An employee severance plan put in place by Yahoo to protect workers after a merger with Microsoft should be rescinded immediately, according to a brief filed by plaintiffs in a shareholder lawsuit against Yahoo and its directors.

The plaintiffs say the plan could skew the outcome of a proxy battle between Yahoo and the activist investor Carl C. Icahn for control of the company.

Lawyers representing two Detroit pension plans that are suing Yahoo asked a judge in Delaware to hold a trial to determine the fate of the plan ahead of the company’s Aug. 1 shareholder meeting. Legal experts said a trial could shine a light on Yahoo’s talks with Microsoft and affect the outcome of the proxy fight.

Both the plaintiffs and Mr. Icahn have criticized the severance plan as costly and said it was an obstacle to any merger. Yahoo has said the plan is necessary to retain valuable employees and is good for shareholders.

The plan offers enhanced benefits, including cash and accelerated vesting of stock options, to any Yahoo employees who are fired or leave because their roles are diminished after a merger or change in control of the company.

It is called a “double trigger” plan because two things have to happen before employees can claim benefits: first, Yahoo has to merge or come under the control of a new board; next, an employee has to be fired or leave following a reassignment.

The plaintiffs argue that a takeover of Yahoo’s board by Mr. Icahn’s slate will count as the first trigger. As a result, under Mr. Icahn’s control, Yahoo could be faced with up to $2.4 billion in potential severance payouts to employees who were reassigned or fired, the same amount that the plan could cost Microsoft, according to the suit.

“If Icahn’s slate prevails, Yahoo shareholders will be funding huge cash severance and equity acceleration over the following two years for every employee who is either terminated or who resigns with ‘good reason’ as that phrase is loosely defined in the severance plans,” the plaintiffs argued in a brief filed late Monday and made available to The New York Times.

Yahoo has said the suit is without merit. A spokesman for Yahoo said that the $2.4 billion figure was an estimate based on a number of assumptions, including that all Yahoo employees would be fired or otherwise be able to claim severance benefits.

Mr. Icahn did not return a call seeking comment.

Mr. Icahn has seized on many of the allegations made in the suit, including claims that the severance plan was meant to deter Microsoft from buying Yahoo, to make his case that Yahoo’s board should be replaced. He has asked Yahoo to rescind the plan in hopes that it will prompt Microsoft to renew its bid.

Labels: Technology

Texas Instruments narrowed on Monday a quarterly earnings and revenue goal it issued in April because of caution among its chip customers and weak demand for high-end phones.

The company, which makes chips, forecast second-quarter earnings of 43 to 47 cents a share on revenue of $3.33 billion to $3.46 billion.

Shares of the company fell 18 cents to $31.15 in extended trading. They rose 9 cents, or less than 1 percent, to close at $31.33 in regular trading Monday.

On April 21, Texas Instruments disappointed investors with a forecast of 42 to 48 cents a share on revenue of $3.24 billion to $3.5 billion.

The company, based in Dallas, said Monday it expected semiconductor revenue in the quarter of $3.17 billion to $3.28 billion, compared with the previously given range of $3.08 billion to $3.32 billion.

Labels: Technology

An American military supercomputer, assembled from components originally designed for video game machines, has reached a long-sought-after computing milestone by processing more than 1.026 quadrillion calculations per second.

The new machine is more than twice as fast as the previous fastest supercomputer, the I.B.M. BlueGene/L, which is based at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

The new $133 million supercomputer, called Roadrunner in a reference to the state bird of New Mexico, was devised and built by engineers and scientists at I.B.M. and Los Alamos National Laboratory, based in Los Alamos, N.M. It will be used principally to solve classified military problems to ensure that the nation’s stockpile of nuclear weapons will continue to work correctly as they age. The Roadrunner will simulate the behavior of the weapons in the first fraction of a second during an explosion.

Before it is placed in a classified environment, it will also be used to explore scientific problems like climate change. The greater speed of the Roadrunner will make it possible for scientists to test global climate models with higher accuracy.

