Hasta La Gadget!

When sticking to a strict diet, it’s nice to have a kitchen scale on hand to make sure you’re eating the proper portions. But if you prefer everything in your kitchen to make a statement, skip the digital scale and go for this beautiful analog alternative designed by Naday Caspi.

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Bond credit rating agency Moody’s cut the credit rating of Sony from Baa3 to Ba1 with a stable outlook — Ba1 is also just below investment grade. In other words, Sony is considered a speculative investment right now and it will become harder for the company to borrow money.

Today’s downgrade comes from its volatile net profit. Despite many staff cuts, some divisions, such as its PC and TV activities, are still losing money or are barely in the black. Increased competition in these areas are to blame.

“We expect the majority of its core consumer electronics businesses — such as TVs, mobile, digital cameras and personal computers — to continue to face significant downward earnings pressure,” Moody’s wrote in a statement.

Yet, the PlayStation 4 was very well received by the company’s customers and reviewers — 4 million units were sold during the holidays. But newly launched consoles don’t generate a lot of profit because margins are very thin after launch. Though it’s still a very good sign for the long term outlook when it comes to selling games and consoles at a later stage in the product cycle.

Finally, Sony currently has a solid lineup of cameras, but other companies could take the lead, or smartphones could bring down prices.

Sony is also a major movie studio and music label. These divisions are apparently doing well, but it’s very tough to predict the future. The vast majority of the profit generated by a movie comes in the few months that follow its release in theaters. You have to start over every year and release hit after hit.

Standard & Poor’s still rates Sony at BBB, two ranks above junk status, while the company is rated junk by Fitch. Shares are currently trading at 16.03, 4.13 percent below Friday’s closing price. With today’s downgrade, Moody’s also notes that the company shouldn’t expect any rating improvement in the near future.

Rockstar Games’ promise of an early January launch for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas on Windows Phone devices may’ve been a bit off — the game just arrived on the Windows Phone store today, as spotted by CNET. The game carries a $7 price tag and …

This article was written on February 06, 2008 by CyberNet.

If you’re using Firefox, there’s a pretty cool way to enhance your Google Apps Bar. It’s called iGoogleBar and it is an extension “that adds Google Apps favicons to the Google Apps Bar, using them as triggers for the Apps’ respective iGoogle Gadgets.” For example, while I’m logged into Google, across the top of my browser window I see links to Google applications like Gmail, Google Calendar, Documents, Photos, Groups, Web, and more. Clicking on those links will direct me to the service.  Using this extension I can click on a favicon that is added to the Google Apps Bar and then view the iGoogle Gadget for the particular application I was clicking on.

After installing the extension, this is what your apps bar would look like (notice the iGoogle Gadget for the Calendar is displayed):

If you’re like me, you’re not going to use every Google application that’s available, and so you’ll want to customize which apps appear.  You can in fact choose what apps you’d like displayed, but it takes a few extra steps which we explain below:

1. Start Firefox.
2. In the Address Bar type “about:config” and press Enter.
3. Right-Click and select New->String.
4. A box requesting the Preference Name will popup and you should enter “bolinfest.igooglebar” (without the quotes). Press OK to continue.
5. The value must be a comma-delimited list composed of any of the following options: Gmail,Calendar,Document,Photos,Groups,Reader,Notebook. If you just wanted Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader to show up in the bar you would enter in Gmail,Calendar,Reader into the value field.
6. Restart Firefox

In the future it would be nice if it were easier to customize the extension, however for now, iGoogleBar is a nice addition to your Firefox Browser for those of you that use Google applications regularly.

Source: Googlified

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In 2004, the U.S. Army made a colossal mistake. It introduced a new digital camouflage called the Universal Camouflage Pattern (UCP), a single pattern designed to work across all environments. Only a few months later, however, as the war in Iraq was intensifying by the day, every soldier on the ground knew the truth: by trying to work in every situation, UCP worked in none of them.

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