hardware

An outage that took down some of Amazon's European Web sites yesterday was caused by hardware error and not hackers, according to the company.

The online retailer's shopping sites in the U.K, France, Spain, and Germany were down for about half an hour starting around 9:15 p.m. GMT, leading to initial speculation that Amazon had been hit by hackers associated with the pro-WikiLeaks group Anonymous.

But in a statement released to Reuters, Amazon attributed the cause to hardware problems.

"The brief interruption to our European retail sites earlier today was due to hardware failure … Read more

Few would question the impact that mergers and acquisitions have had on the IT landscape over the past year, and most people believe the acquisition trend will continue to heat up in 2011. Market consolidation is already happening with big companies getting bigger, and a host of start-ups are looking to carve out a niche.

One of the biggest consolidators via acquisition is IBM. Big Blue has acquired no less than 65 companies since 2003 and in an exclusive interview with CNET, IBM Senior VP and Group Executive Steve Mills told me the company will continue to look for acquisitions … Read more

If you choose to upgrade the hard drive on your system either for a faster drive or for one with more space, you may find Apple's new FaceTime videoconferencing application will no longer authenticate. When launched, the program will give an error stating "The server encountered an error processing registration. Please try again later."

This has been shown to happen when people have upgraded from magnetic hard drives to SSD drives, but may also happen with other hardware changes as well. The problem is because Apple uses a certificate system for authenticating your system with FaceTime, and … Read more

A few people on the Apple Discussion boards have described an issue that seems to have cropped up in OS X 10.6.5, where the system may force-quit the log-in session when attempting to play video.

This is not a widespread problem, but has affected a few people and seems to happen when they use certain media players that support hardware-accelerated video playback. When the crash occurs, the system may flash a blue or black screen and then present the log-in window, quitting all user applications and unsaved data. Not all video players spur this behavior, and the problem … Read more

Our utilities update report is a list of updates for Mac utilities that have been released in the past week. Though a utility can be any tool that helps you perform a routine task (including image manipulation and synchronization), our focus in this column is to bring you those tools that help in troubleshooting Mac hardware and software problems. This week there are updates for several maintenance utilities, and one hardware utility for managing custom display applications.

Maintenance

This week MacPilot was updated with new options to disable the spotlight menu in Snow Leopard, along with a few tweaks to … Read more

Usually when troubleshooting problems there is some logical reasoning behind the issue that can be readily tackled, which is indicated by a steady, observable problem with the system. Even if the solution to the problem is a broad approach, such as reinstalling the operating system or replacing a hard drive, the reconfiguration usually clears the issue and the problem goes away. Despite this, every now and then a problem will crop up that is fairly perplexing.

We were recently contacted by MacFixIt reader Alan, who had a relatively minor though annoying problem where his system would crash under specific conditions … Read more

When Microsoft's hot new Kinect motion-sensitive controller was released earlier this month, Phil Torrone and Limor Fried saw an opportunity to subvert what was being presented as a closed system.

Torrone and Fried, the principals behind the open-source hardware firm Adafruit Industries, love almost any kind of culture hacking, and in the Kinect, they recognized a system that presented users far more utility than Microsoft was offering.

Not wasting the chance to raise a bit of a stir, Adafruit said it would pony up $1,000 to the first person who could come up with an open-source driver for … Read more

Speaking with Engadget at the Web 2.0 Summit, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen shared his thoughts about Apple's handling of the new MacBook Air and what Adobe is doing about it.

Narayen says Adobe did not get a MacBook Air before its release a couple weeks ago, leaving Adobe unable to optimize Flash for the SSD-only portable. Apple's decision to ship the MacBook Air without Flash installed stirred an already cloudy pot in the relationship between Apple and Adobe.… Read more

A hacker won $3,000 today for being the first person to successfully create an open-source driver for Microsoft's Kinect motion-sensitive controller.

Last week, open-source hardware developers Adafruit Industries offered $1,000 to the first person or team to complete the task. After Microsoft told CNET that it did not "condone the modification of its products," Adafruit upped the bounty to $2,000 and later $3,000.

Now, Adafruit writes on its blog, a hacker named Hector has created the driver (see video below), and is taking home the three grand.

"Hector has decided to invest … Read more