The company says it has been eyeing the Flash memory market for a while now and its time has come. So, Rambus has jumped on the best opportunity to do what it has done since its inception: snap up a keystone technology so it can develop a commercial offering and begin generating revenues through third party licensing. Rambus’ latest technology acquisition, Unity Semiconductor, will allow the company to do just that: licence CMOx Flash cell technology to any takers.

According to Rambus, speaking with TechEye, NAND has its days numbered due to the inherent difficulties in scaling the cells below a certain node (20nm), precisely where CMOx leverages its advantages. Calling it an “inflection point” in NAND usage, Rambus is betting on CMOx to carry Flash smaller nodes. At 17nm, CMOx will have four times the density of NAND.

One representative told us: “The Unity technology is well positioned to allow the industry to continue to scale as well as to reduce costs of future generations of non-volatile memory”.

Our source added that this is in line with the company's commitments and "expands the breadth of Rambus memory technologies" which will "open up new markets for licensing”.

CMOx also opens the market to new players. Rambus isn’t locked down in DRAMurai-mode. It will license the necessary IP to any takers, and considering the high demand for cheap non-volatile, low-power, high-density storage, it sounds like a promising proposal for new players.

A timeframe for the mass-market of CMOx has not yet been set by Rambus, but considering the technical requirements and the current state of manufacturing, within two years Rambus will have something that is able to compete with NAND, we gather. Right now the goal is to "broadly licence the technology and create an ecosystem of tools and equipment suppliers to enable the commercialisation of CMOx".

Micron will have a head-start in this process, as we hear the agreement inked just a year ago with Unity Semiconductor to further develop CMOx remains in place. Possibly not under the terms Rambus would like it done. That point remains unclear.

Like it or not, Rambus has been on the bleeding edge of memory development and has the sharpest legal claws one can find in the northern hemisphere. It has had its spats with the industry, but as of late, has been cleaning up unfinished business with its partners – Nvidia being the latest case.

It is thought that the write off is the single largest for a UK IT project, after plans to implement a nationwide patients record system hit the rocks.

The negotiations around the deal are ongoing, writes EHI, but after continued uncertainty the firm has had to inform its investors of a hefty write-off in its quarterly financial results.

It was previously thought that CSC was expecting take a hit to the tune of $1.39 billion (£849 million), approaching the amount of its original investment, and it seems that CSC bosses have finally given in. CSC had orginally been expecting to get a $3.1 billion (£2 billion) payment it claimed back in September, having appeared to have agreed the figure with UK authorities.

For its part of the bargain, CSC had been tasked with putting together the Lorenzo EPR software, but ended up years behind schedule, and has found the UK government dismantling a $18.9 billion (£12 billion) NHS IT project.  Four early adopters of the Lorenzo EPR plan have now pulled out.

For CSC, the good news is that it will still get $150 million (£94 million) every year in maintenance revenues from NHS customers, though there are expected to be redundancies of its staff working on the EPR project, and investors are unlikely to be pleased about being hit in the pocket.

CSC has been in prolonged arguments with the Department of Health over payments, with bungled work and continued delays by the US contractor blamed by the UK department.

Multiple deadlines were given to put the record system in place, with the Department of Health growing increasingly irate as each whizzed past. The Public Accounts Select Committee also tore into the wastefulness of the debacle last year.

However, the government's ability to place large contracts in the first place has also been the subject of heavy criticism. After a series of disastrous IT projects there have been MP inquiries and widespread condemnation of the lack of expertise in negotiating big contracts.

After scathing reports, Cabinet Secretary Francis Maude recently announced that an academy would be put in place to train up government officials in procurement and stop them tottering off after major botch jobs.

According to government IT expert at City University, David Chan, the fact that the government refused to hand over huge amounts of cash following a bungled job is a step in the right direction.

“It is a positive,” Chan told us.  “It shows that they are willing to take the suppliers on, as previously the government has been more willing to hand over money after paying over the odds. The suppliers should bear some of the risk for the project too, and CSC were unable to deliver.”

Chan also said to TechEye that there are lessons to be learnt from yet another IT fiasco: “Obviously the project was a failure, and one of the main things that can be learnt is that it is better to get more small contracts rather than this massive one with CSC.

“Large contracts have been preferred in the past as they are in some senses easier to administer. They also offer kudos to those securing a big contract.”

