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During the full year, Sun’s revenue increased to $13.88 billion, up a slight 0.1 percent, while its net income after charges improved to $1.1 billion from approximately $1 billion in the prior year.

During the quarter that ended June 30, Sun generated revenue of $3.78 billion, down 1.4 percent from a year ago. Sun’s quarter met Wall Street’s revised expectations, according to a survey of analyst estimates by Thomson Financial.

With its shares trading near its 52-week low, Sun announced it will expand its stock buyback program by $1 billion, as it nears the end of the $3 billion share repurchase program it announced last year.

Sun shares fell as far as 14 percent to $9.10 in morning trading, despite the company’s announcement that it will expand its stock buyback program by $1 billion and the fact that it beat Wall Street’s revised expectations.

Sun Microsystems posted a fiscal fourth-quarter decline in revenue and earnings early Friday, amid what it described as slowing U.S. growth.

Excluding charges, Sun posted net income of $275 million, or 35 cents a share, for the quarter. Wall Street had expected Sun to earn 25 cents a share, according to Thomson Financial.

“Despite this progress and strong growth in international geographies, slowing performance in the U.S. impacted top line revenue growth. Looking forward, we remain confident in open source innovation as the accelerant to our growth strategy through increased adoption of our open source offerings,” CEO Jonathan Schwartz said in a statement.

Net income fell to $88 million, or 11 cents a share, in the quarter, down substantially from $329 million, or 36 cents a share in the same period last year.

Update at 7:55 a.m. PDT: Stock’s decline has been updated.

Plaintiffs in the shareholders lawsuit are asking the judge to set a trial date to invalidate the severance plans, prior to Yahoo’s annual shareholders meeting on August 1.

The letter points to Yahoo’s proxy materials filed Tuesday, as well as a posting in Silicon Alley Insider.

In a move to add more grist to the mill, an attorney representing Yahoo shareholders dished up more material to support a call for a speedy hearing date on the company’s controversial employee severance plans, according to a letter sent Wednesday morning to the judge overseeing the shareholders lawsuit.

Yesterday, Yahoo!, Inc. (”Yahoo”) filed proxy materials confirming that a successful proxy contest by Carl Icahn would satisfy the first trigger of the Severance Plan, thereby allowing any employee to obtain full severance benefits if the employee is subsequently terminated or if the employee resigns based on a “substantial adverse alteration in the employee’s duties or responsibilities.” Yahoo further confirmed that the Severance Plan cannot be terminated during the pendency of the proxy contest and cannot be terminated by nominees elected by Mr. Icahn following a proxy contest.

If Yahoo’s goal in filing these supplemental proxy materials was to somehow negate the grounds for a prompt trial, they have accomplished the reverse.

Friedlander, in the letter, then asks Chandler to set a trial date to consider the employee severance plans as “promptly as the court’s schedule permits.”

In the letter to Delaware Chancery Court Chancellor William B. Chandler III, the plaintiffs’ attorney, Joel Friedlander of Bouchard Margules & Friedlander, states:

The letter to Chandler goes on to cite a post in Silicon Alley Insider, which attributes the severance plans as yet another reason why the blog’s author, Henry Blodget, would not vote for Icahn’s proxy slate.

That’s because, as previously reported, billionaire investor Carl Icahn’s proxy fight could be in jeopardy if the severance plans remain in place. If Icahn is successful in getting his dissident directors slate elected to a majority of the board seats, it would set off the first phase of Yahoo’s severance plans. The second phase would kick in if full-time employees are either terminated or resign because their jobs, or responsibilities, had been greatly altered. Yahoo’s outside compensation consultants note the plans could cost upwards of $2.1 billion if all of the company’s full-time employees made use of the severance plans.

Shares of technology companies took a beating on Monday as the House of Representatives failed to pass a bailout plan for the financial sector.

In a televised statement, President George W. Bush said that he was “very disappointed” in the failure of Congress to pass a bill. “We’ll be working to develop a strategy that will enable us to continue to move forward,” he said.

Among the hardest hit individual stocks was Apple, which also was hit with a pair of analyst downgrades. Shares of the
Mac and
iPhone maker closed at $105.26, down $22.98 or almost 18 percent. Also hard-hit were the stocks of chipmaker AMD, which was down nearly 17 percent percent, while Google dropped more than 11 percent to close at $381.

Microsoft, Google, Intel and Yahoo representatives all declined to comment on the market plunge. An Apple representative was not immediately available for comment.

(Credit:
Yahoo Finance)

“Where we go from here is we still have those concerns about everyday Americans,” Pelosi said, referring to the reach of the credit crisis. “We want to insulate them from that. We want to protect them from that.”

This post was updated several times throughout the afternoon with more details and comments, and to reflect market changes.

“Congress has failed to act,” Boehner said. “I do believe that we could have gotten there today, had it not been for the partisan speech that the speaker (Nancy Pelosi) gave today.”

Bellwethers such as Hewlett-Packard, Intel, and Microsoft were all off more than 5 percent. One of the narrowest percentage losses was IBM, which was still off more than 4 percent, to $114.46

When the dust settled at the end of the trading day on Monday, the Dow Jones index was down more than 777.68, a record point decline, with the index down nearly 7 percent from Friday. The CNET Tech index closed Monday at 1375.64, a one-day drop of more than 107 points, or nearly 7.25 percent.

CNET News’ Stephen Shankland and Daniel Terdiman contributed to this report.

With no bill to tout, Congressional leaders shifted to the blame game. Minority leader John Boehner, the Ohio Republican, expressed frustration that the bill didn’t pass, but shifted blame to the Democrats.

“We’ve got much to do, and this is simply too important to simply let fail,” he said.

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Pelosi, a California Democrat, said she will try and reach out to Republicans to resolve the issue.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 777.68 points Monday after the House of Representatives voted against a financial industry bail-out bill. (Click to enlarge.)

The House voted down the $700 billion plan, 228 to 205, with two-thirds of Republicans and a significant number of Democrats casting “no” votes.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index dropped 199.61 points, or more than 9 percent, to close at 1,983.73–the first time it dipped below 2,000 since 2005.

Members of Congress left Monday without scheduling any sort of re-vote, as many aides and lawmakers headed out early for the Jewish New Year, which begins at sundown. A revised bill or new vote could come later in the week, pundits said.

Longtime technology analyst Ashok Kumar, of brokerage Collins Stewart, said the macroeconomic concerns will weigh heavily on the technology industry, which is still perceived as a discretionary expenditure for both consumers and businesses.

News.com Poll Bailout bombshell
Was the House right to vote down the $700 billion bailout plan?

“Until these clouds clear everybody is going to be in a bunker mentality,” he said. “The hope is that six months out or nine months out the clouds have cleared…. but near term obviously the outlook is extremely cloudly.”

U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson later touted the bailout plan he worked on with congressional leaders as one that “gave us the tools we needed to protect the American people.” He further expressed his commitment to coming up with some sort of rescue plan that works, “as soon as possible.”

Democrats, meanwhile, blamed Republicans.

“The administration impressed upon us the seriousness of (this crisis),” House speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters. “We delivered on our side of the bargain. Clearly that message has not been received yet by the Republican caucus.”

The S&P 500 Index dropped 106.46 points, or 8.8 percent, to close at 1,106.55, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index dropped 199.61 points, or more than 9 percent, to close at 1,983.73–the first time it dipped below 2,000 since 2005.

Popular sentiment on Wall Street, he said, is that the government’s inaction amounts to “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.”

(Credit:
Wolfram Research)

The O’Reilly School of Technology announced Wednesday a licensing deal with Wolfram that will let it create an online version of Mathematica called Hilbert that “will emulate the desktop version of the software with remarkable fidelity.”

The software will be available to students in the second half of the year, O’Reilly said. Hilbert will be available through the O’Reilly School of Technology, an online education division of publisher O’Reilly Media.

Mathematica lets users perform a wide variety of mathematical calculations and visualize results.

(Hilbert is named after the German mathematician David Hilbert. Alas, O’Reilly made no mention of an online Mathematica environment being called Hilbert space.)

Going one step further in fulfilling some of the potential of online software, Hilbert will also enable users to create “mashups” that combine the Mathematica abilities with other online work through courses including NetMath at the University of Illinois, said Scott Gray, director of the O’Reilly School of Technology, in a statement.

Mathematica, Wolfram Research’s sophisticated software for complicated mathematical calculations and visualization, is going online.

O’Reilly said it will put an online interface onto Mathematica using Ajax software, a leading example of “rich Internet application” technology that’s increasingly popular for building more polished, elaborate, and interactive Web pages.

AT&T said that it is already working to fight online child pornography. “AT&T has long-standing and established procedures for the removal of illegal child pornography from our servers, including servers that host newsgroups,” said Marty Richter, a representative for AT&T. “Consistent with these procedures and federal and state statutes, when we receive a report of any illegal content being hosted on our servers and we have a good faith basis for concluding that the content is illegal, we will remove it.”

Earlier this month, Verizon, Time Warner, and Sprint announced an agreement with New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to purge their servers of existing child pornography and eliminate access to user groups that distribute child pornography.

My colleague Declan McCullagh points out in a story he wrote following the New York announcement that this tactic will most likely silence thousands of legitimate user groups that use the alt.* hierarchy for Usenet discussions.

“It is not enough for only a few Internet service providers to join the fight against online predators,” the letter said. “Child pornography is not protected by the First Amendment, and distributing this material is illegal.”

Verizon, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint have said they have no plans to actually block access to any Web sites. Instead, they plan to purge or erase any child pornography that has been cached in their servers. They also plan to limit or block access to some of their own Usenet or news groups, which can be used to disseminate this material.

“Protecting the safety of our children must be a top priority, not just for government, but also for businesses with the direct power to reduce the ability to conduct illegal activity,” they said in a joint letter to the California Internet Service Provider Association.

Indeed, this could turn out to be a big issue as California’s politicians try to push for similar action among other Internet service providers. Some large providers such as AOL stopped carrying Usenet, but AT&T still does.

Update: This story was updated at 2:55 p.m. PDT to add comments from AT&T.

California’s governor and attorney general are asking Internet service providers to help stop the dissemination of child pornography.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. issued a press release Friday asking Internet service providers in California to follow the lead of Verizon Communications, Time Warner Cable, and Sprint in “removing child pornography from existing servers and blocking channels” that disseminate the illegal material.

It’s not surprising that the American Civil Liberties Union is opposed to this action. Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU’s technology and liberty program, told CNET News.com in McCullagh’s earlier article that service providers shouldn’t be blocking wholesale sections of the Internet, including Usenet groups, because it could eliminate legitimate discussions. “That’s taking a sledgehammer to an ant,” he was quoted as saying.

For example, Time Warner Cable said it will cease to offer customers access to any Usenet newsgroups, a decision that will affect customers nationwide. Sprint said it would no longer offer any of the tens of thousands of alt.* Usenet newsgroups. Verizon’s plan is to eliminate some “fairly broad newsgroup areas.”

While no one disagrees that distributing child pornography is illegal, some civil liberty experts worry that the way in which ISPs will block access to it could limit free speech for people discussing and distributing perfectly legal content.

Schwarzenegger and Brown said in their letter that it’s important that ISPs in California take action that is similar to the steps Verizon, Time Warner, and Sprint have agreed to in New York. The Internet Service Provider Association is the largest association of Internet service providers in the country, representing more than 100 ISPs. These providers include small ISPs, as well as big ones such as AT&T and AOL.

Sun says that the JDK and JRE 6 Update 4 for multiple platforms is available for download.

Secunia says, “The security issue is caused due to the JRE processing external XML entity references even though the ‘external general entities’ property is set to FALSE. This can be exploited to e.g. access certain URLs or cause a DoS (denial of service) via malicious XML documents.”

According to Secunia, Sun Microsystems has patched a vulnerability that could allow malicious attackers to bypass certain security restrictions.

Twhirl, a desktop client for Twitter and Friendfeed that I dearly love, updates only one site at a time, so I can use it to send Twitter posts to either my main Twitter account or other specialized accounts I occasionally write to. Friendfeed reads in only what I write in my main Twitter account, though. And since Twhirl does not update other services I use, like Jaiku and Plurk, when I use Twhirl I need to be mindful that some of my followers on these other networks aren’t going to see the posts.

Today, for kicks, I tried to draw a map of all the places I write content, all the places it is displayed, and all the intermediate services that re-post my content in places other than where I originally write it. It’s a spaghetti of interlinked services, and it’s becoming unmanageable. I think it’s just dumb luck that I haven’t created an infinite loop of republishing so far. Adding one more service could push things over the edge.

The challenge is keeping track of all the connections between services. It’s a tangle, as I said: I have Friendfeed republishing my Twitter posts. Ping.fm, which I often use to post to Twitter (and thus, to Friendfeed), could just as easily publish to Friendfeed directly. I just happened to set up the Friendfeed-Twitter link before I started using Ping.fm. I have Ping.fm updating several other nanoblog feeds, like Jaiku, Pownce, and Plurk. Meanwhile, my Webware article feed (just my stories) is read into Friendfeed and directly by Jaiku. I do not feed Webware into Twitter directly; I use a republisher called Twitterfeed. I am also using Twitterfeed to republish my ProPRTips blog into Twitter, which is strategic, since I get more readers for that blog’s content on Twitter than the blog gets itself.

Or should I drop it all and just write e-mail newsletters instead?

It gets worse. Each of the sites my content ends up on (partial list: Webware, News.com, ProPRTips, Swagalicio.us, Twitter, Friendfeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca, Pownce, Kwippy, Flickr, Delicious, Digg) has its own communities. And I never know where a conversation will take hold. Since I’m most active on Webware, Twitter, and Friendfeed, I check those services more frequently. Sometimes something I write will spark a conversation on one, sometimes another. There’s no telling. (By the way, Plurk gets a decent share of community action; every time I go there I think I should check in more frequently.) Disqus can do a lot of discussion bridging between blogs, but one thing it doesn’t do is bridge communities between the microblog sites.

I am, so far, managing to keep most of these connections in my head, but I fear that if I sleep for more than nine hours I could forget how my network is put together. I could look at my sketch. But we really shouldn’t need network maps to keep track of what we’re doing where, should we?

So this is my challenge to the Web 2.0 community: Solve the personal content and community problem. Take the multi-publishing chops of Ping.fm, the aggregation features of Friendfeed, the republishing capability of Twitterfeed (with more functions, please), and the discussion aggregation of Disqus, and put it all together into one simple, easy-to-maintain product that acts as a hub for publishing, reading, and community in all these services. And while you’re at it, make sure you don’t steal traffic or community from the services you’re front-ending; they all have personalities we want to keep alive.

Although my profession is creating content and publishing it, my problem is hardly unique. I post a few times a day on Webware and Twitter, and I contribute to some other blogs and podcasts, and once in awhile I update Delicious and Flickr. But compared with some people in non-publishing jobs my output is modest. There are people active on multiple personal content services like Facebook, Digg, Vox, Blogger, and Youtube that produce more content than I do, and they’re also using republishing services to make sure that all their friends, on all their networks, see all their content.

(Credit:
Rafe Needleman / CNET)

It shouldn't be this complicated (click for full-size).

But squeezing so many channels through a limited bandwidth pipe, the sound suffers. Maybe, just maybe if the XM/Sirius merger goes through the combined bandwidth will give us better sound. I’ve got my fingers crossed.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Sirius’ programming, but I hate the sound. It’s grungy, harsh, with no actual high frequencies and muddy bass. The music’s dynamics are squashed flat as Kansas so it sounds like a low bit MP3. Digital smigital, Sirius sounds awful, way worse than FM radio.

(Credit:
Steve Guttenberg)

On the music side I’m a huge fan of Sirius Disorder, their all mixed up, rock, alternate, jazz, world, whatever channel. The morning DJ, Ghosty, is an odd duck, and David Johansen (he of the New York Dolls) serve up wildly disorganized shows. Over on the Underground Garage channel, Andrew Loog Oldham (the Rolling Stones first producer) spews trivia and fascinating stories amidst spinning Nancy Sinatra, the Ramones, Radiohead, Muddy Waters with music from the fifties to the present. Looking for uncensored rap and hip hop, reggae, blues, country, jazz, world music–Sirius is probably playing it, without commercials. Point is, if you have eclectic taste, Sirius has the tunes.

Ah, but the on-air talent, well, it’s better than anything on commercial AM or FM, by a long shot. The fire-breathing Liberal political talk channel, “Sirius Left,” crushes its ever lamer terrestrial radio counterpart, Air America, and you conservatives can feast on the Sirius Patriot channel. For everybody else, there’s Howard Stern, Martha Stewart and NASCAR.

The Jay Thomas Show blows Howard away; he’s on the Sirius Stars channel. Jay’s show mixes current events and politics with beauty queens and all sorts of wackos. Jay’s a really funny guy.

So, how will Intel improve Nehalem integrated graphics? Not surprisingly, more transistors and more bandwidth, according to Gelsinger. “Largely, integrated graphics is as much die area as you can throw at it and as much memory bandwidth as you can give it,” Gelsinger said. “So, could we equal discrete graphics performance with integrated graphics? Of course.” Gelsinger went on to say that Intel will focus on “more transistor budget, leading-edge process technology, and more memory bandwidth dedicated to integrated graphics.”

To address this, Intel intends to boost integrated graphics performance in Nehalem processors and, for the first time, offer a discrete (standalone) graphics product for high-end markets. Both Nehalem and Larrabee are targeted at the 2009-2010 time frame.

Pat Gelsinger, general manager of the digital enterprise group at Intel, spelled out Intel’s strategies for future graphics technology on Monday. He addressed the higher-octane technology that will be built into future “Nehalem” processors and the highly sophisticated “Larrabee” chips that will be offered as “discrete” or standalone products.

And, as the Nvidia CEO has intimated, unless Intel responds aggressively, this could make Nvidia a direct Intel competitor in the future. Nvidia’s newest GeForce 9600 GT GPU rivals, at the very least, Intel chips in complexity. It has 64 stream processors–each individually clocked at 1625MHz–and a 256-bit memory interface running at 900MHz and contains more than 500 million transistors.

NvidiaGeForce 9600 GT boards: each Nvidia chip has over 500 million transistors.

But Gelsinger said there are definite limits to what can be done with integrated graphics because of the big power and transistor requirements for high-end discrete (standalone) graphics products. They have “a very different price point and die envelope and power envelope. Some of the (discrete) graphics chips alone are 150 watts. We build whole platforms for less (power) than that,” he said.

First, some perspective. Intel–not Nvidia or ATI–is the world’s largest supplier of graphics chips for PCs. The reason is simple. Intel-integrated graphics silicon is shipped in tens of millions of PCs every year. It’s a low-cost–and relatively low-performance–solution that many PC vendors opt for. But that doesn’t mean Intel is the premier supplier of sophisticated mainstream PC graphics technology. That distinction goes to Nvidia and ATI. Intel is a non-player. This is evidenced by the proliferation of Nvidia- and ATI-based graphics board reviews at enthusiast Web sites and the bigger role that graphics processors from these two companies play in handling increasingly complex visual applications.

(Credit:
Nvidia)

During a February earnings conference call, Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO of Nvidia, repeated one thing over and over: graphics are in and the central processor is out. There is some truth to this. And Intel’s plans for future silicon technology address this head on.

This is where Larrabee comes in. Gelsinger said that Larrabee–a “many core” chip–will target Nvidia and AMD/ATI’s discrete graphics. “Obviously, if we’re going to be competing in the discrete graphics marketplace, we think we’re going to have to compete well…in terms of traditional benchmarks like 3D Mark,” he said, adding that Intel will support traditional graphics interfaces such as DirectX and OpenGL. A big potential plus: since Larrabee cores will be based on the Intel Architecture, developers who already write code for standard Intel microprocessors can develop for Larrabee without learning a completely new architecture.

Logistically, this will be accomplished by turning today’s three-chip CPU into a two-chip CPU, he said. That means moving the graphics silicon onto the same die with the main processor. More specifically, the part of the chipset referred to as the “north bridge” is going away. The north bridge contains the memory controller and graphics controller. Both of these components will be moved onto the CPU die. The other part of the chipset referred to as the “south bridge” will remain separate. This includes I/O related components.

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Alas, I’m among those with teary beer: I bought a shuffle for Mrs. Cheapskate just a few months ago. But she absolutely loves it, so I will bottle up my overpay rage and pretend I’m not $30 poorer.

(Credit:
Apple)

One additional note: The price-cut shuffle doesn’t qualify for free shipping, which applies only to orders over $50. I feel a tiny bit better.

Speaking of iPods, Apple just announced a price cut on the 1GB iPod shuffle: $49, down from $79. If you can’t make do with a measly 240 songs, cheer up: Apple also announced a new 2GB shuffle, though it won’t be available for a couple weeks. That model will sell for $69, meaning anyone who just paid $79 for a 1GB shuffle will be crying into their beer.