To put the performance of the machine in perspective, Thomas P. D’Agostino, the administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration, said that if all six billion people on earth used hand calculators and performed calculations 24 hours a day and seven days a week, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner can in one day.

The machine is an unusual blend of chips used in consumer products and advanced parallel computing technologies. The lessons that computer scientists learn by making it calculate even faster are seen as essential to the future of both personal and mobile consumer computing.

The high-performance computing goal, known as a petaflop — one thousand trillion calculations per second — has long been viewed as a crucial milestone by military, technical and scientific organizations in the United States, as well as a growing group including Japan, China and the European Union. All view supercomputing technology as a symbol of national economic competitiveness.

By running programs that find a solution in hours or even less time — compared with as long as three months on older generations of computers — petaflop machines like Roadrunner have the potential to fundamentally alter science and engineering, supercomputer experts say. Researchers can ask questions and receive answers virtually interactively and can perform experiments that would previously have been impractical.

“This is equivalent to the four-minute mile of supercomputing,” said Jack Dongarra, a computer scientist at the University of Tennessee who for several decades has tracked the performance of the fastest computers.

Each new supercomputing generation has brought scientists a step closer to faithfully simulating physical reality. It has also produced software and hardware technologies that have rapidly spilled out into the rest of the computer industry for consumer and business products.

Technology is flowing in the opposite direction as well. Consumer-oriented computing began dominating research and development spending on technology shortly after the cold war ended in the late 1980s, and that trend is evident in the design of the world’s fastest computers.

The Roadrunner is based on a radical design that includes 12,960 chips that are an improved version of an I.B.M. Cell microprocessor, a parallel processing chip originally created for Sony’s PlayStation 3 video-game machine. The Sony chips are used as accelerators, or turbochargers, for portions of calculations.

The Roadrunner also includes a smaller number of more conventional Opteron processors, made by Advanced Micro Devices, which are already widely used in corporate servers.

“Roadrunner tells us about what will happen in the next decade,” said Horst Simon, associate laboratory director for computer science at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “Technology is coming from the consumer electronics market and the innovation is happening first in terms of cellphones and embedded electronics.”

The innovations flowing from this generation of high-speed computers will most likely result from the way computer scientists manage the complexity of the system’s hardware.

Roadrunner, which consumes roughly three megawatts of power, or about the power required by a large suburban shopping center, requires three separate programming tools because it has three types of processors. Programmers have to figure out how to keep all of the 116,640 processor cores in the machine occupied simultaneously in order for it to run effectively.

“We’ve proved some skeptics wrong,” said Michael R. Anastasio, a physicist who is director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. “This gives us a window into a whole new way of computing. We can look at phenomena we have never seen before.”

Solving that programming problem is important because in just a few years personal computers will have microprocessor chips with dozens or even hundreds of processor cores. The industry is now hunting for new techniques for making use of the new computing power. Some experts, however, are skeptical that the most powerful supercomputers will provide useful examples.

“If Chevy wins the Daytona 500, they try to convince you the Chevy Malibu you’re driving will benefit from this,” said Steve Wallach, a supercomputer designer who is chief scientist of Convey Computer, a start-up firm based in Richardson, Tex.

Those who work with weapons might not have much to offer the video gamers of the world, he suggested.

Many executives and scientists see Roadrunner as an example of the resurgence of the United States in supercomputing.

Although American companies had dominated the field since its inception in the 1960s, in 2002 the Japanese Earth Simulator briefly claimed the title of the world’s fastest by executing more than 35 trillion mathematical calculations per second. Two years later, a supercomputer created by I.B.M. reclaimed the speed record for the United States. The Japanese challenge, however, led Congress and the Bush administration to reinvest in high-performance computing.

“It’s a sign that we are maintaining our position,“ said Peter J. Ungaro, chief executive of Cray, a maker of supercomputers. He noted, however, that “the real competitiveness is based on the discoveries that are based on the machines.”

