name

Companies agonize over what to name a product, and we certainly recognize how difficult a process it is to come up with a good name.

Over the years, we've seen lots of good ones: the Palm Pilot, the Motorola Razr, TiVo, the Flip cam, are just a few.

But today we're not here to celebrate success. No, let us to rejoice in failure and admire some of the truly bad -- and, in some cases, truly awful -- names that have come along in the last 10 years or so, including the latest additions to the list: the Asus FonePad/PadFone, Grace Digital Ecoxgear Ecoxbt, I'm Watch, Nintendo Wii U, and Qi inductive charging. … Read more

This awkwardly named utility (now known as "Better Rename" in the Mac App Store) can be extremely useful in some very specific situations. Anyone who needs to rename large batches of files on a daily basis--especially Web developers and anybody working with lots of photos or audio files--should definitely check out A Better Finder Rename. Most of what this app does can also be done with the Finder and Automator, but nowhere near as quickly nor as easily.

ABFR offers a huge number of renaming options, everything from modifying text and adding sequence numbers to changing formats and … Read more

In the classic Mac OS, colon characters were used to separate folders in a file path, but in Unix-based systems the folder separator is a forward slash character. These characters are prevented from being used in file names because it would confuse the system when trying to access the file. When Apple developed OS X, the use of the forward slash was adopted because of its Unix underpinnings, so in OS X you cannot include a true forward slash in a file name.

This may cause some confusion, since in the Finder you can rename files to include a forward … Read more

Like many free applications, The Hat from Harmony Hollow Software uses software to do something usually done "the hard way." In this case, it's drawing names from a hat, the time-honored method for randomly selecting individual entries from a group. The app can randomize a list of names so no one can complain about who goes first and who goes last. It can also draw individual names or pairs of names for raffles, sweepstakes, and ongoing contests. It does this all without requiring you to actually write down names, cut up the list, and throw it all … Read more

Windows indexes your computer's files, folders, and drives to speed up searches, but to really exploit the power of indexing, you need a dedicated indexing and search tool, preferably one that's fast, powerful, and easy to use. Free would be nice, too. Index Your Files fits the job description. It searches by date, size, Boolean operators, file extension, and more. It finds stuff fast not only by filtering searches but also by searching only those indexed databases you specify. You can create and search as many databases as you need.

Index Your Files is easy to use, but … Read more

Though it's in hot water with the U.S. government, WikiLeaks is being supported by online activists fighting to keep the site alive.

WikiLeaks is being propped up by a barrage of mirror sites created by activists following moves by Amazon to stop hosting its site and Domain Name System provider EveryDNS.net to cut off its DNS services, according to The New York Times. Such mirrors can replicate an entire Web site, ensuring that all content and documents remain online and accessible even if WikiLeaks' own site is taken down.

But some of WikiLeaks supporters are adopting a … Read more

Comcast customers in Illinois and three other nearby states lost their Internet access last night, apparently due to the same problem that took down service for East Coast customers just a week ago.

Reports first began showing up on Twitter, with Comcast customers in several Midwest states tweeting that their connections were down. Comcast's own Twitter account, Comcastcares, later confirmed that the outage was affecting people in Minnesota, Illinois, and Michigan and seemed to be Domain Name System (DNS) related. The company also said at the time that it was working on a fix.

More specifically, the outage hit … Read more

The modern world has one immutable law: where the founders of Facebook go, so does the rest of society.

Recently, Dustin Moskovitz and Sean Parker, just two of the characters from "The Social Network," donated $170,000 to assist Proposition 19, a California idea aimed at legalizing pot.

And now I read in The New York Times that, sensing a turning of the tides, or merely a cloud of smoke about to emerge from an important chimney, many people are anticipating pot legalization by buying up pot-related domains.

The Times tells of Kevin Faler, who was once a … Read more

Come 2012, confused camera customers might be able to point their browsers to a Web address that looks very different from what's available today: support.canon.

That's because the organization in charge of such names, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, is planning on a dramatic rewriting of the rules for Web addresses that could demote .com's importance.

Today there are just a few of what are called generic top-level domains--.com, .net, .org, .biz, and .edu, for example. But ICANN wants to open the door to, potentially, hundreds or thousands more of these GTLDs.

That's a big change, especially for those who have a brand to protect on the Internet and were taken by surprise by the virtual land grab that took place with .com addresses in the 1990s. Here's a look at what GTLDs mean now and in the future.

What is a generic top-level domain, and how do I get one? In an Internet address, the top-level domains is what comes after the last period in the main server address. There are two broad types: the generic top-level domains such as .com and country code top-level domains such as .jp for Japan or .de for Germany. With ICANN's expansion, though, the term "generic" is something of a misnomer: it could include not only something like .auto or .hotel, but also branded domains such as .ibm or .safeway. … Read more