Amazon.com is counting the effects, if there were any, after its site experienced problems in North America for more than two hours because of ’system issues’.

Before 10am California time on a Saturday, the website was shut down and giving an error code to anyone visiting it, according to Keynote Systems - a company who measures the performance of websites.

However, Amazon’s services it provides to other companies were not affected, nor its international sites.

Amazon is one of the web giants, and it attracts massive amounts of money and traffic, with forecasters expecting the company will bring in more than US$19 million in revenue this year.

Intel, the world’s largest microchip maker, had announced on Friday that it had received a civil subpoena from the Federal Trade Commission, which has been examining informally its pricing and sales rebates for more than a year.

This investigation follows the assault by regulators in Europe and Asia, and the subpoena sees Intel forced to comply with the investigation, while it wasn’t forced to comply before the subpoena was issued.

All three investigations are looking at the same issue: the practises it used to computer makes that have prevented AMD expanding its sales.

The South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission fined Intel for US$25 million after finding that it had violated antitrust laws in South Korea. In 2005, Japan found that Intel had violated antitrust laws, and Intel agreed to change its practises.

AMD is also pursuing a private antitrust lawsuit, which was filed in Delaware in 2005, but the trial date has been pushed back to 2010.

As well, it is understood that many PC makers received subpoenas last week.

TECHGEEK is planning a brand new design to be launched, but we also want some of your input as well. So tell us what we need to change, what we need to remove and what do we need to add to the design.

We have also heard from our editors that they don’t like the red colouring… so we plan to change the colouring to a new colour. We are not going to tell you though, since it’s a secret and we don’t want anyone to know.

As well, if you want a fluid design; someone send me an HTML code for a fluid design and we will use it. You can post it as a comment or send it directly to me at terencehuynh@reawaken.info.

So, have your say NOW!!!!

Terence Huynh
Editor in Chief