According to the latest DRAM Exchange report, the first-tier DRAM makers whipped out their divining rods right on time to pre-empt a massive break in revenues due to the PC sales slump, which lead to contract prices on desktop DDR3 DRAM falling by as much as 25 percent.

Manufacturers reduced desktop DRAM production by 50 percent and slyly shifted production to more bottom-line-friendly mobile and server memory to make up for the break.

As a result, and despite DRAM sales dropping 1.7 percent in Q4 2011, DRAM makers tallied up a total of $6.45 billion in revenue.

Samsung Electronics remains king of the hill in the DRAM business, totalling 44.3 percent of market share, Hynix comes a far second with 23.3 percent share, while Micron and Elpida come in at 12.1 and 12 percent, respectively. Taiwan’s Nanya remains steadfast at no.5 with just 3.6 percent of the market.

The PC slump is projected to continue throughout the first two quarters of 2012, and as interest in mobile and handheld computing devices increases the shift in production will become irreversible.

As DDR3 desktop memory seems to be going nowhere fast, at least not until DDR4 reaches mass appeal in 2015, we’d recommend you buy now to save later, when supply constraint will take its toll.

191 pages of reports were put together back in 1991 as part of background checks for Jobs, who was about to be appointed George Bush senior’s Export Council.

However, it seems that the squares at the FBI were not too pleased about Jobs’ history of dabbling in LSD and smoking weed.

Top spooks were also less than impressed by his alleged habitual lying, citing interviews with people close to him which claim he often attempted to “distort reality” in order to get what he wanted.

One woman also said there were “questions concerning his ethics and morality”, and claimed that his personal life was "lacking" because of “narcissism and shallowness”.

With news that Jobs was also fond of alternatively screaming his head off while belittling his employees or retreating to burst, it certainly seems there was never a dull moment with Steve.

Even those on friendly terms with Jobs often had a bad word to say, with one claiming he was likeable enough but rather “deceptive”.

All of which makes Jobs sound like the ideal politician, with the report stating the Jobs indeed “possesses the qualities to assume a high level political position”.

Feds fearing ‘reds under the bed’ were placated with the report, also noting that the arch-capitalist, Jobs, had no family relations with people living in commie countries, with the Cold War only just drawing to a close.

There was talk, however, about Jobs fathering a child out of wedlock, claiming that he at first denied he was the father of Lisa Brennan-Jobs.

Details were released of blackmail attempts to extort money from Jobs during his first tenure at Apple. A series of phone calls were made by a man who claimed explosive devices had been placed in various homes and demanded “one million dollars” to be paid up. It turned out to be a hoax.

Solar subsidies are being reduced to around half the level of before a government consultation was launched last year, with a drop to 21p/kWh as of April this year.

In July, these could further drop to 13.6p/kWh, while the government stated its aim to change subsidies regularly in accordance with market pressure as part of new plans. It is hoped that this will remove the need for emergency reviews, which have seen the government dragged into court over its premature cuts.

“Today we are announcing plans to improve the Feed-in Tariffs scheme,” Barker said in a statement.

“Our new plans will see almost two and a half times more installations than originally projected by 2015 which is good news for the sustainable growth of the industry.

“We are proposing a more predictable and transparent scheme as the costs of technologies fall, ensuring a long term, predictable rate of return that will closely track changes in prices and deployment."

Energy Minister Greg Barker claimed that new plans would pave the way for a solar boom, with 22GW of installed capacity by 2020.

The optimism has not been shared throughout the solar industry.  Solar Trade Association boss Howard Johns said the plans would destroy the industry, labelling them a “disaster” on Twitter.

Solar industry analyst Ash Sharma at IMS Research also highlighted the negative effect cuts are likely to have, and doubted the ability to reach targets set forth by Barker.

“This seems very optimistic to me,” Sharma told TechEye. “Our best-case forecast shows cumulative installation capacity of less than 15GW by the end of 2020.

“Regardless, is 22GW really that much? That would still be less than what Germany had installed by the end of last year, but a step in the right direction.”

In fact, Sharma believes that the UK is set to fall further behind other leading solar nations with the subsidy cuts. “The UK will definitely play a much smaller role in the global industry in 2012 and beyond,” he told us.“I suspect we may well see a small boom in installations in the next month or so, followed by a real slowdown.”

“In the longer-term we'll see some more gradual growth but I'm not sure we'll see 22GW installed by 2020," Sharma said.

