads

Andy mentioned three Web sites where a human being obviously reviewed the software because they wrote back to him, either appreciating the joke or being annoyed by it. The sites were Filecart.com, Freshmeat.net and Download-tipp.de. He considers the fact that a human responded to him sufficient to recommend these sites. I consider it just the first step.

In his Security Fix column in the Washington Post, Brian Krebs wrote about this today (Beware of Five-Star Vaporware) and concluded with " ... I've never strayed far beyond a handful of sites that I have come to know fairly well, such as CNET's Download.com, SourceForge.net and Tucows.com."

If you want to judge CNET's Download.com Web site, which I trusted for years before having any involvement with the company, then see:

• CNET Download: How we test and rate
• How we test for adware and spyware

Here is a quote from the first page above:

"In addition to screening for common viruses and spyware, we look for other threats that might interfere with our users' security, privacy, and control. When evaluating a submission, we consider publisher Web sites, publisher conduct, and our own experience with a particular product."

It's a cruel world out there.