Of all the things in the world to be able to lay claim to as “the longest,” email addresses probably wouldn’t be the first to jump to your mind. For Peter Craig, though, it’s a badge of honor. He currently holds the URDB (Universal Record Database) World Record for the longest email address at 345 characters. Here’s the full address:

contact-admin-hello-webmaster-info-services-peter-crazy-but-oh-so-ubber-cool-english-alphabet-loverer-abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz@please-try-to.send-me-an-email-if-you-can-possibly-begin-to-remember-this-coz.this-is-the-longest-email-address-known-to-man-but-to-be-honest.this-is-such-a-stupidly-long-sub-domain-it-could-go-on-forever.pacraig.com

Why you would want such a thing is completely beyond me, and this is probably the easiest WR to own. Want to beat Peter? Buy a domain, make an absurd subdomain, and voila! Three hundred and forty-six characters here I come.

Source: Laughing Squid

Among Apple’s various hardware updates today, the company launched a trackpad for desktops, officially dubbed the Magic Trackpad. I’m not real sure where the magic is.

Now granted, I tend to prefer the trackpad to the mouse for general browsing, but this is something that seems aimed at power users, not the casual internet browser. Desktops come with a mouse, so people are comfortable using the mouse. Will they really want to drop $69 for a couple gestures, most of which are mimicked by the controls on your everyday mouse today?

My guess is no, but I’m not naive enough about Apple products to think this thing won’t sell. It would definitely be much cooler if it worked like a tablet (yes, there is some third-party software that can help a bit), but as a simple trackpad, I’m just not that impressed.

You had to see the death of the netbook. The little laptops are unbearably cramped, with crappy keyboards, tiny touchpads, and screen resolutions that could make even your grandparents beg for more. Netbooks were the lame intermediary while tablets waited for their messiah, and now that they have one, the tablets are taking over.

According to a study by Retrevo, some 70 percent of netbook buyers were courted by the iPad and 30 percent made the final commitment. Though those other 40 percent still stuck with their netbooks, I’d imagine the decision was largely financial. It’s hard to beat $200 for a semi-functional computer to kick around. It’s hard to put a price on not looking pretentious, too.

That 30 percent isn’t exactly the blowout you might expect, but it is a signpost pointed at the heart of the netbook industry. Manufacturers like Dell would do well to pay attention. The great thing about netbooks was portability and nothing else. If you can get the portability with more interesting device, that netbook is going to start to look pretty crappy.

With the launch of the iPad, a lot of people (myself included) thought the Kindle was dead. I still don’t believe in purpose-built devices, but I can see the value of the device in the interim, that is, before tablets overtake the reader. But Amazon wants to stay competitive. Bezos is still building out the Kindle team if we are to believe recent job postings.

Most people believe the postings are for the development of the Color Kindle, but Amazon’s CEO tells a different story. According to Jeff Bezos, Amazon is “still some ways out” from delivering a color version of the device.

This isn’t news so much as it is an update. We heard last year that color e-ink displays were years off, but it’ still sobering news for the Kindle devotees.

This is the big story today. J. Allard, father of the Xbox, will be retiring from his position at Microsoft. I say “retiring” because there has been so much speculation about why he was leaving and whether he got fired and what he’s going to be starting and on and on and on. He’s just retiring – taking a leave to go explore the things he didn’t have time to explore when he was working a billion hours a week at Microsoft.

To me, though, this isn’t really news. Allard was involved in some great projects – projects that made Microsoft a ton of money – but none of it has really been incredible. In many cases, the Microsoft products Allard has worked on have succeeded not because of incredible innovation but because it was the only game (or one of very few games) in town.

Consider the original Xbox. We knew about it for years leading up to the launch, and the best thing about it wasn’t the controller or the processor or the original Live experience (which was terrible, by the way). The best thing about Xbox 1.0 was a game called Halo. To me, the Xbox was the natural evolution of consoles, and Live was just the maturation of the console form to keep up with multiplayer standards PC players had enjoyed for decades prior.

The Xbox 360 followed the same path as the original – the natural evolution of console gaming. The Live system is better, but still not great by any means, and I know very few people who use their 360 in the ways the commercials would have you believe every geek has his home connected. There are some neat features, like Netflix streaming for one, but there isn’t anything that is truly innovative about the 360. It didn’t change the way I see the entertainment world any more significantly than, say, an iPod video did when it was announced. It performed virtually the same function as the device before it, just a bit better.

