Google has announced its Google native client, which enables x86 native code to be run securely inside a browser. With Java applets already dead and buried, this could mean the end of the new war between browsers and the various JavaScript engines (V8, Squirrelfish, Tracemonkey). The only question remains whether it can be secured (ala ActiveX) and whether the advantages carry over onto non-x86 platforms.

Via: Slashdot

LG Display Co Ltd and Sharp Corp will plead guilty in mid-December to price fixing in the market for thin-film transistor liquid crystal displays, the U.S. Justice Department said on Tuesday.

LG Display, which agreed to pay $400 million in fines, will be sentenced on December 15, while Sharp, which will pay $120 million in fines, will be sentenced on December 16, according to a court filing distributed by the Justice Department.

Sentencing was scheduled for the U.S. district court in San Francisco.

LG Display, Sharp and Chunghwa Picture Tubes Ltd were cooperating with U.S. authorities, the Justice Department said last month.

European and Asian antitrust authorities were also looking at the LCD market.

Yahoo Inc will tell 1,500 employees on Wednesday they are losing their jobs, after announcing in October that layoffs would occur by year’s end, a person familiar with the situation said on Tuesday.

The expected date of the announcement and some details were reported this week by All Things Digital, a blog covering Silicon Valley. The layoffs will hit hardest in the labor-intensive areas of human resources and finance.

The blog had speculated the layoffs would affect more than 1,500 people, or about 10 percent of Yahoo’s workforce, and the source said the number has not changed.

Google has added a magazine rack to its Internet search engine.

As part of its quest to corral more content published on paper, Google Inc. has made digital copies of more than 1 million articles from magazines that hit the newsstands decades ago.

For now, the old magazine articles can be found only through Google’s search service for finding digital copies of books. But the Mountain View, Calif.-based company plans to eventually include magazine articles in its general search results.

Users who want to restrict the scope of their inquiries to magazines can choose that option through the book search’s “advanced” function.