Best Buy has a pleasant Q4; now, about that customer service...
The fourth quarter was a better period than expected for electronics retailer Best Buy, which on Thursday reported net earnings of $570 million -- down 23% year-over-year, but above expectations and mid-quarter guidance, and sufficient to precipitate an EPS of $1.35.
Seriously, in this economy? According to the company, store sales were indeed down by nearly 5%. But that was offset by revenue gains from new store openings (seriously, in this economy?) and an improvement in the gross profit rate. And, said outgoing CEO Brad Anderson, the quarter finished stronger than it began -- so much so that previously enacted inventory reductions came back to bite them, as eager customers found inventory shortages on wanted products.
Lenovo intros ultra 'green' Windows and Linux PCs
Outfitted with Intel Turbo Charger technology for more efficient performance during peak periods, Lenovo's new S20 and D20 PCs are also largely made up of recycled materials.
Priced from about $1,070 to $1,550, the PCs come with a choice of Intel Nehalem-based Xeon 5300 and W3500 processors, and between Nvidia Quadro and ATI Firepro graphics.
Digg founder steals Tesla's thunder
Pre-production shots of the Tesla Motors Model S were leaked on Twitter this afternoon by Digg co-founder Kevin Rose, just over an hour before the electric car was expected to be unveiled in a live ceremony some are considering "Cupertinic" in nature due to its previously secretive and highly controlled nature.
While the shots were posted on a Flickr page, they were very soon made private and un-viewable to the general public, but not before dozens of bloggers got their grubby mitts on them first. While the external photos are promotional in nature, the photo of the inside -- with a large touch screen in the unfinished center console -- is from an undetermined stage of development.
Coming soon: Opera Mobile 9.7
Click for screen shots of Opera Mobile 9.7
Today, Norwegian browser company Opera announced that Opera Mobile 9.7 will be premiering next week at CTIA Wireless. The cross-platform mobile browser will offer better standards support, and combine the Presto 2.2 rendering engine found in the Opera 10 desktop browser with a new server-side optimization technique the company calls Opera Turbo.
Microsoft touches on some new Windows 7 touch methods
In an update published yesterday on the Windows 7 design team's efforts at standardizing its touch and gesture recognition methods, Microsoft revealed that it has made some of those ergonomic design choices that were up in the air when Win7 was first unveiled last October.
For example, what's the difference between a "drag" and a "scroll?" Think about it; with a mouse, the distinction is clear. There's an on-screen device for scrolling windows, but with a drag, the pointer target is the item being dragged. With touch, the expectation is that the target is the same: To drag a document or to scroll a document, you start by touching the document. So how does the system distinguish the differences?
Red Hat soars into the data center clouds on rising revenues
Profiting in spite of -- or maybe even because of -- the grim economy, open source software leader Red Hat this week posted an annual revenue increase of 25 percent for fiscal 2009.
"Our value proposition continues to resonate with customers who are looking to cut costs and achieve a rapid ROI (return on investment)," declared Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst, delivering the company's financial results for his first full year as the company's chief.
Microsoft launches a pre-emptive strike against cloud competition
Almost every sector of the computing field either has, or is forming, dividing lines between Microsoft and its partners, and a coalition of familiar players outspoken in their criticism of Microsoft. Both factions are vying for the right to the "open" computing mantle, but historically, both sides have actively worked to keep each other away from their respective clubhouses.
Certainly IBM has made no secret of its intention of becoming an axis for cloud computing development; in late 2007, its Blue Cloud Initiative was the topic of our New York Bureau Chief Jacqueline Emigh's very first article for Betanews. Since that time, IBM has been pairing with Google, most ostensibly for a program called the IBM Academic Initiative which aims to inspire, fund, and facilitate the education of new programmers in the distributed computing model. And just last month, IBM took the next step in building out Blue Cloud by announcing something it's calling the Infrastructure Strategy and Planning for Cloud Computing.
The Melissa virus turns 10
The computer worm that gave macros a bad name and changed the shape of malware detection was first detected ten years ago today (Thursday). Melissa was a stake in the heart of the old signature-based anti-virus model and pointed the way toward both more interesting forms of detection and more virulent malware.
