glitch

Some European iPhone owners rolled into work late this morning due to a bug in the phone's operating system that reportedly caused its alarm clock to go off an hour late, as Europe switched from daylight saving time back to GMT.

While the phone's clock changed over correctly, the bug in iOS 4.1 reportedly affected those who had set their alarms to go off at the same time every weekday. "Stupid iPhone's alarm woke me up one hour later today," wrote one Twitter user based in London. "Apparently I wasn't the only … Read more

If there's one device I count on working, it's my television. The rest of my technology can (and often does) go to heck, but I count on the TV to be the device that works while I'm on hold with customer support for the makers of all that other tech stuff.

But, like many Americans, my TV these days is actually powered not by a basic tuner, but instead by an automatically updating computer (in my case a DirecTV HD DVR). Like other similarly equipped DirecTV customers, I awoke Tuesday to find myself with a TV that … Read more

After overcoming some hurdles, researchers operated the Large Hadron Collider at its highest energy level yet on Tuesday, gathering data after smashing protons into each other.

The huge underground particle accelerator at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva, is designed to probe the nature of dark matter, antimatter, and an elusive particle called the Higgs boson, as well as any number of physics issues about how those things relate to the history of the universe.

"We have observed the first collisions [and] lots of beautiful tracks. It's really fantastic," said a representative of one … Read more

Last May, I began a series of behind-the-scenes meetings with Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield about Tiny Speck, the company he and three partners had just started and the game they were working on.

That game, which they announced on Tuesday is called Glitch, has been in the works since last March and much has changed about it in the interim--the artistic styles, the back story, the core game mechanic and the size of the team building it.

Glitch is a social online game that takes place in the imaginations of 11 ancient giants and tasks players with essentially growing an … Read more

On Tuesday, as reported first by CNET, Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield's start-up Tiny Speck announced its new online social game, Glitch.

As described on Glitch.com, "It's called Glitch because in the far-distant and totally-perfect future, the world starts becoming less and less probable, things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and there occurs what comes to be called the 'glitch'--a grave danger of disemprobablization. This results in a time-traveling effort at saving the future, going back into the minds of eleven great giants walking sacred paths on a barren asteroid who sing and think and … Read more

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to live inside the imaginations of a group of ancient giants, get ready to play Glitch.

A new game that went into alpha testing on Tuesday, as reported exclusively by CNET, Glitch (see related behind-the-scenes feature about its development) is a puzzle-heavy, Web-based social MMO built around sending players billions of years into the past to develop the optimistic future that today seems increasingly unlikely.

"The whole world was spun out of the imagination of 11 great giants," said Stewart Butterfield, the president of Glitch developer Tiny Speck, … Read more

Last July, TechCrunch ran an item about Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield's recent tweet that his new company was hiring.

"Maybe I make a terrible boss, but at least I know it," he tweeted. "Work with me." And based on that tiny little missive, his until-then unknown start-up Tiny Speck was flooded with job applicants hoping they join Butterfield as he and his partners made a second attempt at catching lightning in the Web 2.0 bottle.

Of course, no one knew at that point what Tiny Speck was up to, beyond the fact that the … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Stewart Butterfield and his business partner Cal Henderson stared at the MacBook Pro in front of them.

For nearly a year, they'd been struggling to figure out what to call the game their start-up was building. Any time a team member loaded a working version, they'd sit through a few seconds of a splash screen with nothing on it but a generic title featuring little more than the name and logo of their company.

But now, the group had finally given their baby an official moniker: Glitch. And this was one of the first times the two … Read more

Microsoft says it is looking into a problem that is causing some Windows 7 users to get a warning that there is a problem with their battery when, in fact, there is not.

"We are investigating this issue in conjunction with our hardware partners, which appears to be related to system firmware," a Microsoft representative said in a statement on Tuesday.

The warning in question uses the computer's basic input output system (BIOS) to try to determine whether a battery needs replacement. For some reason, the signals are getting crossed and some users are getting the message … Read more