Latest Technology News

Ten percent of the full-timers in Apple's newly mushroomed total of 250 stores got handed pink slips between January and April, according to Apple's latest 10-Q filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

Apple dubbed the laid off salespeople "full-time equivalents," reporting a headcount of 14,000 Apple store employees. That's slashed from the 15,600 number listed in its 10-K filing just last January.

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It has been experiencing double-digit growth for months now, but in March Twitter Web traffic went boom in a big way, jumping 131% to 9.3 million unique visitors. It was the fastest growing Web property last month according to comScore, which released its March numbers this week.

(Remember this as we wait for next month's comScore numbers. Those will reflect April's strange celebrity infatuation with the service -- Ashton Kutcher's competition with CNN to garner a million followers, not to mention Oprah's imprimatur -- yes, other people care about Oprah even if you don't.)

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Landing ahead of the US for "activity" in Red Hat's Open Source Index this year were these countries, in the following order: France, Spain, Germany, Australia, Finland, the UK, Norway, and Estonia. Also among the 75 countries surveyed by Red Hat and the Georgia Institute of Technology, Denmark took tenth place.

At the opposite extreme of the open source spectrum, the study found these ten countries to be the least active, in descending order: Algeria, the Philippines, Morocco, Cameroon, Yemen, Latvia, Mauritius, Nigeria, Kenya, and Moldova.

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Today, Adobe has introduced Photoshop Marketplace a site that is part e-commerce, part social network, and part knowledge base for the company's famous photo editing software.

Adobe hopes to create the definitive site for Photoshop-related resources, tools, and services. To populate the Marketplace by its scheduled launch later in the summer, Adobe encourages partners to sign up and contribute their plug-ins, extensions, educational resources, communities, or event listings to the site. Once launched, users will be able to review and recommend these submissions based upon functionalism and popularity.

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The Fujitsu-Siemens Celsius H270 promises "No more compromises on graphics performance" (PDF available here) That is, unless you're running Linux.

This week, Nvidia and Fujitsu released an alert that some Linux graphics drivers for the Celsius' Nvidia Quadro FX 770M cause a corruption of the notebook's Extended display identification data (EDID). Basically, the EDID tells the graphics card important information about the computer's display, such as its size, pixel mapping data, filter type, and supported timings.

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Within a month of its release, RealNetworks' RealDVD was involved in two simultaneous lawsuits with the MPAA, who sought an injunction on the DVD ripping software they farcically called "StealDVD." Sale of the software was halted in October after only a few days of commercial availability.

Today, the software comes up in court before Judge Marylin H. Patel, the same district court judge who presided over the case late last year, and is most famous for her decision to shut down peer-to-peer music swapping service Napster nearly nine years ago.

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It's not every day that Apple throws numbers around. The company only sparingly uses them, and when it does, it's only to illustrate its most distinguished achievements. Today, the company dropped a couple: Nine months, and One billion downloads.

In the nine months that the iTunes App Store has been open, more than a billion applications have been downloaded, according to the company. That means iPhone/iTouch owners were downloading an average of 3.5 million applications per day, or roughly 33 applications per user.

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During yesterday's unveiling of its accelerated roadmap for 12- and even 16-core processors, an AMD executive said he did not believe the licensing situation between his company and Nvidia would enable Nvidia to produce chipsets that support future AMD platforms. Specifically, it appears Nvidia is not yet licensed to produce motherboard chipsets that support AMD's next-generation processors, reducing the likelihood for multi-GPU SLI support for AMD's "Istanbul" and future generations.

"For 2010 moving forward, the solutions coming out from AMD will be AMD and on AMD at this time," stated server business unit vice president Pat Patla. "We don't expect to see new chipsets from Nvidia or Broadcom for server implementations in 2010. But they will continue to support all existing platforms moving forward through 2010."

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Two years ago, after AMD promised to deliver the best performing CPU to data centers, its Barcelona architecture found the company trying to explain to customers why they shouldn't want performance, in an explanation that looked just as embarrassing as it sounded.

For AMD's last quarter, it actually managed to heal some of the ill effects of the negative economy on its desktop and mobile CPU segments, but not yet in the data center. Server CPU revenue is still hurting, though the company now declines to provide a specific breakdown. The way back for the company, it believes, is to create a marketing position that's similar to where it was in 2006, where system builders and partners started perceiving AMD as "one-upping" Intel.

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AOL took down its Journals and Hometown services, and now Yahoo's following suit with its own GeoCities, the hosting service that once upon a dot-com bubble seemed to include half the personal sites on the Web.

Yahoo isn't currently providing a lot of detail about what users can expect from the shutdown process, other than that it'll happen "later this year," probably in the summer timeframe. As that unknown date nears, says GeoCities Help Page, "We'll provide more details about closing GeoCities and how to save your site data this summer, and we will update the help center with more details at that time."

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Tomas Norström, the Stockholm District Court Judge who presided over the Pirate Bay copyright infringement trial in Sweden is now himself under scrutiny for being a member of two copyright protection organizations, the Swedish Copyright Association (SFU), and Swedish Association for Industrial Property (SFIR).

While the guilty verdict against the four keepers of the Pirate Bay has already been appealed, Pirate Bay attorney Peter Althin said he has filed for a re-trial on the grounds that the court was biased.

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If you've ever had the pleasure of owning a Nissan Z car (I've owned two in my lifetime), you understand the extra feeling of confidence you get from still being able to afford your house, your clothes, and food. They're very solid performers, they look presentable in a crowd full of Porsches and BMWs, and yet their owners are conscientious folk who can also maintain a budget.

Every time I tell the fellows at AMD that I've been a Z owner, they shout back at me, "Well then, you know what we're talking about!" They're hoping that there's a certain niche of enthusiast system builders who aren't all that interested in displaying the measurements of their disposable income in public. For them, on time, AMD released its next version of sensible high-performance: the Phenom II X4 955 Black Edition CPU.

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For the company's fiscal third quarter ended on March 31, Microsoft on Thursday is unveiling some highly unattractive numbers, including a net-income drop of 32% and an EPS decline of 30%, to 33 cents per share (in GAAP earnings; non-GAAP earnings weighed in at 39 cents/share, precisely as had been predicted). Revenues for the quarter were $13.65 billion, a decrease year-to-year of 6%; net income was up by 3%, to $4.44 billion.

As the company prepped for its 2:30pm EDT phone call, a skim of the earnings-report press release reveals that compared to the third quarter of last year, the Online Services and Entertainment and Devices divisions had a rotten few months, with operating-income losses of $575 million and $31 million respectively. Online Services has a history of bleeding out -- they lost $226 million this time last year -- but the folks who bring you the Xbox 360 and other amusements are normally profitable, showing $106 million in operating income a year ago.

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PBS has unveiled the beta site for online consumption of its most popular programs in the way that network counterparts ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, and the CW have already done.

Like Hulu, both clips and full-length episodes are presented in Flash, however, they are not embeddable in other sites, as they are through PBS' YouTube page. Videos include a pre-roll sponsorship slot and no in-video advertisements.

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Earlier this month, eBay began to jettison its mismatched properties, such as content location service StumbleUpon, and VoIP messenger software Skype to concentrate on its original strength, the online marketplace.

In the current economy however, those marketplace properties -- which include eBay, StubHub, and Shopping.com -- are actually creating significant drag on the company's revenue. EBay's first quarter earnings report yesterday showed that while the company's overall revenue dropped about 8%, revenue from its marketplace segment dropped nearly 18%. This was attributed to the strengthened US dollar devaluing overseas transactions, which account for more than half of eBay's business.

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