My point in all of this is that the last decade or so of devices coming out of Microsoft have been pretty mundane. Anticipated. Expected. I haven’t seen much in the last decade that has made me say, “wow,” in that breathy, holy-shit-you-just-blew-my-mind kind of way. Allard was at the helm for some good stuff, but it was just that – good. Nothing great. Nothing spectacular. His decision to retire will have about as much impact on the gadgets we see as will his decision to pursue “adventure sports.” All the best to you, J., but I can’t say I’m going to miss you.

I’ve been undeniably impressed with the iPad since its launch, but I wasn’t convinced I needed one, until now. I’ve spent the last week at my parents’ house in Ohio. I’m lucky enough to work from anywhere, but it’s my recreational web use that’s convinced me I need an iPad.

There have been so many times throughout the week where I’ve wanted to look something up or show something to my brother, or just browse the web while we trade off on games of League of Legends, but my laptop felt too cumbersome and my iPhone just isn’t big enough. Kicking back with my feet on a desk and my laptop across my thighs leaves my knees aching. Carrying my laptop to the cement deck out back feels cumbersome, mostly because of the weight.

In the end, it’s about convenience for me. I want a device that feels big enough to browse on and watch videos and share things with the people near me. The iPhone is great as a one-man device, but it doesn’t hold up in a social setting. An iPad, though, would do just the trick.

Once upon a time I worked for a Steelcase dealer in Ohio. Though we specialized in systems furniture (the industry name for cubicles), we also dealt in some of the tech stuff associated with office life, including video conferencing solutions. The most expensive is a product from Steelcase’s conference room division, Polyvision, called Thunder. A basic system installation cost $100,000 and boasted a feature list that has now been largely duplicated by Skype. A few years back the ability to quickly share your desktop wasn’t as easy as right-click, share desktop. Now, though, Skype can handle it, and Skype’s free.

Next week Skype plans to add five-way video calling to its service offering. The new feature will be free for starters, but may start to cost over the course of the year. You can bet plenty of businesses will be reconsidering their video conferencing options (or consider using video conferencing for the first time) when this rolls out. On the personal side, this is perfect for families and friends spread across the country. My own immediate family is currently spread across three states, soon to be four. It would be great to jump on and video chat with all of them for free.

I know the iPad 3G launch and the cancellation of at least two Windows 7 tablets in the same week is likely just a coincidence, but it’s hard to shut out the voice telling me the news might be related.

You might remember Microsoft’s Courier, the dual-screen tablet that could fold like a book and had an amazing demo video. It’s dead, folks. Done. Microsoft said the project would no longer be supported. Alongside that bit of bad news comes word that HP is canceling its Windows 7 tablet, the same tablet Steve Ballmer debuted at CES 2010. HP is reportedly displeased with Windows 7 as a tablet platform and will be moving to Google products.

The HP cancellation is the big news of the two. Dropping Microsoft for Google’s cloud operating system is a first for big manufacturers, and it points to a growing sentiment in the development community. The world wants simple products, and while some might decry iPhone OS and its relative lack of features, no one can deny its success. For the average consumer, Windows just doesn’t make much sense.

Fusion Garage is eager to get feedback on its JooJoo tablet. It’s so eager, in fact, that it sent all of the pre-order customers (a whopping 64 people) a personal email asking for feedback. Oh, that email also contained every other customer’s email address in the CC field. You know, guys, there is a BCC field for a reason.

Personally, I think this is hilarious. It’s not like every spammer in the world doesn’t already have your email address. What are the dupes that got suckered into buying a JooJoo going to do with it, anyway? Email you when their device fails? At least you can commiserate with one another, right? Here’s the full text of the email:

Dear Sir and Madam,

Thank you for supporting JooJoo.

We hope to get your feedback about the JooJoo Tablet. Please revert back to us want you think of our product. Please drop us a line on how your JooJoo is working.

Thank you.

JooJooSupportTeam

Source: Uneasy Silence

Hardly a day passes when Google isn’t buying some new startup or a service that has just exploded into mainstream popularity. Late yesterday the news broke that the search giant had just purchased yet another company, but this time it was a name I’d never heard: Agnilux.

After the implicit “who the hell is that,” I dug around to see what I could find. It turns out Agnilux is a server hardware development company, some are guessing a chip developer, that’s packed to the gills with former TiVo and Apple employees. Agnilux was also founded by former employees of P.A. Semi, another chip developer that Apple bought in 2008.

It suffices to say Google is getting a lot of talent in this little-known acquisition. The TiVo ties have raised questions about Google TV, but as far as anyone knows it’s just one guy in Agnilux that came from TiVo. Still, when we don’t much, it seems like anything could be reasonable.

Apple product launches are always a little bittersweet. The products are usually great, and if not they’re called Apple TV. But along with the products you have to put up with Apple fanatics talking about how this thing you don’t have will revolutionize the world. To some extent I believe the hype but there is that intense feeling that it’s a bunch of bullshit. Ray Bradbury gets along just fine without technology, doesn’t he?

While I’m not ready to write off technology, I do like to keep things in perspective with little pranks like this. Gizmodo has 8 great false backgrounds for your crazy friends’ iPads. Drop one of these bad boys on that pristine new tablet and watch the horror cross the owner’s face when it lights up.

Source: Gizmodo

It was a big day for Apple. It was a big day for fanboys (and fangirls). It was a big day for publishers. Alright, it was a big day for just about everyone. Yes, even you haters, because like it or not the iPad is here and it’s a pretty big deal. It’s the first ultra-portable device that’s capable of handling all of your day to day tasks, be it business or entertainment.

The iPad is such a big release that Steve Jobs himself showed up at the Palo Alto location to survey the damage for just under an hour. Analysts are setting estimates for day one sales around 700,000 units, a huge chunk of the supposed couple million Kindles in the wild. By comparison, the iPhone sold just 270,000 units when it launched.

The iPad does have a leg up in that it has access to the iPhone OS App Store. Along with iPhone apps, the iPad will have its own set of apps designed to take advantage of a larger screen size.

With the iPad launching tomorrow there are a lot of apps to get excited about, not the least of which is Pandora. Pandora has been a huge success on every mobile platform. It’s also saved me from many a dull road trip with a virtually limitless pool of musical styles. The app got an update this week to include the iPad version and it looks great.

The update includes a large screen version for the iPad, making the artist description and album art that much more accessible. The update also adds album artwork for every station and improves streaming for quicker song selection and less service dropouts. I gotta say, I’ve never had serious problems with streaming, though it does occasionally seem slow, so the improvements will be great.

The really nice thing for the iPad is that everything is on one screen. There’s no flipping back and forth for stations and artist info and all that. The new app seems focused on users getting to know the artist’s their browsing which will be great for Apple with iTunes integration.

It can be hard to wait for your new gadget to ship. I’ve spent countless hours fretting over Newegg shipments, whether they were for me or a friend. I’ve also spent countless upcharges on rush shipping to make sure I get my toys the very second they’re available.

Apple offered a rush shipping method with the iPad pre-orders for an extra $12. That’s not so bad for tech gear, that is, until you find out that standard shippers would receive their tablets on the same day. Did I mention standard shipping is free?

Thankfully, Apple decided to come clean and refund the rushed shipping upcharge. Here’s the letter you’ll be receiving if this affects you:

To Our Valued Apple Customer:

Thank you for your recent Apple iPad purchase.

Our records indicate that when you placed your iPad pre-order, you chose to pay for expedited shipping.

Expedited shipping is not necessary to ensure delivery. Apple has processed a refund for the shipping charge on your order. Please contact your card-issuing bank for information on when the credit will be posted to your account.

Your iPad will deliver on April 3rd in the areas where UPS offers
Saturday delivery.

You can view the most up-to-date status of your order at
.
Sincerely,
The Apple Store Team

The JooJoo lawsuits have unearthed some very interesting information. Apparently the device formerly known as the CrunchPad isn’t doing as well as expected. It isn’t doing well at all. To date there have been just 90 JooJoo preorders, that’s a nine with one zero after it, and 15 of those have been returned (which supposedly hasn’t been easy).

If you’ll remember, the initial run of JooJoo’s was supposed to finance a run into high production and provide the financing to support a legal defense against TechCrunch and Michael Arrington. For some reason I don’t think $44,000 is going to do that.

Part of the problem is that the JooJoo was announced in the same month as the iPad at the same price. Who are you going to buy a $500 tablet from, Apple, or some company you’ve never heard of for reasons other than the lawsuit brought against it because the tablet it’s selling may be stolen IP. I think we all know the answer to that one.

Source: Gizmodo

A few weeks back someone dug up some placeholder SKUs in Best Buy’s database that seemed to indicate the store would be getting the iPad. There was some speculation, though, since it seemed the first run of the device was going to sell out very quickly. As it turns out, the rumors are likely true. Several sites have managed to dig up Best Buy’s “Apple iPad Launch Playbook,” detailing protocol for day one sales of Apple’s tablet.

This is great news for anyone feeling impulsive about the iPad decision. If you haven’t already heard, the first round of iPads is completely sold out. You won’t be getting one from Apple on day one. It’ll have to wait until April 12th. That is, unless you want to hit up your local Best Buy. According to the document some 675 locations will have the iPad in limited quantities.

Source: TUAW

This weekend brought an interesting surprise for anyone attempting to purchase themselves a nifty, new, Wi-Fi iPad. It’s sold out. You can still buy it, of course, but the ship date isn’t April 3rd anymore. It’s April 12th. In-store pickup has been removed as a shipping method as well.

This is a big deal for Apple’s new device. I’m still standing behind the statement that no one really knows what it does. Yes, the promise of apps and the advent of a color ereader are nice, but $500 is a lot for that promise. Will it be that much better than a laptop? We’ll have to see.

Most estimates put the sold-out round of iPads around 500,000. That’s a crapload of units, especially considering that none of them have 3G. I know some people aren’t expecting big 3G sales, but I’d bet the nerds of the world will pick up a 3G unit for the just-in-case insurance. There’s really not a compelling reason to not get one and plenty of reasons for it. Remember, there are no contracts, so you can grab a month of service whenever you need it.

Source: 9to5 Mac

George Hotz, the young man responsible for the initial crack on the iPhone, may have put together a hack to unlock any iPhone OS device, including the iPad. Well, he thinks so anyway. There’s obviously no way to prove it until the iPad comes out and Mr. Hotz isn’t willing to give out a release date for the new crack.

The hack is a software-only exploit that allows jailbreaking of iPhone OS devices with just a simple click. Here’s the word from GeoHot himself:

The jailbreak is all software based, and is as simple to use as blackra1n. It is completely untethered, works on all current tethered models(ipt2, 3gs, ipt3), and will probably work on iPad too.

Don’t ask about a release date. You won’t make it happen any sooner.

There you have it. Wired had a phone interview with Hotz during which he said he may release the hack the day the iPad releases but that he would wait to see what the iPhone hacking community does. Here’s hoping for a launch day release.

You might have noticed that one major publisher is missing from the list of iPad adopters: Random House. You might think it’s because it doesn’t believe in the platform, or it has some dispute with Apple. None of the above. As the Financial Times has it, it’s because Random House doesn’t want to get into an ebook price war.

So let’s get this straight. To avoid a price war, the publisher is willing to stay with a company who requires a fixed price of $9.99? A company all the other publishers are glad to get away from? A company that is so desperate to keep publishers that it threatens to remove their goods from its store if those publishers don’t comply?

Yes. Apparently that. Granted, Apple’s model could potentially mean less profit per book for publishers because of the 30 percent cut it takes. It will make up for that, potentially, by giving publishers a little more control over their pricing and theoretically increasing the reach of ebooks. For the full story, head over to the Financial Times.

I almost laughed out loud when I saw the diminutive text that accompanied Amazon’s new Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers. It reads “Including the iPad,” in a tiny, scrunched up font. Funny content wars aside, the new app looks pretty great, and it gives us a look at the full color future of digital books from Amazon.

The new app include fancy features like page turn animations and adjustable backgrounds while holding onto the Amazon Whispersync technology to keep your reading experience up to date across multiple devices. While this may be the future of reading with Amazon, it makes me wonder where the future of the company’s hardware lies. I still can’t imagine a world in which Amazon wanted to get into the hardware business for just a couple years, but maybe it did. It’s still the largest online retailer, and content distribution is really a nice business. Just ask Apple.

If the future of the Kindle brand lies in apps across all platforms, though, Amazon would do well not to piss off so many publishers. All the work Amazon has done to this point will be null if readers can’t get the books they want in the Kindle store.