Worst nightmare of Intel - Official Investigation by FTC

It is the first blow for the processor giant. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which supervises free trade in the U.S., announced that it was launching a formal antitrust investigation against Intel.  The stakes are high for both Intel and AMD; the total market for microprocessors racked up $225 billion in sales last year.

I can here the cheer at the AMD Headquarters and so do I. Yes I am an AMD Freak. Intel's Nehalem has been bothering AMD since its release and also the recent lost battles against Intel are a big wound in AMD.

The announcement has turned to be the much sought medicine to get AMD ready for the next battle. Both the companies have spends have spend tens of millions of $$$ in Legal issues and PR.

William E. Kovacic, the new chairman of the trade commission, the successor of Deborah P. Majoras, with the backing of some of the fellow commissioners has drawn first blood !! Majoras was a more lenient appointee, and helped work out the antitrust settlement in 2001 with Microsoft.  D. Bruce Sewell, Intel’s senior vice president and general counsel, says that the U.S. antitrust laws are different than European ones, and it will not be charged. Intel is planning on racking up its Capitol Hill efforts, though, likely in the form of lobbyist dollars.

AMD's top executives expressed their pleasure over the Commission's decision. Tom McCoy, executive vice president for legal affairs at AMD, stated, "Intel must now answer to the Federal Trade Commission, which is the appropriate way to determine the impact of Intel practices on U.S. consumers and technology businesses. In every country around the world where Intel’s business practices have been investigated, including the decision by South Korea this week, antitrust regulators have taken action."

The largest U.S. antitrust investigation since the Microsoft one of the 90s came the same week as more good news for AMD; Korean officials slammed Intel with a $25 million fine for violating its fair trade laws. The Korean officials discovered that Intel illegally paid Samsung Electronics and the Trigem Company $37 million in payments between 2002 and 2005 to not buy AMD processors. The European Union's European Commission (EC), which charged Intel with "the aim of excluding its main rival from the market" is expected to expand its charges this year.

Intel currently owns somewhere between 80 to 90 percent of the worldwide microprocessor market. Many U.S. citizens do not realize that U.S. laws do allow monopolies, unlike elsewhere, but forbid companies with a monopoly from using its dominance to restrict competition.

With mounting evidence worldwide, Intel faces a tough case before the FTC. However, it will likely do what it takes, or perhaps more aptly write the lobbyist checks needed to prevent it from becoming the next Microsoft. Meanwhile, AMD will also likely step up its efforts in hopes that it can stop its downhill slide by a court victory over Intel

Million $$$ Question - Will the world end in 2012 ?

It is time to break the silence. A lot of gossip and chit chat is going on about the world ending in 2012. Lots of reasons are laid down by experts from various fields. Be it religious, astronomic, scientific, geological... You name it and the experts have reasons. I would like to share with you my views about this...

Mayan Calendar

Before we see about the reason laid by the Mayan calendar, lets refresh our idea about Mayans...

The Mayans were a bloodthirsty race and were good at two things:

• Building highly accurate astrological equipment out of stone
• Sacrificing Virgins.

The Mayan Calendar is something profoundly different than just a system to mark off the passage of time. The Mayan Calendar is above all a prophetic calendar that may help us understand the past and foresee the future. It is a calendar of the Ages that describes how the progression of Heavens and Underworlds condition the human consciousness and thus the frames for our thoughts and actions within a given Age. Thousands of years ago they managed to calculate the length of the lunar moon as 329.53020 days, only 34 seconds out!
The Mayan Calendar is not predicting the end of the world 2012, but the start of a new era; the golden age.

More : Here

Sun Storms

Solar experts from around the world monitoring the sun have made a startling discovery: our sun is in a bit of strife. The energy output of the sun is, like most things in nature, cyclic, and it's supposed to be in the middle of a period of relative stability. However, recent solar storms have been bombarding the Earth with so much radiation energy, it's been knocking out power grids and destroying satellites.

When the solar cycle reaches its peak in 2012, it will hurl at Earth mammoth solar storms with intense radiation and clouds of high-speed subatomic particles millions of miles across, the scientists said. Dikpati's forecast puts Solar Max at 2012. Hathaway believes it will arrive sooner, in 2010 or 2011.

The key to the mystery, Dikpati realized years ago, is a conveyor belt on the sun.

We have something similar here on Earth—the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt, popularized in the sci-fi movie The Day After Tomorrow. It is a network of currents that carry water and heat from ocean to ocean--see the diagram below. In the movie, the Conveyor Belt stopped and threw the world's weather into chaos.

The sun's conveyor belt is a current, not of water, but of electrically-conducting gas. It flows in a loop from the sun's equator to the poles and back again. Just as the Great Ocean Conveyor Belt controls weather on Earth, this solar conveyor belt controls weather on the sun. Specifically, it controls the sunspot cycle.

