Category: GReader

Chrysler Group LLC could repay most of its government loans as early as next week after raising $7.5 billion from bank loans and bond sales.

It has not been a good year for Sony, which was affected both by the massive earthquake in March and the PSN outage that spanned from April into May. There couldn't be any doubt that those things would have a drastic impact on the company's bottom-line, and it's now taking the time to give investors an idea of just how big an impact that could be — even though the financial issues lie largely elsewhere. Sony is set to announce its full financial report for its fiscal year this Thursday and, to soften the blow, estimates have been revised steeply downward. Previously Sony predicted a ¥70 billion ($855 million) profit, but now thinks a ¥260 billion ($3.14 billion) loss is rather more accurate — a ¥360 billion non-cash charge taking the wind out of ¥200 billion in operating income.

The earthquake was directly blamed for a loss of ¥22 billion, but that figure could certainly grow as this estimate is only through the end of March. Additionally, Sony has provided a early guess of a ¥14 billion (about $172 million) total cost for the PSN breach. That's less than two bucks per exposed account, but again we wouldn't be surprised if it's a figure that increases through the year. You know, once the lawyers start having their fun.

Sony estimates $3.2b loss this year, $171 million cost for PSN breach originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 May 2011 08:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink The Wall Street Journal, gamesindustry.biz  |  Sony [PDF]  | Email this | Comments

Harold Camping speaks! The 89-year-old Nostradamus from Northern California, who spent millions of his followers' dollars to get out the word that the world was ending on Saturday, has been noticeably silent since that day came and went rather unremarkably. But he's at last ready to talk — and oy, what a weekend. Don’t get him started. More »

HP‘s expectations for its new TouchPad tablet are running pretty high — so high, in fact, that they can only be expressed with a make-believe number. During a recent press conference in Cannes, HP’s Eric Cador boldly declared that his company’s new slate won’t just be the best on the market, it’ll be the bestest. Cador explained:

“In the PC world, with fewer ways of differentiating HP’s products from our competitors, we became number one; in the tablet world we’re going to become better than number one. We call it number one plus.”

A spokesman later confirmed that the device will launch in the UK with apps from the Guardian, Sky and Last.fm, but promised that “thousands” of other apps are on the way. The metrics might sound a bit optimistic, but the message is clear: HP thinks the TouchPad will annihilate the iPad and blow our minds to smithereens. We’ll just have to wait and see whether it’s as explosive as advertised.

HP thinks the TouchPad will be ‘better than number one,’ if that’s even possible originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 May 2011 03:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  The Daily Telegraph  | Email this | Comments

A lot of Cold War-era Area 51 documents have been declassified and National Geographic has discovered a rather low-tech method the US Military used to fool the Russians. It involved cardboard, the occasional heater and infrared satellites. More »

Wonder Woman‘s gone the way of the Generation X and Justice League TV pilots, but pictures of Adrianne Palicki rocking the fabled hot pants have hit the web. They’re certainly more risqué than those worn by the illustrious Lynda Carter. More »

The union representing urban-based workers at Canada Post was to present a new offer Sunday that it hoped would address the remaining outstanding issues as a strike deadline loomed.

Android: If you’re looking for a fast and feature-rich alternative to the default Android gallery, QuickPic can get the job done. The app allows you to browse and edit images quickly, and even perform batch operations against multiple photos on your SD card. More »

The ChromiumPC modular computer, first unveiled by Xi3 last year, is ready to ship this summer, with an architecture designed specifically for Chrome. More »

Not yet, though we’ve been trying to do so since at least the 1970s. Fabricating an environment that needs no power other than the sun and is a closed system (where waste gets broken down and reused) is extremely difficult. More »

Probably one of the best games ever created has found a place in the Android Market. J-J-J-Jenga is now available on your Android device. For us Canadians it’ll cost $2.89 but the good news is that when you get a game like this you want it as close to the real experience as possible. Natural […]

Related posts:

1. Android Market officially has 100,000 apps
2. Gartner: Android captured 36% market share in Q1 2011
3. Google to introduce Android Market for Android 1.6 soon

Researchers manipulate DNA strands to solve computational problems.

“What’s in a name?” We’d ask Toshiba, but the company hasn’t been able to give its upcoming 10.1-inch Honeycomb tablet one in five months — or has it? If you’ll recall, Toshiba registered the name Thrive for trademark and related domain names last month, and now evidence is mounting that all of that work wasn’t in vain. TabletCommunity learned days ago that a commercial for the device was in production via some chatty actors on Twitter; soon after, the site also uncovered a parking page for the slate on Toshiba’s website, albeit with little more than the aforesaid name categorized under “Tablets.” It’s a welcome update in light of the vapid titles “Antares” and “ANT300” that had also seemed possible, and once word spills of US pricing and availability, perhaps we can focus on more pressing matters… you know, like benchmarks.

[Thanks, Jakob]

Product portal, tweets suggest ‘Thrive’ moniker for Toshiba’s Honeycomb tablet originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 21 May 2011 04:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink TabletCommunity  |  Toshiba, @DavidLyddon, @actorlulumiller , @bigashb (Twitter)  | Email this | Comments

Google is on a mission to make the Web faster. One thing that slows down pageload times are fat image files. Even JPEG and PNG files can get pretty big. So Google is developing a new image format called WebP (which is a sister format to its WebM project for videos).

The key to making image files on the Web smaller without losing sharpness is better compression of the original file. Today, Google announced via the Chromium blog that the compression algorithms for WebP just got better and that they can even handle different parts of an image separately so that parts of it can be displayed without waiting for the entire image to be compressed and decompressed.

The images above, for instance, are from this gallery comparing JPEG to WebP. The WebP images are significantly smaller, but look just as sharp. Can you tell the difference? Unfortunately, WebP is only supported in Chrome and Opera browsers. Google products such as Gmail, Picassa Web albums, and Google Instant Previews also support WebP. But other than Opera, it’s pretty much an all-Google affair.

Websites aren’t going to start using WebP images just for Google Chrome visitors. But if it does speed things up without reducing the quality of images, other browsers will start supporting it as well or else be left behind.

One of the features that many people love in Chrome is the minimal UI at the top of the browser. Want to minimize it even more? Then you will definitely want to make use of the new feature added to the Experimental Features page.

To get started enter “about:flags” into the Address Bar and hit Enter. Scroll down until you see the listing for Compact Navigation. Enable it and let the browser restart to gain access to the feature.

Once the browser has restarted right click on one of the tabs and select Hide the toolbar from the Context Menu.

Here is what the top of the browser looks like afterwards. As you can see the Back, Forward, and Tools Menu buttons have moved into the Tab Bar.

To access the Address Bar simply click on the tab. Keep in mind that the Address Bar will auto-hide rather quickly if you do not make use of it soon enough.

Hiding the Address Bar and Bookmarks Bar will really minimize the top UI section of the browser (see first screenshot above).

Note: For the moment the feature is only available on Windows systems for Chrome Dev, Canary, and Chromium releases.

[via Digitizor]

HTG Explains: What is HDR Photography, And How Can I Use It?	Improve Your Photography by Learning the Elements of Exposure	Mac OS X Viruses: How to Remove and Prevent the Mac Protector Malware