Top 10 IT vendors losing money

It's no surprise that some IT vendors have posted losses amid one of the harshest downturns in decades, but the scale of the losses in some cases is truly eye-watering, says Computing.co.uk.

Here we list the biggest losers to date. All results are those reported for the three months to 31 March 2009, unless otherwise stated.

Sun Microsystems - £132 million ($201 million). Currently in the process of being acquired by software giant Oracle for about £4.9 billion, Sun's precarious financial position was affirmed when it posted a loss of £132 million for the quarter ended 29 March 2009, significantly worse than the £22 million deficit posted in the year-ago quarter.

In tough times, you have to make tough decisions, and Japanese server maker NEC this morning announced in Tokyo that it was pulling out of the Next-Generation Supercomputer Project sponsored by the Japanese government, reports The Register.

The project involved NEC, Fujitsu, and Hitachi building a hybrid scalar/vector massively parallel system.

NEC is not exiting the parallel vector supercomputer business, which at one point put the company on top of the Top 500 supercomputer list with its Earth Simulator monster. That machine - a cluster of 5 120 of NEC's SX series of vector supercomputers - was rated at 35.8 teraflops and ruled the Top 500 for the early years of this decade.

According to a study, file-sharing sites help make popular acts more popular, says The BBC.

The research, by industry body PRS for Music, showed the most pirated pop songs tend to be those at the top of the music charts.

There was little evidence that file-sharing sites helped unsigned and new bands find an audience, it found.

In what is just the latest Facebook phishing scam, hackers on Thursday broke into accounts and sent e-mails to friends urging them to log on to fake Facebook sites, reports CNet.

The social-networking site is in the process of cleaning up from the hack and is blocking compromised. Victims were directed to log back in to the site, but actually logged into the one controlled by the hackers, unwittingly giving away their passwords.

Facebook did not immediately respond to an e-mail seeking confirmation and information about the hack. The number of users affected remains unknown, but a Facebook spokesman told The New York Times it "is not widespread and is only impacting a small fraction of a percent of users".