Leading Hotels of the World, the fancy-lodging chain I only ever hear about in airline-magazine advertisements, has badly flubbed a discount offer celebrating its 80th birthday. So many people tried to get the chain's $19.28/night discount rate that its servers supposedly crashed.Sure, blame the sysadmin. What the…

We knew things were looking grim in the fatally overcrowded online ad-network space. But this is ridiculous. AdBrite's homepage currently states that the network, favored by smaller publishers, is serving "0 impressions a day on 0 sites." A glitch in its stats mechanism, surely — but also a harbinger of the shakeout…

In the past year, Apple earned top scores in both customer satisfaction and brand loyalty. It's a tribute to the power of marketing. And for Apple customers' collective delusion, we credit Greg Joswiak, a top marketing executive who handled Mac hardware before he moved on to pushing iPods and iPhones.While Apple…

Thinking about making a run on your bank from the privacy of your own home? If you're a Bank of America customer, good luck — the site has been down since 8 a.m. PST, and the problem has seems to have grown worse since it started. At first, users couldn't verify their "SiteKey" to access their accounts. The company…

Pride cometh before the fall, with Lehman Brothers having spent $309 million on information technology infrastructure in the quarter before the venerable financial firm went belly-up, which was up from $282 million the previous quarter. The company spent $1.1 billion on IT in 2007. Projects included a system for the…

Journalists hate when this happens: Federal investigators say Friday's fatal collision of a Ventura County Metrolink commuter train with a freight train may not have been caused by an engineer busy with text messages, as was reported over the weekend. The spokesperson who blamed the engineer and called it…

Terry Childs is the San Francisco government systems administrator who, threatened with losing his job, took over the network. Childs finally gave in from his jail cell and handed mayor Gavin Newsom the passwords he'd changed, along with a liturgy of hate for his pointy-haired bosses. San Francisco bureaucrats make…

Running on Windows Vista, Apple's iTunes 8 isn't actually a computer virus, according to WordNet's strict definition of term as "a software program capable of reproducing itself and usually capable of causing great harm to files or other programs on the same computer." But that's only because iTunes 8 doesn't…

What exactly went so horribly wrong with Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system, the one customers waited seven years for only to have a steaming pile of fail land on their laptops? That's the question Maximum PC had for representatives from Team Redmond. After the jump, the key problems a surprisingly candid…

Ever suspected those "Report Bug" tools in Web browsers leave you shouting into an abyss, your feedback discarded? An engineer at Mozilla, the maker of Firefox, has just confirmed that's actually been the case for months. Mark Smith explains that his misconfiguration of database led to the loss of three months of…

British traders should've been buying and selling like mad earlier today on the news of the U.S. government's effective nationalization of sputtering loan giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Instead, they got kicked offline. A spokesperson for the London Stock Exchange says the exchange's TradElect trading system…

Can Google charge for a service it mostly gives away — and that doesn't always work? That's the experiment it's conducting with Google Apps. Gmail, the email service at the heart of Google Apps, went down three times earlier this month, and Google has sent a note to customers who pay for its "Premier Edition" —…

Google's named after "googol," an incredibly large number — misspelled. Does it surprise you that the search engine makes mistakes with math, too? Just for fun, watch what happens when you use the Google calculator to solve equations involving a Googol (10^100).Click each formula to see Google's calculator results: …

Luxer-than-thou retailer J. Crew has mostly avoided the economic pinch, since its customers barely notice that they're paying $4 a gallon for gas. Instead, the retailer has been laid low by buggy software, reports the Business Technology blog. One outraged customer, shown here, was billed $9,208.50 and shipped…

Google's calculator function fails when handling large numbers. News.com's Stephen Shankland opinionates: "Any company that named itself after a big number must be held to a higher standard." Cut the Googlers some slack, Stephen: How are they supposed to maintain optimal blood-sugar levels for accurate coding when…

Sent in by a tipster: A leg bedecked with a tattoo of Twitter's "fail whale," the cetacean mascot deployed when the short-updates site takes on water. Can you think of a better caption? Leave your suggestion in the comments. The best one will become the new headline. Yesterday's winner is trisomy21 with "Sergey,…

The power is out in South Park, San Francisco's startup epicenter. Wired and Yahoo Brickhouse — in the same building — are affected. Caffe Centro is down. Jack Falstaff isn't answering the phone. Six Apart, a block away on Fourth Street, is up. Workers are roaming the neighborhood. Got any more data points? Send 'em…

Sunnyvale-based storage startup Agami called an all hands at 11 AM, Monday, August 4. "I thought we were getting bought out,'' one sales rep told the Mercury News. Instead, CEO David Stiles told his employees that the company was shutting down and that everyone had to clear out by 1 PM. "Basically we all felt…

Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry claims “there have been multiple cases of overheating and fire damage, in particular during recharging" iPod Nanos sold during the model's first year of production in 2005. An Apple spokesperson confirmed that “in very rare cases”, batteries in first generation iPod…