CHRISdotTODD

When you are not using your computer or game machine, what are they doing? Just for the cost of electricity, you can contribute to worthy causes such as protein folding or searching for ET. Organizations from Stanford ( Folding@home ) and Berkley ( SETI@home ) have small programs that you can download for your computer, that will only run when your computer is idle. Folding@home and SETI@home are able to do this through using Grid Computing technology. The Folding@home project started in 2000 with assistance from Intel, Google, and others. What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease? Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery. So with the help of the Folding@home project, researchers are able to process data faster t...

Yahoo! reported on the 24th that Sony has another recall -- this time it is their Cyber-shot camera . "The liquid crystal display screens of eight camera models might not display images correctly, images could be distorted or cameras might not take photos at all." This affects cameras sold over 16 months from September 2003 to January 2005. Apparently this is not the first camera recall for Sony. Compared to the S&P 500 and Nasdaq over the last three months , things do not look good for Sony. I do not expect the PS3 to help them much either.

The November issue of Wired has a great article on " Building a Better Battery ". John Hockenberry begins with a story of a battery that catches fire, and then takes us to the first battery built in the 1800s. Hockenberry quickly takes us through the history to the point of talking about lithium-ion. Today, most Li-ion cells contain at least two – and sometimes three – separate countermeasures to keep the reaction from getting out of control. Finally, we hear a bit about Sony before Hockenberry concludes with the current research in battery technology. CNet reported on October 23rd that Sony has even more battery recalls. Batteries that shipped with laptops sold by Fujitsu, Gateway, Sony and Toshiba comprise this recall... ...worldwide tally... ...more than 3 million... This extends the list to Dell, Lenovo/IBM, Apple, Sharp, Fujitsu, Gateway, Sony, and Toshiba.

After many months, Sony has finally issued a recall of their batteries in their Vaio laptops . The list of companies who have recalled Sony batteries now include Dell, Apple, Toshiba, Sharp , Fujitsu, Lenovo , Hitachi, and Sony. The only major manufacture that has not recalled Sony batteries is HP, which is a bit odd considering all the other manufacturers eventually placing a recall. As you may recall, Sony originally said the problem was limited to Dell, and then Dell and Apple . Seem just a matter of time before HP is part of the crowd too. U.S. Today posted on article on October 2nd that indicated Sony will end up replacing 10 million batteries.

If you are still counting, Sony has had to recall over 7 million, yes 7 million, laptop batteries. This has affected Dell, Apple, Lenovo/IBM, and Toshiba. According to ZDNet and CNet , Sony's stock has dropped 8.2% since the first battery recalls in the Dell laptops. Of course the stock drop also takes into account the long delay to the PS3 game console. Analyst Masahiro Ono from Morgan Stanely: Sony's battery business is expected to have an operating profit margin of about 5 percent in the current business year to March. That compares with Sony's own estimate of its overall operating margin of 1.6 percent for the year. This seems a bit odd with the battery problems -- perhaps there are some financial creativity to handle the expenses related to the recall. I know that the techies, such as myself, pay attention to this stuff, but it will be interesting to see how big of an effect the battery recall and PS3 delay has on Sony's overall business. On top of this, we hea...

Sony furthers its losses, this time with a battery recall 1.8 million Apple laptops , for a total of 4.8 million batteries. At a cost from $170 to $250 million for their battery problems, I do not think a 2% loss in shares is that much. Interestingly enough, if you look at Sony's stock over the last 12 months in comparison to the NYSE, they are not doing so bad. I plotted closing stock price and trade volume for some of more notable Sony announcements over since the Rootkit problem reported on October 31, 2005. I looked at the day before, the day of, and the day after each announcement. With all the bad things going for Sony, perhaps their recent $65 million purchase of Grouper is good news. Robert Cringely thinks so . Mr. Cringely, in his "i, cringely" column talks about how Sony can use this purchase to learn how to play in the new video era. At number 8 in volume, 1% of video traffic, I think this could be another loss for Sony. How many people have even heard of Gr...

ZDNet is reporting that the laregest battery recall in Dell's history could cost Sony $85M to $430M. Sony also supplies batteries for Hewlett-Packard, Apple Computer and Lenovo. Adrian Kingsley-Hughes of ZDNet says he will folllow the progress on his blog, including any problems with these other manufacturer's laptops. InfoWorld reports that Sony and Dell have been discussing the battery problems for the last 10 months.

Dell has identified several products (4 million in all) that may contain batteries manufactured by Sony that are defective. The affected products are as follows: Latitude: D410, D500, D505, D510, D520, D600, D610, D620, D800, D810 Inspiron: 500M, 510M, 600M, 700M, 710M, 6000, 6400, 8500, 8600, 9100, 9200, 9300, 9400, E1505, E1705 Precision: M20, M60, M70, M90 XPS: XPS, XPS Gen2, XPS M170, XPS M1710 If you own one of these products, Dell has set up a specific website where you can check your battery serial number and learn what to do next. Is this just one more problem for Sony? They had the rootkit problem; the delay to the PS3 ; Blu Ray vs. HD , with a delay and the first models not being able to play movies -- what's next? Oh yeah -- they are struggling in their launch of a music service for their PSP due to DRM issues .