According to a report in the Wall Street Journal AMD's former chairman Hector Ruiz has been named as a key figure in an insider trading scandal currently under investigation.

Six employees of the hedge-fund firm Galleon Group, including the co-founder, have now been charged with a complicated insider trading scam which has caused the fund to be wound up. An AMD executive named as a figure involved in the insider trading in court documents released this month wasn't named but the Journal is now saying that it is Ruiz.

The allegations are that the AMD executive spoke to Galleon staff last year, before the announcement that AMD was spinning off its chip division into a separate company. Galleon bought shares before the announcement of the spinoff was made but investigators say the fund lost money on the deal because of a falling stock market.

If correct, the news will be a major shock to many in the industry. Ruiz has an excellent reputation for honesty in the industry and many are having difficulty in believing that he intentionally took part in something illegal.

The investigation has been the talk of Silicon Valley all month, since besides hedge fund staff several other big names in the technology world are also under investigation. Rajiv Goel, a director in strategic investments at Intel Capital and Robert Moffat, senior vice president and group executive at IBM.

Posted by Iain Thomson on October 28, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two pilots who overshot Minneapolis airport by 150 miles have blamed their laptops for the error.

On October 21 a Northwest Airline Airbus A320 en route from California overshot its destination in Minnesota. An investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board has revealed that they were not asleep at the controls, but busy on laptops.

The pilots said that they were aware of frequent radio calls trying to ascertain what was going on but were instead analysing future work schedules on their laptops in "a concentrated period of discussion".

"Both said they lost track of time," investigators said, according to AFP.

What was so engrossing was apparently the details of changes caused by the merger of Northwest and Delta.

Delta chief executive Richard Anderson said: "Nothing is more important to Delta than safety. We are going to continue to cooperate fully with the NTSB and the FAA in their investigations."

From a personal standpoint, based on more than a few years covering the airline industry, for a pilot to ignore the radio for that long something's got to be really riveting. Can the merger really be so engrossing?

Posted by Iain Thomson on October 27, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Earlier this week the results of a study on the energy efficiency ratings of each state in the US was released, and California was on top. Other states which ranked highly were fellow tech hotbeds such as Massachusetts and Connecticut.

That the tech hotspots were able to take top honours doesn't really come as much of a surprise, as the rankings are not based on energy consumption, but on efforts to implement energy efficiency programs and technologies. The states that have a greater concentration of tech firms should have more sophisticated efforts in place.

It does, however, speak well for California, and Silicon Valley in particular. The state has always prided itself as a leader in social and technological movements, and last week the Governor told the crowd at Oracle's OpenWorld conference that Silicon Valley and the rest of California's IT industry is now and should in the future take the lead in making the country as a whole greener and more energy efficient.

That the state has now been recognised as the leader in energy-saving efforts should be a nice feather in the cap of Silicon Valley and the green tech crowd in particular. 

Posted by Shaun Nichols on October 22, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger turned up at Oracle OpenWorld 2009 to woo the tech industry and apologise for his wife's mobile phone use.

Schwarzenegger passed a law banning drivers from using mobile phones while driving without a headset last year. The law, while sensible if not enough, is highly unpopular and Maria Shriver, Schwarzenegger's wife, has been photographed repeatedly flouting the law.

"I know that some day in the future you will have a hands-free cellphone, even if my wife doesn't believe it yet," he joked.

"Can you believe that? She was caught three times in a row with holding that phone in her hand like the Stone Age."

"Of course I promised the people that I would take action and stop her. This is a no-win situation, I can tell you that right now, because if I don't take action the voters get upset and if I do take action and stop her then I get no action."

He carried on the risqué tone with a joke about how important technology had been in his career, saying that he would not have been as good a body builder without high-tech gym equipment and 'food supplements', a reference to his early steroid use.

However, the rest of the 20 minute speech was of a more serious note. Schwarzenegger is clearly no technology expert, and long sections of his speech praised the IT, telecoms, biotech and green technology but sounded rote.

However, he clearly understands why technology matters to California. He seemed particularly excited about smart grid technology, which would be crucial to cutting costs and generating new power systems.

Geolocation applications were also hot on his agenda; GPS systems let aircraft drop water on forest fires precisely where needed, even when the pilots are blinded by smoke. This is a big issue in a drought state where forest fires are an increasing problem.

While he is obviously enthusiastic about the industry he went out of his way to praise the union of Oracle and Sun. This was not surprising considering the event, but remember Schwarzenegger has to retire next year, a 2010 Senate run is rumoured and there's support to be raised.

Posted by Phil Muncaster on October 15, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The organizers behind the upcoming CES conference in Las Vegas have confirmed that Yahoo chief executive Carol Bartz will be delivering a morning keynote on the first official day of the show.

There was once a time when a keynote from the chief executive at Yahoo was a very big deal, of course that time was several years, two market crashes and three CEOs ago. The company is far from the trailblazing media darling that dominated headlines at the height of the dot-com boom.

While the company may not possess the huge market share or generate the media frenzy it once did, this upcoming keynote will still be important for Bartz. Closing in on one year at the helm of Yahoo, she will be making a big speech that could well mark her transition from the "new CEO" to simply just the CEO at Yahoo. Additionally, this will be Bartz' first chance to make some actual company announcements free from the overtones of corporate housecleaning and rebuilding that have hung over many of her earlier addresses.

It could be interesting to see how Bartz handles the situation and whether Yahoo can deliver big enough news to justify the keynote billing. The first day of CES is often a very heated competition for media attention and headlines, with companies seeking to steal the top billing with a big product announcement. Last year it was the Palm Pre, does Yahoo have anything that big up its sleeve?

The last time a Yahoo company exec gave a big speech at CES, Jerry Yang was rolling out the company's redesigned home page and portal plans. While the plans were fairly interesting, they were quickly drowned out when a few weeks later Microsoft went public with its bid for Yahoo and Yang's standing at the company began to take a downward spiral that eventually ended with the hiring of Bartz...so at least she doesn't have too tough of an act to follow.

Posted by Shaun Nichols on October 14, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The chairman of the FCC Julius Genachowski warned today that the mobile industry was facing "a looming crisis" over spectrum.

Speaking at the CTIA wireless conference he pointed out that the government had increased the amount of spectrum available three-fold, when the volume of data traffic has increased 30-fold.

"What happens when every mobile user has an iPhone, a Palm Pre, a BlackBerry Tour or whatever the next device is?" he said.

"What happens when we quadruple the number of subscribers with mobile broadband on their laptops or netbooks?"

He told the assembled delegates that smarter wireless networking would save around 40 per cent of current spectrum use. The government would also be moving much more quickly to reallocate unused spectrum.

Genachowski no doubt sees this as an olive branch to the industry from the government after the FCC announced plans to enforce network neutrality. One doubts it'll work, given the strength of feeling on the issue.

Posted by Iain Thomson on October 8, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nobody likes to think about what happens when they die, but a Slashdot reader has created an amazing sarcophagus for his brother's ashes using a Sun SPARCstation.

When his brother died the man took his brother's ashes from the crematorium and installed them in a Sun SPARCstation by taking out most of the power supply, the hard disk and the floppy drive. He left the motherboard and sockets in to make sure it didn't leak.

What remains is possibly the most technical grave site in existence. It was presented to the family at the wake and people put down their messages for the departed on Post-it notes and fed them into the computer via the floppy port.

The result was a memorial fit for a true geek, and a marvel of inventiveness in the face of family tragedy.

Posted by Madeline Bennett on October 1, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)