fire

iPad met its match in the TouchPad

On Friday, August 19, Apple's iPad finally met its marketing match. That's when Hewlett-Packard's TouchPad went on sale for as little as $99 and triggered the kind of buying frenzy that had been reserved exclusively for products from Apple.

Over the last year and a half, no other tablet had been able to come as close as the TouchPad to eclipsing the fixation that consumers have had on the iPad.

Roger Kay, principal analyst at Endpoint Technologies, believes the TouchPad's demise should give Apple pause. Especially if such a product were repeated by another major tablet … Read more

Best of Buzz Out Loud 15: Jobs steps down,TouchPad fire sale, and Parry Gripp interview (Podcast)

Tim Cook becomes CEO of Apple as Steve Jobs steps down; cute-animal-song wunderkind Parry Gripp joins us to talk about his new Baby Monkey iPhone game; and The Internetorati clamor to buy discounted TouchPads, while HP's stock plummets 20 percent to a six-year low.

U.S. Best Buy to sell $100 HP TouchPad Sunday

Select Best Buy stores will sell the HP TouchPad tablet for $99.99 on Sunday.

A store manager in suburban Los Angeles said the TouchPad will go on sale when Best Buy opens its doors Sunday at 10 a.m. The sale applies to all Best Buy stores that have stock, but not all stores do, he said.

Stores typically have stock in the tens of units, not hundreds, according to the store manager. "If people start lining up, the stock will go fast," he said.

Both models will be sold: the 16GB and 32GB, for $100 and $150, respectively, he said.

This comes in the wake of fire sales by Hewlett-Packard on its TouchPad site and at Best Buy in Canada, among other U.S. resellers.

HP announced Thursday that it is shuttering the WebOS device business. … Read more

Rapid-release takes hold in Firefox 6

The bottom line: Firefox 6 is a worthy expression of Mozilla's ideals. The browser is competitively fast, sports a new minimalist look, and includes some excellently executed features. Unfortunately, that describes most of Firefox's competition, too.

Review: The second version of Firefox to come under the new rapid-release aegis, Firefox 6 follows in the footsteps of Google Chrome, which adopted the rapid-release cycle a while ago and is now up to version 13 (at the time this review was written) despite having its first release only in 2008.

Firefox 4 had a massive impact on Firefox 5 and … Read more

Rapid-release takes hold in Firefox 6

Firefox 4 had a massive impact on Firefox 5 and … Read more

Rapid-release takes hold in Firefox 6

Firefox 4 had a massive impact on Firefox 5 and … Read more

Motorola announces XT531 for Asian, European markets

Motorola Mobility announced a new, "budget friendly" Android smartphone for Asian and European markets this week with the XT531. Powered by Android 2.3 Gingerbread and an 800MHz processor, the touch-only handset features a 3.5-inch display and a 5-megapixel camera. Additional specifications include a front-facing VGA camera, a microSD card slot, and support for 3G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n) and GPS.

The XT531 will launch in China later this month as a single-SIM card model. A second, dual-SIM version is expected to arrive later this fall for select Asian markets.

Consumers will find that … Read more

Patriot WildFire SSD review: Mostly wild

Of all SATA 3-based solid-state drives (SSDs) CNET has reviewed, the Patriot WildFire offers the wildest performance.

On the one hand, it didn't excel in file-transferring tests where we time how long a drive takes to copy files from one place to another. But on the other, it did much better with application performance than its peers. This singles the drive out from the rest and means that when used as the main drive that hosts an operating system and applications, the WildFire increases the overall performance by reducing the time needed for an application to load and finish … Read more

Managing overheating external hard drives in OS X

External hard drives are exceptionally popular peripheral devices, and it is exceptionally likely that you have one attached to your system given the recommendation to use Time Machine or some similar form of full-system backup. If you have a laptop, then it is additionally likely that these external drives you use will be the smaller 2.5-inch laptop drives that can be powered off the computer's USB or FireWire bus. While convenient, sometimes these drives can end up getting exceptionally hot with use, to the point where it may hurt or even burn if you hold the drive for … Read more

How to use satellite data to track Las Conchas fire

The Las Conchas wildfire, a 92,735-acre blaze extending around the community and national laboratory of Los Alamos, N.M., often moves faster than the officials who monitor it. That can be frustrating for people who want to see where the fire is burning.

But NASA has an automated answer for the impatient: the MODIS satellite. It records fire data, and the U.S. Forest Service packages it up so Google Earth users can get a rough but useful view of the fire's behavior.

Here's how to take a look. But first, I'll share a sobering NASA photo taken from the International Space Station on Monday, the second day of the fire.

It's a daunting image for anyone like me who knows the area and the scale involved. There are 752 people fighting the fire right now, including four bulldozers, 28 fire engines, and five helicopters. Since the Cerro Grande fire of 2000, which burned hundreds of Los Alamos homes and thousands of acres of Los Alamos National Laboratory property, the lab has taken new fire counter measures including more forest clearing and automatic fire-suppression systems. So far today, physical risks to the lab are lower than earlier in the week, LANL Director Charlie McMillan said. … Read more