Sony Computer Entertainment America Inc says that since it cut the price on its PlayStation games console to $200 from $300, sales have risen over three-fold: what we are experiencing is Christmas in June, cheered a jubilant Sony.
The wrap-up to the bizarre case where former Intel Corp employee Guillermo Gaede stole Pentium chip designs and tried to sell them to Advanced Micro Devices Inc – which immediately informed Intel, is that the Argentinian has got 33 months.
Correction: Amdahl Corp points out that there’s no such thing as an Admiral processor – it’s just a CMOS-based processor (CI No 2,941).
Debra J Murray, former treasurer and vice-president of finance for Kurzweil Applied Intelligence Inc was sentenced to three years’ probation and to community service for her role in a scheme to falsify the company’s books before it went public in 1993. Murray was given a lighter sentence than guidelines had called for after she pleaded guilty and co-operated with the Justice Department’s prosecution of other Kurzweil executives. They included the former president of the Waltham, Massachusetts maker of automated speech-recognition systems, Bernard Bradstreet, and the firm’s former vice-president of sales, Thomas Campbell. In May, a jury found both men guilty of record falsification and conspiracy, and both of them face fines of up to $1m and 10 years in prison.
IBM Corp has set up an Olympic electronic mail service for fans around the globe to send messages via the Internet, to Olympians in general, to their favorite teams or to individual athletes. IBM opens its Surfshack – a tent housed within the confines of the Olympic Village on July 6, where athletes can check out and respond to their mail; you can drop your favourite sporting hero a line or two on http://www.fanmail.olympic.ibm.com.
