For some odd reason Slashgear has been using the term smartbook in their posts, a portmanteau that is, arguably, about as descriptive as “sandwichbacon” or “cleverob/gyn” in that it conflates two terms in with the suggestion that other members of its own classification are not equally sandwich-oriented, clever, or smart. While we will forgive them this slip, they just got a… → Read More
Whoops. Philadelphia-area Gamefly members who have been wondering why in the hell they never got their rented copies of Cooking Mama finally have some answers. The culprit, 34 year old Reginald Johnson of Germantown, PA, stole some 2,200 Gamefly games while working as a mail-processing clerk between April and September of 2008. → Read More
Raise your hand if you’ve been caught on camera running a red light (I am raising my hand). Depending upon how often you get caught by red light cameras and how much you have to pay per ticket, this $200 “Red Light Camera Detector” may end up saving you some money and insurance headaches in the long run. → Read More
The whole world was bullish on iTunes LPs when they were announced; I called it a black eye for the majors, whose CMX format has yet to be popularized. But the hype was curbed when it was discovered that there was a $10,000 fee associated with the service, putting it completely out of reach for less affluent artists and small labels who can’t afford that price for promotion.
Luckily for them… → Read More
That NVIDIA and Intel haven’t been getting along lately isn’t big news but it looks like NVIDIA has finally gotten up from the dinner table and left the restaurant in a huff. The epicenter of the problem appears to be NVIDIA’s Ion chipset, which provides some much needed oomph to netbook and nettop platforms. Intel wants to keep a distinct separation between its low-power, low-cost Atom… → Read More
You know how sometimes you turn on the TV, and it’s still on 16:9 mode, but you’re just watching the news? And the people are all kinda squashed, but you don’t feel like picking the remote up and hitting the picture mode button? Yes? So, sir, you are confessing that you willfully modified the original copyrighted image, without the consent of the creator. It’s a good thing you weren’t running a… → Read More
Nobody expected that this Apple-Psystar affair would be rapid or easy, but at this point it’s positively interminable. Psystar has just switched out a lawyer, who probably just about keeled over from constantly parrying Apple’s well-founded injunctions against his client’s business. Here’s hoping Mr. Welker takes a well-deserved vacation. → Read More
Bezos may have apologized, but the stink of Amazon’s unprecedented act of cyberburglary is still strong enough that people aren’t likely to forget any time soon.
It’s a good thing, then, that Amazon has struck while the iron is still slightly hot by announcing the terms under which they will consider themselves justified in making your book an unbook. → Read More
Apparently it’s not okay to send West Virginia’s governor five free laptops. What a world! Governor Joe Manchin’s office got a nice four-pack of Compaq laptops earlier this month, followed a week later by a fifth machine from HP. The only problem was that nobody in his office ordered them or paid for them. → Read More
Who hasn’t thought about suing their college for some reason or another? Trina Thompson is doing it. She’s a 27-year-old IT graduate from the Bronx who’s suing her alma mater, The Monroe College, for the $70,000 worth of tuition she spent there. Why? Because she doesn’t have a job and she doesn’t think the college has tried hard enough to help her find one. → Read More
Late last year we reported that a company named Psion was gearing up for some legal action in order to defend products it had called the “Netbook” and “Netbook Pro” back in the early part of the decade.