Having surpassed the petaflop barrier, I.B.M. is already looking toward the next generation of supercomputing. “You do these record-setting things because you know that in the end we will push on to the next generation and the one who is there first will be the leader,” said Nicholas M. Donofrio, an I.B.M. executive vice president.

By breaking the petaflop barrier sooner than had been generally expected, the United States’ supercomputer industry has been able to sustain a pace of continuous performance increases, improving a thousandfold in processing power in 11 years. The next thousandfold goal is the exaflop, which is a quintillion calculations per second, followed by the zettaflop, the yottaflop and the xeraflop.

Labels: Technology

Freescale Semiconductor, the chip manufacturer taken private in 2006, is expected to announce Monday that it will join with several venture capital firms to spin off a unit that focuses on a newer kind of computer memory.

The new entity, EverSpin Technologies, comes as Freescale seeks to pare its product line.

Freescale will give its portfolio of a memory technology called MRAM to EverSpin and hold a stake in the new company, the companies involved said. A group of outside firms, including New Venture Partners, Sigma Partners, Lux Capital, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Epic Ventures, will invest a total of about $20 million, they said.

MRAM, which stands for magnetoresistive random access memory and has been in development since the 1990s, is intended to improve on current memory technology because it uses less power than conventional designs and is considered more stable. But it is not widely used yet.

“MRAM technology is one of our crown jewel technologies,” Lisa T. Su, Freescale’s chief technology officer, said.

Plans for the spinoff began about six months ago, as Freescale began talking with Lux Capital about a way to commercialize its MRAM technology. Memory technology is not Freescale’s core business, Ms. Su said, and while the company had not considered selling the MRAM unit outright, it and Lux had hit upon the spinoff as a possible solution.

But it also comes amid a tougher time for the chip maker, which was acquired for $17.6 billion in 2006 by a consortium of private equity firms. Since then, demand for its products from Motorola, its onetime parent company, and from automakers has fallen, and it is coping with the debt added after its leveraged buyout.

Ms. Su said the new venture was not linked to financial troubles at Freescale: “We’re not doing this for financial reasons, not for cash or anything like that.”

Stephen Socolof, a managing partner of New Venture, said his firm and others in the investor group would join in the manufacturing of MRAM and develop other uses for the technology.

Labels: Technology

At the request of its SharePoint and Office product development teams, Microsoft Corp.'s Office Labs operation has created and is testing a prototype of an internal social network that can provide employees with feeds and updates about their colleagues.

With a layout that is strikingly similar to Facebook.com's (in which Microsoft invested US$240 million in October 2007), TownSquare is fueled by enterprise news feeds that use Web services to query SharePoint for public information, such as promotions and company anniversaries, about an employee.

TownSquare also notifies users when a document or file is modified. Users can customize their feeds and monitor who is receiving information about them.

In early January, Pratley's group told 100 Microsoft employees about the network. Since then, 8,000 employees who learned of TownSquare by word of mouth have visited the network at least once, Pratley noted. About 700 use it daily.

Some Microsoft customers, which he declined to name, are testing the TownSquare network for use in their companies.

Office Labs works as a sort of advance development team that tests technology concepts suggested by employees and, as in this case, development teams. Pratley stressed that TownSquare is not a product, but a platform to test the technology concepts. By hammering out the various likes and dislikes of its users before releasing a product, "We're trying to get version three goodness into a first release," he added.

"We have instrumentation ?so we know which things people use," Pratley noted. "We share that with the client teams we work with. They take the knowledge about usage so they don't make so many mistakes in product design."

Many third party vendors have targeted SharePoint as the core data source for information to feed their enterprise social networking and other Enterprise 2.0 applications. Several have announced upgrades to their products or new integration with SharePoint this week at the conference.

Anecdotal evidence has shown that employees like the TownSquare tool, Pratley noted. Employees especially appreciate being able to monitor the creation and editing of documents by colleagues, he added. One employee used the network to find a sponsor within Microsoft to fund her trip to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.

