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Originally designed to fight the Soviets in WWIII, the F-22 Raptor has never seen combat. And now, Barack Obama needs to decide whether to keep building them or kill the plane forever.
Financiapocalypse has claimed yet another victim. This time it is Office Depot—and they are planning to close 112 stores, or 9% of their North American locations over the next three months. ... Read More »
DHL, a popular shipping alternative to FedEx, UPS and the US Postal Service, has gone belly up in the ever more fun economic crisis. Today the company announced that it will end all domestic shipping services starting January 30th (which means 9,500 layoffs) while only international shipping to/from the US will remain. Hopefully one less competitor in the ring won't increase all of our internet shipping costs too greatly. [DHL]
Posted by Nick Broughall at 11:50 AM on November 3, 2008
That crappy Aussie dollar that we've been bitching about? Apparently it's not all bad. Susannah Moran in Australian IT is reporting today that thanks to our dollar plunging so spectacularly in recent months, we're now the cheapest country in the world to buy iPods, improving from a paltry 14th position back in July.
So what does this mean? Well, maybe you should consider buying your next iPod sooner rather than later to take advantage of our crappy economy consider getting any Poms, Yanks, or other tourists with a stronger dollar to buy you an iPod for Christmas. If they can afford it, that is...
[Australian IT]
Sony's hurting, Apple's soaring, and Samsung is doing fine, even as it definitely shows stress from the economy. Aggressive pricing and marketing are leading it to spend more to make more, driving overall profit down 44 percent from a year ago to $US850 million.
Computers have reduced tons of the bustle on the NYSE floor, but it's still a pretty charged place. Here you can duck the telescoping trading terminals as you swoop around a full 360-degree flash panorama courtesy of the NYTimes. Can you feel the pain? [NYTimes - Thanks, Dan!]
If as Sony goes, so goes the rest of the consumer electronics industry, it's totally screwed. They've just issued a grimtastic revision of their earnings forecast: Yearly profit outlook slashed by 38 percent from its July forecast of $US2.4 billion to just $US1.5 billion, and one Tokyo analyst says that "this is just the beginning of a big earnings collapse," in which Sony stands a "good chance" of losing money this year.
Not surprisingly for AT&T, the iPhone 3G is a strong part of their quarterly earnings report. Off the top they added two million net subscribers, ballooning to nearly 75 million total, and it looks like the iPhone 3G played a solid part in landing them. Of the 2.4 million iPhone 3Gs activated last quarter, 40 percent were to new AT&T customers (which, doing the math, shows that nearly two-thirds of iPhones are sold outside of the US now). Interestingly, selling so many and subsidising them so hard actually cost AT&T $US900 million this quarter. Oh, and AT&T is still the financial size of a small country: They spent $US25.7 billion to make $US5.6 billion. [AT&T]
As if we didn't have enough with the stock market going down in flames on its own, computers have decided to screw them a little bit more and make everyone go "WTF" for a few minutes this morning. After dropping around two hundred gazillion points yesterday, today the Dow Jones industrials saw another drop of 700 points, which was suddenly reduced to 125 and then went down again. Everyone thought "rebound" for a second there, until they realised what was really happening.
Banks aren't the only thing failing right now. Beleaguered big box Circuit City's stock has dropped below 50 cents a share, meaning it's on the brink of going under. Since Blockbuster pulled out of a deal to buy them earlier this year, it's looking like no one will step in to save them. I'm no big fan of Circuit City, but I don't want to see them fold, either, since less competition is rarely a good thing. [CE Pro, Image via qnr]
