Following the decision to stop the production of its HD DVD product line, Toshiba is about to declare a $986 million loss (100 billion yen). Declaring the said amount as loss will pull down the company’s full-year operating profit to $2.43 billion (250 billion yen) which is short of its projected profit for this year.
When Toshiba decided to pull the plug on its HD DVD production, the company was not expecting that it would be force to implement changes in its production line. Neither did the company expect that it would incur other charges that would multiply the $486 million (50 billion yen) that it previously expected to lose.
Despite this projected loss, Toshiba is still confident that it could earn an operating profit of $2.82 billion (290 billion yen) for this year until March of 2009. However, some company executives admitted that this might not be possible as the company may further be affected by falling prices of microchips and LCD’s.
Aside from losing substantial amount in its operating profit, Toshiba may also face some problems from HD DVD agreements that the company has entered into with companies such as Universal Studios, Paramount Pictures and Dreamworks Animation.
If Toshiba still wants to achieve its targeted operating profit, it must get up on its feet as early as now. The earlier decision is beginning to take its toll on the company as trading prices of its Shares are going down to as high as 1.5%.
The Playstation Dualshock is back. After all the controversy over copyrights and gamer-hating judges, you can finally per-order yours for $50. It’s wireless and sixaxis, too [Plunder Guide via Video Game Blog]
Shortly after the fall of the HD DVD format Microsoft officially announced that they were ending production of the HD DVD player for the Xbox 360 and we, along with a number of others, figured they would be jumping on board with Blu-ray in short order.
According to Microsoft exec Aaron Greenberg, group product manager for the Xbox 360, the company appears to have no plans to move in the direction of a Blu-ray player, or any high-def player for that matter, for their game console. “Xbox is not currently in talks with Sony or the Blu-ray Association to integrate Blu-ray into the Xbox experience,” Greenberg said. He followed up that comment with “We’re the only console offering digital distribution of entertainment content,” which leads us to believe that Microsoft may have taken this opportunity to rid the console of physical disc media all together.
Microsoft will likely continue to promote and grow the Xbox Live online service instead which might be a better option for them and will almost certainly keep them from investing in another technology that gets beat out by a competitor such as the HD DVD player.
Is GoDaddy playing censorship God again or did the police ranking site RateMyCop actually really hit its bandwidth limit? RateMyCop has been gaining popularity lately because it allows visitors to post comments and ratings on police officers. It would have been alright if the site was not disclosing officer names and badge numbers, but unfortunately it does.
In fact this feature was the reason why visitors are going to the site. Unfortunately for police officers RateMySite puts them in danger by revealing their personal information. Thus, they wanted the site to be shut down. And so a couple of days ago, fans and visitors of RateMyCop were surprised to see a site’s main page with no trace of the contents of the except for a small note that says “Oops!” RateMyCop founder Gino Sesto did what he had to do being the site owner, so he contacted GoDaddy and asked why his site was down.
GoDaddy claimed that RateMyCop’s bandwidth allotment for the month has already been exceeded by the site. This was refuted by Gino saying that it was not possible for his site to reach its 3 terabyte limit since the site’s page views ranges from 80,000 to 400,000.
Was this another case of GoDaddy censoring a site hosted on its server or did RateMyCop really reached its bandwidth limit? Who is telling the truth? You’re guess is as good as mine.
Today AT&T announced the availability of their own new version of the BlackBerry Pearl with the 8120 as a replacement for the 8100. The BlackBerry Pearl 8120 comes to AT&T with some new features that are already enjoyed by Sprint and Verizon, but most notably has WiFi added to its connectivity and forgoes the GPS.
An external-facing microSD slot, regular-sized 3.5mm headphone jack, 2 megapixel camera with video recording and an improved browser round out the updated features on the new smartphone. It also of course has all the features of the 8100 model as a quad-band GSM/EDGE (850/900/1800/1900MHz) world phone along with the slim candy bar design, Bluetooth and the almost-QWERTY keyboard.
AT&T has the global Pearl 8120 available today for its business customers with pricing at $200 with a 2-year contract and discounts.
Alvin Aronson, a student at RISD, made this clock that raises and lowers individual segments of corian gradually to tell the time. Very slick, here's the video - Link, and his site - Link.
[Read this article] [Comment on this article]
Written by Becky Stern on March 13th, 2008 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Arts.
With the recent reports of the OLPC foundation looking for a CEO to replace Nicholas Negroponte, it seems they were only partially true. While they are indeed looking for a CEO, Negroponte has stated that not only is he not the current CEO, but they also have NO current CEO.
“Replacement is not the right word. We have no CEO. I have never held that title nor used it. I will continue to do what I do, no real change.”
So while the search for the CEO continues, it seems he will continue to act in his current role, which sounds like it will not have any changes based on a new CEO coming in.
AT&T introduced the BlackBerry Pearl 8120 among their list of available smart phones today, following Verizon’s release of the RIM BlackBerry 8310 some time ago. The new Pearl 8120 features a 2.0-megapixel camera with built-in flash and video recording capabilities, MicroSD card support, handsfree Bluetooth, a QWERTY keyboard, and a Wi-Fi antenna that will allow it to easily connect to wireless networks. It’s currently available for $199.99 with a two-year contract (after rebates and discounts), which I’d say is a fair bargain, although it wouldn’t hurt if they had managed to include a built-in GPS in the thing too.
Shortly after the fall of the HD DVD format Microsoft officially announced that they were 
Today AT&T announced the availability of their own new version of the BlackBerry Pearl with the 8120 as a replacement for the 
