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February 28, 2017

Lenovo ThinkPad X300 Battery

Nikulin has not been charged with anything directly related to the DNC hack, which US intel agencies have said was part of a Russian political influence campaign. Even if he's not a (publicly named, at least) suspect he remains a person of interest in the case. US authorities have filed separate charges against him that remain under seal.Russia has responded to the American extradition request against Nikulin by asking the Czechs to ship him back home to face an $2,000 bank hacking charge dating back to 2009."He was never formally accused at that time. I think the reason is that he was recruited [by the Russian security services]," said Ondrej Kundra, political editor with the Czech weekly magazine Respekt, told The Guardian.Russia reportedly offers hacking suspects immunity from prosecution in exchange for their assistance.Adam Kopecky, Nikulin's Czech lawyer, told The Guardian that his client â€“ who denies all charges â€“ was being treated as a political pawn. "He is unhappy about being detained for a long time in a foreign country and about the accusations against him. He wants to return to Russia â€“ but as a free man," Kopecky said.

Prague's chief prosecutor is expected to make a determination on the twin extradition requests by early February, a spokeswoman for the city's municipal court said. ®The proposed settlement [PDF] covers an eleven-year period from 2000 to 2011 when prosecutors claim a huge section of the laptop market, including Hitachi, Sony, NEC, Samsung, Sanyo and Toshiba, all agreed to overcharge consumers for new batteries. The same was true for batteries for power tools and camcorders.The class action lawsuit alleges that the companies collectively agreed to limit their output to keep wholesale costs up and then control prices charged to consumers to rake in bigger profits. An estimated 16 million people were affected.The case has been going on for four years and has put the value of price-fixing damages at just under $1bn (roughly $60 per person). The settlement that was agreed to in December and filed this week would, however, bring the total available for refund to just $65m after Sony settled for $19.5m, LG for $39m and NEC is offering $2.5m.According to the settlement, Hitachi's offer is slightly more than estimated damages of $3.2m, and NEC's $2.5m is more than double its estimated damages of $1m. It is hoped the shortfall will be made up by pressuring the remaining companies â€“ Panasonic, Samsung, Sanyo and Toshiba â€“ to settle.

As ever, the real winners will be the lawyers, who have spent four years litigating the case. During that time, more than eight million documents have been provided and read through, 25 depositions of just Hitachi and NEC people have been taken, and a long list of hearings and meetings have been billed to reach the settlement. The settlement itself is filing number 1,672 in the case.When the case is finally settled, people who bought stand-alone laptop batteries from any of those companies will receive emails informing them of their win. Assuming, of course, they are still using the same email from over a decade ago and assuming they can prove the purchase. A victory for the common man! ®The new recall is an extension of an earlier announcement in June, which covered more than 40,000 batteries. The US Consumer Product Safety Division advisory states that the batteries in question were manufacturered by Panasonic in China. One battery has already overheated and caused around $1,000 of damage."The batteries are compatible with HP, Compaq, HP ProBook, HP ENVY, Compaq Presario, and HP Pavilion notebook computers. HP has expanded the number of recalled batteries, which were shipped with notebook computers sold between March 2013 and October 2016," it states.

"The battery bar code is printed on the back of the battery. 'HP Notebook Battery' and the model number are printed on the battery. The batteries included in this expanded recall have bar codes starting with: 6BZLU, 6CGFK, 6CGFQ, 6CZMB, 6DEMA, 6DEMH, 6DGAL and 6EBVA."The Canadian recall notice states that, in all, HP sold 5,700 batteries in Canada, 142,900 in the US, and 8,500 in Mexico. It reports nine cases of the batteries overheating or catching fire in Canada and the US, and no reported cases in Mexico."Customers should cease use of affected batteries immediately," HP warned."Customers may continue to use their notebook computer without the battery installed, by connecting the notebook to external power. HP's primary concern is for the safety of our customers. HP is proactively notifying customers, and will provide a replacement battery for each verified, eligible battery, at no cost."For IT admins who don't want to spend the entire day checking each corporate laptop, HP has released software that can automatically check for dodgy power packs â€“ although you'll need .net Framework 4.5 and HP CASL Framework to run it. ®

Comment When Martin Fink resigned from his positions at HPE in August 2016, the announcement said: "Martin Fink, our chief technology officer and head of Hewlett-Packard Labs, will be retiring from HPE at the end of the year, after more than 30 years with the company." He was retiring, we were told, but he was just 51.In Fink's time running HP Labs, and then Hewlett-Packard Labs after the HP-HPE split, he helped HP embrace Linux, launched its Helion public cloud service and spearheaded The Machine development and associated Memristor memory technology. The Helion cloud has been discontinued. The Memristor development is much-delayed and The Machine prototype supports Optane (3D XPoint) DIMMs while HPE has a ReRAM development effort with Western Digital, which actually inherited it when it bought SanDisk, with whom HPE set up the deal, in 2016.The Machine project was reviewed publicly at the end of last year and its memory-driven computing ideas will find a home in the roadmaps for HPE's servers but likely will not result in an actual Machine product.

