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The “Business Enterprise” restriction is unreasonably broad in that it purports to restrict Mr. Papermaster from going to work for any company that engages in competition with his former business unit to any extent, even if Mr. Papermaster will not be working for the part of the company that does so. Likewise, the “significant competitor or major competitor” prong purports to restrict Mr. Papermaster from going to work for one of these companies even if the work that Mr. Papermaster will be doing is completely unrelated to the work he was doing at IBM. These provisions are not necessary to protect any legitimate interests of IBM.

InformationWeek spotted the court documents filed late Thursday in federal court in New York claiming that IBM’s noncompete agreement with Papermaster shouldn’t apply to his potential employment at Apple, since the two companies are not competitors in the arena where Papermaster will be employed. In October, Apple hired Papermaster to replace outgoing
iPod executive Tony Fadell and lead the development of future versions of the iPhone, but IBM is suing to prevent him from working for Apple for a year.

Apple’s
iPhone man-in-waiting, Mark Papermaster, has filed a countersuit against his former employer in a dispute over a noncompete agreement.

IBM has successfully obtained a preliminary injunction preventing Papermaster from reporting for duty at Apple, but it seems that’s a pretty standard decision in cases such as these. The two parties are scheduled to have a status conference regarding the case on Tuesday.

The Noncompetition Agreement is also unreasonably broad in that it purports to impose an unreasonably lengthy time limitation. In the world of technology, any trade secrets that Mr. Papermaster possesses would lose their value prior to the expiration of a year. The purported geographic scope of the “Restricted Area” is similarly unreasonable. Mr. Papermaster has resided and worked in Austin, Texas for the past 17 years, yet the language of the Noncompetition Agreement purports to restrict him from working anywhere in the world based on the global scope of IBM’s business. Again, these restrictions are not necessary to protect any legitimate interests of IBM.

Papermaster’s counterclaim focuses on the clauses of the noncompete agreement, arguing that it is too broad and would not permit Papermaster to work for any technology company anywhere in the world for a year following his departure from IBM.

But imagine the amusement of the guardians of the law as they enjoyed the feast of felony being described.

I know that sentence sounds a little like a scene from the CW’s quite rivet-free “Supernatural.” And no one is quite sure how the phone suddenly spurted into action.

You may enjoy his words when speaking of lifting the stereo: “It took all my energy to lift it out of the car.”

(Credit: CC Wandering One/Flickr)

You can listen to the call here, courtesy of the Phoenix New Times.

The unnamed teen was allegedly hanging with his buds and regaling them with what seems to be the story of how he had ripped a stereo from a
car and stolen a Cricket phone.

He was charged with felony vehicle burglary.

The police kept listening in for quite a while, performed a little signal triangulation and, according to a police spokesperson, actually caught the stereo-stealer with the machine still in his hands.

It is rumored that the cell phone has been nominated for a police commendation.

Still, in the pulsating moments that the kid was boasting of his crimes, his cell phone decided to call 911.

In which case, the cell phone belonging to a 16-year-old from Peoria, Ariz., is of a mind to uphold truth, justice and to make 16-year-old thieves look really, really stupid.

"Dear Kid, You steal that Corolla and I'm calling the cops."

While his friends were apparently unimpressed with the Cricket (they’re rather more moved by BlackBerrys), I am stunned to discover that people these days bother to rip stereos out of cars. Somehow that seems so 1987.

There are those who believe machines have minds of their own.

Perhaps the vibrations from the nether regions of the teen, engendered by his excited pride at pulling off the Peoria Job, activated a one-touch button to 911 on the cell phone in his pocket.

Perhaps it took all his gray matter too.

That’s actually really surprising–or maybe blogs have become so ingrained on the Web that people don’t even know they’re reading them.

That’s still higher than the number of people who said they used social-network recommendations, though: ten percent of “blog readers,” and four percent of all those surveyed.

Results of the survey are similar when it comes to advertising: a quarter of “blog readers” say they trust ads on blogs that they read (versus 43 percent on “familiar” or mainstream media sites), but a slightly lower 19 percent say they trust the ads on social networks.

So what does all this mean? Well, it’s good news for BuzzLogic, which tracks blogger influence for clients and has seen blog advertising pushed aside a bit on Madison Avenue in favor of “appvertising” and social ads. Aside from that, the real take-away point is that the results seem to indicate most blogs are less mainstream than you might think: Only a fifth of respondents say they read a blog at least once a month.

Half of all those surveyed who identify as “blog readers” (people who read more than one blog per month, a fifth of total survey respondents) say that blogs are important to them when it comes to making purchasing decisions. But they don’t necessarily find them to be all that reliable: only 15 percent of blog readers, and five percent of all those surveyed said that in the past year they had trusted a blog to help them make a purchase decision.

Facebook likes to trumpet the value of “trusted referrals”–recommendations and ads with the endorsements of members of your friends list. But a new study from Jupiter Research, commissioned by analytics company BuzzLogic, says that consumer purchases are more likely to be influenced by what they read on a blog versus what their social-networking rosters recommend.

President-elect Barack Obama appears to be gearing up for a space race 2.0, this time with China.

