ITNEWS !!

PS3 sales are slumping, but not as bad as the Wii’s sales, which have been cut in half.

(Credit: Sony)

Sony latest earnings show that it continues to be hammered by the worldwide recession and strong yen, suffering a net loss of $390.5 million in the quarter that ended June 30.

The bright spot was Sony’s motion picture division, which saw a 6.5 percent boost that was largely attributable to the relatively strong showing of “Angels & Demons” at the box office. But almost everything else, including TV, video game, and computer sales, was down in a big way.

In an article, The New York Times highlighted the 37.4 percent year-over-year slump in gaming and computer sales (Vaio PC). The article noted that PlayStation 3 game consoles were “particularly sluggish” and that software sales had dropped.

According to the report, Sony said it sold about 1.1 million PlayStation 3s and 1.3 million PlayStation Portables in the latest quarter, compared with 1.6 million PS3s and 3.7 million PSPs in the same period a year ago.

The wane in PSP sales is particularly brutal, although part of that slowdown may have been due to rumors earlier in the quarter that Sony would release a new PSP later in the year. (And sure, enough, the PSP Go was unveiled in June at E3.) Also, the constant spate of rumors involving the potential arrival of a new PS3 Slim certainly hasn’t helped sales of the current game console.

On a more positive note, we recently attended a PlayStation preview in New York that highlighted the PSP Go and the exclusive titles available for both the PSP and PS3 platforms during the upcoming holiday-shopping season. Overall, it looked pretty good.

Sony can also be consoled by the fact that sales are also way down for the Wii, as Nintendo reported a 66 percent fall in quarterly operating profit on “slowing demand for its Wii console and a stronger yen.”

Nintendo sold 2.23 million Wii consoles in the quarter, compared with 5.17 million the same quarter a year earlier.

However, Nintendo still posted a profit of $445 million and is forecasting that it will sell 26 million Wii consoles before year’s end–along with 30 million DS handheld game players, which, by the way, is seeing increased competition from another handheld device. Nintendo didn’t mention the PSP as the rival in its earning call, but rather Apple’s iPhone.

Comments? Is the PlayStation franchise in serious trouble or will it pull out of its funk this holiday season? Does Nintendo need to cut the price of Wii?

(Credit: Apple)

For those of you looking for more capacity in Apple’s combo 802.11n router/NAS drive, the company has boosted its top-end Time Capsule to 2TB and slapped a $499 price tag on it.

More significantly, Apple also dropped the price of the 1TB model–which just Wednesday cost $499–to $299. Aside from the higher capacity, nothing else appears to have changed.

Previously, Apple also offered a 500GB Time Capsule, but that model has been discontinued and can only be found in the refurbished aisle, where it’s going for $199.

All I can say is that if Apple was able to shave off $200 on the 1TB model, it must have had one hell of a nice margin.

Vertrue, which operates a so-called Web loyalty program, apparently isn’t as forthcoming with information as some U.S. Senators would like.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate’s Commerce Committee issued a subpoena to Vertrue requiring that the privately held company turn over documents that committee investigators requested in May, including communications with business partners and credit card companies.

Companies like Norwalk, Conn.-based Vertue, along with WebLoyalty and Affinion, are marketers that make “cash-back” and coupon offers to consumers and charge those who enroll in their loyalty programs. The three are under investigation after scores of consumers complained that they were duped into paying monthly fees.

(Credit: Vertrue.com)

George Thomas, a Vertrue spokesman, said that it was Vertrue execs who requested the subpoena as they would refuse to give up consumers’ privacy unless ordered to by authorities.

“We requested in writing that the subpoena be issued and that’s because one of the items requested was consumer information,” Thomas said, “including consumer complaints and inquiries over the course of a decade, which would include personally identifiable information about the consumer.”

In a CNET News story published last week, WebLoyalty said that its service is popular with the vast majority of users. Typically, Web loyalty programs–which offer discounts or cash back if the customer just enters an e-mail–present offers as a consumer is about to finish a purchase. Many who complain about the programs say that the terms are tucked into a dense field of fine print and graphics.

Also, many consumers who allegedly “opt in” to the program don’t know that by just keying in their e-mail address, companies like Vertrue and WebLoyalty can acquire access to their credit cards. WebLoyalty’s CEO, Rick Fernandes, said last week that his company pays retailers such as Buy.com, Fandango, and Orbitz for access to their customers’ cards.

