Microsoft has finally settled a six-year legal battle with Immersion over XBox controllers. Yes, Xbox controllers. It may seem irrelevant, but there are big bucks when it involves a device sold with every videogame console.

Immersion develops haptic feedback technology, called TouchSense, which makes videogame controllers shake violently in your hands to simulate action on screen. The company filed patent infringement suits against Microsoft and Sony, maker of the PlayStation 2 (at the time).

Microsoft agreed to settle in 2003 and paid $35 million to Immersion, $26 million of which was settlement, in return for licensing rights and equity. They also agreed that should Immersion settled with Sony, Immersion would pay Microsoft a minimum of $15 million for any amount received from Sony up to $100 million, plus 25 percent of any amount over $100 million up to $150 million.

Well, Immersion hit the jackpot with in 2006 when it settled the suit with Sony for a hefty $150.3 million, since it was getting a piece of the action for every controller and the PlayStation 2 was a monumental success, with 140 million units sold. Sony agreed to use Immersion's technology in its products as well.

Microsoft wanted Immersion to keep its end of the bargain and sued the company in July 2007. Immersion countersued, saying Microsoft had breached the confidentiality agreement of the settlement by suing.

As part of the settlement, Immersion pays back Microsoft $20.75 million of the $26 million settlement, and Immersion joins Microsoft's Partner Program. "We are pleased to resolve our outstanding dispute with Microsoft and to put this litigation behind us," said Immersion president and CEO Clent Richardson in a statement.

Protests at technology events are extremely rare. I know I've seen a few over my career but can't remember the last one.

So seeing people all over the place at the NVISION 08 show was really surprising. The show is spread out over a number of buildings, rather than contained inside one like most shows. With people walking around outside, this gives the flier-floggers plenty of opportunity to hand out their sheets.

The bright yellow pages ready "Find the flawed chip..." followed by two pictures of a potato chip and a third pic with a laptop in it. Below it read "... and you could get nVidia FAIL!" The front of the page rants about the chip problems in notebooks using nVidia chips, while the back has a full page copy of a Wall Street Journal article on the subject.

It left me utterly confused. nVidia has had an exceptional track record, yet these people are making it sound like a few laptop chips are the new Ford Pinto. And these people were everywhere, with thousands of pages of paper. Who could organize something like this?

Turns out there is more than meets the eye. A source told me here at the HOT CHIPS show at Stanford University that a food worker's union is trying to organize the dining facilities staff at nVidia's corporate offices, and the staff is resisting. So the people "protesting" at nVidia's show are actually from a food service union, trying to hassle the company for not unionizing. You wouldn't know it from the fliers, but as it turns out, there is full disclosure on their blog, called My NVIDIA Fail.

Talk about FAIL. Most people know that the problems with the laptops are not the chips but the heat sinks on them. Not to mention this is an nVidia show. Do they really think they can sway anyone? You'd have as much luck selling Windows Vista at MacWorld Expo.

There's never enough hours in the day during a busy trade show and the Intel Developer Forum was no exception. Bone tired as I was at the end of each day, there was still so much more to do.

Day three featured my biggest regret. Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple and the creator of one of the biggest distractions of my teen years (the Apple IIe) was present for an interview on stage with NPR journalist Moira Gunn and to sign his book "iWoz."

Unfortunately, this overlapped with Intel CTO Justin Rattner's keynote and until they invent a Time Turner for real, I can only be in one place at a time, and Rattner it was.

On the way down from the third floor to the second of Moscone West (the floors are ridiculously far apart, almost two stories compared to a regular building), this sight greeted me.

Getting the shot involved pulling out my iPhone and running back up a down escalator. Not as easy as it sounds with one hand fumbling for a cell phone while your laptop bounces around in the backpack. So apologies to the fellow in front of me in the pics, whom I nearly collided with going up the stairs.

By the time I'd filed my report on Rattner's keynote, Woz waz, er, was gone. Well, maybe next year.

Now we know how Paul Otellini is going to sell all that flash memory like he promised. Intel announced at the Intel Developer Forum it is entering the solid state drive (SSD) market with a trio of drives aimed at laptops, desktops, and even servers.

The latter is remarkable, as SSDs are usually targeted at notebooks. But the company feels it has a winner in its drives. The X25-M and X18-M drives are targeted at desktops and notebooks. They will come in 2.5 inch and 1.8 inch designs, with 80GB and 160GB capacity and very fast access.

