fox

Fox News is sometimes criticized for floating wayward ideas.

This criticism is unfair and unbalanced. The station understands its viewers better than any other and offers them a fine and subtle mixture of both fear and reassurance.

However, perhaps Fox News' "Fox and Friends" allowed its enthusiasm this week to fly a little too high. For the station reported that the city of LA had invested $1 billion in a jetpack called the Martin. The suggestion was that LA's police, paramedics, and fire department were in grave need of such a flying gizmo. This is entirely understandable, given LA's quite hopeless traffic situation.

Though "Fox and Friends" co-host Brian Kilmeade did offer words of caution: "You gotta make up some rules because you're going to have jetpacks flying into choppers," I have to report that the Fox report is rather untrue.

For LAPD chief Charlie Beck told the Los Angeles Times: "We certainly haven't bought any jetpacks. We haven't bought [squad] cars for two years."

While trying to muzzle my disappointment with the LAPD for such obvious technological myopia, I am grateful to Gawker for attempting to discover where Fox News might have done its flying sourcing.… Read more

Congratulations to frequent guest and friend of the show Clayton Morris for reaching 100 episodes of his own podcast, The Grizzly Bear Egg Cafe!

Clayton joins us on The 404 this morning to chat about podcasting, backyard wrestling, and the tornado that hit New York last night!

We invited our buddy Clayton Morris of Fox and Friends to help us celebrate our 404th episode, so we're returning the favor for the 100th episode of The Grizzly Bear Egg Cafe, a podcast he does with Chikara founder and pro-wrestler Mike Quackenbush.

Girl Scout Weekly describes the show as "an omnibus podcast of pop culture, news, and tales from two rather odd lifestyles..." and Clayton tells us the origin of the name, because bears apparently do not lay eggs, which is news to all of us.

To celebrate his 100th episode, Wilson also cooked up a brand new logo for the show with a semi-embarrassing story to go along with it- apparently it's kind of difficult to purchase a single egg in New York City! We're also chatting with Clayton about the ins and outs of running a successful podcast and he even gives us a preview of some of GBEC's upcoming guests that include veteran artist Stan Bush and David Byrne from The Talking Heads!

Finally, join us after the break for Calls From the Public which features an appearance by one of our new favorite callers that sounds like the bastard child of Bill Cosby and Harry Caray.

There's also another voicemail ripping into yours truly for missing out on Shawshank Redemption, but I'd rather watch stuff like this anyway. Thanks to Clayton for waking up early to Skype with us this morning, and look for his physical being on a very-near-future episode of The 404! Have a great weekend everyone!

On the eve of Apple's annual fall media event, The Wall Street Journal reported that two major Hollywood studios will rent TV shows on iTunes for 99 cents.

According to the Journal, Apple will announce Wednesday at its media event that Disney and Fox will embrace--at least for a while--a price structure that Apple wants all the other studios to adopt.

Right now, TV shows are not available for rent at iTunes. The Web retailer offers numerous episodes free of charge and others, such as the hit AMC drama "Mad Men," the price to buy a single … Read more

Fox to Phone requires two installations and a Google account, but once installed it's a nearly effortless tool for quickly sending links and snippets of text from your desktop to your Android-powered smartphone. (There's also a version for Chrome: Chrome to Phone).

Getting started isn't complicated, but can be a bit tedious. Once you've installed this browser extension, you'll have to install the Android app on your phone. Frustratingly, there's no quick link or QR code to the app, and instead only encourages you to search for it in the Android Marketplace. (It's … Read more

Google is providing its users with an elegant and simple method to transfer links and snippets of text from its Chrome browser to its Android handsets. Available on Thursday, Chrome to Phone requires two installations and a Google account, yet works almost effortlessly to make what you're looking at on your desktop instantly accessible on your smartphone, too. It also requires users to be running Android 2.2 (Froyo) or later.

Users must install the Chrome extension, which frustratingly doesn't provide a QR code or other easy access to the Android marketplace link (available on Download.com). Once … Read more

No longer a fledgling upstart, Firefox is the gold standard of alternatives to the still-dominant Internet Explorer. This browser is full-featured, secure, and lightning fast--although competition is strong and it can no longer be said that Firefox is the fastest browser available. Its killer selection of add-ons remains strong, however, with built-in support for the next generation of themes, called Personas.

Several notable improvements in recent updates keep Firefox abreast of current browsing tech. In addition to improvements made to the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine so that it renders Web applications faster, there have also been other significant under-the-hood changes. These … Read more

Firefox's use of CPU resources has improved but hasn't gone away completely.

The popular Web browser has had a longstanding CPU (central processing unit) utilization issue that--in some cases--overtaxed the CPU, causing noticeable heat issues in small laptops.

I wrote about this last November after I had been grappling with this issue for more than a year. First, on an Hewlett-Packard business ultraportable and then on the Apple MacBook Air. As I stated at the time, my theory is that many users don't notice Firefox CPU utilization on large, well-ventilated mainstream laptops. But it can be an issue on ultraportables, which are more sensitive to heat because of the obvious design constraints (typically under an inch thick).

On the HP ultraportable (model 2510p, running Windows Vista), CPU usage became a major concern. The cause was twofold. First, at least one HP 2510p SKU (using a 1.33GHz CPU--the configuration I owned) had a design problem. When the unit got hot, it would shut off without warning. That, combined with Firefox's CPU usage issues, as spelled out clearly by Mozilla in the link above, made for an unstable mix. Firefox, I determined after much trial and error, triggered most of the shutdowns on my HP laptop.

While this never happened running Firefox on the MacBook Air (which I use now), it did continue to cause overheating. I have both the original MacBook Air (which uses an older 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor) and a newer version (which has a newer 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo processor). Running Firefox on the older Air became unsustainable at times because of the heat issue. While moving to Safari didn't completely alleviate the heat problem, Safari did not generate the level of heat and fan activity that Firefox did.

Before I go any further describing the issue, let me say this: that was then. Mozilla has made strides--at least for the Web pages I access most often--in improving Firefox CPU utilization on the Mac.… Read more

Last Friday Adobe released a security bulletin that outlines a vulnerability in their Flash player software for Web browsers, where the plugin could be caused to crash and result in the affected computer being taken control of by an attacker. Some systems already have been attacked via this vulnerability, so Adobe is calling it a critical problem.… Read more