This is an artist's rendition of Ares I in the assembly building at the Kennedy Space Center. Ares I is a two-stage rocket configuration topped by the Orion crew vehicle and its launch abort system. It is designed to carry crews of four to six astronauts and has a 25-ton payload capacity.

Citing people who’ve discussed the idea with the Obama team, Bloomberg says they believe collaboration between the country’s civilian space agency and the military’s space program would speed up the time in which the U.S. is able to send people back to the moon.

(Credit:
NASA)

But Obama would like to get Orion in the air before then. Getting a working rocket system up and running will be critical to getting the U.S. back to self-sufficiency with its space programs. As it stands now, the current space shuttle is scheduled to retire in 2010. So if Orion launches with Ares as planned in 2015, this leaves a five-year period of time in which the U.S. will have to pay Russia to fly astronauts to and from the ISS. And that’s assuming Orion (and Ares) are delivered on time. If history is any indicator, delays are likely if not guaranteed. And with added demands for federal funds due to the recession, it’s unclear where NASA and some of its programs stand.

Bloomberg’s sources suggest the Obama team believes the Defense Department (which spent about $22 billion in the last fiscal year) can share some of its resources to give NASA a boost–and that they’re even considering scrapping development of the Ares rocket entirely in favor of using the Pentagon’s Atlas or Delta rockets, which are much further along in development.

Obama’s transition team is considering doing away with some of the barriers that separate the U.S. Department of Defense and NASA, according to Bloomberg.

The main–and very costly–goal is to build a rocket that can carry Orion, NASA’s next-generation spacecraft, to the International Space Station, the moon, and further out into the solar system. NASA has planned to use its new Ares I rocket for that purpose. Last year, it completed preliminary design review for the Ares rocket, which is slated to launch for the first time in 2015.

Whatever they decide, the incoming administration is likely feeling some pressure from China, which plans to land a robotic rover on the moon in 2012, with a manned mission to follow a few years later.

Low-power HE processors, with speeds ranging from 2.1GHz to 2.3GHz, are designed to address a segment of the server market–such as massive data centers–”that must maximize performance during peak hours while managing the energy costs during idle and low-utilization hours,” AMD said.

The new server processors are updated versions of AMD’s 45-nanometer Shanghai processor.

The five new low-power 45-nanometer quad-core AMD Opteron HE processors operate at 55-watt ACP, or Average CPU Power (PDF). This standard differs from Intel’s Thermal Design Power, or TDP, rating.

At the 105-watt ACP thermal envelope, these new processors are immediately available in three new systems from HP, as well as from other technology partners, AMD said.

Updated on January 26 at 9:50 a.m. PST with additional information about ACP and TDP thermal-envelope ratings.

AMD’s HE processor 55-watt ACP is very close to Intel’s Xeon quad-core E5430 processor, for example, which has a TDP of 80 watts.

“TDP is much more conservative,” Fruehe said. “The TDP on those (HE) processors is 79 watts,” he said. But the “average customer is going to see them running in the mid-40s (ACP) range,” Fruehe added.

Pricing for AMD "Shanghai" HE and SE quad-core processors

“When we first came to market, we brought out the standard-power (Shanghai processors) because that’s where the bulk of our market is,” John Fruehe, the director of business development for server and workstation products at AMD, said in an interview. “As always, we follow(ed) up fairly quickly with the HE, which are the energy-efficient models, and the SE, which are the high-performance models.”

Advanced Micro Devices on Monday released low-power and high-performance processors that will find their way into servers from Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Sun Microsystems, and Rackable Systems.

(Credit:
AMD)

High-performance SE processors, which run at 2.8GHz, are targeted at customers with “the most performance-intensive data center workloads,” AMD said.

The challenge for GoodRec is getting distribution and users to create a social web of recommendations. Users are already giving recommendations on Facebook, MySpace, Yelp, and a variety of other other services. “We learned that a barrier to making reviews is that a lot of people are willing to do it privately, so GoodRec has Facebook-like capability to limit who sees your recommendations,” said Goodrec CEO Mihir Shah. Goodrec also has proprietary technology for providing recommendations to users based on personal taste and recommendations from friends, he said.

Goodrec is a service for
mobile browsers that features recommendations from people you trust. Rather than rambling reviews, GoodRec has a simple thumbs up, thumbs down, or mixed rating (no stars) and short text messages for evaluating restaurants, bars, movies, books, and other entities. The service also allows posting of photos and other content associated with making recommendations.

“This kind of functionality married to Twitter is a powerful application,” said TechCrunch judge and former Yahoo executive Jeff Weiner. As a standalone application, Goodrec has a lot of competition. Integrating deeply with a Twitter-like service and other social networks may be the best route for Goodrec to succeed.

The final start-up presenter at TechCrunch50 summed up many of the themes at the event–mobile, social, and on the
iPhone.