Fink's retirement announcement also said: "We will move Hewlett-Packard Labs into the Enterprise Group under Antonio Neri. This move will also help align our R&D work on The Machine with the business â€“ particularly how we integrate key components like photonics and Memristor into existing product lines â€“ by bringing together our innovation roadmap with our business roadmap." Pre-split HP Labs was run by Fink and covered all of the HP product areas, from printers to PCs to networking to servers and so forth. Post-split the printers-to-PCs HP had its HP Labs run by Shane Wall while HPE had Hewlett-Packard Labs run by Martin Fink, and that no longer had printer and PC/laptop/tablet-related activities. Fink, along with Enterprise Group GM Antonio Neri and other execs, reported directly to CEO Meg Whitman.The Helion cloud was canned in October 2015. The Memristor development has consumed years of time and money and not resulted in licensable IP or revenue-earning product. By cutting a deal with SanDisk over ReRAM it seemed to many that HPE was signalling that Memristor tech development was being pushed on to the back-burner. The Machine was a huge research project that, so far, has not resulted in usable technology and the fruits of which will now be spread across HPE's server product set as it progresses towards memory-driven computing.

We feel Fink, at the age of 51, was persuaded to leave or pushed out so that Hewlett-Packard Labs costs could be better controlled, and Neri could be given overall control of it inside his Enterprise Group.So Fink, facing a shrunken Labs structure and, we think, a demoting transfer into Neri's Enterprise Group, "retired". Just over four months later, he has un-retired, and taken up the CTO role at Western Digital.We think Hewlett-Packard Labs will slowly shrink in size and influence and focus less on blue-sky developments and more on things that have a foreseeable ROI. Neri's Enterprise Group will pay for Hewlett-Packard Labs and will surely want a return on this money, although calculating its ROI must be an exercise in creativity.This could result in an exodus of talent from Hewlett-Packard Labs as researchers and scientists there see career options becoming limited. El Reg thinks the days are long gone when a server manufacturer can invent and productise a memory technology, if they ever existed in the first place after IBM and magnetic core memory. There are three main reasons we see for this.

One is that the market for such technology â€“ chips of some sort â€“ is made up of server manufacturers, and server maker A isn't likely to license memory technology from competing server maker B, not when alternatives from independent fabs are available. Secondly, the in-house demand for such chips is not likely to be high enough to create enough volume to make the fab cost affordable.The technology and process development difficulties are so complex that specialised and experienced chip foundry partners are needed yet the main ones are focussed on cross-server OEM markets and not single-vendor products. Even though HPE partnered with SK Hynix to develop Memristor chips, the likelihood of other server manufacturers buying Memristor chips from SK Hynix was vanishingly low, particularly once Intel and Micron launched 3D Xpoint memory.So the memory technology development focus has shifted to the DRAM and flash fab operators. By selling their product to many server vendors they get the volume they need to drive down per-chip costs.Their job is to do a better job of productising their next-gen memory technology better, meaning faster and with a road to affordability, than their competitors.

There are too many candidate technologies offering their own claimed combination of DRAM-class speed, non-volatility, density, density roadmap, and affordability, and there will have to be a cull in the ranks of:Eight candidates to fill the DRAM-NAND gap is far too many. Fink has a fight on his hands to convince server vendors and others that Western Digital's storage memory candidate tech, ReRAM, is the one to choose. We think we can say HPE is on board the ReRAM train. If WD can sign up another major OEM then that would be a great honking signal that ReRAM's day has arrived.The elephant in this storage-class memory room is Intel and Micron's 3D XPoint. We look forward very, very much to Western Digital's positioning and comparison data for its ReRAM versus 3D XPoint. XPoint has to be demolished by ReRAM or sidestepped. It is going to be fascinating to see what happens and how Western Digital takes on the challenge. ®Shortly after the American College of Education (ACE) in Indiana fired IT administrator Triano Williams in April, 2016, it found that it no longer had any employees with admin access to the Google email service used by the school.

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