Current and former executives from LG, Chunghwa, and Sharp have all agreed to plead guilty to various charges of fixing the prices of TFT-LCD screens. The executives will face six to nine months in jail, pay $20,000-$50,000 fines, and have also agreed to help the United States government in other LCD price fixing investigations. The companies themselves are ending up having to pay criminal fines to the government of $585 million, collectively. It was mentioned that Sharp was fixing the prices of LCDs sold to Apple, Dell, and Motorola. Hopefully this means that the prices of technology utilizing LCD screens is going to drop from this point onwards, but in times like these, you never do know.

Remember those lovely laser discs that education systems seemed to so lovingly embrace back in the 80s and 90s? The discs resembled what today's children would probably call a giant DVD, and these would be placed upon a massive tray to be sucked into a player twice the size of your VCR (VCR? What's that?). All of the memories associated with these players may bring tears to the surface, but you're going to have to face the truth sooner or later: Pioneer just ended production of its last three laser disc players, meaning that replacements for the said players, assuming you own one, will now be gone... forever. Stock up and buy a couple, and you'll be able to enjoy those massive discs for years to come instead of using them as frisbees. Honestly, though-- how did the laser disc player last this long?

The past week wasn't as packed with events and shows as the previous one, but luckily for us, that didn't mean there wasn't enough to report on. This week focussed on netbooks, Steve Jobs' health, and KDE/Qt. This week's My Take is a shameless plug for one of the best television shows we've seen in a while.

Protothreads are a type of extremely lightweight threads - each protothread requires only two bytes of memory - that are usually used for embedded firmware programming, where memory is at a premium. Protothreads combine the low overhead with event-driven programming with the algorithmic clarity of threaded programming.

After successfully battling Microsoft over the company's bundling of Windows Media Player, the European Union is now ready for more. The European Commission has charged Microsoft with violating competition laws because of the Microsoft's bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows.

Using an Mini-ITX motherboard and some spare parts lying around my study, I was able to put together an extremely powerful internet filtering appliance that is not only powerful but fast, reliable, and darn near impossible to circumvent by computer savvy teens. Most parents do not want to bother becoming the internet police of the household but today's internet is a very hostile place with many different opportunities for trouble.

The KDE project has released the first release candidate for KDE 4.2. "The KDE Community today announced the immediate availability of "Cilense", (a.k.a. KDE 4.2 Release Candidate), the only planned release candidate for the KDE 4.2 desktop. Cilense is aimed at testers and reviewers. It should provide a solid ground to report last-minute bugs that need to be tackled before KDE 4.2.0 is released. Reviewers can use this release candidate to get a first look at the upcoming KDE 4.2 desktop which provides significant improvements all over the desktop and applications. It is not recommended for everyday use, however."

The PC industry is going through a very, very dark period right now, with the netbook being the only bright spot on many manufacturers' balance sheets. Since the saving grace of the industry is powered by Intel's Atom chip, it shouldn't come as a surprise that it's also the only positive element in Intel's abysmal quarterly results.

Yesterday we ran a story on how educational institutions defaulting to Microsoft Office may stifle some people who do not own a copy of Office or Windows. A Forrester Research report now states the bloody obvious by claiming that organisations stick with Microsoft Word not out of necessity, but out of habit.

2009 certainly isn't the year for economical prowess even in the thriving world of technology. Even the untouchable Google is apparently taking a hit now that it is cutting the jobs of 100 recruiters as well as closing several satellite engineering offices. Seagate seems to be taking a somewhat heftier blow but grinning and bearing it as they cut 2,950 (6%) jobs worldwide as well as reducing executive pay up to 25%. Microsoft hasn't announced any doom just yet and hopes to avoid layoffs, but if it means staying afloat, the company could announce another chunk of the world unemployed by next Thursday.

There's a story making its rounds across the 'net about a woman who missed several online classes, and failed her semester, and she claims this happened because she bought a Dell laptop with Ubuntu on it - instead of Windows. She didn't know what Ubuntu was, and was surprised to see that her Windows software, such as Microsoft Office, didn't work. While this isolated case sounds a bit ridiculous, there is still a bigger problem here.

Test-Freaks reviews the EFi-X USB V1, a boot processing unit that implements a working version of EFI, allowing you to, among other things, boot Mac OS X Leopard without modifying anything. In other words, there's no hacking involved. The caveat: there's a HCL. They conclude: "I have had the opportunity of reviewing a multitude of items over the past two years and the EFiX is one of the most unique and exciting products that I have encountered. It works as advertised and could not be any simpler to install and setup. Using a store bought copy of Leopard, I was able to get up and running in under an hour. By using recommended hardware from the hardware compatibility list the user can build a Mac as powerful as even the highest end Mac Pro models. The EFi-X USB V1 seems to be an evolving product as the makers add new features with each subsequent firmware upgrade. If you want to build a machine capable of running OS X, Windows and Linux on one platform, then the EFi-X USB V1 is the solution."

The first screenshots of Office 14, the sucessor to Office 2007, have been leaked onto the internet. The screenshots include "Access 14, Excel 14, Groove 14, InfoPath Designer 14, InfoPath Filler 14, InterConnect 14, OneNote 14, Outlook 14, PowerPoint 14, Project 14, Publisher 14, SharePoint Designer 14, Visio 14, and Word 14." Office 14 has no official release date yet.

Version 5 of the Java Language Specification added 10 new methods to java.lang.Math and java.lang.StrictMath, and Java 6 added another 10. Join Elliotte Rusty Harold for a look into "new" features in the classic java.lang.Math class in this article, which explores the functions designed for operating on floating-point numbers.