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 Apple is recalling almost every charger sold

with its 3G iPhone due to a shock hazard. The

Ultracompact USB Power Adapter may snap off and

leave exposed prongs sticking out of the socket.

Apple said it has received a small number of com-

plaints but has decided to recall all of the chargers

for the phones. Defective chargers were sold in

the U.S., Canada, Japan, Mexico, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru,

Argentina, Chile, Costa Rica, and Panama. Updated chargers for phones that are not

part of the recall have a small green dot on the bottom. If your charger does not have

the dot and looks like the charger in the picture, Apple recommends that you discon-

nect it and discontinue use. In the meantime, you can charge the iPhone 3G by plugging

the USB cable into a powered computer’s port until a new charger is sent to you. Bad

chargers may also be exchanged for free at Apple stores. For more information con-

sumers should visit http://tinyurl.com/hotapplepie.

RECALL ALERT

Good

Bad

You have to activate

drivers to get X-Fi sup-

port on the Asus Maximus

II Formula board.

This isn’t a totally new prac-
tice. Creative began using
activation on its X-Fi cards
that feature Dolby Digital
Live support as an accounting
tool. Since the company pays
Dolby for each soundcard
owner that uses Dolby’s real-
time encoder, Creative forces
each person to activate the
card’s drivers. The activation
process also helps Creative
address the issue of end-users
using its drivers to add Dolby
Digital Live to the company’s
other products. That prac-
tice got Creative into some
hot water with Dolby—as

well as with the hardware

community, which balked

when Creative squelched the

bootleg drivers.

In the case of the Asus

Maximus II Formula board,

the Dog suspects that

Creative is using activation

to protect its own intellec-

tual property. These moth-

erboards don’t actually use

any of Creative Labs’s hard-

ware, just the company’s

algorithms. The activation

is probably there to prevent

some enterprising lad or

lass from simply sharing the

audio drivers with someone

who didn’t pay for a board

with licensed X-Fi support.

This probably also helps keep

the motherboard vendors

happy because if they had to

pay an extra $5 to Creative

for the driver support, they’d

be pissed if brand B basically

got it for free.

Still, it’s a pretty lousy

situation for the consumer,

as the monitoring mecha-

nism does use RAM and CPU

cycles to determine you’re

using a licensed version of

the drivers. You can avoid

all this by just not install-

ing the X-Fi drivers; the

Maximus II Formula works

fine without the drivers,

but you do lose much of the

advanced functionality.