Before long, your computer is going to be watching your every move—Microsoft is reportedly working on integrating the Kinect motion sensor into laptops. The Kinect, which is a special Xbox peripheral that uses a camera and microphone to watch and listen to a user for commands, has been successfully hacked to work on a computer by hobbyists, but the device would need to be modified significantly to work in a portable product such as a laptop.

The Kinect was released in early November 2010, but hasn’t been overly successful as a gaming controller due to fairly poor participation by game studios. Its uses as a user interface controller have been decidedly more interesting; only a few weeks after the Kinect hit shelves, videos were posted online of people using the device to play a piano as they tapped imaginary keys on a desk, control robotic arms, and navigate through web pages.

Microsoft has been surprisingly supportive of open-source Kinect products, and has released an SDK to allow programmers to more easily access its functions. This news about integrating a Kinect sensor into laptops could lead to Minority Report-esque interfaces in the future, with users speaking commands to their computers and businessmen in airports waving their arms around to view documents on their laptops.

Microsoft provided no estimates as to when we might actually see laptops with motion tracking features, but we do know that they will be licensing the technology to manufacturers rather than building a solution in-house.

Michael Dell

Dell was hit hard today with a $100 million settlement charge, ultimately putting an end to a five year investigation by the SEC. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has been pouring through Dell’s financial records since 2005 upon allegations of inaccurate accounting and reporting practices.

Michael Dell, the founder and CEO of Dell, will also be facing a hefty fine that will have to come out of his own pocket. Dell, the CEO, will have to fork over $4 million due to the SEC uncovering a commercial, yet mostly hidden, relationship between Dell’s company and Intel.

According to the SEC, Dell has not been entirely honest with its customers with regard to their relationship with some of their hardware providers. Some aspects of Dell’s relationship with Intel should have legally been disclosed to the public, thus the computer industry giant will now face the consequences.

Dell set aside the $100 million in June of 2010 in preparation for finally resolving this dispute. That amount plus Michael Dell’s own $4 million ante closes all disputes regarding their history of faulty accounting, financial reporting, and nondisclosure of their ties to Intel.

Faulty Dell

Documents from a three-year-old lawsuit against dell were recently unsealed.  Dell was allegedly aware of their computers having faulty capacitors and knew the computers were likely to break.  Documents show that Dell shipped computers from May 2003 to July 2005 that were at risk of breaking, as they contained the faulty capacitors made by Nichicon.

The Dell OptiPlex computers containing the bad capacitors were mostly sold to business and government customers.  The bad capacitors are reported to break and potentially leak chemicals inside the computer, which in turn could also be potential to start a fire.  In a study by Dell, in a three-year span the bad capacitors were likely to cause issues up to 97 percent of the time.

Despite the growing complaints to Dell still continued to sell the faulty computers.  A Dell hired contractor conducted an investigation on the situation and discovered that Dells initial estimate of failing computers was off by ten times.  The contractor reported that Dell was also replacing defective motherboards with other defective motherboards.

In some released documents about how to handle questions around the faulty Dell systems, Dell salesman were instructed “not to bring this to customer’s attention proactively” and “Emphasize uncertainty.”  In another email from a Dell Employee to a Dell customer it was stated” We need to avoid all language indicating the boards were bad or had ‘issues’ per our discussion this morning.  So, it seems Dell employees were deliberately trying to conceal the growing capacitor problems.

The Dell lawsuit has not yet gone to trial.  Dell did not recall any of the OptiPlex Computers, and with the newly released court documents Dell may end up receiving many more complaints.  There are potentially a number of customers who are unaware of the issues that plague their Dell OptiPlex computers, or even why their computers had failed to begin with.