Google has announced the sale of Motorola Mobility to Lenovo for a total of $2.9 billion. $1.41 billion will be paid at the end of the agreement, $660 million in cash and $750 million in Lenovo shares. The remaining $1.5 billion will be paid over the next three years. Google bought Motorola Mobility in August 2011 for $12.5 billion.
Google has decided to open the counteroffensive against the Rockstar consortium, which in October 2013 sued Google and its partners Asus, HTC, Huawei, LG, Pantech, Samsung and ZTE for alleged violation by Android of some patents owned by the consortium. According to Google, Rockstar’s lawsuit has placed a cloud on Google’s Android platform; threatened Google’s business and relationships with its customers and partners, as well as its sales of Nexus-branded Android devices.
On December 10, 1993, id Software made available the MS-DOS computer game “Doom” in its shareware version on the first of a series of bulletin boards and an ftp server giving rise to one of the most legendary stories in videogame history. The shareware version included only the first episode, titled “Knee-Deep in the Dead”, while the commercial version offered for sale included two more episodes: “Shores of Hell” and “Inferno”.
The great mathematician and computer science pioneer Alan Turing received a posthumous award, the Icon Award for Outstanding Achievement, one of the Attitude Awards, accepted by two of his nieces. Recently the production of a biopic about the scientist started starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Turing and Keira Knightley as his friend and colleague Joan Clarke.
On September 27, 1983 Richard Stallman announced the birth of the GNU project. This acronym stands for “GNU’s Not Unix” and indicates a willingness to create a Unix-compatible operating system but with the fundamental characteristic of being free. The point was that no one had to pay for permission to use the GNU system.
