Dell Recalls 4.1 Million Laptop Batteries

Dell is recalling 4.1 million batteries from its laptop computers because they have the unfortunate tendency to burst into flame, as these photos demonstrate.

The recall covers four models of Dell laptops sold from April 2004 to July 2006:

Potentially affected batteries were sold with the following models of Dell notebook computers or separately as secondary batteries:

• Latitude: D410, D500, D505, D510, D520, D600, D610, D620, D800, D810
• Inspiron: 500M, 510M, 600M, 700M, 710M, 6000, 6400, 8500, 8600, 9100, 9200, 9300, 9400, E1505, E1705
• Precision: M20, M60, M70, M90
• XPS: XPS, XPS Gen2, XPS M170, XPS M1710

This isn't the first time that Dell laptop components had fire problems. Last year, I received a letter from Dell notifying me that the power adapter on my Inspiron was a fire and electrical hazard.

Security · 2006/08/15 · 8 COMMENTS · Link

Help! Help! You're Being Repressed!

An excerpt from a recent comment to Workbench:

Ha! I beg you to censor this! It will be the premier coup in my lodge, Rogers -- proving every single word I've written ...

I granted his wish and deleted the comment.

Fear of being called a censor used to work on me, because I believed that a commitment to free expression on the Internet meant giving wide latitude to readers who took the time to comment, even when they were hostile, abusive or obscene -- especially when I was the target of their wrath.

I have all the power on my servers, so it seemed unfair to use any of that editorial discretion to silence a critic. Part of this belief was motivated by seeing how many times web hosts will drop a controversial site when its content generates hate mail. The Bonsai Kitten spoof couldn't find a host willing to publish it amid a barrage of complaints by enraged cat fanciers.

I also wanted to win an argument I had with Jerry Pournelle and his cronies a million years ago on GEnie. He was the censorious host; I was the crank who believed the deletion of my post was the "coup in my lodge." How dare a writer, who draws his living from speech for which our ancestors fought and died, suppress the speech of others! As I recall, I was so insufferable in the ensuing discussion I'd like to travel back in time and flame myself.

After a decade of publishing on the web, I finally reached my screw-that moment regarding censorship a few months ago. Someone else can carry the First Amendment flag. The speech here isn't free to me -- it's $225 a month plus labor. Telling someone you have a right to free speech on their site is like walking into their house and demanding a ham sandwich.

The most I now offer is an attempt to moderate fairly, save deleted comments briefly in case you want them back, and provide advice on setting up your own site to get out from under the thumb of the man.

Anyone who doesn't like these rules is free to post somewhere else.

Publishing · Censorship · Moderation · 2006/08/15 · 33 COMMENTS · Link

RMail Feeds RSS to 20,000 Email Users

The path Randy Charles Morin is taking with RMail, a service for reading RSS feeds by e-mail, is beginning to remind me of how Joshua Schacter's hobby project, del.icio.us, was adopted by so many people that it mushroomed into his full-time gig and was acquired by Yahoo six months later. Users are joining RMail at such a fast clip that Morin finally realized there's commercial potential in the idea.

With absolutely no Web 2.0 fanfare and a web design that's optimized for Internet Explorer 3.0, RMail has grown to 20,000 users who receive 30,000 emails a day, and he told the Canadian tech site Maple Leaf 2.0 that 15,000 people joined in the past 90 days.

I never really considered Rmail a product when I wrote it. It was a solution to my own pain. But in the last three to six months, I've been gaining users at an increasing rate as RSS becomes mainstream and other RSS to email services fail to deliver. In fact, I didn't even consider Rmail worthy of funding until I heard that FeedBlitz got funding for doing nothing less than what Rmail has been doing for a year.

I signed up today to try it out. If you'd like to test RMail with a feed that updates frequently throughout the day, here's a subscribe box for the Drudge Retort:

Step one in Morin's business plan is to secure enough funding to work full-time on the site. He left off Step 5: "Buy the Toronto Maple Leafs and bring the Stanley Cup back to Canada where it belongs."

Rss · Email · Startups · 2006/08/15 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Steve Gillmor's Got My Attention

Steve Gillmor parted company with ZDNet and shut down his InfoRouter blog a few weeks ago, stating afterward on his personal blog that there were "real issues, some of which I can't discuss except by indirection."

I was upset to see InfoRouter shuttered, because I've come to appreciate Gillmor's bizarre takes on Web 2.0, which read like tech magazine hype filtered through Dennis Hopper.

