12 |MAMAMAXIMXIMXIMXIMUUUUMMPPPCC| FEB 09 | http://www.maximumpc.com
QUICKSTART^
THE BEGINNING OF THE MAGAZINE, WHERE ARTICLES ARE SMALLLCD Makers Admit to
Price Fixing
Penalties in excess of $500 million
L
G, Sharp, and Chunghwa recently pleaded guilty to
charges of conspiracy in an attempt to keep the price
of LCD panels artifi cially high; the companies will pay
$585 million in fi nes, with LG paying $400 million of that total.
The U.S. Justice Department charged LG and Chunghwa with
conspiracy for meeting to discuss prices and exchanging
sales information. Sharp was charged with three counts
of conspiracy to fi x prices of panels sold to Dell, Motorola,
and Apple. This isn’t the end of the issue, however. All three
companies face a number of class action suits from affected
parties, and the European Union also has yet to weigh in on
any fi nes for the companies. – T ETime to dust off
your aged Voo-
doo3 videocard.3dfx Drivers Updated
I
f you’ve long been hanging on to an old 3dfx
Voodoo videocard for sentimental reasons, you can
now feel justifi ed in your unhealthy attachment.
That’s because although 3dfx has been defunct
for years, a dedicated legion of fans lives on in the
form of 3dfx Zone (www.3dfxzone.it), which recently
released updated drivers for 3dfx cards to work with
Windows 2000/XP 32-bit or XP x64. Based on a unifi ed
architecture, the SFFT 1.5 driver package works with
multiple 3dfx GPUs, including the entire Voodoo3 family
as well as the VSA-100 Voodoo4 and 5 cards. –K SU
sually, I don’t write about Google, because
googling it is so hard. But ambiguity isn’t
enough to thwart my interest in Google’s
recent movement in the world of books. Google
Books (originally Google Print) has come to a
settlement with publishers that will, in essence,
make it the default collecting society for out-of-
copyright books—with no congressional oversight.
It’s the result of 1337 legal hacking. In 2004
Google announced plans to scan in-copyright
books that were part of university holdings, some-
thing no other book scanner had talked about
doing. In 2005 the publishers and authors sued
Google in a move that sent waves of not shocked at
all through the copyright community. It was closely
watched by sad copyright wonks ( moi ) as possibly
defi ning fair use online.
Google skipped all that and instead suggested
amassing a library no one could duplicate and
selling the books. The publishers went along for a
cut of the action. Thing is, because Google settled,
it’s a deal only Google gets.
This leaves access to most 20th century books
to one company. On the one hand, someone is
fi nally scanning and making orphan works avail-
able to the world. Isn’t it better that they exist at
all, even if it would take a crack team of pirating
ninjas to sneak them out of the Google machine
rooms?
Maybe not. Google has closed the door
behind them, and other public-trust scanning
projects, governmental and nonprofi t, are left
out in the cold.
Organizations like Openlibrary.org have
always wanted to create a universal library for
all. Google’s always wanted to control a universal
library for all. As well it should be—Google is a
company, and to the extent that it’s a steward of
our cultural heritage, its fi rst purpose is to make
its shareholders richer. Doesn’t that sentence
make you feel icky?
Some say companies are the best way to
protect our culture. As a fan of the Library of Con-
gress, NASA, NOAA, the USGS, the Park Service,
etc., I disagree.
The deal still has to be approved by the 2nd
Circuit Court in New York—then it’s one for the
sad antitrust wonks to watch.BYTE RIGHTSFrom Orphans to
Captives?
QUINN NORTONQuinn Norton writes about copyright for Wired
News and other publications. Her work has
ranged from legal journalism to the inner life
of pirate organizations.any fi nes for the companies. – T EHP
Prototypes
Memristor
Chip
Memristors, the fourth
fundamental circuit
(after capacitors, resis-
tors, and inductors),
have been theorized
since UC Berkeley
Professor Leon Chua
predicted their exis-
tence in 1971, but it
wasn’t until April 2008
that Hewlett-Packard
Labs built a working
memristor prototype.
Memristors are nano-
scale switches that act
as logic gates, but with
a twist—they “remem-
ber” their state even
when powered down,
so they can perform
calculations and act as
nonvolatile memory.
In November, HP
announced a prototype
chip that incorporates
both transistors and
memristors—the fi rst
of its kind—and though
it’s a long way from
a production model,
it points to future
applications in neural-
net-type processors, as a
replacement for volatile
RAM, and eventually
as even a processor/
memory hybrid.
HP’s memristor
prototypes are built on
a 15nm scale—much
larger than the 4nm HP
thinks it can achieve but
already smaller than the
45nm process of modern
chips. And even though
current memristor-
chip prototypes run at
about a tenth the speed
of DRAM, we expect
Moore’s Law to kick
in any day now. We
wouldn’t be surprised
if, thanks to memristors,
the computers of 2018
look nothing like
today’s. –N E