billboard

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- How Facebook knew a man was gay before anyone else did .

- NYC subways deploy a touch-screen network, complete with apps and Wi-Fi.

- Man who got porn site logos tattooed on his face now somehow regrets his decision.

- Lululemon pulls popular yoga pants for revealing too much.… Read more

LG is aiming to steal some of Samsung's Galaxy S4 thunder with a copycat billboard in Times Square.

In the heart of New York City, LG has updated its traditional billboard to tout its Optimus G phone. But the billboard is a virtual duplicate of the one for the Galaxy S4.

LG's billboard is a bit larger than Samsung's and towers above it on a Times Square building, potentially stealing the attention of busy New Yorkers.

Even LG's ad copy takes a swipe at Samsung.

The Galaxy 4S billboard tells people to "Be ready 4 … Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Satire site The Onion apologizes for offensive Oscar tweet.

- Daniel Tosh apologizes on Twitter for rape joke during stand-up routine.

- The most terrifying button on Facebook.

- Billboard starts counting YouTube Hits on its Hot 100 lists, Harlem Shake gets first place.

- Video: Harlem residents respond to Harlem Shake.… Read more

Leaked from today's 404 episode:

- Is Spotify unfair to musicians?

- Spotify reports net loss of $59 million 2011.

- Spotify will pay $500 million to artists and rights holders in 2013.

- Benford's law, also called the first-digit law.

- Godwin's Law, also known as Godwin's Rule of Nazi Analogies.

- The Audiophiliac wants to see your audio system.

- Are the Monoprice 9774 speakers inspired by, or knocks-offs of, the Energy Take Classic 5.1?… Read more

Billboard's charts, the gold standard for assessing the most popular music, now have a new metric.

YouTube streaming data is now being incorporated into those charts, Billboard announced yesterday. YouTube viewership will now join digital and physical singles sales, terrestrial radio airplay, and streaming as the metrics that determine Billboard's chart order.

Since there are often thousands of clips of a single music video, Billboard's YouTube data is limited to "all official videos," Vevo clips, and user-generated videos that are using "authorized audio." In other words, only legitimately used songs can be included … Read more

We have all witnessed cruelty.

Some of us might have even been responsible for it occasionally.

But one can only speculate what on Earth might been going on in the head of a woman called Laura. For she seems to have paid money in order to hire a digital billboard to tell her lover that she had found another.

On Valentine's Day.

As that fine, upstanding British paper the Sun reported, Jordan Wilson noticed the digital billboard at a gas station in Manchester, England and wondered just what had caused such an explosion of cold-hearted cruelty.

He posted it … Read more

Being the person in charge of the Networking category, I've received many e-mails asking what my current personal router is, and how often I change it.

Even though I've worked with many routers -- in fact, I have reviewed most of the existing Wi-Fi routers on the U.S. market -- I don't change my home router very often. This is mostly because programing a router can be a tedious task, and I use a lot of different applications and services with many clients, all of which require different settings in the router's firmware.

That said, since the Wireless-N (802.11n) standard was introduced in 2007, I've used just about five Wi-Fi routers. Most of them them have served me very well over the years and I still have them all, except for one that was broken during a move.

The following is the list of those routers and how they've worked out for me.… Read more

I admit it, I have a problem. I am a fan of fast networking products and often feel uneasy if what I have isn't the latest and greatest. That hasn't changed at all, despite the fact that over the years, I have realized that the latest and greatest is generally way more than I need.

The truth of the matter is, for most homes (and even certain types of small offices), all you need is a stable Wireless-N Wi-Fi router. This is because the main purpose of the router is often just to share the Internet connection and some network resources, such as printers and documents. Since the Internet speed generally caps at much lower amount than Wireless-N's speed, it won't get faster if you upgrade the router to the latest and greatest. On top of that, the majority of wireless hardware clients, such as tablets, smartphones, laptops, support Wireless-N (802.11n) or the slower Wireless-G (802.11g) standards. Since the speed of a network connection is determined by the slowest speed of any party involved, a lot of time having a superfast router doesn't help with the speed of the local LAN, either.

That said, if you just want a simple home network to share the Internet and data files, the following routers will more than get the job done. The best part is that none of them costs you more than $80.… Read more