Cracking open the story lines: engaging Hollywood and the record business. Not by embarrassing or attacking the Cartel, but by peeling the layers of the emergent user in control of point to point content. As I told Furrier last night, tech is the new rock n roll. The big budget production is not the target, nor is user generated content. Everybody except the Gang make the mistake of voting at one end or the other of this continuum. In fact, PROFESSIONALLY rendered user-controlled content is the sweet spot. It's not amateur hour, it's applying low-barrier technology and rapid development methodology to the real competition: soap operas. ... We're funding this effort by delivering return on investment (datapoints) to users and incenting them away from silos and towards the pool.

Please don't ask me what that means.

Gillmor's a tech journalist turned tech blogger turned tech evangelist, pushing the concept of attention, which I can't explain because it doesn't hold mine. Lately, he's been baiting current and former colleagues into arguments regarding his work performance.

When Gillmor claimed that the Gillmor Gang tech podcast had been cancelled by Sirius Radio, Adam Curry responded that it was demoted from regular airing because of the show's lack of updates.

If you can demonstrate consistent, timely delivery of the Gillmor Gang, it will be welcomed with open arms into Sirius rotation. ... Give the Audience the respect it deserves.

When Gillmor wrote that he was fired from his eWeek blog in 2004 because "I just didn't give a damn what some online pinhead in the San Francisco office had to say about what journalism was all about," his former editor Matthew Rothenberg replied that the real disagreement was over his lack of updates.

We didn't burn out on you based on page views, we burned out on you because you weren't actually posting much of anything! I could pay a high-school kid or my mom or a fire hydrant not to post -- and pay them a lot less than we were shelling out to you based (ironically or not) on your past tech bona fides working for the mainstream media you affect to disdain.

I don't know what's going on here, but as a writer myself, I wouldn't want to get into public fights with former editors regarding busted deadlines (thank God I've never missed one). One of Gillmor's final InfoRouter posts stated that he recently quit Paxil and lost a beloved 13-year old family dog, both of which might make bridge-burning seem like a better idea than it is.

Tech · Journalism · 2006/08/14 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

RSS 2.0 Specification (version 2.0.8) Published

The RSS Advisory Board proposal to revise the RSS specification has passed 7-0 with members Matthew Bookspan, Rogers Cadenhead, Loïc Le Meur, Jenny Levine, Eric Lunt, Randy Charles Morin and Greg Smith voting in favor.

The specification has been edited to reflect http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification as the document's permanent URL and RSS-Public as the mailing list where users should post RSS-related questions and comments. No other changes were made.

All edits to the specification are logged. This revision of the document has the version number 2.0.8.

Rss · 2006/08/12 · 1 COMMENT · Link

Flying Under Security Level Red

Arriving for a flight out of Boston's Logan Airport at 4:30 a.m., Doc Searls caught the leading edge of the London terror story:

Something bad happened (they won't tell us), and now the TSA won't let you carry any liquids, gels, pastes or fluids of any kind (pens?) through security checkpoints. Gotta check your medicines, sunblock, water bottels, whatever. This directive went down this morning (it's 4:30am here at Logan in Boston) and has caused a huge backup at the ticket counters and the security checkpoints. ...

Source: "This is the real deal."

What are they not saying? Gives me the creeps.

The Department of Homeland Security declared the highest possible threat level on "flights originating in the United Kingdom bound for the United States," which is the first time the terror alert swatch has gone red.

I thought they were saving red for another horrific day like 9/11, when there's such a heightened state of emergency that planes are grounded, government officials head for safety, people scramble to account for loved ones and TV goes 24/7 terror.

Politics · 2006/08/10 · 12 COMMENTS · Link

Most Major U.S. Papers Offer RSS Feeds

The Bivings Group has issued a study on RSS, podcast and blog adoption at the top 100 American newspapers:

• 76 of the newspapers offer RSS feeds
• 0 of those feeds contain the full text of articles
• 0 of the feeds contain ads
• 31 offer podcasts
• 80 offer reporter blogs
• 19 publish reader comments
• 77 don't require registration

I'd love to have the study's list of papers that offer RSS and don't require registration, because they're the best sources for news articles to pass along on blogs like the Drudge Retort. I hate sending readers to media sites that require registration.

Three no-registration, feed-publishing papers I read regularly: the Cincinnati Enquirer, Houston Chronicle and in Canada, the Toronto Star.

Rss · Podcasting · 2006/08/07 · 3 COMMENTS · Link

Read More Entries