ama

Shortly after announcing pricing for its upcoming Surface tablet, the Microsoft device's engineering team took to Reddit today to hold a virtual Q&A with the site's users.

It was an unusual marketing move by Microsoft, but sending some of its top technical people to interact with the Reddit community offered a rare opportunity for free publicity in a forum where the company could make its pitch to a crowd of technically savvy users. Led by Panos Panay, the general manager of the Surface team at Microsoft, the team answered posted questions for two hours, in what … Read more

President Barack Obama broke all the campaigning rules when he held an unmoderated Q&A session on one of the Internet's most infamous socially aggregated new sites -- and he also broke a Reddit record.

Obama's session on Reddit yesterday attracted more user activity than any other single submission to the forum, more than even the site's front page, Reddit revealed today in a stats breakdown of the virtual visit.

By the end of the day yesterday, the site had clocked nearly 3 million page views for the submission and the number kept growing by the … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- The POTUS did an AMA on Reddit yesterday, and here are the Web site's stats.

- Metal Gear Solid movie heads into production, will be produced by Avi Arad.

- Google begins reminding users of friends' birthdays.… Read more

U.S. President Barack Obama briefly took to Reddit today to do one of the popular social news site's AMA or "ask me anything" sessions.

The interview, which kicked off just after 1 p.m. Pacific and lasted roughly an hour, quickly brought the site to its knees.

Ahead of the overload, Reddit founder Alexis Ohanian confirmed that President Obama was legitimately participating in the event, adding that the questions were being answered from Charlottesville, Va., where Obama is currently campaigning for a second term.

The format allows any registered Reddit users to ask questions, and the … Read more

In today's show, Facebook shareholders are fuming, Windows Phones need updating and Prime subscribers are streaming:

Facebook and several banks have been slapped with a lawsuit, accused of hiding some details about revenue estimates days before the stock went public. The charge is this: Facebook spoke with select analysts about additional information on revenue expectations than what was disclosed in amended filings. Smaller investors are upset they were left out of the loop, and say they lost money because they didn't know the full picture. But even if Facebook did give extra info to analysts, it's not … Read more

Welcome to another Yuletide episode from The 404 Podcast! We'll be publishing these podcasts, videos, and rerun episodes all the way up until we return on January 10 for a block of live shows from CES in Las Vegas!

Inspired by Reddit's AMA section, we've asked our listeners to submit their questions to be answered on today's episode. No question is too personal, so tune in for a closer look at the hosts of The 404!… Read more

In collaboration with AMD, Seagate announced Monday its demonstration of a new hard drive Serial ATA (SATA) interface, tentatively called SATA3, that offers speeds up to 6Gbps, or 600MBps.

(SATA3, or SATA 6Gb/second, was developed by the Serial ATA International Organization under the Serial ATA Revision 3.0 specifications.)

Currently most consumer-grade computers use either the SATA or SATA2 interface that offers cap throughput speeds of 1.5Gbps and 3Gbps, respectively, or 150MBps and 300MBps. However, it's important to note that because of software and hardware overhead, the actual speed of most SATA hard drives is still less … Read more

For those of you who are keeping score, last week, the American Medical Association decided to postpone the vote on whether or not heavy video game playing is an addiction.

In a statement prepared by the organization, an AMA spokesperson explained that more research needs to be conducted before a decision is made: "Given that approximately 70 to 90 percent of U.S. youths play video games, the AMA today called for more research on the long-term beneficial and detrimental effects of video game and Internet use."

I can't help but think that the AMA should really … Read more