A rather surprising article hit the front page of the BBC on Tuesday: the next generation of hard disks could cause slowdowns for XP users. Not normally the kind of thing you’d expect to be placed so prominently, but the warning it gives is a worthy one, if timed a bit oddly. The world of hard disks is set to change, and the impact could be severe. In ..read more
Apple COO Tim Cook’s warning from early 2009 wasn’t the only one that handset makers received before Apple sicced the lawyers on HTC last week. According to a research note from Oppenheimer analyst Yal Reiner, Apple began warning top executives at companies such as HTC and Motorola in January that it wasn’t too happy about seeing allegedly iPhone-related IP showing up in proposed new products.
According to “industry checks,” ..read more
Amazon has pulled the plug on its affiliate program in Colorado thanks to a new state regulation on sales tax collection. The company sent a notice to its Colorado-based affiliates Monday morning to let them know about the decision, urging residents who depend on the affiliate program to contact their lawmakers if they want the program back.
Most states only require retailers to collect sales tax if they have ..read more
We recently ran a video for the just-released Borderlands content “The Secret Armory of General Knoxx.” To watch the video, you had to put your birthdate into the window to prove you were old enough to view the M-rated content.
We’re sure most of you are familiar with age-gated video content, but we received a few e-mails asking about why some content is age-gated, and that got us thinking… ..read more
Did you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit? We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I’m going to explain why.
There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won’t hurt a site financially. This is wrong. Most sites, at least sites the size of ours, are paid on a ..read more
When Public Radio Exchange (PRX) developed the free Public Radio Player for the iPhone, the nonprofit hoped for 500,000 downloads. It now has 2.5 million. “I’m very happy with that number,” says PRX executive director Jake Shapiro.
He should be. The PRX dev team has already cranked out two great iPhone apps, one for public radio in general and one for the popular show This American Life in particular. Both apps ..read more
Bowing to pressure from activist groups and to the dictates of common sense, the Obama administration has done what the Bush administration wouldn’t and declassified some general information [PDF] about the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative (CNCI), a sweeping program that the Bush White House launched in early 2008 to protect the government and critical civilian networks from cyberattacks. It turns out that, like at least one other effort ..read more
The typical image people have of air traffic control (ATC) is that of a group of people in an airport tower who coordinate aircraft activity by staring at radar screens that use points of light to represent aircraft. While not fundamentally incorrect, this isn’t a fair representation of the extent of ATC operations. This article will flesh out that simplistic image and introduce you to the ..read more
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 has an easy job on the PC: it just has to suck less than Modern Warfare 2. There have been videos released showing how the game has been optimized for the PC, there is a server browser, the graphical and sound settings can be tweaked and adjusted, and dedicated servers are back!
Of course, you have to rent the dedicated servers from EA’s partners, but ..read more
Most companies, when they go to the enormous expense of designing a complex chip, tell everyone about it. Even a company like Sun or IBM, whose chips are used only in their own computers, unveil the details of their new processors well before products based on those new parts come to market. This is true for game consoles, for SoCs of all flavors, for PC chips, and for ..read more