Psion initially sent out cease and decist letters to various websites in the UK, demanding that references to “netbook” or “netbooks” be removed, and then later got into a legal scuffle with Dell… → Read More
RealNetworks is currently entangled in a legal case over a prototype hardware DVD ripper called “Facet.” Described as “TiVo for DVDs,” the $300 box aims to replace set-top DVD players by allowing owners to rip their movie collections directly to a 500GB hard drive for quick and easy access and playback. → Read More
That $99 Aspire One deal we covered late last year – Aspire One + two-year AT&T DataConnect plan – has both RadioShack and AT&T in hot water after a lady signed up for the deal and tallied up more than $5000 in overage charges within her first month. → Read More
And here we go again. After Dell (and later Intel) petitioned to have Psion’s “netbook” trademark canceled, claiming it was a generic term and that Psion wasn’t even selling anything called a “netbook” any more, Psion responded by saying it’s been actively selling the “Netbook Pro” (above photo) even though the machine is no longer manufactured. → Read More
More information concerning Psion, the company that trademarked the word “netbook” back in 2000. You’ll recall that the company sent out cease and desist letters to certain sites that used the term “netbook” and even got Google to remove “netbook” campaigns from its Ad Words advertising program. Guess who’s not too happy about all this? Dell. → Read More
In the midst of The Pirate Bay vs. The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) legal goings-on, Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde has asked that supporters stop hacking anti-piracy websites, saying, “Our case is going quite well as most of you have noticed. In the light of that it feels very bad that people are hacking web sites which actually puts us in a worse light than… → Read More
Thanks for waiting patiently for this to all pan out over the last year or so, but that Pittsburgh couple that wanted $25,000+ from Google after noticing their home on Google Maps Street View has had their case thrown out of court. → Read More
These jokers will never get along. They’re in court at the moment, arguing over whether an agreement made in 2004 applies today. Intel says that Nvidia is not licensed to create chipsets for Nehalem-based Intel products. Nvidia says that actually, they are licensed. And now it’s down to the lawyers to doubletalk it out. → Read More
Apple has filed comments to the 2009 DMCA triennial rulemaking committee complaining about jailbreaking and asking that it be deemed illegal. The EFF has specifically requested that jailbreaking be considered fair use because it allows users to improve the iPhone’s overall capabilities. The EFF writes that Apple is taking umbrage with the cracking of the bootloaders and the OS and that the… → Read More
Chalk up a victory for Psion, the company that trademarked the product name “netbook” eight or nine years ago. You’ll recall that the company sent cease and desist orders to certain websites in late December demanding that the term “netbook” be removed.
Turns out that Psion’s got a case. → Read More
The Los Angeles County Superior Court is pursuing a settlement for owners of scratched up first-generation iPod nanos. The suit alleges that early runs of the devices “contained a design or manufacturing defect that resulted in excessive scratching.” → Read More
Whuh oh. Looks like every utterance of the word “netbook” might come under fire from Psion Technologix, makers of such fine blast-from-the-past products as the Revo. → Read More
Poor Simon Cowell. Apparently someone on a motorcycle had been constantly following closely behind the notoriously cranky American Idol judge’s Bentley and he couldn’t figure out why. Turns out, there was a magnetic GPS tracking device stuck to the undercarriage of his car, which helped explain why the aforementioned motorcyclist kept showing up at Cowell’s private meetings. It’s unknown… → Read More
It’s no secret that Apple wants everyone to use iTunes, especially to sync with their iPod. I personally can’t stand iTunes and prefer Winamp, and many others share my view but have enjoyed Apple hardware. Some more code-savvy people than myself have in years past determined how to read and write to the proprietary iTunesDB file, allowing non-Apple software to sync with iPods. Apple… → Read More
When this legal melee began earlier this month, I guessed that the judge was simply taking IBM at its word and ordering Papermaster to stop work essentially at their whim. Well, you can’t blame me for underestimating the Judicial Branch, can you? Recently revealed records show that the judge had pretty solid reasoning for believing Papermaster was a serious threat to IBM in his new position… → Read More
I’m thinking a little of column A, a little of column B. The story is this: Huang Jin, a student in China, bought an Asus laptop that was having a lot of hardware trouble. She sent it back a couple times and eventually they replaced the CPU, which then started overheating. Examining it, she found it to be an “engineering sample” — an early run CPU made for testing purposes… → Read More
Whoops. Fox News is reporting that the World Bank is smack-dab in the middle of what “may be the worst security breach ever at a global financial institution.” It’s not really clear what exactly has happened but it is clear that this isn’t the first time that the bank has had problems with its cyber security and that some of the more serious past intrusions have come from IP addresses… → Read More
Most people who get threatened by the RIAA with a lawsuit opt to settle out of court. Maybe they should go to trial instead. Jammie Thomas of Minnesota did just that. She was found guilty of sharing 24 music files over the Kazaa network and ordered to pay $222,000 – that’s $9,250 per track. The decision came from a federal jury last year and marked the one and only trial win for the RIAA. → Read More
Not actually the actual chair the teens actually built in actuality. Two 17-year olds in Germany got busted on Saturday for tooling around town on their undeniably awesome office chair outfitted with a lawnmower engine and bike brakes. It’s being called the world’s fastest office chair but I’d be really interested to see how fast it actually goes and also the office chair that’s the second… → Read More
Ubisoft is not amused about the 700,000-some copies of Assassin’s Creed that spread like wildfire around the web six weeks before the game was available at retail stores. Ubisoft has tracked the initial leak back to Optical Experts Manufacturing, the company in charge of producing copies of the game for sale. It was found that an employee of the company had taken the game home and leaked it out… → Read More
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