amazon

My Kindle display self-destructed

I was planning to write about how much I'm loving the Amazon Kindle. I got one to try to consolidate some of the weight and clutter I routinely carry with me on trips in the form of books/magazines/newspapers, and spent several hours on my Cincinnati to London flight absolutely loving the device.

The wireless connectivity and other technological features of the Kindle are nice, but that's not where it shines, in my view. No, it's the feel of the Kindle that is amazing. I read for hours, surprised by how well it rested in my hands and by the exceptional display.

Well, the display was "exceptional" until it stopped working. I got to my hotel an hour ago and, since I couldn't yet check in, decided to open up the Kindle to read. Despite having used it just two hours ago on the train into London, and having done absolutely nothing that could have physically impacted the screen (Rode in a taxi? Checked in at my hotel? The Kindle was safely protected in my bag all the while...), the screen is apparently dead.… Read more

'Wii Fit Girl' not a marketing ploy for Nintendo

Titled "Why every guy should buy their girlfriend a Wii Fit," the YouTube clip shows 25-year-old Lauren Bernat hula hooping in time with the fitness video game in her T-shirt and underwear. The video has been viewed more than 2.4 million times and was suspected to be a viral marketing ploy for Nintendo's Wii Fit.

The speculation emerged after learning that both Lauren Bernat and Giovanny Gutierrez, who filmed the footage, work in advertising. Gutierrez works as the director of Interactive Media for Tinsley Advertising in Miami, Florida. Bernat works as an account executive at the … Read more

Google's right, but cloud computing's timeline isn't so clear

Earlier Tuesday, a Google executive by the name of Rishi Chandra made the argument that the move to cloud computing was just a matter of time.

""The next 10 years of innovations are going to be in the cloud. Enterprise software is not going away, but there is a transition taking place," he said during a conference taking place in Boston.

I don't know whether it will be 10 years or not, but that's the trend. Nobody still seriously argues that it won't be easier to run word processors or spreadsheets off a central … Read more

Buzz Out Loud 741: 3Gasm

All the iPhone and App Store news you can shake a stick at. Plus, RIM and Palm say they're thrilled about the new iPhone. Huh. Us, too! But it's a delayed, uh, 3Gasm, since the phone won't be coming out until July 11. In other news, Amazon broke itself, the MPAA wants to break your movie recording, and SanDisk kills the TakeTV and Fanfare less than a year after it was born. Listen now: Download today's podcast EPISODE 741

Live blog: Steve Jobs at WWDC 2008 http://news.cnet.com/8301-13579_3-9960064-37.html

What’s good for … Read more

Another Amazon outage, this time hitting U.K, too

Amazon.com's Web site was offline again Monday, another significant interruption of services after a two-hour outage Friday.

As of 10:08 PDT on Friday, Amazon's main Web site showed the "Http/1.1 Service Unavailable" error message that also showed on Friday.

The e-commerce giant's Friday outage affected its Amazon.com site used by U.S. visitors. Monday's outage appeared to affect its U.K. site as well.

Update 10:26 a.m. PDT: Amazon.com is back, though the U.K. site still appears down to me. On Friday, the site was … Read more

IMDB victim of denial-of-service attack

On Friday, Internet movie database IMDB fell victim to a sustained distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that coincided with Amazon.com being offline, says one researcher.

Soups Ranjan, a senior member of the technical staff of network protection and management company Narus, said in a blog that he found evidence that at least one of the IP addresses used by IMDB fell under a sustained DDoS attack between 10:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. PDT Friday.

"My attempt to load the IMDB page via a direct connection to the Web server under attack (http://72.21.206.… Read more

Amazon working again, but what went wrong?

Update 4:36 p.m. PDT with outside comment about possible causes of the Amazon.com outage.

A two-hour Amazon.com outage is over. Now on to the post-mortem: what triggered the problem?

Amazon declared itself clear of the problem this afternoon. "The Amazon retail site was down for approximately two hours earlier today beginning around 10:25 a.m. The site (is) back up," the company said in statement.

But as to the explanation, the company only hinted that its complicated computing infrastructure was, unsurprisingly, a culprit.

"Amazon's systems are very complex and on rare … Read more

News.com Daily Podcast: Restoring an American film classic

Amazon.com suffers an outage, and Warner Bros. gives a digital makeover to The Godfather. Listen now: Download today's podcast

Six years ago, Warner Bros. developed digital technologies to make copies of damaged or decaying film negatives and return the movies to their original viewing quality. But the latest project came with added pressure: director Francis Ford Coppola looking over technicians' shoulders as they digitally remastered his masterwork, The Godfather. CNET News.com's Greg Sandoval tells intern Holly Jackson the story of the painstaking restoration process.

Also in today's podcast: Carl Icahn names his price for Yahoo; … Read more

The Filter's recommendations hew to the mainstream

The Filter is an entertainment recommendation service that asks questions about your taste, then tries to refer you to CDs and DVDs you might be interested in buying. (The site will eventually add other forms of entertainment, such as TV shows.) It's been in a closed beta since earlier this year, and has gotten some press thanks to the involvement of art-rocker Peter Gabriel. On Tuesday, it opened to the masses.

The idea's not new--Amazon.com has had a recommendation engine for years, and many online music services like Pandora, iLike, and Jango employ variations on that theme. … Read more

Amazon suffers U.S. outage on Friday

Update 3:22 p.m. Amazon has declared the outage over. For details, check our follow-up posting. Updated 12:43 p.m. PDT with further details, including partial site recovery.

Amazon.com was inaccessible to many U.S. visitors for more than an hour and a half Friday.

The site went offline completely by 10:21 a.m. PDT, but efforts to restore the site appeared to be taking effect about noon, said Keynote Systems, which monitors Web site responsiveness. As of 12:45 p.m., the site was working intermittently, with many product pages functioning but others still broken. … Read more