The drives will have a read transfer rate of 240 Mbytes per second and a write speed of 70 Mbytes per second. Write speeds are slower than a standard hard drive but the read speed is faster than the 180 Mbytes/sec of Western Digital's Velociraptor drive, which spins at 10,000 rpm.

Intel has new controllers with ten parallel channels and a function called Native Command Queuing (NCQ), something rarely used on SSDs, that allows for up to 32 simultaneous transactions. The drives are power-friendly, too consuming 0.15 watts in use and 0.06 when idle.

The X25-E Extreme is slightly faster than the X25-M, with read/write speeds of 250Mbytes and 75 Mbytes, respectively. It will also be smaller, only 32 or 64GB of capacity. Intel claims it can handle up to 35,000 read operations per second, while write operations are only 3,500 per second.

The drives will be available later this year. Intel said HP and Lenovo have already signed on as OEMs.

Intel Chairman Craig Barrett opened the Intel Developer Forum with a bang, taking the U.S. federal government to task over what he felt was its failure to invest in education and research and development.

Barrett is not shy in his opinions that the U.S. is falling behind in education. In January, he penned a lengthy critique for Forbes magazine. And the IDF is a gathering of programmers from all over the world. In this instance, though, he didn't mince words.

In discussing the U.S. education system, he said the one tool that could help students in the classroom is "a teacher.

"The answer is not throwing money at the problem, the answer is throwing good qualified people at the problem. There is a lack of good qualified teachers in the U.S. public school system," he added.

Intel has long supported the International Science and Engineering Fair, and now is taking that one step further. Barrett announced the Intel Challenge, where anyone can submit an idea in one of four categories: healthcare, economic development, education, and the environment. The winning idea in each category will be awarded $100,000.

He went on to strongly criticize the U.S. government for what he felt was a lack of federal spending on research and development of all kinds. "R&D is how you move forward in the world's economic system. For that, you need the right environment, and the government dictates the business environment… Every country in the world knows this. Every country except one: this one," he said.

Barrett went on to say "We don't work as hard as we should on incentivizing innovation.  The government refuses to acknowledge that investing in R&D is important to the future competitiveness of the U.S. Everyone else is recognizing that."

According to the federal Congressional Budget Office, fiscal year 2007 R&D spending by the government totaled $137 billion.

Barrett went on to discuss another pet cause of his, health care, with an odd analogy. "Our healthcare system is the mainframe computer of today. Today you get sick, you go to the hospital. We need to fix this. You should be able to solve technology to solve some basic diagnosis problems," he said.

However, he did not propose an EKG machine in every home. Instead, he gave a demo of an electronic medical records system that would give any doctor in the world instant access to a patient's medical records. He demonstrated it rather dramatically, by lying down on the state.

The man is a showman, if nothing else. As for Nehalem? He didn't mention it once. That honor goes to Pat Gelsinger, who takes the stage at 12:35.

Clearly AMD has no intention of giving Q4 over to Intel. The company announced that "Shanghai," the first server chips made with the 45nm manufacturing process, will ship in the fourth quarter of this year, around the same time as Intel's Core i7, a.k.a. "Nehalem" will hit the market.

AMD had already said Shanghai would come out this year, it just hadn't said when. The news is an attempt to one-up Intel on the eve of its annual Intel Developer Forum, which kicks off on Tuesday.

Shanghai will introduce a number of changes, although none as radical as the oft-delayed Quad Core Opteron, "Barcelona," which was a true quad core design. It will be the first AMD processor made on a 45nm design, something Intel has been doing for a while. This should translate to higher clock speeds while consuming less power.

Shanghai will have 6MB of L3 cache, three times Barcelona's cache, and will support 800MHz DDR2 memory. Barcelona supports 667MHz memory. There will also be improvements in AMD-V, a virtualization technology for better processor clock scheduling. Clock speeds are still not known.

The best argument in Shanghai's favor will be that it supports AMD's Socket F design, the same as Barcelona and the older dual core Opteron, so existing Barcelona servers can be upgraded with just a BIOS upgrade and a chip swap. Migrating from older Intel systems to Core i7 means a whole new motherboard, processor and possibly memory.

Security vendors have been warning for some time that the new gimmick among the malware and spammer communities is trying to latch on to legitimate sites and names and ride their credibility.

In the past few weeks, a spam botnet called Rustock flooded the Internet with what looked to be CNN's Top 10 news stories and video clips. However, all of the links went to the same address, which careful observers noted were not to a CNN.com address.

Instead, they went to an off-shore site that popped up a window telling the user their version of the Flash player was obsolete and they needed to download a new one. What they got was a Trojan loader, a small application that "phones home" to a malware host server and downloads whatever the spammers want to send down, usually a keystroke logger.

MX Logic, a security firm in Denver, Colorado, estimated that at one point, Rustock was sending out 160 million fake messages in a 48 hour period while Marshal, a U.K-based security firm, estimated that at its peak, Rustock was pumping out 55 percent of all spam on the Internet.

People got smart to the CNN spam and quickly blocked it. However, spammers never stay still. Anti-spam and anti-malware provider Sophos has noted that the spammers have switched from fake CNN headlines to fake MSNBC headlines. They are, if nothing else, entertaining headlines.

• msnbc.com - BREAKING NEWS: McCain told lies to win votes
• msnbc.com - BREAKING NEWS: Anthrax case solved
• msnbc.com - BREAKING NEWS: Preliminary polls for the election
• msnbc.com - BREAKING NEWS: Google launches free music downloads in China
• msnbc.com - BREAKING NEWS: Jerry Yang relinquishes control over Yahoo
• msnbc.com - BREAKING NEWS: Europeans dislike Americans attitudes
• msnbc.com - BREAKING NEWS: Mary-Kate Olsen responsible for Heath Ledger's death

Sophos confirmed that the MSNBC spam, like the CNN spam, is coming from the Rustock botnet, making it the biggest and most pervasive botnet on the Internet. The company said the payload is the same: a malicious software loader that will download code to your computer, which could be a key logger, a spam bot, or anything else the botnet owners want to send down.

Richard Wang, head of the virus lab at Sophos, said that as malicious code goes, the payload in the MSNBC spam is reasonably common. "At the moment, what we are seeing is fake security software that pops up a warning saying you have so many viruses and it gives a link to a Web site with the antivirus software to remove it," he said.

Of course, it's all a lie. There is no software, but he notes that you are prompted to give your credit card information to make the purchase, "and the potential for trouble after that is obvious," said Wang.

The MSNBC letters do have characteristics of a spam letter, so it should be possible for other spam protectors to detect and block them, he added.

One month into the two-year marriage many have made with an iPhone 3G, and the honeymoon is definitely over in some quarters. While I am not as angry as others, when I see this kind of bubbling frustration, it's usually an indicator of one type of ending. Ever heard of Mt. Vesuvius?

Within a day of use, it became obvious that the 3G service stunk. San Francisco is supposed to have full 3G coverage, and I had no problems with my prior 3G phone at all. It was a very different story with the iPhone. Calls were dropped and the battery drain was unacceptable for a cell phone. On disabling 3G, service improved immediately. There were no more dropped calls. Audio quality was fine. Battery life was much better.

As it turns out, I wasn't the only person to notice this. AT&T denied their network was dodgy by pointing out they have plenty of other 3G phones with no such problems. Turns out they were right. The culprit, it seems, is turning out to be the Infineon chips used in the phone.

P.T. Barnum famously declared "There's a sucker born every minute," but even he couldn't imagine this.

Secure Computing's TrustedSource Research Team has issued its August 2008 report on all things spam, and among the stories: the top 10 celebrity names used in spam, designed to draw a response.

Secure Computing generated this list from two services it offers, Secure Web (Webwasher) and Secure Mail (IronMail) products, and correlated the e-mails against its global reputation system, TrustedSource.

Far and away the most popular name for bait was, perhaps not surprisingly, Angelina Jolie. On average, about 2.28 percent of the total global daily e-mail volume contains subjects like "Angelina Jolie naked," "Angelina Jolie nude movie," and "Angelina Jolie naked video."

Yeah, there's about a half-dozen of them at the local Blockbuster.

Secure Computing tracked back more than 100,000 unique IP addresses to the Angelina spam on the first day of the outbreak, which is apparently related to a new botnet infection.

The "Angelina Jolie" spam campaign contains a URL linked to an executable binary, most often with the filename msvideoc.exe, which is hosted at multiple domains. Secure Web determined it to be hosting a Trojan horse virus, big surprise.

For numbers 2 through 10 we have:

2) Barack Obama

3) Paris Hilton (who for once made a video worth watching.)

4) Britney Spears

5) Jessica Simpson (why, pray tell, is she famous? Give me three reasons and the first two don't count.)

