risk

Absolute Risk is a fun, free take on a classic game of world domination

How do you feel about global domination? Answer 1: "Ick." Answer 2: "I'm fine with that, as long as it's me doing the dominating." If you chose Answer 2, you'll probably enjoy Absolute Risk, a classic Word Domination Risk game from Developersland. Chances are good you're already familiar with the basics of this free strategy game, which involves moving armies to conquer territories and continents: We have a clue that it's based on a classic board game with something of a monopoly on the Risk market. But while you need to … Read more

Dropbox rival Space Monkey puts 'cloud' in your house

SAN FRANCISCO--I keep writing off online consumer storage as a business (see CX: Good sync product, doomed market), but there's still life left in the model. One of the most interesting new twists, Space Monkey, is a weird blend of Dropbox, BitTorrent, and Crashplan that just might work over the long haul. The product was announced today at the Launch conference.

There are three key technologies making up this cool but strange product:

1. Space Monkey is a synchronizing cloud storage provider like Dropbox. What you store on your account is automatically replicated to other computers you own. Like … Read more

Fisker Karma recalled over battery fire risk

Although there have been no reports of problems so far, Fisker is recalling 239 Karma plug-in hybrid sports cars due to a high-voltage battery problem that could result in a fire.

The problem with the luxury plug-in hybrid is that certain hose clamps may have been positioned incorrectly during assembly, which could cause a coolant leak near the battery compartment.

According to the the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration: "If coolant enters the battery compartment, an electrical short could occur possible resulting in a fire."

Fisker plans to notify customers, and dealerships will replace the high-voltage battery with … Read more

Conquer the world!

TurboRisk allows you to try your hand at world domination. Just like wielding global power, this freeware take on the classic board game quickly becomes addictive. Once you get started, it's easy to lose track of time with this game.

After a painless installation, we were presented with a colorful world map in a simple and uncluttered interface. TurboRisk uses just a handful of buttons, and it's clear what each one does. The object of the game is to conquer all the territories on the map. That seems pretty straightforward, but it isn't. Thank goodness there's … Read more

EarthRisk crunches data to predict extreme weather

EarthRisk Technologies is mining years of weather data for profit.

The San Diego-based start-up today launched HeatRisk, a Web-based application designed to predict extreme heat events 30 to 40 days out. The target audience is meteorologists who work for energy companies or other organizations which need a long-range forecast to hedge their risk from extreme temperatures.

Over time, EarthRisk Technologies intends to design a product aimed at less technical users and investigate whether its research method can be applied to predicting extreme storms, according to President and Chief Science Officer Stephen Bennett. Its first product, released last year, is for … Read more

This Day in Tech: Apple's new cloud service, Twitter adds Follow button

Too busy to keep up with the tech news? Here are some of the more interesting stories from CNET News for Tuesday, May 31.

Cell phones and the radiation risk (roundup) Based on new findings, the World Health Organization classifies cell phones as a potential cancer risk. Meanwhile, CNET launches a series on the state of cell phone research. More

iTunes in the cloud? Apple's cloud service will be unveiled at next week's WWDC. And unless the iTunes maker can't complete licensing deals with music publishers, Apple will show off a new cloud music offering. See what we know… Read more

Top 5 personal digital disasters (video)

From butt dialing to a bungled reply-all or the newer traps of errant social posts and geotracking, it seems there is no end to the ways you can ruin your day with technology. What fun! Here are the Top 5 digital screw-ups you can easily avoid.

Failure is an option

I recently discussed techniques for reviewing projects to improve their likelihood of success. Underlying this is the reality that projects do fail often, at a greater rate than we'd like to admit.

Some failures are spectacular. After spending tens or hundreds of millions of dollars over a period of years, nothing ever really works. The entire investment of time, money, energy, effort, and focus has to be completely written off. Those are the legends. The laughing stocks.

But it's a mistake to conflate failures and catastrophes. Most failures are mundane and much smaller scale. They result from changing … Read more

Conquer a medieval world

Carcassonne is the extremely well-done iOS version of the popular, German-style board game of the same name.

The interface of Carcassonne is a faithful, interactive adaptation of the physical board game, in which players take turns placing small, square tiles to create a medieval landscape with roads, cities, cloisters, and fields. In some ways, the touch-screen Carcassonne is almost superior to the physical game. You can touch and drag tiles into place, rotating them with a tap, and the app highlights legal placement options (and marks with a scratched "X" any squares that can no longer be used). … Read more