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AMD reports loss of $416 million in Q1
Advanced Micro Devices reported a net loss of 416 million dollars for the first quarter of 2009, a bigger loss than a year earlier. The loss was worsened by charges related to the spin-off of AMD’s chip manufacturing operations into a new company, GlobalFoundries. AMD’s revenue fell 21 percent year on year to 1.2 billion dollars, somewhat better than analysts had expected. The outlook for future quarters is “murky at best,” according to CEO Dirk Meyer. On the bright side, there are signs that the decline in user demand for PCs has stopped, and AMD is once again in control of inventory levels. AMD plans to ship new laptop and server processors later this quarter, including dual-core Athlon Neo processors for ultrathin laptops and Istanbul chips for servers.
Yahoo revenue down 13 per cent in Q1
Yahoo’s profit and revenue fell sharply in the first quarter as the beleaguered Internet company added a softening online ad market to its list of woes. Revenue totalled 1.6 billion dollars, down 13 percent — but much higher than the $1.2 billion analysts had expected. Net income fell 78 percent. The company will cut costs by laying off 5 percent of its employees, the first job cuts under its new CEO, Carol Bartz. She expects that once the economic crisis lifts, companies will increase their spending on the type of online advertising Yahoo specializes in: display brand advertising in which marketers pay a premium for the quality and placement of the ads.
Mozilla patches a dozne security flaws in Firefox 3
Mozilla has patched 12 security vulnerabilities in Firefox 3, four of them considered critical. It’s the highest number of flaws its patched in one go since December, when it squashed 13 bugs. Two of the four critical vulnerabilities were in the Firefox browser engine, and two in its JavaScript engine. Other patches prevent rogue search plug-ins from sending users to malicious Web sites and block attackers from using Adobe Flash to conduct cross-site forgery request attacks or secretly plant cookie-like objects on a machine to track the user’s movements on the Web.
Second Life to get adult content filter
Inhabitants of Second Life, the virtual world run by Linden Lab, will soon have new options to customize how they see the world. The first will be the ability to filter adult content, Linden Lab said on Wednesday. The base for the filtering is a new three-tiered rating system that will offer the ability to divide Second Life into Adult, Mature and PG regions. Adult-oriented content will be migrated from the Second Life mainland to a newly created continent. Users that want to access Adult regions will have to authenticate their accounts by having payment information on file or by using Linden Lab’s age verification system.
And those are the top stories from the IDG Global IT News Update, brought to you by the IDG News Service. I’m Marc Ferranti in the New York bureau. Join us again later for more news from the world of technology.
