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Potential backlash from failed Sun-IBM negotiations could include a distraction by Sun's management and board in justifying their decision to reject an offer with a high premium, rather than focus on their struggling business, Sacconaghi noted.

The IBM-Sun buyout talks durig the last two week of March, the end of Sun's quarter, could make its fiscal third quarter challenging, given that up to 40 percent of Sun's revenue is generated in the last two weeks of a quarter, Sacconaghi stated in his report, noting customers are likely to have lingering concerns about Sun's future.

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LAKE FOREST, Calif., March 30 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Western Digital Corp. (NYSE: WDC), a world leader in hard drive storage for computing and consumer electronics applications, today announced that it has completed a $65 million cash acquisition of SiliconSystems, Inc., Aliso Viejo, Calif., a leading supplier of solid-state drives for the embedded systems market.

Since its inception in 2002, SiliconSystems has sold millions of SiliconDrive products to meet the high performance, high reliability and multi-year product lifecycle demands of the network-communications, industrial, embedded-computing, medical, military and aerospace markets. These markets accounted for approximately one third of worldwide solid-state drive revenues in 2008. SiliconSystems’ product portfolio includes solid-state drives with SATA, EIDE, PC Card, USB and CF interfaces in 2.5-inch, 1.8-inch, CF and other form factors. SiliconSystems has developed extensive intellectual property to address the stringent embedded systems market requirements to ensure data integrity, eliminate unscheduled downtime, protect application data and software and provide for data security and protection through its patented and patent-pending PowerArmor, SiSMART, SolidStor and SiSecure technologies.

WD’s storage industry leadership, worldwide infrastructure, and technical and financial resources will enable further growth in SiliconSystems’ existing markets and customer relationships. SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will provide additional building blocks for future products to address emerging opportunities in WD’s existing markets.

“We are delighted to have the SiliconSystems team join WD,” said John Coyne, president and CEO of WD. “The combination will be modestly accretive to revenue and margins as a result of SiliconSystems’ existing position as a trusted supplier to the well-established $400 million market for embedded solid-state drives. SiliconSystems’ intellectual property and technical expertise will significantly accelerate WD’s solid-state drive development programs for the netbook, client and enterprise markets, providing greater choice for our customers to satisfy all their storage requirements.”

Integration into WD begins immediately, with SiliconSystems now becoming known as the WD Solid-State Storage business unit, complementing WD’s existing Branded Products, Client Storage, Consumer Storage and Enterprise Storage business units.

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Comcast said Wednesday afternoon that it hasn't changed its policy. An executive who spoke at the same conference as Cicconi told the audience that the company has sent 2 million notices on behalf of content owners. A company representative said the company has no plans to test "a so-called 'three-strikes-and-you're-out' policy."

But music industry sources told CNET that Comcast has agreed to cooperate with the RIAA in other ways.

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In March 2009 SuperTalent introduced its UltraDrive series to market. This whitepaper outlines some of the performance testing done by SuperTalent showing the outstanding performance of the UltraDrive series. Both UltraDrive series achieved Sequential Read and Write speeds as high as 250MB/sec on the ATTO benchmark. With IOMETER the UltraDrive ME measured over 10,000 Sequential Read IOPS and nearly 16000 Sequential Write IOPS and 6500 Random Read IOPS and around 4000 Random Write IOPS. The UltraDrive LE series (SLC Flash) results were even better for Sequential Write, and Random Read and Write, yielding over 13,000 Sequential Read IOPS and nearly 7500 Random Read IOPS and 5000-6000 Random Write IOPS. Compared to a standard 7200RPM HDD from Seagate the 128GB UltraDrive ME lowered boot time by nearly 70 percent; booting the system in just over 9 seconds vs. nearly 30 seconds. Although the UltraDrives are available in densities ranging from 32GB to 256GB this whitepaper will focus on the performance of the 54-256GB Density Products.

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Based here in San Francisco, OnLive timed its formal unveiling to this week's Game Developers Conference, where it will be showcasing the technology and 16 initial games it will launch with. The service is currently in a closed beta, but is expected to go into a public beta this summer, and to launch this winter. According to Perlman, OnLive's technology will make it possible to stream the games in such a manner--high quality, no matter what kind of system the user has--by virtue of a series of patented and patent-pending compression technologies. And instead of requiring users to download the games, OnLive will host them all and stream them from a series of the highest-end servers. Users will have only to download a 1MB plug-in to get the service up and running.

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It finally looks like we have unofficial confirmation of the DSi's virtual console.

Check out Kombo for the whole story, but the highlight--as I'm sure we can all agree, is the revelation that the DSi will allow you to download Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games.

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For AMD, the 2001 Intel agreement allows it to manufacture chips using Intel's X86 design and rely on chip foundries for up to 20 percent of their total manufacturing capacity. Intel, meanwhile, receives royalties from AMD, under the deal. The companies, despite their heated legal battles over antitrust matters, have had a long-standing patent and licensing relationship, going back to 1976. But this latest turn of events could result in a change in that relationship. AMD, in its filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, said Intel sent it a letter that alleges AMD: Committed a material breach of the Cross License through the creation of the company's Global Foundries joint venture and purports to terminate the company's rights and licenses under the cross license in 60 days if the alleged breach has not been corrected.

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There you go, folks. Reductio ad absurdum: a company is a machine, or at least analogous to one, kinda sorta like one. Therefore any process or method they come up with to do business would be patentable, presumably, in that universe. Well. Could someone please patent what Wall Street just did to the economy, and then refuse to license the "invention", so as to prevent those dudes from ever doing it again? Or just patent flaming greed, will you, somebody? Do the rest of us a favor and get it off the table or at least constrained.

The court rejected that claim about a company being analogous to a machine, but Justice Pauline Newman, while agreeing with the majority, nevertheless argued that it's good for the economy to have business methods patents, so we shouldn't go too far in limiting them. *Too far*?!

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The company says its software and chips allow graphics chips to carry out ray-tracing calculations at a 20-fold speed-up compared with existing PC hardware. It said it expects to deliver chips by early 2010 that will be about 200 times faster. In a demonstration, Caustic executives manipulated a photo-quality image of a sports car, removing components and changing lighting and background settings to change reflections on the vehicle's surface.