It’s worth noting that while Thomas and Vertrue say they wouldn’t give up consumers’ private information unless ordered to, Buy.com, Fandango and Orbitz appear to have a much lower threshold for sharing that information.

For anybody looking for more information, they should visit Consumerist.com, which has done an excellent job of covering WebLoyalty and Vertrue for several months. To see a long list of consumers complaints about these companies, try here.

States that do not ban texting by drivers could forfeit hundreds of millions of dollars in federal highway funds under legislation introduced Wednesday in the Senate.

Under the measure, states would have two years to outlaw the sending of text and e-mail messages by motorists or lose 25 percent of their highway funds each year until the money was depleted.

“Studies show this is far more dangerous than talking on a phone while driving or driving while drunk, which is astounding,” said Senator Charles Schumer, Democrat of New York, one of four senators to introduce the proposed legislation.

Schumer said the authors were responding to recent studies that have begun to quantify the risks of texting while driving. One study released earlier this week from the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute found that truck drivers face a 23 times greater risk of crash or near crash when texting than when not doing so.

Research from the University of Utah, which used a driving simulator to study the ability of motorists to multitask, found an eightfold greater risk of crashing when texting. By comparison, Utah researchers showed that drivers using a cell phone to talk face a four times greater risk of crashing, about equal to someone with a 0.08 blood alcohol level, generally the legal limit for intoxication.

Currently, texting while driving is banned in 14 states, including Alaska, California and New Jersey, as well as the District of Columbia. The legislature in New York recently passed such a measure and sent it to the governor for a signature.

Regulation of the roadways generally happens at the state level. But in the past the federal government has exerted pressure on the states based of the threat of withholding federal highway funds, as Congress did in 1984 to pressure states to raise the minimum drinking age to 21 years.

Schumer said that the legislation was essentially based on the drinking age law.

The Governors Highway Safety Association, a group that represents state highway safety agencies in every state, opposes texting while driving but does not support the proposed legislation.

“We oppose sanctioning states since there is not yet a proven effective method for enforcing a texting or cell phone ban,” an association spokesman, Jonathan Adkins, said.

Safety advocates said that such concerns about enforcement were raised about seat belt laws but argued that the value of such laws–even if they could not be enforced all the time–created awareness about the issue and set societal guidelines for the behavior.

The other sponsors of the Senate measure include Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, and Kay Hagan of North Carolina.

Entire contents, Copyright © 2009 The New York Times. All rights reserved.

A security hole in Internet Explorer that opened the browser to hackers since early July was caused by a single typo in Microsoft’s code.

An errant ampersand (”&”) took the blame for the exploit, admitted Microsoft in a blog published Tuesday at its Security Development Lifecycle (SDL) Web site.

Michael Howard, a security program manager at Microsoft, explained in his blog that the typo corrupted the code of an ActiveX control used by the browser. The control was created by Microsoft using an older library of code, which Howard admitted has flaws. Because of those flaws, the typo caused the code to write untrusted data, exposing the browser to the bad guys.

Outside of its regular Patch Tuesday routine, Microsoft issued an emergency fix for IE, which it said would block attempts to exploit the flaw in ActiveX controls.

Development tools like Microsoft’s own Visual Studio use the same library of code, known as Active Template Library (ATL). On the same day it released the emergency patch for IE, the company also released a Visual Studio fix.

Howard said the typo would have been difficult to spot in a review of the code, and that none of Microsoft’s code analysis methods would have uncovered it either.

In his blog, Howard played a high-tech version of “Where’s Waldo?” by challenging readers to find the typo amid a few short lines of code, even hinting that it was a single character.

The code lines he listed were:
__int64 cbSize;
hr = pStream->Read((void*) &cbSize, sizeof(cbSize), NULL);
BYTE *pbArray;
HRESULT hr = SafeArrayAccessData(psa, reinterpret_cast(&pbArray));
hr = pStream->Read((void*)&pbArray, (ULONG)cbSize, NULL);

And his riddle for readers:
“I’ll give you one more clue – it’s a one character typo. Give up? Look at the last line. The first argument is incorrect. It should be: hr = pStream->Read((void*)pbArray, (ULONG)cbSize, NULL);”

The hole was originally uncovered earlier this month by a pair of German researchers. Thomas Dullien (also known as Halvar Flake), CEO of Zynamics GmbH, and his friend Dennis Elser detailed their discovery in a blog. After the exploit became known, the two did some digging into the code and found the unwanted “&” character.

So what will Microsoft do to guard against future typos?

