More AMD layoffs impact 1,100, execs to get pay cuts
The news is no better for AMD, which today confirmed it is letting go of 9% of those remaining employees who are not being transferred to The Foundry Company -- 200 by attrition, and an additional 900 by traditional termination.
This is in addition to the 600 being let go internationally announced last November (the original estimate was 500), and 1,600 whose "transitioning out" began earlier in 2008.
CNN.com invites beta testers to a live Inauguration Day event
If you've been considering or planning an interactive party with a few million of your closest friends to watch the inauguration of Barack Obama and Joe Biden next Tuesday, CNN.com has an idea for a way you can use that time as a productive beta tester. On January 20, the interactive division of the news network will be partnering with Facebook in a worldwide test of a video delivery and sharing service.
Here's the details as CNN.com presented them to Betanews this afternoon:
New service pack for CorelDRAW X4
Today, Corel is making available the first service pack for its CorelDRAW X4 graphics package, the latest edition of the first great illustration app for Windows. In my experience with the package (I wrote a book on version 6 way, way back, and I reviewed version 1.0 for Computer Shopper two decades ago), it's my opinion that X4 could use some help in the stability department.
Though Corel's marketing is touting SP1 for its increase in the number of cameras supported for RAW images, a check of the change log shows SP1's main focus is stability improvement. Since simply moving the X4 palette around can crash the program, I'm hopeful that Corel has paid serious attention to its users' complaints. Of course, being able to actually download SP1 will help; in my experiences today, X4 is certain it already did download it. When it tries to install SP1, though, that routine naturally fails. Maybe it's a firewall problem (that's always a candidate), though I'll keep you apprised as to what I find.
Circuit City to liquidate remaining inventory
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Circuit City has reached an agreement with liquidators to sell all the merchandise in its remaining 567 stores in the US. This is the beginning of the endgame for the nationwide electronics retailer, which already filed for Chapter 11 protection last November.
In a press statement minutes ago, the court-appointed CEO of the company, James Marcum, said, "We are extremely disappointed by this outcome. Regrettably for the more than 30,000 employees of Circuit City and our loyal customers, we were unable to reach an agreement with our creditors and lenders to structure a going-concern transaction in the limited timeframe available, and so this is the only possible path for our company."
Is the Atom saving Intel?
Falling consumer demand for PCs is triggering declining orders for CPUs, Intel admitted yesterday, but not across the board. As it turns out, its smallest consumer processor may be the mightiest of all this year.
While the world's economic troubles have corporations everywhere clamoring for solutions, it's not as though nobody saw the storm coming. The news from Intel yesterday, during its quarterly conference call to financial analysts, indicates that the processor it created not as much for performance but for portability and price may be floating the company's boat: the unsinkable Atom.
Nokia adds less restrictive licensing option to Qt development platform
A growing number of general purpose applications, including Adobe's latest version of Photoshop Elements, are being built upon an open source software platform that was originally developed by a company called Trolltech, and that was originally marketed as a tool for developing "widgets." That may have been a misnomer; while it certainly provides widgets, the Qt platform builds an underlying graphical model for programs that can be deployed across Windows, Linux, and Macs on the desktop, and even on smartphone OSes.
It's for that reason that Nokia acquired Trolltech last year, resulting in the leading cell phone manufacturer having its first desktop software platform. The deal was approved by the European Commission last June, though developers remained skeptical about how seriously committed Nokia would be to maintaining the cross-platform aspect of Qt.
Economic downturn cancels out 15% annual PC market growth
Separate reports released almost in tandem this morning by two of the world's three leading hardware analysis firms, show that what could have been a stellar year for PC manufacturers was wiped out in one quarter.
The downturn is being felt more keenly by Dell, which saw its annual growth rate slow by about 6 percent, according to figures from IDC's Worldwide Quarterly PC Tracker report and preliminary figures from Gartner. That company lost about one point of market share in the process, and its slim lead over HP in US unit shipments narrowed even further -- from about 5 points to about 1.1 points, according to Gartner's numbers.