From what I’ve heard, most organizations settle in at approximately 95 percent PCs, and 5 percent Macs. Seems like a small and manageable percentage, but here’s the rub. According to some services vendors and PC administrators I’ve talked to, a large portion of the
Mac users are executives–CEOs, COOs, chief legal counsel, etc. These folks get top priority and can be very demanding, so network and endpoint administrators have to be on their toes and establish strong Macintosh “chops” quickly. As a result, some IT professionals claim that 5 percent of Macs may as well be 20 percent of the total PC population. Thus 5 percent equals 20 percent.

Historically, IT pundits would point to this inefficiency as a reason why organizations should not allow employees to use Macs. Heck, maybe some analysts still do. There is more in play than just labor cost and accounting here however. “C-level” people tend to get what they want and, obviously, they want Macs.

Do Macs make these folks more productive, creative, or engaged? I don’t have any data suggesting that they do, but this would be a worthwhile study. In any case, if Macs make the mucky-mucks happy and a happy worker is a productive worker, those excess PC support costs may be well worth it.

A lot of companies have torn down the PC Berlin Wall and now allow employees to use Macintosh computers as well as PCs. Apparently, this creates some interesting dynamics for PC support people.

On its Web site, OAuth is likened to a valet key given to a parking attendant–the key only allows access to, say, drive the
car, but doesn’t enable the trunk to be opened. “You give someone limited access to your car with a special key, while using your regular key to unlock everything…While OpenID is all about using a single identity to sign into many sites, OAuth is about giving access to your stuff without sharing your identity at all (or its secret parts).”

Twitter’s OAuth interface is now open to all developers, enabling more secure access to the service via its application programming interface from third-party Web sites. Alex Payne, Twitter’s API leader, made the announcement in–what else–a tweet Monday.

OAuth is an open standard for online authentication. It enables a user who stores information such as a password on a particular Web site to then authorize yet another site to access that data, all the while not sharing the user’s identity with that site.
Twitter OAuth had been offered to some developers in a closed beta a few weeks ago, according to Twitter’s OAuth FAQ.

Previously: How I got burned by Twitter’s API, why it matters, and how to fix it.

In June, Google announced OAuth support for sharing data through its Google Data interface, then some months later said it would also adopt the standard for widget platform Google Gadgets.

Intel will also participate in a short course on 22nm CMOS technology.

The 32nm paper and presentation “describe a logic technology that incorporates second-generation high-k + metal gate technology, 193nm immersion lithography for critical patterning layers, and enhanced transistor strain techniques,” Intel said.

Intel said it will provide technical details about the 32nm process technology at the International Electron Devices Meeting (IEDM) next week in San Francisco.

“Producing 32nm chips next year would mark the fourth consecutive year that Intel has met its goal,” the company said.

“The company is on track for production readiness of this future generation (of transistors)…in the fourth quarter of 2009,” the chipmaker said in a statement.

Finishing the development phase for 32nm process technology keeps Intel on track with its “tick-tock” strategy. Tick-tock is intended to introduce either a new processor microarchitecture or cutting-edge manufacturing process about every 12 months.

(Credit:
Intel)

Intel has completed the development phase of its next-generation manufacturing process that shrinks chip circuitry to 32 nanometers, the chipmaker said Tuesday night.

Intel 32-nanometer SRAM chip

Intel processors are currently made on a 45nm process. Generally, smaller geometries result in faster and more power-efficient processors.

Other Intel IEDM papers will “describe a low power system on chip version of Intel’s 45nm process, transistors based on compound semiconductors, substrate engineering to improve performance of 45nm transistors, integrating chemical mechanical polish for the 45nm node and beyond; and, integrating an array of silicon photonics modulators,” according to the company’s statement.

So I once went on a movie date with a guy who thought it was sort of weird that I posted to Twitter about the movie in mid-date. In retrospect, it probably was weird, and a bit rude, and I wouldn’t do it again (and no, there was no second date). But get a load of this one.

(Credit:
Twitter)

Mayer has become an extremely avid user of the microblogging service (username is @johncmayer), along with fellow celebrities like basketball player Shaquille O’Neal, comedians Jimmy Fallon and John Hodgman, and actor Ashton Kutcher (who famously got his wife, actress Demi Moore, to join Twitter as well).

“People claiming to be friends of (Aniston) have told Star magazine that she finished the affair after discovering Mayer, 31, spent hours on the networking website, despite telling her he was too busy to get in touch with her,” the Telegraph report alleged.

A concluding note to John Mayer: Look on the bright side. At least this time the tabloids aren’t blaming a breakup on infidelity, drug addiction, or the failure to disclose a venereal disease. I know plenty of nice, smart girls who wouldn’t mind a Twitter-addicted beau.

But now it looks like the celebrity Twitterers may be getting a glimpse of what many of us in the tech industry know already: Chronicling your life in constant 140-character updates doesn’t leave much wiggle room once you’ve gotten used to always telling the world what you’re doing. I’m sure more than a few people have gotten in trouble because they Twittered about watching sports at a bar when they’d informed their bosses that they were holed up in bed with the flu.

John Mayer's deep thoughts on Twitter.

Sources quoted in Star magazine and rehashed by the U.K.’s Telegraph (we can tell this anonymous source is just rock solid) claim that the highly publicized relationship between pop singer John Mayer and actress Jennifer Aniston fizzled because of the evil forces of…Twitter!