"That is the kind of information that spreads through an enterprise social network," he said. "By posting it out there, the people interested can pick up on it, and other people can ignore it. It's a way to keep in touch in a social way with people you work with."

Like Facebook, TownSquare also includes a photos of users and allows them to note when they are away from their workstations, such as at a meeting or in the cafeteria for coffee.

While some employees have expressed initial surprise at all the information that Microsoft has about them in its intranet, once people see the type of information that is included in the feeds about them, "they see it's pretty safe stuff and say okay," Pratley said.

Labels: Technology

BT's trial of super-fast broadband is unlikely to put the UK back in the fast lane analysts have said.

The telecoms firm is offering fibre to the home to 300 newly built homes in Ebbsfleet, Kent.

Speeds will start at 2.5Mbps (megabits per second) with "bursts" of 100Mbps and the service could be free to consumers on the trial.

"These speeds make it the lowest fibre service in Europe", said Jupiter Research analyst Ian Fogg.

"I am surprised. This is a trial and I see no reason why they aren't trialling the highest speed the technology can deliver. What is the point of a trial if you don't really test things?" he said.

But a BT spokesman said that the speeds would be "very decent".

"Higher in fact that anyone currently needs," he added.

BT pointed out that while 10Mbps would be a baseline minumum for customers, download speeds would increase depending on what the user was doing, such as downloading a movie.

And while the capacity is shared, customers would still get speeds of more than 50Mbps when required, said BT.

It is also hoping to offer the service free for the first two years to all the 10,000 homes which will eventually be built at Ebbsfleet, in a bid to kick-start next-generation broadband.

This plan has yet to be approved by Ofcom.

Conservative company


BT's FIBRE TRIAL OPTIONS
2.5Mbps download speed/ 0.5Mbps upload speed
10Mbps down/2Mbps up
10Mbps down/2Mbps up, burst to 30Mbps for downloads
10Mbps down/2Mbps up, burst to 100Mbps
Source: BT Wholesale

The UK has been criticised for its slow adoption of super-fast broadband.

Cable provider Virgin Media is currently the only company offering speeds of up to 50Mbps while some other ISPs are rolling out service offering speeds up to 24Mbps.

BT pointed out network capacity using fibre affect all services across Europe.

Virgin customers with 20Mbps connections have it "throttled back" during certain times of a day.

The longest you can actually run your 20Mbps package at "top speed" before the throttles apply is seven minutes, said a BT spokesman.

In Europe a handful of operators are offering download speeds of between 20 and 100Mbps, with most also offering very fast upload speeds as well.

Ebbsfleet will have 10,000 homes connected via fibre, although building will not be complete until 2020.

BT has not yet announced any other new-build sites earmarked for fibre.

Part of the reason for BT's decision to market fibre trial speeds lower than they are techinically capable of could be natural caution.

"BT is historically a conservative company and has a tendency to suggest a lower performance than will be the case," said Andrew Ferguson, editor of ThinkBroadband, a broadband comparison and news site.

"How often people at Ebbsfleet will see 100Mbps speeds depends on how much capacity is available to link the site to broadband providers, and how much capacity they have out to the internet," he said.

Uploading speeds

In the first instance, with just 300 homes earmarked for the trial, speeds are likely to far exceed 10Mbps.

"But as more people sign up they may find that at peak times such as Friday and Sunday evenings they are only getting 10Mbps," said Mr Ferguson.

He said he was more disappointed by the upload speeds, which peaks at 2Mbps.

Having a fast upload speed makes it far quicker for people to put their own content online.

Services which allow people to upload voice, pictures and videos needed higher speeds, said Mr Ferguson.

"Uploading has been undersold but it offers the potential, for example, to bring about a sea-change in how media is produced," he said.

"The BBC has been criticised for its regional coverage but with decent speeds people in those areas could upload their own video clips," he said.

Labels: Technology, World News