Like most infants, Melissa started out as a harmless expression of love -- in this case, allegedly a hacker's love for a lap dancer (don't judge). It was, appropriately enough, first distributed via alt.sex, the Usenet group. The host Word file allegedly contained information for an assortment of adult-entertainment sites, but the payload was the Word macro, which functioned in the 97 and 2000 versions of Microsoft's word processor as well as in various versions of Excel. If a Melissa-infected file was opened in one of those programs, the poisonous macro looked into Outlook's address book and sends itself to 40-50 of the names it found there.
IE8 loads pages faster, but not fast enough, in Microsoft test recreation
Performance needs to be something the user feels. That's the explanation we hear from companies that have had difficulty of late demonstrating raw performance by the numbers (AMD comes readily to mind). Numbers may tell you a certain story, Microsoft's marketing team proclaims, but if the user doesn't perceive the speed increase, it may as well not be there.
So in a white paper released last week along with IE8, entitled "Measuring Browser Performance" (PDF available here), made the case that today's Web pages are comprised of so many components, any one of which may load faster or slower in one browser than another. And because of that, the only way to get a real sense of which browser is generally faster is to feel the overall speed.
Tech journos vs. tech bloggers (cue slapfight)
So which tech-review venues get the job done better, traditional publications or gadget blogs? There's a lovely little fuss brewing online over the matter. In the print corner, weighing in at I Edited Windows Magazine You Whippersnappers, Computerworld's Mike Elgan. In the blog corner, weighing in at What Have You Got Against Living Trees And Breaking News, Brian Lam of Gizmodo. Enjoy the feud, boys!
Another day, another Google privacy kerfuffle
One suspects that sooner or later Google will catch grief from every single person who's ever felt grumpy about all those other people cluttering up his or her planet, as yet another privacy "watchdog" complains about the search site's Street View maps. This time it's the UK's Privacy International, the director of which says that various British citizens have experienced "clear embarrassment and damage" thanks to months- or years-old images on the site. PI is asking the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to shut the service down.
Setting aside the question of why a group based in the nation with the highest number of surveillance cameras per citizen would bother stressing about Street View, the "clear embarrassment and damage" clause leads to just one question for the casual observer: What in the name of Tim Berners-Lee are they doing in the streets of the UK these days, and does the term ASBO come into play at any point?
System update fixes Wii's problematically tiny storage
Nintendo today has provided a solution for the Wii's painfully underdeveloped onboard storage by endowing the console with the ability to boot games directly off of SD cards.
Previously, any downloaded games could only be launched if they were installed on the Wii, but with the System's meager 512 MB flash memory, that only left space for a handful of titles. While this was manageable early on, when all that was available were Virtual Console emulator titles that didn't consume much space, the introduction of WiiWare titles made that small amount of storage seem even smaller.
Facebook addresses whining over recent redesign
It's axiomatic that any site redesign will cause hysterics among some portion of the readership. But Facebook's user complaints over the new look have succeeded to the extent of eliciting a lengthy, slightly abashed, and palpably frustrated blog post from Chris Cox, the company's "director of product," discussing where the site goes from here.
What users apparently will not succeed in doing is in getting Facebook to back down from its new, more Twitter-like mien. The post outlines a variety of adjustments in the works, including live page updating (no more hitting Refresh!), better control over which applications intrude in one's stream, realignment with the new Highlights features to bring it back in line with the old News Feed functionality, and some reorganization of navigation components.
'Sprint 4G' to come to 15 new markets in 2009-2010
Sprint announced today that WiMAX will be coming to ten major markets this year: Atlanta, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Chicago, Philadelphia, Dallas, Seattle, Portland, Charlotte, and Fort Worth.
Unlike Baltimore, the only city with a complete Sprint WiMAX deployment, these will not fall under the Xohm moniker. Nor will they fall under the spun-off "Clear" brand, even though the deployments are going to be essentially the same.
Analysis: Dell's data center play will meet new opposition from Cisco's system
Today's big data center announcements from Dell may have been expedited just a tad by Cisco, which stirred up interest last week after having unveiled its very first Unified Computing System. In an environment where other big companies are scaling back, Cisco is building on two fronts, the other one being the acquisition -- also last week -- of pocket camcorder maker Flip Video.
While switch-maker Cisco is a newcomer to data center servers, Dell already places third in the overall blade server rankings with a 9% market share, according to analyst group IDC. But although much less so than Cisco, Dell still has a long way to go to catch up with market leader Hewlett-Packard with its 58% share, and IBM with 22%.
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