forecasts

The Weather Channel is a free weather-monitoring application that provides many more features than Apple's built-in Weather app. You can find paid weather applications that are more specialized, but The Weather Channel (sponsored by the eponymous cable channel) offers a lot, including forecasts (hourly, 36-hour, and 10-day), quick access to Weather Channel local and regional video forecasts, severe weather alerts, and a dynamic map (which you can use to see everything from rainfall to "feels like" temperatures and the UV index). You can also set favorites and go back to recent locations which makes The Weather Channel … Read more

Correction, 10:46 a.m. PST: This story misstated the day the SIA made its announcement. It is Wednesday.

The Semiconductor Industry Association said Wednesday it is projecting the first decline in global chip sales since 2001.

SIA projects that 2009 sales will decline by 5.6 percent to $246.7 billion before resuming growth in 2010.

The forecast projects sales this year of $261.2 billion, a 2.2 percent increase from sales of $255.6 billion last year. But sales in the fourth quarter, historically a strong time period for the microelectronics industry, are expected to decline by … Read more

Electronics and entertainment giant Sony warned investors on Wednesday that its yearly profits will be far below what the company anticipated.

The Japanese company said it expects to record $1.5 billion (150 billion yen) in profit for the current fiscal year, which is a 59 percent drop from the previous year.

In July, Sony said it expected to post profits of $2.4 billion, or 240 billion yen.

One of the main culprits has been the increasingly unfavorable yen-to-dollar conversion rate. The company's headquarters are in Tokyo, but the bulk of its business is in the United States … Read more

As has become increasingly obvious over the last few years, games are being used more and more as tools for helping people and organizations work their way through all kinds of problems and scenarios.

That's been the reasoning behind the steady growth of initiatives like the serious games movement, whose practitioners promote the idea of deploying games in education, government, military, and other sober institutions that need new ways to resolve troubling issues.

And now it appears that an august group of futurists is hoping that they can employ large numbers of people to play collaborative games in search of solutions to some of the world's most vexing problems.

That was the word Tuesday from the Institute for the Future, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based think tank that focuses on identifying the directions that mankind will take down the line. … Read more

Don't trust Marshall Seese? Me neither--the Weather Channel anchor looks a little shifty to me. And I think Jim Cantore's been left out in the field a little too long. If you've lost faith in the Weather Channel, it's time to take meteorological matters into your own hands with the USB Wireless Weather Forecaster. Plant the wireless sensor unit in your backyard, connect the small LCD touch screen to your PC, and sit back as it tracks the temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, rainfall, and wind speed.

What doesn't it do? Well, it doesn't work … Read more

Online advertising is starting to feel the effects of a tepid economy, industry analysis firm PubMatic said in a release Tuesday.

Based on data from "billions of ad impressions" and several thousand online publishers in its AdPrice Index, PubMatic asserted that clicks per thousand monetization rates (CPMs) dropped between March and April, using it as an indicator that the economic slowdown has begun to hit the online ad industry. Large Web sites (over 100 million monthly page views) are feeling the pain, the firm said, with monetization dropping 52 percent from 38 cents in March to 18 cents … Read more

Let's face it, the iPhone can do a whole bunch of things, some necessary (like talking, texting and emailing) and others not-so-necessary (like the rolling-a-make-believe-ball-into-a-peg-fame) pretty well. But, you would hope that one of the more basic features like the weather function would work better than it does. Sure, the icons are pretty and easy to understand. One of my favorites is the ambiguous sun-with-raindrops icon, so you know that it's supposed to rain and be sunny, right.... The forecasts are not detailed, and have questionable accuracy at best. I've been noticing this trend for months now, … Read more

When it comes to your weather-knowing needs, The Weather Channel Desktop 6, which moved out of beta this past week, contains a wealth of meteorological and atmospheric information that goes far beyond three-day forecasts. Of course, it does that, too. The app can predict weather for as short a period as the next 12 hours or as extended a span as the next 12 days. There's a storm watch and pollen count for your physical well-being and reports on cloud behavior over local golf courses, lakes, and amusement parks to help plan your day.

The Weather Channel Desktop also … Read more

Though already expecting losses from the failed HD DVD business, Toshiba's shareholders were told Wednesday to expect more bad news.

The Japanese electronics giant said the market for NAND flash memory (the kind of chips used in portable gadgets) was weak and expected to get worse, the Wall Street Journal reports.

"We now see prices falling 50 percent this fiscal year, after predicting 40 percent in October," said Executive Vice President Fumio Muraoka.

As a result, Toshiba lowered its expected profit for fiscal year 2007, which ends March 31, to 125 billion yen ($1.26 billion), from … Read more