According to research by warranty firm SquareTrade, you really get what you pay for, with premium-priced laptops lasting longer than their cheaper counterparts on average. Good news for those who’ve spent money for specs, bad for buyers trying to eke by on affordable netbooks; from the survey of 30,000 portables, netbooks have a 5.8% chance of failing within the first year.

Another notable trend becomes clear when comparing brands. Here’s the list of nine different brands, ranked from most reliable to least, in terms of malfunction rate:

Asus
Toshiba
Sony
Apple
Dell
Lenovo
Acer
Gateway
HP

Looks like Asus‘ marketing department have a new talking point to advertise, while Apple has …read more

Whoops, I hope this Microsoft exec still has a job.
On the iPhone Jailbreak community.
January 10, 2001: Let’s Make a Wiki!
Why do you have to pay $200 for your city’s law code again?
Banned Xbox Live players: OVER 1 MILLION!!!!!
Who would’ve thought a cute Blue Hippo is a scammer?
One Yotabyte equals approximately one million million million gigabytes:

Is XKCD pro-DROID?

At the risk of playing Captain Obvious here—it’s easy to see why people would want to go online for more information after big events—I’ll conclude that feltron’s research into CNN.com’s traffic over the last 13 years is proof that historic events drive pageviews and unique visits.
At least that’s true if you’re a well-known baseline news source like CNN. Feltron’s graph below, aside from plotting the site traffic’s steady rise, also points out the 10 busiest weeks, shows how much of the traffic each part of the site enjoys, and marks important events in recent (American) history.

The research also makes it …read more

Nothing’s sure yet, but a recent Apple patent application details an in-OS advertising system that could conceivably “disable some aspect of [the OS'] operation to prompt the operator to pay attention to the advertisement.” Eeek!
European Parliament says: feel to cut off persistent file-sharers from the Internet, member states!
Good advice: if you no longer need a SIM, destroy it by breaking it in half. Not if you want to “protect” your hot girlfriend from potential suitors.
If you’ve never bothered researching the history of the Internet, this easy-to-digest slide show should help.
I’m a Nokia fan, but I still scratch my head over …read more

Today marks the start of a week-long promo from HP. The company has slashed prices of two desktops and two laptops apparently in an effort to move stock, through discounts that last until the 24th of this month:

HP Desktop Deals

Save up to $515 instantly on the NEW HP Pavilion Elite e9280t Series Customizable Desktop PC! – Savings Include: $300 instant rebate, FREE 750GB hard drive upgrade (-$50), FREE 15-month Norton Internet Security subscription (-$49), 35% off a 21.5-inch diagonal widescreen monitor (-$90), and get FREE shipping (-$29).
Save up to $415 instantly on the NEW HP Pavilion Slimline s5280t Series Customizable …read more

Yes, the FBI director has his own commander. Not the president of the US or some senate committee, but his wife who banned him from doing online banking after he nearly fell for a phishing scam.
Iceland is all about being (literally) cool, which is why they want to become the server capital of the world. They offer natural cooling crucial to cutting down data center costs and energy consumption.
Adaptive roof-tiling technology that absorbs heat during the winter and reflects it during the summer. How? Simply by switching between black and white.
A summary of Leo Laporte’s career. For some reason, I …read more

Over the last two-and-a-half years, search engine giant Google analyzed the performance of the thousands of computers it uses for its own data centers. The surprising trend? Based on real-world data, Google concluded that the error rates of memory chips are higher than previously believed. Much much higher:
How many errors? On average, about one in three Google servers experienced a correctable memory error each year and one in a hundred an uncorrectable error, an event that typically causes a crash.
Older research showed that, for every 1 billion hours, a memory chip would fail on average around 200 to 5,000 times. …read more

Seems that, according to a picture posted on MADATOMS, internet cults are US-centric by nature. Mac Zealots, Whedonites, Wikipedia Editors, and Second Life Residents all patronize services and products invented in the US. Another sign that America is still king of geekiness—or at least enjoy the most attention from geeky media.

My personal favorite? The “How to Infuriate Other Members” of the Mac Zealots Cult: “Write an honest, negative tech review about an Apple product [or service, for that matter].”

According to Gordon Bell, a researcher from Microsoft, the average human’s life requires approximately 350GB worth of data storage. This estimate was made during a Q&A as part of an article featuring his work, which basically involves storing every waking moment for digital posterity.
Personally, that seemed like a really low figure to me. “Only” 350GB to encompass the entire sum of our life experiences? Then again, if 3G users only consume around 211MB a month, and the average daily traffic of the internet is “mere” terrabytes (or thousands of gigabyes), then the figure makes sense. The amount of information we …read more

So a big typhoon named Ketsana has hit the northern part of the Philippines, stranding thousands within the capital Metro Manila, and forcing the government to declare a “state of calamity” for at least 26 different areas.

And while families are forced to retreat to the roof to avoid the rising water, and while power and infrastructure failure accompany the typhoon’s destruction, at least one Filipino has found the time and resources to capture the flooding up-close—and share it with the rest of the world online.
Here are those snapshots below, with the low quality of the cell phone camera made obvious …read more