In his blog, Howard acknowledged the need to clean up the company’s coding process. He said that Microsoft will update the tools it uses to find these types of errors. The company will also require its programmers to use the newer ATL code. In the past, Microsoft never told its programmers what to use. But says Howard in his blog, “We’re going to change that!”

When Windows 7 is unleashed this fall with more gesture-recognition built directly into the operating system, more PC makers are planning on taking advantage.

While touch-screen desktops are gaining popularity, there haven’t been many consumer-friendly touch-screen notebooks yet. But that will change soon. Last week Sony said it plans to release a touch-screen Vaio notebook this fall, and Hewlett-Packard and Asus did so earlier this year.

But the question is whether there’s a need for touch screens when it comes to portables like notebooks. Adding touch to desktops, like HP, Dell, Asus, and others have done, appears to be gaining some momentum and boosting the faltering desktop market.

The first time
If a Vaio touch-screen notebook were to strike a chord with consumers, it would be the first time. There have been plenty of touch-screen notebooks that convert into tablets released over the years, and almost all of them have been purchased by the IT departments of large companies, police departments, the military, and more recently, hospitals.

There are several reasons they haven’t really taken off with consumers: they’re very expensive, heavy, and there’s a dearth of good consumer software with touch applications.

Last year, according to IDC, just 1 percent of the notebook market, or 1.4 million units, were touch-screen notebooks. By the end of this year it will actually shrink to .6 percent, and by 2010, be at .7 percent. That means IDC isn’t expecting Windows 7 to drastically alter the landscape of the touch-screen notebook market.

So why is this idea being revived? History doesn’t suggest consumers will flock to this, though touch screens are far more popular in smaller devices like smartphones and portable media players now. It’s feasible that the success of the iPhone and the G1 could translate to a computing experience that requires two hands and a physical keyboard.

‘Toe-dipping’
What could be going on is just some experimentation, or “toe-dipping,” as IDC analyst Richard Shim put it. And while it could be handy for some applications, like just pressing a play button on screen for music or video, there’s just not a lot of software out there yet to make it worth the extra cost.

“You can see some apps that could be convenient, but I think right now there isn’t enough software to really create a flourishing touch-screen market, let alone touch-screen notebooks,” Shim said. Desktops make sense because they’re much larger and stationary, and are being used more as communal PCs. “With notebooks it’s a more personal device…and if you have a touch pad sitting there (near they keyboard), why wouldn’t you use it?” Plus, there’s that pesky habit you have to break yourself of: the instinct not to touch your screen.

So, herewith are some of the variations that PC makers have already come up with, with varying degrees of success.

(Credit: CNET)

NEC Versa LitePad
The first crop of slate-style tablet PCs released in 2002 from Fujitsu, Motion Computing, and ViewSonic–despite being truly flat–were too big and heavy to represent any real break from the tried-and-true notebook design. But the NEC Versa LitePad really looked like a pad of paper with PC functionality. In fact, the LitePad is almost identical in size to a small spiral-bound notebook and weighed only 2.2 pounds, but it cost $2,399 when it was released in 2003.

HP Compaq Tablet PC TC1000
The HP Compaq Tablet PC TC1000 squeezed three computers into one back in 2002. It was a small, light, slate-style tablet PC, with a great stylus, but it also had a snap-on keyboard to make it a thin-and-light notebook. Unfortunately, the battery life was just three hours. But it also came with a dock so it could transform into a desktop as well. It started at $1,699, but was mostly meant for enterprise customers.

(Credit: Panasonic)

Panasonic Toughbook 29
Another twist on the touch screen in a notebook came from with the idea of a detachable touch screen. The Panasonic Toughbook 29 came with the option of a separate, portable touch screen that could be used up to 300 feet away. Panasonic’s fully rugged line of Toughbooks are designed to take some spectacular abuse at the hands of military, construction foremen, public utility employees, and even consumers. But they never gained a foothold with regular folks.

(Credit: Hewlett-Packard)

HP Touchsmart TX2
HP released the first made-for-consumers multitouch notebook late last year, but it hasn’t made any sort of dent in the popularity of touch screens. It’s a 12.1-inch convertible tablet that has the iPhone-like ability to scroll, zoom, flick, and drag and drop by using your fingers on the screen. It does have a more reasonable price tag below $1,200.
Asus Eee PC T91
A Netbook and convertible tablet, the touch-screen Eee PC could be the future of touch-screen PCs.

(Credit: Asus)