glitch

The Netflix Player by Roku, which enables owners to watch streaming Web video on their TV sets, has received plenty of applause from pundits and owners since debuting last May. But the box now faces its first major challenge.

Customers from around the country have been "experiencing inexplicable loss of video-streaming quality," for at least three weeks according to Roku's engineers, who have posted comments at the company's Web forums. Device owners have posted complaints to the same forums about receiving less than half of the video quality they've had in the past. One user told CNET that the video stream is now "unwatchable."

Tim Twerdahl, vice president of consumer products at Roku, told CNET News on Monday that the company is still unsure about what exactly triggered the problem, but he said indications are it originated at Netflix. Twerdahl added that the problem likely affects Netflix's other boxes as well as Roku's player.

"All we know is Roku didn't make any changes," Twerdahl said. "This is not a box problem. We know from some reports that this seems to be correlated with a change in Netflix's content distribution network (CDN), and Netflix is trying to figure out what the issue is." … Read more

Are you prepared to help Susan042764 from New Jersey?

Apparently, her marriage is at risk, and only your knowledge of the iPhone can save it.

This drama is being played out, very publicly, on the Apple support site.

See if you are moved by Susan042764's question:

"Please help! I took my husband's i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but … Read more

Updated at 3 p.m. PDT with details from the FAA.

Hundreds of flights were delayed in cities across the country Tuesday because of a computer failure in the Federal Aviation Administration's system for processing flight plans.

A representative from the FAA said a software problem in the administration's central system for processing flight plans, based in an Atlanta office, caused the system to go down at about 1 p.m. EDT on Tuesday. That failure prompted a backup system in Salt Lake City to take over flight-plan processing, but a backlog in the handover caused flight delays … Read more

Netflix has traced the causes of a lengthy system outage this month that prevented the online movie rental service from shipping for several days to a hardware glitch.

The good news for the company is that it received lots of help from vendors to determine that the cause of the outage, which hobbled the company's ability to ship DVDs from August 11 to August 15, was a "key faulty hardware component." Steve Swasey, a Netflix spokesman, said the company's "strongest aspiration is to safeguard this from ever happening again."

The bad news for the … Read more

Hewlett-Packard lists 24 laptop model variations affected by a widely reported Nvidia graphics chip defect. HP said the flaw has been a warranty issue since November of last year.

Dell made a statement Friday regarding the same graphics chip issue. Nvidia published a "Business Update" on July 2 that addressed the problem. The Nvidia defect is centered on a "weak die/packaging material" in certain versions of Nvidia graphics silicon used in laptops. The die refers to the chip itself and the packaging is what encases the chip.

HP has published a list of potentially affected … Read more

Update on July 27 at 10:00 a.m. with additional information

Dell has issued a system update for a well-publicized problem with Nvidia chips.

The company said Friday it has posted BIOS updates for an Nvidia graphics chip glitch affecting laptop computers. Citing Nvidia information, Dell said the "affected GPUs (graphics processing units) are experiencing higher than expected failure rates causing video problems."

"The issue is a weak die/packaging material set, which may fail with GPU temperature fluctuations. If your GPU fails, you may see intermittent symptoms," the Dell blog said.

Dell said the … Read more

Updated at 2:49 p.m. to include the information that Red Herring's Web site is back up.

Troubled online news site RedHerring.com was inaccessible Friday for more than an hour.

In the same week that the publication was booted from its offices in Belmont, Calif., Red Herring's Web site suffered a glitch Friday and didn't go back up until about 1:30 p.m., according to a source, who asked for anonymity.

Red Herring is on at least one tech pub's "Death Watch" and the site outage might have led some to … Read more

This blog was updated at 9:30 a.m. PDT with information from Microsoft about the cause of the glitch.

Owners of some AMD-based computers are finding that the move to Windows XP Service Pack 3 has sent their systems into an endless reboot cycle.

"While the root cause of this issue is complex, it results from OEMs improperly placing a Windows XP image created for an for Intel-based computer onto machines with non-Intel chipsets," Microsoft said in a statement. "Microsoft issued guidance to OEMs advising them to only load Windows XP images onto like hardware in … Read more

Adobe Systems said on Friday that it has fixed a bug that delayed a planned update of its Photoshop Express program this week. The software maker said in a statement that the updated version of the free, Web-based photo editing program is now available.

"We're happy to report we have successfully fixed the bug that slightly delayed our newest feature update for the Photoshop Express beta," Adobe said in a statement. "New updates are now publicly available. We appreciate your patience as we focus on delivering a quality experience for our users."

Adobe had planned … Read more