customers

Movie rental firm Netflix had to delay deliveries by a day after its site was down for nearly 11 hours on Monday. It's thought the problem was caused by a routine weekly maintenance session, scheduled for the middle of the night, mistakenly taking ... place during the day. Engineers noticed the problem at 7am Pacific time and didn't get it fixed until 6pm. (Source: wired.com ) Because the company's distribution centers all rely on the website to access customer data, no deliveries were possible on Monday. A spokesman said on Tuesday that "We're shipping everything that should have been shipped ... (view more)

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Time Warner is testing a plan that could end flat-rate monthly broadband subscriptions. The second-largest Internet service provider in the US, Time Warner will soon launch a trial in the Beaumont, Texas market with four different prices for those ... downloading up to 5, 10, 20 or 40 gigabytes each month. They chose Beaumont randomly and say the area doesn't have a specific problem with heavy broadband use. A spokesman said it was a possible way to tackle the problem of light users effectively subsidising those who use the Internet more often. "What we're trying to accomplish is to create a ... (view more)

Apple CEO Steve Jobs has a nagging pet peeve: he absolutely hates waiting in long lines, be it for a coffee or a hamburger. The only difference between Jobs and the countless others who share his grief is that the tech magnate is actually going to ... do something about the situation, and likely make millions in the process. Jobs is in the midst of patenting a service that will allow customers to skip the line at coffee houses and fast food joints. If he had his way, Jobs would ensure that nobody would have to stand in a line ever again. The method is as simple as it is complex: a system that ... (view more)

While the debate over whether or not Windows Vista is driving sales for large PC vendors rages on, Vista reportedly appears to be helping push sales of ' white box ' PCs with Windows XP for smaller system builders. Some system builders have seen ... sales increase this year as consumers and small-to-medium-sized businesses (SMBs) come to them for 'white-box' PCs with Windows XP installed instead of buying brand name PCs preloaded with Windows Vista. Small system builders say the demand for Windows XP has risen steadily this year as the hype after Vista's January launch wore off and complaints ... (view more)

Last week we reported on the release of a new legal downloading page called "SpiralFrog.com," which boasts free downloading but disallows users from uploading material to an iPod. Since it's not much of a competitor for iTunes (although it will ... surely take a few customers away), Amazon has a more deadly new weapon in its arsenal. Already firmly established as the world's largest online compact disc retailer, it's really not much of a leap for Amazon to take on Apple in this sphere. Although iTunes certainly retains great name recognition when it comes to online music sales, Amazon's recently ... (view more)

The most "hip and trendy" music download site is combining with the one retail environment that may just as well define "hip and trendy". Yeah, that's right, Apple's megapopular iTunes music service has teamed up with overpriced java distributor ... Starbucks, promising free songs to customers waiting for a caffeine fix. According to reports, Starbucks intends to dole out some 50 million free tunes in its domestic coffee shops to promote iTunes' upgrade to wireless service, set to debut in select markets soon. What's the deal? For the month between October 2 and November 7, Starbucks ... (view more)

Following in the footsteps of Dell, Lenovo and Novell recently announced an agreement to provide preloaded Linux on Lenovo ThinkPad notebooks and to provide support from Lenovo for the operating system (OS). The announcement came at the LinuxWorld ... Conference ... (view more)

Windows Vista Ultimate director Barry Goffe has apologized for Vista's 'Ultimate Extras.' What are 'Ultimate Extras'? Ultimate Extras were initially a key selling point for the Ultimate edition of Windows Vista. When the operating system (OS) first ... launched in January of this year, four extras were released: Windows Hold'Em, 16 language packs, Secure Online Key Backup, and Windows BitLocker Drive Preparation Tool. But since then, the ultimate extras have fallen flat. In fact, not a single extra has been released since January, except for a beta version of a feature known as DreamScene. ( ... (view more)

Although chairman and recent Harvard graduate Bill Gates has bragged that Microsoft has shipped its new operating system, Windows Vista, some 40 million times, there has been much criticism of the product. That's not news. However, word that ... Microsoft will offer more simplified methods of "downgrading" new systems to Windows XP, is. Much to the company's chagrin, customers have demanded that newly purchased computers ship with the outgoing operating system XP rather than Vista, which took some ten years to create. (Source: networkworld.com ) The new, XP-friendly initiative will help customers ... (view more)