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parislemon:
The company lost $3.2 billion in the last quarter to close out their fiscal year $5.7 billion in the red.
It was the fifth straight quarter that the company has failed to make (well really, keep) a dime. Worse, it was the fourth straight year the company has lost money overall.
And this year was the worst in the company’s 66-year history. Ouch.
In the coming year, they project to turn a (small) profit once again. We’ll see… Something not in their favor:
In November of last year, Sony projected that the total loss for the fiscal year would come in around $1 billion. In February, after a disastrous quarter, they changed the estimate to $2.9 billion.
The actual number ended up just about double that.
Sony clearly thought they could right the ship. But they have not. They lost more last quarter than they were projecting just three months ago that they would lose for the whole year.
Could have been worse though — could have been the $6.5 billion yearly loss the company warned about a few weeks ago. Some bright side.
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parislemon:
By now you’ve seen the numbers. Just in case, the keys:
Revenue: $39.2 billion
Profit: $11.6 billion
iPhones: 35.1 million
iPads: 11.8 million
Macs: 4 million
iPods: 7.7 million
The first stand-out number is the 35 million iPhones sold. Before last quarter’s insane 37 million sold, 20 million had been the previous record. Hard to fathom that Apple almost matched their record this quarter (which was a non-holiday quarter and a week shorter than last quarter).
But the real stand-out is the 47.4 percent gross margin Apple hit for the quarter. When they were at 44 percent last quarter, company executives went out of their way to note that they probably wouldn’t hit that type of margin again. Instead, they shot past it.
The reason is likely because the iPhone accounted for a larger portion of Apple’s revenues since the new iPad was only on sale for a couple of weeks last quarter (and older iPad sales dipped leading up to the new one). The iPad has a worse (but still very healthy) margin than the iPhone.
In other words, it would be hard to imagine the margin continuing to rise. 50 percent sounds impossible. But then again, 47 percent sounded impossible.
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discoverynews:
Wasps Never Forget a Face
The findings add to the debate about whether facial recognition skills in people are learned or inborn.
The wasps are “phenomenally better at learning wasp faces than anything else we tested them on,” said Michael Sheehan, a graduate student in evolutionary biology at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “They’re not just good at faces. Like people, the way they learn faces is different from the way they learn other images.”
Read more
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discoverynews:
Voyager Probe Gives Us ET’s View
When NASA launched the Voyager spacecraft in 1977, the mission was to study the outer planets of the solar system. Now the probes are so far away, they are able to make measurements of our galaxy from an outsider’s perspective.
For the first time, scientists have been able to measure a type of radiation streaming out from the Milky Way that in other galaxies has been linked to the birthplaces of young, hot stars.
Irene Klotz on the Voyager Probe’s view.
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Google has announced that it is dropping seven more products in an effort to simplify its range of services.
The out-of-season “spring clean” brings an end to services including Google Wave, Knol and Google Gears.
It is the third time that the US firm has announced a cull of several of its products at the same time after they had failed to take off.
Experts said the strategy might put off users from signing up to new services.
Google announced the move in its official blog.
“We’re in the process of shutting a number of products which haven’t had the impact we’d hoped for, integrating others as features into our broader product efforts, and ending several which have shown us a different path forward,” said Urs Holzle, Google’s vice president of operations.
“Overall, our aim is to build a simpler, more intuitive, truly beautiful Google user experience,” he added.
Wave goodbye
The seven latest products earmarked for the chop are as follows:
- Google Wave - an attempt to combine email and instant messaging for real-time collaboration
- Google Bookmarks List - a service which allowed users to share bookmarks with friends
- Google Friends Connect - allowed webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding a snippet of code
- Google Gears - much-hyped effort to maintain web browser functionality when working offline
- Google Search Timeline - a graph of historical query results
- Knol - a Wikipedia-style project, which aimed to improve web content
- Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal - a project which aimed to find ways to improve solar power
Google had previously announced its plans to kill off some of the projects on the list.
It has now given details about when the switch-offs will occur. For example Wave will be retired in April, and Knol content will be taken offline in October.
Source: BBC
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Scientists are getting closer to the dream of creating computer systems that can replicate the brain.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have designed a computer chip that mimics how the brain’s neurons adapt in response to new information.
Such chips could eventually enable communication between artificially created body parts and the brain.
It could also pave the way for artificial intelligence devices.
There are about 100 billion neurons in the brain, each of which forms synapses - the connections between neurons that allow information to flow - with many other neurons.
This process is known as plasticity and is believed to underpin many brain functions, such as learning and memory.
Read More…
Tagged:
AI,
Artificial Intelligence,
brain,
chip,
advance,
tech,
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Facebook said it has rid its site of most of the pornographic and violent images posted as part of a spam attack.
The social network blamed a browser vulnerability and said it was improving its systems to defend itself against similar attacks in the future.
Thousands of the website’s 800 million users have complained about the pictures over recent days.
BROWSER BUGS:
Spam attack worked via a “self-XSS vulnerability in the browser. During this attack, users were tricked into pasting and executing malicious javascript in their browser URL bar causing them to unknowingly share this offensive content.”
It also offered the following advice to help guard against further attacks:
- Never copy and paste unknown code into the address bar
- Always use an up-to-date browser
- Use the report links on Facebook to flag suspicious behaviour or content on friends’ accounts
Tagged:
facebook,
porn,
socials,
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Intel has developed an accelerator chip capable of running at speeds of one teraflop, equal to one trillion calculations per second.
The firm showed off the chip, dubbed Knights Corner, on a test machine at a supercomputing conference in Seattle.
Computer power on this scale is used to solve a range of problems in fields such as weather forecasting, molecular modelling and car crash simulations.
The chip pits Intel against rival add-on processors from Nvidia and AMD.
Tagged:
tech,
intel,
chip,
computer,
|
 Technology...,
when misused, poisons air, soil, water and lives. But a world without technology would be prey to something worse: the impersonal ruthlessness of the natural order, in which the health of a species depends on relentless sacrifice of the weak. |
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