Items tagged with bad
iPad case, anyone? How about one with a built-in solar panel? It's possible to have the both of those with Element5's newest product, the Mini L Solarbag. It's a Swiss-made case that'll hold your iPad, iPad 2 or any other iOS device with a Dock Connector. There's also a bit of room for accessories and peripherals, and there's a solar panel on the outside as well as a power connector on the inside that allows customers to juice up their gadgets with the sun, and then have that energy passed along to the device inside. The company's not making it clear how much energy is being converted here, nor how long you'd need to keep it in the sun in order to make a real dent in helping out that battery,...
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Ever had a bad blind date? Or, here's a different way of looking at it: have you ever worried about a blind date and set up a call from your friend, just in case it was bad, so that you had an excuse to leave? Well, with Fake Calls, an iPhone app, you don't need to infringe on your friends' spare time any longer. The idea is the application will simulate a call to your iPhone, and you can customize the time, caller ID, number and more. Of course, the developer doesn't use a bad date as an example, rather an annoying conversation, but come on! This is perfect for bad matchmaking. The developer (Magic Tap) says: Simulate calls with this great application! Have you ever been in the situation where...
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We wrote earlier about HP's announcement about NVIDIA GPU failures in 38 of its slimline desktop PCs. While that's bad enough, The Inquirer says it has memos from allegedly from an internal knowledge base at Apple which states that all of NVIDIA's parts based on its G92 architecture sent to Apple have had to undergo the same change in bump material required to fix the issues in the heat-related failures we've been talking about since earlier this year.It should be noted that taking the source into account, a big fat "rumor," or perhaps "unsubstantiated" should be placed right here.However, they're not always off the mark. And, after all, if HP is seeing issues, why not another PC...
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We know that both HP and Dell have planned to extend the life of Windows XP by using the "Downgrade Rights" Policy which allows buyers of certain versions of Windows Vista to get a copy of Windows XP along with Vista. But a report indicates that HP is looking at two different ways to make an "end run" around Vista. According to Business Week, HP, the world's number one computer maker, has started two initiatives to reduce the somewhat negative impact of a Windows Vista-based computer. The first project, one that HP publicly acknowleges, involves a "customer experience" group created nine months ago, led by a former director of HP's research labs, Susie Wee. That effort is to develop add-on software...
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Palm just doesn't seem able to catch a break these days. Take the Foleo for example. When Palm announced it, it made waves but also drew some criticisms. Once VIA announced their Nanobook, many were keen to compare the two and it seemed that Foleo wasn't winning too many armchair comparisons by the world's forum jockeys. Once Asus entered the fray it was more or less over for Foleo and Palm pulled the plug.But the Foleo might be responsible for an entire segment of UMPC/mini-notebooks.“It's easy to point to the Eee PC from Asus and its surprising and instant popularity. But the Eee wasn't the first to employ the broader concept of a mobile Web device that looked like a...
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In this situation, "oops" doesn't cut it. No matter what you say, "sorry" will not butter the biscuit, so to speak. All apologies, simply isn't enough to make good on this ridiculous blunder. OK, so maybe things were looking pretty bleak on the high seas that fateful day and a few of the rookies were a bit nervous they might not get back to see dry land and that cocktail waitress at the Beef-N-Ale but holy mackerel, man! Suck it up! You can't anchor here. There's a big fat pipe of fiber-optic cable below and don't even think about interrupting India, Egypt, and Dubai's daily dose of HotHardware! Submarine Cable World Map "According to reports, the internet...
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A lot of users have called RealPlayer "badware," but mostly for performance reasons. All right, all right, we're being kind; there have been plenty of complaints over Real Networks' policies before.StopBadware.org said Tuesday it has labeled two versions of the RealPlayer media player as "badware," or spyware.RealPlayer 10.5, it claims, "fails to accurately and completely disclose the fact that it installs advertising software on the user's computer." And RealPlayer 11, it claims, "does not disclose the fact that it installs Rhapsody Player Engine software, and fails to remove this software when RealPlayer is uninstalled." Ryan Lukin, PR manager for RealNetworks, disputed some of the claims....
