The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘issue’

There’s a reason robots have traditionally been portrayed as evil in our entertainment. It’s because they are evil. Or, I should say, amoral, which isn’t even close to evil, but is possibly more dangerous

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Korea building all-robotic theme park; I don’t need to tell you how this will end

The absurdity of this issue, I swear. Get this: churches (and other deals like outdoor events) have been using microphones that operate on the 700MHz spectrum since, like, forever.

Read the original here:
Churches (and others) will have to upgrade their mics right quick or the FCC will be very angry

While a lot of this stuff is “Well, Duh,” there’s still more than enough interesting commentary in Lukas Mathis’ fascinating examination of realism in UIs. Most UI elements are symbols of objects but many are significant objects in themselves, symbolic representations of functionality or whimsy. For example: Coda’s leaf isn’t a representation of the idea of a leaf; it’s a very specific leaf, the Coda leaf.

Read more here: 
Why is the “home” icon a little house?

I guess since I’m the resident diabetic at CrunchGear that I should write all the diabetes-related stories. Good old diabetic Doug

Read more from the original source: 
Breath-based glucose sensor developed (and why it may never make it to market)

When we last wrote about the problems with the new 27-inch iMac’s screen a few weeks ago, there were over 1,600 replies on Apple’s support board about the issue. That’s 110 pages of replies. And the thread had been viewed some 260,000 times — much, much more than any other thread. I’m fairly certain more than all of the other ones combined, actually. Those numbers now? Try 2,860 replies, 191 pages, and over 400,000 views. Yeah, this problem is not going away.

Amazingly, Apple still has yet to reply to these messages piling up. Yes, they issued what they said was a fix for the problem, but that was actually before our post. Obviously, for many people, it did not work. I happen to have one of these affected Macs, and randomly, I think I’ve stumbled up an easy, but janky fix. It doesn’t solve the issue, but it does seem to eliminate for a while.

If you go to Settings, click on Expose & Spaces, and locate the Active Screen Corners portion of Expose, you’ll have an option to set one of the corners of your screen to “Put Display to Sleep.” Set one corner to do this. The next time your screen starts flickering, activate this hot corner and put your display to sleep for a few seconds. When it comes back on, it should be okay (for at least several hours in my experience).

Alternatively, I’ve found that if I restart my computer it helps too. But that’s a pain since you have to close everything you are working on, obviously. The resolution appears to work because the problem would seem to be related to overheating. Several commenters in the forums noted this, and I’ve noticed it as well. If you put your hand behind the iMac when the flickering problem is going on, you’ll notice it’s hot. Really hot. Almost scalding hot.

Again, it’s a somewhat janky temporary fix, but sadly it’s all we have now. Or you could try sending your iMac back. But I’ve done that once too — the iMac I got back still has the issue.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Bad news, Droid owners. Android OS version 2.0.1, which all up-to-date Droids are running, has a bug that makes it fairly easy to bypass the phone’s screen-lock security mechanism. The security feature, when working, requires users to input a pattern using onscreen dots before they can access most of the phone’s features (the iPhone offers a similar option).

Exploiting the bug is fairly simple: while receiving an incoming call on a Droid that has its Lock screen activated, you can simply hit the dedicated ‘Back’ button to bypass the lock and jump to the homescreen. This, of course, gives access to the owner’s Email account, cookied web pages, phone directory, and everything else stored on the phone. You can take a tiny bit of solace in the fact that the thief would have to know your phone number or wait for someone to call your phone to exploit the bug, but that’s not particularly reassuring. The issue was first reported earlier today by The Assurer, which says that it is apparently only affecting Android version 2.0.1 on the Droid (which already represents a large chunk of Android’s userbase).

We reached out to Google about the issue, and a Google spokesperson gave us the following statement:

“We are aware of the issue and we’re working to deliver a fix to Motorola Droids shortly.”

Android isn’t the first smartphone OS to fall prey to security bugs like this. In August 2008 a similar flaw with the iPhone allowed people to easily bypass the phone’s lock screen.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Another day, another Rackspace outage. The hosting company had a complete and total failure today that took down a number of big sites on the Internet, including ours. This has been happening all too often in recent months, including downtime just last month.

The failure apparently originated in the company’s Dallas-area server farm. But unlike previous times, this does not appear to be a power issue, the company says. Some other sites that are currently affected include: 37signals, Brizzly, Scoble’s blog, all of the sites hosted by Laughing Squid, Tumblr custom domains, and many others.

