Nintendo pays $21m in Wii patent trial

Nintendo, the world's biggest maker of handheld game machines, was told by a federal jury to pay $21 million to a Texas company for infringing a patent used in the Wii and GameCube systems, reports Bloomberg.com.

The jury in Lufkin, Texas, awarded the money to closely held Anascape, which sued Nintendo in 2006. Anascape founder Brad Armstrong claimed Wii and GameCube used his invention, patented in 2005, related to ways to make game controllers.

Nintendo, based in Kyoto, Japan, said last month it expects to sell 25 million Wii players this year. US retailers sold 721 000 Wii consoles in March and the game system is sold out at some stores, according to market researcher NPD Group. Nintendo said it did not use Anascape's technology and challenged the patent's validity.

The industry momentum for data portability brotherhood hit a bump yesterday when Facebook blocked Google's Friend Connect service from accessing Facebook members' data, reports ITWorld.

Friend Connect violates Facebook's terms of service because it "redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users' knowledge", Facebook official Charlie Cheever wrote on the company's blog for developers.

"Just as we've been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we've had to suspend Friend Connect's access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance," Cheever wrote.

A Missouri woman, whose online taunting was blamed in the 2006 suicide of her 13-year-old neighbour, now faces criminal charges, says ITWorld.

A grand jury yesterday handed up an indictment charging Lori Drew, 49, of O'Fallon, Missouri, with one count of conspiracy and three counts of unauthorised computer access. A federal grand jury in California heard the case because that is where MySpace, the Web site where the taunting occurred, is located.

Drew faces a maximum of five years in prison on each of the counts.

IBM's Roadrunner supercomputer will rely on speed and quick thinking, to keep ahead of its competition. The massive system is poised to become one of the world's fastest high-performance computers (HPCs), according to IBM officials, says eWeek.

At IBM's facility in upstate New York, engineers are putting the final touches on Roadrunner before it's shipped to the Department of Energy's facility, in Los Alamos, in August. Donald Grice, IBM's chief engineer for the Roadrunner project, said the $100 million machine is likely to offer a sustained performance of one petaflop, one quadrillion calculations per second. This is a goal that several other HPC makers such as Cray, Sun Microsystems and SGI are working toward.

In the past two weeks, SGI and Intel have announced plans to create a supercomputer at Nasa that will break the petaflop mark. Meanwhile, Sun is working toward its own system that will reach the petaflop plateau.