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HBO,Time Warner's cable TV channel, is launching a service allowing subscribers to download and watch HBO content like the Sopranos and Sex in the City on their computers and various mobile devices. It will be offered as a free add-on to their existing subscribers to HBO and HBO on Demand. Targeted at younger subscribers and travelers who watch TV shows and movies on laptops, HBO on Broadband will offer 600 titles each month, with 400 of those available at any time, as well as a live stream of the main HBO channel.HBO on Broadband will also suggest titles based on viewing habits. Programming will be available for at least a month, but will be erased from users' libraries at its expiration date.The...
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If watching all 3 “Back To The Future” movies was supposed to teach us anything, it's that people shouldn't tinker with time. Nor should anyone modify DMC-12s without serious contemplation of the consequences, but perhaps attempting to treat time like a toy was perhaps the more serious message.Apparently nobody got this message out to the good people in the U.S. Congress, and their 2005 change to the daylight savings system has caused all kinds of havoc. Thankfully nothing along the lines of Armageddon-esque/Y2K-horror story events seem to have happened, but rather plenty of small things seem to have gone wrong. Here are a few interesting stories about such events:“At least...
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Poor box office receipts have been blamed on a number of things (besides a bad movie, that is), including poor weather, natural disasters, embarrassing news for the stars, strong box office competition, etc. This is the first time we have heard a video game blamed for bad box office.Industry expectations for "The Heartbreak Kid," the date movie that re-teamed him with the Farrelly brothers (the duo who made him a megastar in "There's Something About Mary"), called for a $20 million to $25 million opening for the film. Instead, "Kid," which cost north of $60 million to make, managed only $14 million in the U.S. and Canada -- heartbreaking, indeed.But there's more. Total industry ticket sales...
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Is your boss a jerk? Mine is. I'm self-employed. The king of all bad bosses has got to be Fairchild Semiconductor. It constantly drove bright, forward thinking tech pioneers out of the building. Their loss is all our gain. "Fairchildren" started Intel in 1968, for instance. And lots, lots more of the most important companies on earth.In the 1980s, the folks at the Semiconductor Materials and Equipment International trade group assembled a flow chart that tracked "Fairchildren" who created spinoffs such as Advanced Micro Devices, LSI Logic and Electroglas. Perhaps the most important was the venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. A more recent parallel to the Fairchild diaspora...
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I have a soft spot for Netscape.com. AOL purchased the brand name back in 1999, probably trying to get a little goodwill from people like me that remember when Netscape was THE web browser. The Netscape.com portal has used a"social news" format for submitting and voting on the prominence of news stories for over a year now, but parent AOL has decided to return to having an editorial staff present the news. The feature received tepid response when it was introduced last summer. Over the past year, U.S. visitors to the Netscape home page dropped by about half to 2.4 million in July, according to comScore Media Metrix. By contrast, visitors to social-news rival Digg.com nearly quadrupled...
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If you're running Intuit's popular QuickBooks Online Edition, the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team is warning you that your ActiveX controls might be stabbing you in the back,at least if you visit a malicious webpage. Computer Emergency Readiness Team? That's what CERT stand for? Are they like code ninjas? Does someone project an html signal onto a cloud at night to summon them? Never mind. Fix your ActiveX controls. The vulnerabilities, rated “highly critical” by Secunia, can be exploited by a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system. “By convincing a user to view a specially crafted HTML document (e.g., a web page or an HTML...
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The term shill bidding, sometimes with only one l, is defined as somebody who bids on their own goods and/or services being auctioned in an attempt to drive up the price. It's forbidden on eBay, and is even illegal in many areas. That doesn't always deter people and/or organizations from doing it, but when they get caught here's a good example of what can happen: "An American jewellery firm EMH Group was fined $400,000 by the New York state attorney general’s office for allegedly bidding in its own auctions on eBay.com to increase the prices by some 20 per cent, according to media reports." In addition to the fine the company has been banned from all forms of online auctioning for a period...
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