Oracle's big idea rests with Taleo's cloud-based talent management software, which Oracle hopes will allow it to further build on its own cloud business. Bloomberg reports that Ellison, in addition to arguing about cutting down trees, has been on a $40 billion buying frenzy in what has been a cloud software variety of Supermarket Sweep. 

Buying over 70 companies to put it on its way, Oracle is hoping to bolster its operational cloud strategy to help it provide services which manage staff and keep corporate cogs turning. Much like others wheeling and dealing in enterprise software, Oracle's grand vision is to win over customers by pushing management up into the cloud.

Taleo says that after the acquisition, the collaborative efforts of both of the companies will create a cloud service for customers to manage human resources, and "improve the employee experience through faster on boarding and better collaboration with team members via social media".

The entire enterprise management space is spending right now. Analyst Tim Jennings, at Ovum, says rivals like SAP and Salesforce have also been picking up companies in the Human Capital Management sector. They acquired Success Factors and Rypple, respectively.

HP, meanwhile, paid arguably over the odds for Cambridge-based company Autonomy - with a price tag at $10 billion. 

Ovum believes the string of buys is indicative of a larger trend. The enterprise is increasingly accepting Software-as-a-Service. More visibly, Jennings suggests, the industry is aggressively battling against each other to appear like it is the top dog on cloud nine. They aren't interested in migrating their own services to the cloud, and are instead happy to splash out on companies so they can supply their own flavours.

Taleo's board of directors unanimously approved the deal, which is expected to close in the middle of this year, as long as it jumps through the hoops of all the regulatory approvals. Which it most likely will.

Unity Semiconductor owns several memory patents, 147 to be precise, and in particular those relating to a non-volatile Flash memory technology that goes by the name of CMOx (Conductive Metal Oxide).

CMOx works by moving oxygen ions between conductive and insulating metal-oxide layers within a single chip. It has been developed by Unity, uses IBM’s cross-bar memory technology, and is an alternative to NAND Flash. It promises to eradicate the ubiquitous NAND Flash used in so many of our favourite gadgets.

CMOx offers higher storage density, due to its three-dimensional structure, and simpler manufacturing design than NAND. It features a much smaller cell size than NAND (resulting in more cells per wafer) and lower power requirements. As things stand, CMOx is cheaper to manufacture than NAND, promises up to ten times faster writes and will have four times the storage capacity at 17nm. The greatest advantage of CMOx, however, seems to be that it doesn’t rely on untested technology. It can be manufactured with today’s CMOS manufacturing tools, only not as dense as its projected 17nm capacity of 1Tb.

The technology itself, however, is already going on nine years old, which begs several questions. If it is so good, why does NAND even register? Our best explanation is that the now-defunct Unity Semiconductor was not a sales-, but a chip design company, inexperienced in the ways of licensing, which it even tried last year.

At the beginning of 2011, Unity Semiconductor signed an agreement with Micron, with the prospect of commercialising CMOx products, but it now seems nothing good came of it, playing the company right into Rambus’ expert IP-licensing hands. It is now up to Rambus to license off the IP to the likes of Samsung, Toshiba, Hynix Micron and, who knows, maybe Intel.

The - exclusively - factory jobs in Nokia business units in Hungary (2,300), Finland (1,000) and Mexico (700) follow Stephen Elop’s masterplan of killing off the manufacturing arm and sourcing everything from Asian sweatshops factories, which offer more competitive conditions than its European and American counterparts.

According to analysts, shedding Nokia’s massive manufacturing arm is a good thing, reported Reuters, and was eagerly anticipated by investors.

These had been none too pleased with the 73 percent break in the company’s Q4 earnings, but the company line remains that sales of its new Lumia phones are good. Its partnership with Microsoft is ever so slowly gaining traction with over 1 million Lumias sold between mid-November and December 31st. Continued debate about the bugginess of Lumia devices aside, sales results don’t seem too bad for the doom-and-gloom forecast for the Finnish company.

Lumia 700 and 800 series smartphones are currently sourced from Compal Communications, we are told. However, previous rumours that Nokia will keep Lumia 900 devices manufactured in-house seem to lose relevance, as the Finnish phone designer must lop off its factories as fast as it can to regain investor trust.

The job cuts add up to 30,000 so far but should continue throughout 2012, as more and more manufacturing is moved to Asian contractors.

The Swingin' Stephen Elop told us at Mobile World Congress last year that job cuts are merely a new life journey for all involved, and that ex employees should consider losing their livelihoods an opportunity.