A tip came in this weekend from someone with a fleet of new MacBooks. His complaint? Every 50 or so clicks and the trackpad butto freezes for 5 to 10 clicks and then wakes back up. The tipster writes:

So we’ve bought about 10 of them, all of them have awful problems recognizing clicks. The trackpad has a bug where it does not click about 60% of the time.

Anyone else having this issue? It seems posters at the Apple Discussion board are experiencing it fairly consistently.

I would have expected the Death Star to lay off people before EA would. I guess the Empire had a pretty solid economy, though. It seems that although EA is doing well in the long term, it’s cautious of incurring too much in costs during the downturn. Don’t worry, I’m sure we’ll be having Maddens for years to come, but a 6 percent reduction in headcount at something like EA is a serious move. I hope they don’t have make any more like that.

We’ve received a couple of anonymous tips that DirectTV, a $24 billion satellite TV provider, may be entering the online TV wars with a new site called DirectTV Web On Demand. The site would compete with startups like Hulu, Joost, Fancast, Sling.com, etc.

We don’t know much about the service, or even if it’s real. One of the tipsters says they’ve worked on the project and supplied us with the mockup screen shot above, which could quite possibly be real. On the other hand, we’ve spoken with industry insiders and they say they’ve heard nothing about the project.

The screen shot shows Heroes, which is an NBC show. The only way for Fox and NBC shows to be syndicated on the web is via a deal with Hulu. For CBS shows, they have to go through the CBS Audience Network.

That means it’s either very, very early in the development process or it doesn’t exist at all. We have an email in to DirectTV for comment.

Sun Microsystems is on the ropes. The New York Times says so, the hallway conversation starts and ends with “too bad”, and the wagons appear to be circling around, or rather, behind Jonathan Schwartz, leaving him outside the fort as the gates are closed.

Much of this capitulation to a situation Sun has been in for some time could come from the lessons of this long struggle in our country’s political and economic systems, which have become inextricably intertwined to the point where it apparently matters not at all what either candidate does or proposes. Instead, the public intuition is that change in management is less risky then standing pat.

With all this pressure on Schwartz, perhaps the best way to view the situation is to determine a so-called Failsafe deadline, so described as the point in time beyond which nuclear bombers can not turn back from their missions. In Sun’s case, what difference would a change in leadership make, and at what point?

We’ve been getting a lot of tips from people who have been having problems reaching the Revver website lately, getting videos uploaded or playing the ones already hosted on the platform. We haven’t paid much attention to them so far, because every time we check, the site seems up and we experience no trouble playing videos.

But something is definitely up.

It’s Elevator Pitch Friday Saturday, which means another startup has created a video that’s worth showing you. This week’s presentation comes from Scour.com, a meta social search engine.

Scour searches and displays results from Google, Yahoo and Live Search all at once and enables each of its members to vote each listing up or down based on its relevance to their keyword as well as comment on their experiences with the site. In addition to the combined results Scour offers a kind of get-paid-to-search scheme based on points in a way similar to Microsoft SearchPerks. Users earn a point for each search, vote or comment they make and can claim a $25 Visa card when they’ve reached 6,500 points.

(Watch the video after the jump):

If you have kids and Nickelodeon (or Nickelodeon.com) just doesn’t cut it for you all the time, tune into Totlol. It’s children’s Web video for the children of the YouTube generation. In fact, Totlol was built by one developer in Vancouver, B.C. (Ron Ilan, father of two) entirely on the YouTube platform. It is a collection of thousands of child-appropriate video clips from YouTube, chosen by parents, and rated by toddlers.

Totlol uses the YouTube API and reskins all the videos with its own player (much like we do with Elevator Pitches). Viewers can rate and collect videos. Collections act like playlists. Plop your child in front of the computer, and it plays all the way through (not that I would ever do that, of course).

WorldFriends, a social network with a focus on connecting internationally-minded people, was established as early as 2003 but has flown under the radar of the American blogosphere since. The Tokyo- and Shanghai-based site, which now has nearly 2 million users from all over the world, did a soft (re-)launch last week, mainly enhancing a number of networking features.

WorldFriends is walking a fine line between being a platform for dating, language exchange and making international friends. At first sight, WorldFriends actually looks much like a heavily internationalized version of your average dating site. The profile page, for example, features a member slide show (showing only female users if that is what you said you are interested in when signing up), a “New photos”-container (again girls only) and an “Your Ideal Match”-list.

Since our last update a week ago, we’ve added 18,885 job eliminations at tech and media companies to our Layoff Tracker. That brings the total to 38,538 layoffs across 108 companies over the past two months.

Some of the bigger reductions this week came from Motorola (3,000), Qwest (1,200), and Electronic Arts (600). Among startups, there were job cuts at Revision3 (10), Emusic (10), Sugar Publishing (9), Aliph/Jawbone (25), matchmine (42, deadpool), and Gizmos (10). We’ve also started adding media companies facing disruption from the Internet, including Gannett (3,000), Time Inc. (600), and Conde Nast (32), whose Portfolio magazine laid off nearly all of its Website staff.

If you know of any layoffs at a tech company, please submit a tip with the name of the company and number of layoffs. If it’s been covered, also send a link to the blog post or news article. (For those more interested in who is hiring, check out our job board).

Here is the full list of layoffs from the past week: