According to official April figures released by the NPD Group, the Playstation 3 found itself beaten out for fifth place by an unusual competitor: its predecessor, the Playstation 2.

A 50% leap in Playstation 2 sales accounts for the surprising change, an increase likely prompted by the system’s price cut on April 1, a move which apparently electrified interest in the nine-year old platform.

The PS2’s success was probably the only nugget of April sales news to put smiles on the faces of Sony execs. Nintendo platforms continued their lockdown of the top spots, with the Wii coming second and the DS coming both first and third, courtesy of the just-launched DSi: the DS’s two hardware variations accounted for an astonishing million sales during April.Meanwhile, the Xbox 360 was down slightly over last April, but still managed a solid fourth place and remains on course for a record-breaking year.

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WASHINGTON (AFP) - - Worldwide sales of personal computers fell sharply in the first three months of the year but the US market held up better than others, market research firms IDC and Gartner reported Wednesday.

IDC said worldwide shipments of desktop and portable PCs fell 7.1 percent in the first three months of the year compared with last year while Gartner said they registered a decline of 6.5 percent in the quarter to 67.2 million units.

"We are seeing some evidence of channel inventory restocking, particularly in the US," said Gartner research director George Shiffler. "This restocking should not be interpreted as a recovery in PC end-user demand; it’s still unclear if the global PC market has hit the bottom."

Shiffler’s comments contrasted with those of Intel president Paul Otellini, who said Tuesday that the world’s biggest computer-chip maker believed PC sales had "bottomed out during the first quarter and that the industry is returning to normal seasonal patterns."

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Tomorrow — April 1 — is D-Day for Conficker, as whatever nasty payload it’s packing is currently set to activate. What happens come midnight is a mystery: Will it turn the millions of infected computers into spam-sending zombie robots? Or will it start capturing everything you type — passwords, credit card numbers, etc. — and send that information back to its masters?

No one knows, but we’ll probably find out soon.

Or not. As Slate notes, Conficker is scheduled to go "live" on April 1, but whoever’s controlling it could choose not to wreak havoc but instead do absolutely nothing, waiting for a time when there’s less heat. They can do this because the way Conficker is designed is extremely clever: Rather than containing a list of specific, static instructions, Conficker reaches out to the web to receive updated marching orders via a huge list of websites it creates. Conficker.C — the latest bad boy — will start checking 50,000 different semi-randomly-generated sites a day looking for instructions, so there’s no way to shut down all of them. If just one of those sites goes live with legitimate instructions, Conficker keeps on trucking.

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Admittedly I don’t think much about it at all. I leave my laptop running overnight because I know it’ll take five minutes or more to get things going in the morning — not just booting up, but launching the various apps I start the day with, downloading my overnight email, filtering out the spam, and otherwise "getting settled."

But all the power wasted while computers are sitting idle overnight adds up, and one study has finally tried to measure it. The tally: An estimated $2.8 billion wasted on excess energy costs each year in the U.S. alone.

On a CO2 basis, that’s 20 million tons of carbon dioxide, about the amount produced by 4 million cars on the road.

The full report is available for download here (scroll down to "PC Energy Report US 2009").

But big numbers like that become almost meaningless in an era of trillion-dollar bailouts, so to put the wasted energy in perspective, the study provides the data in terms you can better understand: If you run a company with 1,000 PCs left on overnight, you can save about $28,000 a year if they are turned off after hours. That’s not chump change.

Of course, it’s also a fact that your PC will function better if you restart it regularly, and nightly shutdowns can help you avoid having to suddenly reboot in the middle of the day when you’d otherwise be productive. So even though this little laptop, by my math, eats up only about a quarter’s worth of power overnight, maybe it’s a smart idea — and ultimately a time-saver, too — to shut it down after hours after all.source: link

MANILA (AFP) - - Internet usage in the Philippines is on the increase but rarely for doing business online — most people are using the web for social networking or to play games, according to a survey Thursday.

It is the first time such a survey has been conducted in the Philippines, where only around 20 million people — 22 percent of the country’s 90 million population — have access to the Internet.

The survey by Yahoo! and consumer information group Nielsen found that most of those going online are between 10 and 29 and are educated and techno-savvy.

It showed that 53 percent of Internet users play online games, and only 24 percent read the news online.

In stark contrast, "online transactions or commerce remain low," with only three percent conducting banking activities or making purchases online.

Nielsen executive director Jay Bautista said internet users are forecast to increase by at least 10 percent this year.

However, he said the global economic downturn, which has softened economies around the world, would likely "flatten or bring down ad spending" just as it did during the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

The survey was carried out from October to November last year and covered some 1,200 people across the Southeast Asian archipelago.

 source: Link

SEOUL (AFP) - South Korea’s Samsung Electronics on Monday unveiled what it says is the world’s slimmest LCD (liquid crystal display) TV.

The new product, measuring only 6.5 millimetres (0.26 inch) thick, is thinner than any other existing TV set, and even slimmer than most mobile handsets, Samsung said in a statement.

Its thickness is one seventh of Samsung’s "Bordeaux 850" LCD TVs, which is currently the thinnest on the market, the company said.

The new product, which adopts an LED (light emitting diode) backlighting system, will be on display at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas from January 8 to 11, Samsung added

source> yahoo!

Shoe-wielding Iraqi journalist Muntadar al-Zaidi, who was catapulted to international prominence after throwing his shoes at President Bush during a press conference in Iraq, is now the star of the latest in viral Web games.

"Sock and Awe" — named after the military doctrine employed in the US operation to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — allows players to throw shoes at a figure of President Bush, as he ducks behind a podium.

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