Items tagged with Failure
As iOS 8 rolls out across Apple's devices, the bug reports -- the inevitable, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes maddening bug reports -- have begun to surface as well. iPhone and iPad users are complaining of slow keyboards, iMessage problems, glitches, app crashes, content management issues, missing content, sticky notifications, and a host of other problems. The good news, I suppose, is that no one has uncovered any truly game-ending bugs yet. That's not to say people haven't suffered crashes; any time you update a device to a new operating system someone somewhere is going to have a failure -- but there are no widespread reports of people bricking devices or destroying them wholesale. That...
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In a world in which its corporate communication team wasn't apparently being run by two monkeys and a sack of hammers, Microsoft executives would've taken the stage yesterday and delivered a concise, official explanation as to whether or not used games will run on the console. In point of fact, everyone thought they did. Wired's exclusive report yesterday purported to have the full scoop on how this situation would be handled. Specifically: Wired asked Microsoft if installation would be mandatory. “On the new Xbox, all game discs are installed to the HDD to play,” the company responded in an emailed statement... What follows naturally from this is that each disc would have to be tied...
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The Internet has been grumbling over Sony's unexpected PlayStation Network shutdown for the past few days, but new information from the company will put the outrage into overdrive. According to Sony's official statement: we believe that an unauthorized person has obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for...
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Holiday shopping at one of the web's popular retailers was impossible for some European users over the weekend. Amazon's websites in Europe were down for more than half an hour on Sunday night. Although a group of activists by the name "Anonymous" had encouraged an online attack in an attempt to crash Amazon.com by overwhelming it with requests, the outage experienced by Amazon's European websites over the weekend was unrelated to any such attack. It appears the outage was caused by a hardware failure in the company's European data center network. According to a spokeswoman for Amazon, "The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure in our European...
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It's not often that we hear credible reports that a driver may have caused actual, physical harm to a video card, but that's precisely what an unhappy group of users has done. According to reports, the latest series of Forceware (196.75) caused certain cards to overheat or fail altogether due to a fan control problem. NVIDIA has pulled the driver and issued the following statement: We are aware that some customers have reported fan speed issues with the latest 196.75 WHQL drivers on NVIDIA.com. Until we can verify and root cause this issue, we recommend that customers do not download this driver. Instead, please stay with, or return to 196.21 WHQL drivers. Release 196.75 drivers have been temporarily...
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For Facebook users who might have noticed that some previously-uploaded photos were mysteriously missing from their Facebook pages, Facebook wants you to know that it is aware of the problem, it is fixing the problem right now, and perhaps most importantly: "Don't worry: Your photos are safe." Apparently, while Facebook engineers were performing a "routine software upgrade" this last Friday night, several hard drives that store user photos experienced "simultaneous hardware failures." The Facebook engineers are still a bit baffled by this, as such multiple, simultaneous drive failures are not very common. (Note to Facebook engineers: Make sure you check the drive controllers for hardware failures...
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Conventional wisdom says that solid state drives (SSDs) should have lower failure rates than their mechanical counterparts simply because SSDs lack moving parts. Sadly, it seems that theory and reality have clashed once again:“A large computer manufacturer is getting around 20 percent to 30 percent of the flash-based notebooks it is shipping sent back because of failure rates and performance that simply isn't meeting customer expectations, the firm stated in a report on Monday. Avian gathered this information on a recent swing through Asia.Approximately 10 percent to 20 percent of the flash notebooks shipping from the large manufacturer are coming back because of technical failure, (Avi)...
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We think it's a bit early to declare Amazon's new Star-Trek-esque reader as a flop just yet. Sure it may not be the prettiest thing we've ever seen, and the price is a bit higher than what we were expecting, but all in all it could just be a glimpse of things yet to come.Not everybody shares our optimistic outlook on new hardware, especially Don Reisinger of CNet, who writes:“When bookstores are within driving distance and Amazon.com is a click away of most people, what's the impetus to use one of these?Everything I've heard from the proponents of this device attempt to glorify it as the "21st century's book." What a crock. E-book Readers provide few valuable experiences. And out of that...
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Engineers at Google have published a PDF concerning hard drives and what factors are most likely to cause them to fail. They studied 100,000 hard drives over the course of five years and had some pretty interesting findings. "It is estimated that over 90% of all new information produced in the world is being stored on magnetic media, most of it on hard disk drives. Despite their importance, there is relatively little published work on the failure patterns of disk drives, and the key factors that affect their lifetime. Most available data are either based on extrapolation from accelerated aging experiments or from relatively modest sized field...
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