 

More Here

The Atom Smasher

Scientists in Europe have been building the world's largest particle accelerator. Basically its a 27km tunnel designed to smash atoms together to find out what makes the Universe tick. However, the mega-gadget has caused serious concern, with some scientists suggesting that it's properly even a bad idea to turn it on in the first place. They're predicting all manner of deadly results, including mini black holes. So when this machine is fired up for its first serious experiment in 2012, the world could be crushed into a super-dense blob the size of a basketball!

More Here

The Bible says...

If having scientists warning us about the end of the world isn't bad enough,religious folks are getting in on the act as well. Interpretations of the Christian Bible reveal that the date for Armageddon, the final battle between Good an Evil, has been set down for 2012. The I Ching, also known as the Chinese book of Changes, says the same thing, as do various sections of the Hindu teachings.

Super Volcano

Yellowstone National Park in the United States is famous for its thermal springs and Old Faithful geyser. The reason for this is simple - it's sitting on top of the world's biggest volcano, and geological experts are beginning to get nervous sweats. The Yellowstone volcano has a pattern of erupting every 650,000 years or so, and we're many years overdue for an explosion that will fill the atmosphere with ash, blocking the sun and plunging the Earth into a frozen winter that could last up to 15,000 years. The pressure under the Yellowstone is building steadily, and geologists have set 2012 as a likely date for the big bang.

The Physicists

This one's case of bog-simple maths mathematics. Physicists at Berkeley University  have been crunching the numbers. and they've determined that the Earth is well overdue for a major catastrophic event. Even worse, they're claiming their calculations prove, that we're all going to die, very soon - while also saying their prediction comes with a certainty of 99 percent- and 2012 just happens to be the best guess as to when it occurs.

Slip-Slop-Slap-BANG!

We all know the Earth is surrounded by a magnetic field that shields us from most of the sun's radiation. What you might not know is that the magnetic poles we call north and south have a nasty habit of swapping places every 750,000 years or so - and right now we're about 30,000 years overdue. Scientists have noted that the poles are drifting apart roughly 20-30kms each year, much faster than ever before, which points to a pole-shift being right around the corner. While the pole shift is underway, the magnetic field is disrupted and will eventually disappear, sometimes for up to 100 years. The result is enough UV outdoors to crisp your skin in seconds, killing everything it touches.

Disclaimer: This is a collection of ideas from various web sites. I personally feel the world is not going to end in 2012.

Windows 7 would be Tweaked Windows Vista

Last week, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) gave a teeny, tiny bit of information about the successor to Windows Vista, currently named Windows 7. There wasn't a lot of real meaty data in its disclosures, but it said enough to reset any expectations you might have that Windows 7 would be a radical departure from Windows Vista.

The biggest clue about the necessarily modest goals of Windows 7 is the time frame. In the team blog, Chris Flores says it's "still on track to ship approximately three years after the general availability of Windows Vista." Since Vista became available in November 2006 for businesses and January 2007 for consumers, the company has a few months of leeway built into that goal. However, Vista has been a slow seller. Microsoft would be best served financially by having Windows 7 ready by the 2009 holiday season. That would mean Windows 7 needs to be wrapped up by September 2009 so that OEMs can test and preload systems for retail sale.

Here we are in June 2008, about 18 months from that date, and Microsoft hasn't shown its Windows 7 work to the public so far. We knew a lot more about Vista when it was 18 months from ship -- of course, that was because it slipped several times so we didn't know it was 18 months away at the time. If Microsoft really wants to meet that date while still providing a product that's faster and more compatible than Vista, it doesn't have a time to add major new features. Windows 7 will not be nearly as disruptive as Vista was to XP.

So what will be in Windows 7? We can expect to see a few new trimmings such as Internet Explorer 8.0, and probably a new version of Media Player. There will be an obligatory new default UI theme so that users will know they're not running XP or Vista. The most important changes will probably be tweaks to excise the bloat and performance hiccups that Vista introduced into the Windows foundation. Perhaps Microsoft will finally provide some tools that help users and developers determine which software and drivers are clogging the system; they got tantalizingly close to that with Vista's performance event logging, but it requires too much sleuthing to connect the dots and find the culprit.

The development of Vista was a major a nightmare for Microsoft; it started out with incredibly ambitious goals and ended up totally resetting those goals in the middle of the process. It cannot afford to let that happen again. The best way to guarantee a firm ship date is to set modest goals for Windows 7 and avoid risky features or major changes to the operating system. Vista may not be as far from that goal as it appears; Windows Server 2008 is built on the same foundation but is much faster. The success or failure of Windows 7 will depend on how well Microsoft does those tweaks.