posted by weildish on Sun 1st Feb 2009 01:15 UTC
Sony just reported that through the fourth quarter of 2008, their profits plummeted a staggering 95%, losing $1.67 billion. The reported down profits were taken from last year's Christmas season, usually the time of the year that all companies including Sony sell the most products. This is the first loss that Sony has reported since 1995 when they produced several box-office flops. In lieu of the situation, Sony is reportedly cutting 8,000 jobs and going to shut down five or six of the 57 worldwide factories. Will the headless chicken that is the economy ever recover?
Features
Linked by Jesse Smith on 03/15/10 15:21 UTC
All Linux users have their own vision of the ideal distribution. Some people crave stability, others want new and exciting features, some people are very security focused and others are concerned about licensing. Warren Woodford has his own vision and he's made it accessible to the world via MEPIS. This week he was willing to take a few minutes to talk about his creation.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 03/14/10 15:12 UTC
It's no secret to anyone that while Apple sued HTC, the lawsuit is more about Google than HTC itself. Since Android is open source, and owned by no one, it's kind of hard to go after Google itself, and as such, HTC was the prime target, since it is the number one Android smartphone maker. The New York Times has an in-depth article up about the subject, with a whole boatload of quotes from people within the two companies, and it paints a picture of all this being a highly emotional and personal vendetta - especially from Apple's side.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 03/12/10 23:18 UTC
And thus, our true colours reveal. Since Obama was the young newcomer, technically savvy, many of us were hoping that he might support patent and/or copyright reform. In case our story earlier on this subject didn't already tip you off, this certainly will: Obama has sided squarely with the RIAA/MPAA lobby, and backs ACTA. No copyright and/or patent reform for you, American citizens!
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 03/12/10 20:42 UTC
It's been quiet about the Google-China dispute for a while now, but today, the silence was broken by China's minister of Industry and Information Technology, Li Yizhong, who stated that Google must either obey Chinese law or "pay the consequences", leaving no room for a compromise. With more and more western countries building their own internet filters and internet monitoring schemes, it becomes ever harder to make a strong fist against China.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 03/12/10 19:56 UTC
While we are all busy discussing Apple suing HTC for patent infringement, we're almost forgetting that Nokia and Apple are also embroiled in about ten million lawsuits going either way. The most recent move comes from Nokia, who seeks to dismiss Apple's antritrust claims using pretty much the same arguments Apple used to counter Psystar's antitrust claims.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 03/12/10 15:54 UTC
As most of you will know, Microsoft lost the patent lawsuit filed against the Redmond giant by i4i, while also losing the first appeal. Microsoft was forced to remove the infringing functionality from Word for US customers, but they also filed a second appeal. This appeal, too, has been lost.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 03/11/10 22:59 UTC
Common wisdom has it that Flash is a resource hog, and that HTML5 will prevent your processor from having to work really, really hard to show animations of videos. Well, a number of people have conducted benchmarks with the latest browsers and Flash betas, and common wisdom is starting to show serious signs of crackage.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 03/11/10 17:25 UTC
Earlier this week, it was time for the Association for Computing Machinery, ACM, to announce the winner of the 2009 Turing Award, one of the more prestigious prices in the computing industry. The award was awarded to Charles P. Thacker; a name you might not recognise, but certainly one that has influenced the world of computing a great deal.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 03/10/10 23:58 UTC
If you thought the growing criticism directed at the United States Patent and Trademark Office would force them to rethink their strategies in granting patents, you're most likely wrong. After a re-examination that took more than four years, the USPTO has reconfirmed Amazon's ominous one-click patent.
Linked by Thom Holwerda on 03/10/10 22:15 UTC
All Mozilla projects (the major ones at least, I didn't check them all up) are licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1. It's already over a decade old, and the Mozilla Foundation believes it is time to overhaul the license, with a focus on modernising what they believe to be outdated wording.