Sony said net profit tumbled 95% in the third quarter, as the global slump hurt sales of its core electronics products. The Japanese electronics giant said net profit plunged to 10.4 billion yen ($115.6 million) from 200.2 billion yen a year earlier. The operating loss in the quarter was 18 billion yen, a reversal from operating profit a year earlier of 236 billion yen. Sony attributed the operating loss to factors such as the rise in the yen, and a loss in its financial services segment because of declines in the Japanese stock market.

The earnings report showed the damage is greatest at Sony's core electronics division, which accounts for more than half of its total revenue and makes the brands for which it is best known — from Walkman music players to Bravia TV sets. The division, long a dependable source of profit as the company struggled to turn around its entertainment and other businesses, booked a 15.9 billion yen operating loss during the October-December quarter. That period includes the key holiday shopping season, usually a boon for electronics sales.

Jeff Gardiner Answers Fallout 3 DLC Questions @ OCModShop and other reviews from around the web can be found by visiting our forums!

Recently I got the chance to speak with Jeff Gardiner, lead producer for Fallout 3 DLC about the latest addition to the multi award winning game.

OCMS: What is the background and setting for the new material?

JG: Operation: Anchorage is allows the player to discover the location of a secret military installation housed deep inside of Washington, D.C. The Brotherhood of Steel Outcasts are trying to requisition top-secret military technology from a long dead war But the only way to open the safe is by successfully completing a training simulation in which the player will have to liberate Anchorage, Alaska from an invading Red Chinese occupying force. This battle played out hundreds of years ago, and is a staple of the Fallout 3 canon. Once inside the sim the player will have to utilize stealth and combat cunning to overcome a huge military presence; theyll even have the opportunity to outfit and order their own Strike Force in the process!

Jon Peddie Research (JPR) today announced estimated graphics shipments and supplier market share for the fourth calendar quarter of 2008.GPUs are used in industrial and medical systems, point of sale terminals, kiosks, digital signs, and PCs. And, in the case of over one third of all PCs being shipped today, more than one GPU is being used Total shipments of GPUs for Q4'08 was 72.35 million. During the same quarter last year, 100.5 million GPUs shipped, and in the previous quarter, Q3 '08, 111.26 million units shipped representing a 34% drop quarter to quarter and a -2% drop year over year. It isn't good seeing a 34% drop in video card sales in Q4, but no big shocker with the hit the economy took in Q4 2008.

“The fourth quarter is usually a positive quarter for the computer industry. There has obviously been some inventory problems in the quarter as sales failed to live up to the optimistic expectations of the third quarter, 2008,” said Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research in Tiburon California. “Vendors were bracing for a slower than usual quarter due to economic factors, but performance this quarter was surprisingly low. Put simply, the market stalled in the fourth quarter. Due to the worldwide financial market meltdown, the U.S. housing market meltdown, layoffs, and media reports, the consumer has hunkered down to wait out the storm. “We're forecasting a strong Q3 and Q4 for 2009 and bracing for what will probably be the worst Q1 and Q2 decline we've seen since the Internet bubble pop of 2000.”

Taiwan-based electronics manufacturer, Grandtec, claims that it is now shipping “the world’s first USB to HDMI converter”–the Grand HD Cinema. Grandtec claims that the Grand HD Cinema can use your Windows XP or Vista system’s USB 2.0 ports to send 720p HD video to an HDMI-equipped display, such as widescreen HD LCD or plasma TV. The Grand HD Cinema is a 1.30×2.17×3.94-inch (HWD) adapter with a USB port on one end and an HDMI port on the other. It gets its power from the USB port, so it doesn’t need an external

As NVIDIA branches out from being just another GPU maker and looks to fight with the likes of Intel in the burgeoning netbook component sector, it’s going to need a few good men and women to make it happen. That being the case, we’re not at all surprised to see the company going out and selecting Bill Dally to be its new Chief Scientist and Vice President of NVIDIA Research. NVIDIA is plucking Mr. Dally (pictured) from Stanford University’s computer science department, where he previously stood as a Professor

One of the changes to iPhone ’09 was Faces, facial recognition to assist in tagging photos. While Apple said this would only work on the faces of people, it appears that some have managed to prove that it does indeed work on felines, at least. Yes, the folks at Mac|Life have spent way more time than we would have, using pictures of their own cats to prove that given enough sample images, the iPhoto facial recognition feature can indeed be trained to spot specific cats. That’s how the feature works on people,

Never one to sit idly by on the sidelines and let things play out on their own, Google has always tried to play an active roll in shaping how Internet technology is used and regulated. Net neutrality is one of the concerns that Google has been very vocal about, and now Google is putting tools into the hands of researchers and everyday users to help us determine if ISPs are “blocking or throttling particular applications,” such as using traffic shaping and network prioritization practices–just like the ones

Well, you can’t say you saw this coming, can you? After the United States Senate approved a four month delay for the digital TV transition that would have effectively moved the cutover date from February 17th to June 12th, the House of Representatives stopped the whole show.In a shocking decision, the House voted 258 to 168 in favor of the bill, but under the special rules for this vote that required a full two-thirds majority to pass, it didn’t quite make it. If it had received the appropriate amount of yeas,

ASRock has recently been including a feature called Instant Boot on their N7AD-SLI motherboards and claims that it only takes 3 to 4 seconds to boot up to Windows. Read on as we benchmark the ASRock N7AD-SLI motherboard and overclock it to see what it can really do. We also tossed in a couple of videos to better explain the board layout and BIOS functionality.

Fennec, AKA Firefox Mobile, is targeted for an initial release on the Windows Mobile-powered HTC Touch Pro during the first week in February, according to a post of meeting minutes on the developer wiki. According to the minutes: We are targeting a Milestone release for the first week of February, targeting the HTC touch pro. We are two patches away from the meta goal of building from trunk. The tools changes have review from dougt, and are waiting for review from ted, who has promised review by the end of the