Thursday, February 19, 2009
Nokia signed a loan agreement with the European Investment Bank (EIB) to the tune of $623.9 million. Why the sudden need for cash?
According to Reuters, the five-year loan will be used in part to "finance software research and development (R&D) projects Nokia is undertaking during 2009-2011 to make Symbian-based smartphones more competitive."
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Didn't Gateway go bankrupt?
Gateway has a full line of notebooks that come in all sizes. The company is also closely related to Acer, which has the most popular netbook on the market with its Aspire One. Last year Gateway launched a pair of new notebook lines called the MC and MD series. The difference was a scant 0.6-inches in screen size with the MC line using a 16-inch LCD and the MD using a 15.4-inch screen.
The MC and MD machines had the same chassis design and Gateway has launched a new notebook line called the TC series that uses the same chassis design with a smaller 14-inch screen. The notebook is low priced at $649.99.
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Hewlett-Packard workers fired up their PCs this morning only to find a long memo from Mark Hurd explaining why he was hitting them with wide-ranging pay cuts in an effort to prevent further job losses at the computer vendor.
The move followed HP's first quarter earnings report yesterday in which it coughed to a double digit dip in printer, server, and PC sales.
HP CEO Hurd told employees yesterday that no more jobs would be axed for the foreseeable future, but instead applied salary reductions across the board.
He said that he would take a 20 per cent base pay cut, presumably as a show of solidarity with his workforce.
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The Obama administration has apparently opted to forbid Google and other search engines from indexing any content on the newly launched Recovery.gov.
Is this even more evidence that the administration's much-publicized commitment to transparency is simply hype?
Recovery.gov, which went live Tuesday, is set to act as a central clearinghouse for information related to the newly signed American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The legislation is designed to stimulate the flagging U.S. economy.
The site's robots.txt file has just a few lines of text:
# Deny all search bots, web spiders
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
Shameful.
Labels: cell phone, Gateway, google, Hewlett Packard, nokia, president barack obama
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