Nvidia braces its shareholders for a loss
Flash Player 9 or higher is required to view the chart
Click here to download Flash Player now
if (typeof(embedWikichart) != "undefined") {embedWikichart("http://charts.wikinvest.com/WikiChartMini.swf","wikichartContainer_47DE69C7-8F48-C8EC-4A8F-DB2EA63B310C","390","245",{"startDate":"15-07-2008","endDate":"15-01-2009","showAnnotations":"true","liveQuote":"true","ticker":"NVDA"});}
Now it's Google's turn: Big changes in a bad economy
In a very different business climate from last year, Google's classic strategy of firing up all burners evenly to see what projects cook first, may have abruptly ended this morning.
In a manner atypical of Google, which usually deposits its resources in a central location, it was left to every department affected by an apparent round of severe budget cutbacks to relay the bad news today on its respective blog. Google referred Betanews this morning to those individual statements, in lieu of a larger corporate comment.
The next net neutrality showdown, on the edge of the network
The deck chairs are being shuffled all over Washington this month, but some familiar net neutrality legislation may be brought up once again. This time, one of the nation's biggest content providers is ready to face it down.
Perhaps the entire success of CE manufacturers' plans to endow their HDTV displays with built-in IPTV channels, linked directly to services such as Netflix through the Internet, is based on the notion that those displays will soon have faster access to less compressed, richer high-definition content than they do today. In fact, the content delivery networks (CDN) that enable movies and other high-bandwidth content to appear faster, if at all, are looking at ways to engineer the Internet itself to reduce the number of hops required to deliver items such as movies.
Remaining problems with Win7 beta downloads
We're testing a theory here at Betanews: that a problem with the most recent revision of Sun's client-side Java VM may be preventing Microsoft's Download Manager app from enabling downloads of the latest Windows 7 beta for some users. Those tests are ongoing, and we'll keep you apprised of progress.
UPDATE While some testers have already found success in downloading the gargantuan Windows 7 .ISO DVD image file, others are like us and have had a truckload of problems. There may be any number of reasons why that have nothing to do with Microsoft's servers, and one we're tracking down has to do with the most recent Java 6 Update 11, which is used for the Download Center applet, used when trying to download the .ISO using both Firefox and Internet Explorer.
Is it a 2 TB WD drive on the way, or just something close?
Last month, a Czech online computer retailer -- either inadvertently or by design -- posted a listing for a 2 TB Western Digital hard drive. The price wasn't exactly stratospheric, but it's a little high, which might make you think it's some kind of scam, but it's got the right part number for what exactly such a part would be.
However, when news to the press was leaked out last December 15, the specs didn't exactly say 2 TB. Let's just say the Czech retailer rounded up. The original word said to expect this new model in the WD20EADS power-saving product line, which is why some believe it will actually end up spinning at 5400 rpm rather than 7200. But the window for any such real announcement from WD may be closing fast: Its fiscal second quarter conference call is scheduled for two weeks from today.
In search of YouTube's copyrighted music muter
This morning, Mashable's Stan Schroeder discovered some examples of independently submitted videos to YouTube where the music track has been muted, and a notice given to that effect. Apparently, the system Google has long promised for identifying music tracks by their signatures, is working.
But is it working everywhere? Schroeder's examples include a track of mainly music, with just an accompanying slide, by blues great Albert King, apparently "ripped" off of one of those big, spinning, vinyl things folks used to use for music. People do like to post music to YouTube for some reason, even if it's only accompanying a slide telling you what the music is. We went looking for other examples of copyrighted tracks to test the depth of its detection ability.
It's Carol at Yahoo
It is a done deal: As widely reported yesterday, Carol Bartz, the former CEO and until yesterday Executive Chairperson of Autodesk, is the new CEO of Yahoo effective now.
The news from Yahoo looks very straight up, and even Jerry Yang's public statement includes some upper-case: "I believe Carol is the ideal person to take Yahoo forward and I will be honored to be a resource to assist her in any way she finds helpful. I believe Yahoo's best years are still ahead of it. For the past 14 years, I have poured all of my energies into this great company -- and I hope to keep contributing to its success for many years to come."
Mitigating the bad news that may emerge from Sony
Just last October, Sony gave guidance suggesting it could post a $1.5 billion profit for its entire fiscal year ending next March. But the Japanese business news service Nikkei said this morning that the company may actually now be preparing to post a $1.3 billion loss for the year.
Now, there's no official announcement, and no forms have been filed to that effect, although oftentimes news like this is "leaked" through business news services first to diffuse the effect of a bad shock. Sony had all day to refute the leak as rumor or innuendo, and hasn't done so.
© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy.