Adobe Systems Inc

Freescale Semiconductor is entering the fast-growing netbook market with a solution that promises to make possible portable devices that feature 8.9-inch displays, eight hours of battery life, and prices under $200.

Freescale's solution is based on its new i.MX515 processor featuring ARM Cortex-A8 technology. The solution includes software, components and resources that aim to help OEMs rapidly develop and deploy netbooks.

While the nation's top three automobile giants are trying to convince the government that they need a bailout, other businesses are doing what they can to stay afloat even if it means slashing thousands of positions.

Today, Sony joined the growing list of companies who have had to cut a percentage of their workforce to stay competitive. Sony announced Tuesday that it will slash 8,000 positions between now and March 2010 in its electronics business, cut operation costs, and cut inventory.

Chipmaker Advanced Micro Devices is among the most recent casualties of the slowdown in technology spending. On Dec. 4 the chipmaker drastically cut its sales outlook, saying fourth-quarter revenue will drop about 25 percent from the third quarter's $1.59 billion.

AT&T, one of the largest phone companies in the world, has fallen victim to economic turbulence. AT&T announced Thursday it will cut four percent of its workforce, or 12,000 jobs.

With 303,530 employees worldwide and $120 billion in pro-forma revenue in 2007, AT&T said the cuts are the result of a poor economy and an effort to reorganize and focus on specific businesses within the company, including wireless, broadband and video.

Adobe Systems is poised to launch several key enhancements to its Adobe Flash platform in San Francisco this week at its MAX 2008 conference.

Any major upgrade to Flash is significant because 81 percent of worldwide online videos are viewed with Flash technology, making it the number-one format for video on the Web, according to comScore. Adobe's Flash Player is also installed on 98 percent of Internet-connected desktops and a growing number of mobile devices.

Today's LCD monitors and plasma displays are a substantial evolution from the monochrome CRT relics of PC antiquity. High brightness, support for more than 1 billion colors and sharp resolution are just a few of the latest improvements.

Color-Critical LCD

Reach into your pockets after a business trip. You've got business cards, crumpled receipts and perhaps other scraps of paper with information needed for databases, expense reports and tax time. Dealing with this mess of paper is as much fun as visiting the dentist.

The new NeatDesk desktop scanner I've been testing can help you through this drill. It combines a speedy sheet-fed scanner with digital filing-system software called NeatWorks 4.0 that neatly sorts and organizes the information. For now, the scanner works with Windows only; a Mac version is expected in 2009.

Security research firm Sophos on Wednesday discovered attackers have launched their own presidential campaign. Attempting to exploit President-elect Barack Obama's historic victory, the spam attack sends e-mails with the subject line "Obama win preferred in world poll" and a return address of news@president.com.

Clicking a link in the e-mail takes victims to a Web page that insists on downloading Adobe Flash 9 to view a video of the first African-American president's "amazing speech." The scam is this: It's not really Flash. It's dangerous malware.

Adobe Systems has released a security fix to address eight major vulnerabilities in version 8.12 of its free Adobe Reader application. The flaw was first reported to Adobe five months ago.

Core Security Technologies on Tuesday issued an advisory disclosing the vulnerability, which could affect millions of individuals and businesses that use the popular PDF file-viewing software. Specifically, CoreLabs engineers discovered attackers could exploit Adobe Reader to gain access to vulnerable systems by using a specially crafted PDF file with malicious JavaScript content.