SANTA CLARA, Calif., Sept. 1, 2005 - Intel Corporation today filed its response to a lawsuit recently initiated by Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) regarding Intel’s business practices. In the response, Intel refutes AMD’s claims and states that its business practices are both fair and lawful.

The Intel response explains that AMD’s claims are factually incorrect and contradictory. In addition, AMD’s complaint — by attempting to impede Intel’s ability to lower its prices — would hurt consumers, not help them.

“Innovation, investment, customer focus and great products have led to Intel’s success over the years,” said Bruce Sewell, Intel general counsel. “These are the things that have been fundamental to our decision making as we’ve sought to move the industry and the pace of technology forward.

Source: Intel

An Israeli startup is quietly working on a chip to offload and improve the artificial intelligence used in games.

Imagine sneaking up on an elite soldier when suddenly alarm bells sound. The soldier, spotting you in your role as a superspy, immediately yells, dodges once or twice, then runs facefirst into a wall.

Sound familiar? It probably does, because that’s the scenario Israeli startup AIseek hopes to eliminate forever from the multibillion-dollar world of video games.

When completed, AIseek’s AIS-1 chip would improve one of the key weak points of computer games, executives said. While the multi-billion graphics industry led by ATI and Nvidia spun off from the need for dedicated graphics accelerators, gamers have complained for years that the artificial intelligence, or coding that defines the artificial behaviors of the “opponents” that a gamer competes against, has demanded its own improvements.

Read complete article @ source

Source: ExtremeTech

The parents of four kids have been sentenced to three months in jail for neglect, after becoming addicted to internet gaming.

It emerged in court that both parents had become utterly engrossed in the online gaming world - the 28-year-old father spent all his waking hours playing online, the BBC reports.
Click Here

Neighbours spotted two of the children standing naked on a window ledge, and called the police. The subsequent investigation uncovered what Arbroath Sheriff Court, Scotland, was told was one of the worst cases of neglect seen by police or social workers.

The youngest was found in a heavily soiled nappy. The other three were all dirty, and hardly clothed. Two of the children needed emergency dental work, and one had to have all her teeth removed.

In sentencing, Sheriff Norrie Stein said that the level of neglect had been appalling.

Source: The Register

SANS - Internet Storm Center reports that an email which is promising news about the Hurricane links to a site appears to provide malware in addition to a brief news article.

The text of the email (the original is in HTML):

Subject: Re: u1 Katrina killed as many as 80 people.

Just before daybreak Tuesday, Katrina, now a tropica l storm, was 35 miles
northeast of Tupelo, Miss., moving north-northeast with winds of 50 mph.
Forecasters at the National Hurricane Center said the amou nt of rainfall
has been adjusted downward Monday.

Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour said Tuesday that Hur ricane Katrina killed
as many as 80 people in his state and burst levees in Louisiana flooded New
Orleans.

Read More..

‘Read More..’ links to nextermest.com [DO NOT VISIT! MALWARE!].

In addition SANS discovered a couple of the domains yesterday which were scams apearing to be a donation sites for a hurricane relief, they since removed the paypal button.

There are now about 230 .com domains that contain the strings ‘katrina’ and ‘hurrican’, and SANS is asking for the public’s help in reviewing them.

Toshiba may not launch HD DVD products until 2006, breaking its previously stated deadline for the introduction of the technology.

Toshiba and other HD DVD backers have for some time pegged late 2005 as the launch point for the next-generation, blue-laser optical disc format in the US and Japan.

However, a spokeswoman at the company’s Tokyo HQ today revealed that for Toshiba at least, zero-hour may now come in 2006, Reuters reports. Toshiba may launch in Japan this year, the spokeswoman hinted, but it certainly seems unlikely that the planned end-of-year US debut will now not take place.

Source: The Register

A girl has become the first swimmer in the U.K. saved from drowning by a computerized pool-monitoring system.

The accident happened Aug. 24 when a 10-year old girl in a swimming pool in Bangor, North Wales, sank to the bottom of the deep end.

A Poseidon monitoring system installed in the pool registered that a swimmer was in distress because she was at the bottom of the pool and not moving, and within three seconds sounded the alarm to the lifeguard on duty who pulled the girl out of the water.

The girl sinks to the bottom of the deep end of the pool (source)

The girl was resuscitated and taken to a hospital, where she recovered. Less than 40 seconds elapsed from the system alert of the potential drowning to the victim being pulled from the pool.

The Gwynedd Council installed the system at the pool for $118,000 (65,000 pounds) two years ago.

Source: News.com

Apple has dropped a 30-day trial offer for its Mac mini after less than 12 hours.

The promotion–”Mac mini Test Drive”–offered a 30-day money-back guarantee, and was available only through Apple’s online store. It was launched on Wednesday in the US, but by Thursday morning UK time Apple’s site no longer showed the promotion.

Apple did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the promotion.

Apple’s site had stated that: “We’re so confident you’ll love your new Mac Mini, we’ll let you test-drive it for 30 days with no risk. If you decide you don’t want it, we’ll take it back.”

The rapid retraction of the offer prompted plenty of speculation online among bloggers and those in the Mac community.

Source: News.com

VoIP provider Skype Technologies is actively seeking to quell rumors that the company is for sale.

In an email exchange with TechWeb, a public relations representative for the company in the U.S, said flatly: “Skype is not for sale.�?

The “for sale�? rumors have been circulatinging in recent days along with the report that the Luxembourg-based firm has hired investment banking firm Morgan Stanley & Co. to examine its options including floating an IPO.

Skype did not comment beyond saying the firm is not for sale.

Source: Information Week

Cornell University and Tel Aviv University researchers have developed a method for enabling a computer program to scan text in any of a number of languages, including English and Chinese, and autonomously and without previous information infer the underlying rules of grammar. The rules can then be used to generate new and meaningful sentences. The method also works for such data as sheet music or protein sequences.

The development — which has a patent pending — has implications for speech recognition and for other applications in natural language engineering, as well as for genomics and proteomics. It also offers new insights into language acquisition and psycholinguistics.

Source: science blog