This is another black eye for the company, though they are generally responsive with other issues we’ve had throughout our time with them. But until they can prove to be more reliable, we’ve decided to get a backup version of TechCrunch up and running at another datacenter, for when someone inevitably trips over a power cord at the Dallas Rackspace center again.

Here’s a few updates from the company:

As of 3:45 PM CST, we are currently experiencing an issue within our Dallas / Fort Worth data center.  We are investigating the issue and will post an update momentarily.

UPDATE: As of 3:55 PM CST, to clarify: This is a networking issue affecting Cloud Sites in our DFW data center.

UPDATE: As of 4:05 PM CST, networking engineers are quickly working to address this issue.  We should have a resolution shortly.

UPDATE: As of 4:14 PM CST, another point of clarification: This is not a power issue in DFW, all power is confirmed up and has not been down.  This is a networking issue.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

10 days ago, Facebook developer Joe Hewitt rocked the iPhone development world when he announced that he would stop making iPhone apps because he was fed up with the way Apple is running the App Store. This is significant since Hewitt was pretty much solely responsible for one of the most popular (and best) iPhone apps out there: Facebook’s. And now, just a little over a week later, we may be seeing the downside of Hewitt’s decision.

The Facebook iPhone app is broken, and has been for a while now. Every single user profile page contains zero updates or posts. Instead, each loads a stream that reads “USER has no recent posts.” Judging from Twitter searches, tips coming in, and a Facebook thread, this has been the case since at least yesterday, and possibly before that.

To be clear, Facebook’s main News Feed is still being populated with updated items, but if you want to see elements from any individual user, you’re out of luck. And that’s bad when one key feature of the iPhone app is the ability to pin friends’ profiles to your main screen in order to more easily access such information. And it’s really bad when, again, this is one of the most popular apps that there is.

After Hewitt’s decision to stop iPhone development, Facebook’s VP of Communications Elliot Schrage left us a comment reaffirming Facebook’s commitment to Apple and, in particular, their iPhone app. He wrote that Facebook “has a great team of engineers taking over iPhone related development.”

So a full team has replaced Hewitt, but they can’t seem to keep the app from breaking. And I’m not sure they even realize it is broken. But plenty of users do.

Update: In an email, a member of Facebook’s communication team confirmed the issue and says they’ve alerted the engineering team. But I’m still wondering how Facebook’s new iPhone “team” could have either missed this issue or have let it go unresolved for a day or so now?

How many Facebook developers does it take to fix an app? We’ll find out, I guess. The answer should be one: Hewitt. But sadly, that’s not the case anymore.

[thanks Andy]

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Google Voice was GrandCentral before Google acquired that company back in 2007. Like most Google acquisitions it took a long time to fully rebuild the service on Google’s infrastructure, and even today Google Voice is still in private beta.

But lots of changes are coming. Google Voice should roll out publicly shortly. Users may be able to port their existing phone numbers to Google if they choose. Google’s acquisition of Gizmo5 will give the service a client soft phone plus enhanced VoIP capabilities. And who knows what part Google Voice will play in in the upcoming Google Phone.

So a little housekeeping is in order. And the first item on the checklist is to shut down the GrandCentral website on December 31, 2009. Users were upgraded to Google Voice earlier this year, but old GrandCentral messages are still on the old site. So if you want to keep them, Google suggests you download them soon.

The email:

From: voice-noreply@grandcentral.com
Date: November 20, 2009 11:55:25 PM PST
To:
Subject: The GrandCentral website is shutting down – GrandCentral is now Google Voice.

Dear GrandCentral User:

We’re writing to let you know that we will be closing down the GrandCentral website as of December 31, 2009.

All GrandCentral accounts were upgraded to Google Voice earlier this year, but since that time, you’ve still been able to log-in to your GrandCentral account and listen to old messages there. You will no longer be able to log-in to your GrandCentral account after December 31. Because of this, we strongly suggest downloading any messages or contacts that you want to keep in the next 43 days.

We will send you another reminder before closing down the site, but we suggest you take action now to download any information you want to keep.

- The Google Voice Team

And since we love Google Voice so much, I think it’s ok if we say goodbye to GrandCentral by looking back at the many times over the years that we’ve poked fun at the service. A few of my favorite missteps made by the awesome service from the GrandCentral archives:

GrandCentral’s “One Number For Life” Not Really

GrandCentral Homeless Stunt Worked So Well It’s Time For An Encore

GrandCentral Offline: If You Wanna Be A Phone Company, You Can’t Go Dead

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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?

Original post: 
Changing projector’s aspect ratio may violate copyright, according to manual