6) Hillary Clinton

7) George W. Bush

8) Osama Bin Laden (can I get a tracert on that IP address? I could use the $25 million reward)

9) Brad Pitt

10) Michael Jackson (wait, he actually works as bait?)

Let's hear it for the global economy. Global sales of semiconductors for the first half of 2008 grew 5.4 percent over the same period in 2007, to $127.5 billion, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA). June sales were up by eight percent over June 2007 and up 0.5 percent from May 2008 sales.

It's the so-called "emerging markets" - Latin America, Russia, India, China, and eastern Europe - that are driving things while the U.S. sputters thanks to its economic woes. In 2008, developing countries will account for half of worldwide PC sales, around 153 million units.  

Mobile devices are growing even faster, accounting for 66 percent of total worldwide unit sales of over 1.3 billion, up from 61 percent last year. Chips for mobile phones made up about 20 percent of total semiconductor sales this year so far, while PCs accounted for 40 percent of sales.

 The emergence of large middle-class populations in China, India, Eastern Europe, and Latin America has more than offset the effects of slower growth in the U.S. economy. We expect that demand for consumer electronic products in these new markets will continue to outpace growth in developed markets for the next several years.”

For the year so far, the U.S. is up only 2.8 percent, while Europe is up 5.1 percent, Japan (considered a mature market and thus excluded from Asia/Pacific figures) rose 2.8 percent, and Asia/Pacific gained 12.9 percent.

It's not all rosy, however. Memory prices continue to suffer due to the vast oversupply. The cost of 1 gigabit of DRAM has declined by 43 percent during the past year, while the price of 2 gigabits of NAND flash has declined by 61 percent in the last year.  

That's good for consumers, of course. Micron estimates that the memory content of the average PC will increase at least 50 percent this year, while the memory content in the average cell phone will increase by more than 150 percent. There has also been rumor of a 64GB iPod Touch from Apple later this year. Gotta do something with all that flash memory.

With its typical lack of fanfare, Apple has released the iPhone 2.0.1 software, just three weeks after the release of the iPhone 3G and 2.0 software. The release notes were short even by Apple standards: "Bug fixes." Great description for the 249.2MB download. iPhone users know the drill: plug it in, fire up iTunes and click "Check for updates."

There has been a fair amount of kvetching on MacRumors, TUAW, Gizmodo and elsewhere about iPhone 2.0 software, calling it buggy and unstable. For what it's worth, after three weeks with the 3G phone the only thing I didn't like was the 3G. I rarely had any bars and it frequently dropped calls. Plus, the battery ran dry very fast. When I disabled 3G, the phone stabilized. No more dropped calls, good, clear audio, and longer battery life.

Of much greater concern is the numerous reports of cracks appearing in the plastic around the phone. With the 3G design, Apple shifted from a mostly metal back to an all-plastic back, and people are finding cracks around places like the phone jack, volume buttons and other parts of the case.

Apple has not formally acknowledged the problems, so it remains to be seen how this is handled. If these cracks worsen and the phones fall apart, will there be a recall/replacement? Or will they pass the buck and say users are abusing the phones? This could get very interesting. Or ugly.

Be that as it may, I love the phone and don't want any other.

nVidia has denied reports that it will soon be exiting the motherboard chipset market. The story first ran last Friday in the Taiwanese tech publication DigiTimes, citing unnamed sources at motherboard makers.

The story just didn't make sense when I first read it. Why in the world would a market leader - nVidia claims more than 60 percent of the AMD market and a decent chunk of Intel as well - want to bail on a thriving business? Well, Nehalem might be a good reason. With the memory controller going on the CPU and the frontside bus going away, chipsets will no longer be needed.

But why quit now? Nehalem isn't due until December and even then, it will take it years to fully consume the market.

Well, they're not quitting. nVidia's top spokesman Derek Perez issued a flat denial to InternetNews.com, calling the article "groundless" and saying "We have no intention of getting out of the chipset business."

Once again I find myself following up on a story that was irresponsible and lazy (Dell dropping AMD, anyone?). I like DigiTimes and have gotten some nice leads from them. Given they are in Taiwan, the heart of the Asian component sector, they have a lot of connections.

But this was truly irresponsible, to run a story (I'd link to it but it's hidden away to only paid subscribers now) full of speculation and conjecture on where the chipset developer team might be redeployed without so much as a comment from nVidia. This hurts all of us and the media profession does not need another kick in the junk.

(I'm really setting myself up for a huge fall if I ever screw up big, eh?)