Items tagged with whatcouldpossiblygowrong
For the past nine days, Maxis has been caught in a firestorm of epic proportions. Having failed to beta test the game appropriately or account for actual server loads, Maxis' SimCity servers disintegrated under the onslaught of people wanting to play a game they paid for. Since launch day, company executives and representatives have remained...
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There are, it seems, some companies that simply can't get changes right -- and if there's a Top Ten list somewhere, Facebook deserves to be on it. The company's latest bright idea, now rolled out to all 900M users, was to change your default email address from whatever it was currently to "John.Doe@facebook.com." This...
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In early 2010, a brand-new company named Righthaven began cutting deals with newspapers by promising to safeguard their content online. Said protection consists of suing anyone and everything for so-called copyright infringement, even in situations where no sane judge would rule infringement had taken place. Now the tables have turned; Righthaven...
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Nintendo has taken a page from Sony's playbook, even as the video game giant struggles to recover from the impact of its decision to remove Other OS support. The Free Software Foundation recently examined* the EULA and privacy policy Nintendo attaches to the 3DS; both are far more draconian than corresponding...
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Sony has sent an open letter to Congress detailing and defending its actions in the wake of multiple (successful) hack attempts over the past two weeks. The company previously declined to attend a hearing scheduled in the wake of its data theft debacle. The head of that hearing, Mary Bono Mack, tore the company up one...
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BlackBerry's PlayBook has raised eyebrows and gotten attention from all corners since the company unveiled it early last fall. We've had a bit of hands-on with the unit and covered BlackBerry's attempts to improve the tablet's attractiveness by running Android aps (albeit imperfectly) on its QNX operating system. If a leaked PDF is accurate,...
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One of the persistent criticisms of the Motorola Atrix and HTC Inspire is that the devices don't deliver anything like the wireless speeds AT&T claims they're capable of. AT&T has been coyly playing cat and mouse over the question of whether or not its phones consistently deliver "4G" speeds but has finally...
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It's been nearly a decade since the music industry declared war against file sharers via its controversial policy of suing individuals supposedly identified via their IP addresses. After all this time one would expect the various companies to present a consistent, united front. As a recent court filing against...
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When Nvidia announced its next-generation Tegra product at the Mobile World Conference, it pulled out all the stops in an effort to impress. The stats themselves were impressive—the chip packs a twelve-core GeForce GPU in with a quad-core ARM CPU—but NV opted to hammer home the point by showing benchmark results. According to Nvidia,...
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It hasn't been a good month decade for AOL. A little over a week ago, The New Yorker published a profile of the company's CEO Tim Armstrong in which the author, Ken Auletta, dismissed most of the website's published content as 'piffle.' Worse, Armstrong admitted that the vast majority of the company's subscribers—some three million...
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Seagate issued a general announcement yesterday in an apparent attempt to clarify its SSD plans going forward. Of all the various hard drive vendors, Seagate has been by far the most acrimonious towards SSD development; former CEO Bill Watkins' plans for dealing with the introduction of SSDs was to threaten to sue the companies out of existence....
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Windows Phone 7 devices support additional storage via MicroSD but making use of that capability has become problematic. Users who attempt to re-use MicroSD cards they purchased for older phones are in for a nasty surprise. Insert a legacy MicroSD into a Samsung Focus, and the device may crash, slow considerably, or suffer data corruption....
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In the wake of the pair of thwarted bombings by Al Qaeda last month, the TSA has announced additional restrictions and guidelines for passengers traveling both within the United States and internationally. In additional to logical and prudent steps, such as banning packages from Somalia and Yemen (temporarily) and...
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It's been a few months since we heard much from the Lower Merion school district (LMSD) and the allegations of improper conduct, voyeuristic behavior, and civil rights violations leveled against administration employees and the vice principal of Harriton High School, Lindy Matsko. The case and accompanying federal...
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