Hardware

In the '90s, when the MP3 was new, it was difficult to predict the medium's effect on the music industry and our culture. Today, the results of the MP3 revolution are starting to show, and I sometimes wonder what we won.… Read more

Yesterday, Computerworld brought us 5 reasons to ditch the Mac and return to PCs (tip o' the antlers to John Gruber via e-mail). And, sadly, they weren't April foolin' us.

Listen, then, Mac user to the tale of one "Mac fan" who switched... back! (Please shoot the Macalope now.)

So while Apple's sales continue to grow, Keanini decided to buck the trend, and gave up on his most recent Apple machine, an Intel dual-core based MacBook Pro.

That seems like kind of a waste since he could have just used Boot Camp to run Windows on … Read more

Why didn't anybody think of this before? Grand Theft Auto franchise developer Rockstar Games has teamed up with Amazon.com in an interesting joint promotion.

When GTA IV comes out on April 29 and you are cruising around inside doing whatever evil deeds come to mind, you might like a particular song playing on one of the radio stations in the game. Well, you will be able dial a number on your in-game virtual cellphone and receive a text message with artist and title information. And if you've signed up to be part of Rockstar's upcoming social … Read more

In an announcement that will surely test the patience of Zunefans, European newspaper GNT has quoted Microsoft France's Francois Ruault as saying the third generation of the Zune MP3 player will likely have a worldwide release during the holiday season of 2009. While folks in the European Union are probably happy to hear they'll be getting the Zune at all, the rest of us have just glimpsed a long wait for a Zune 3 hardware refresh.

The article goes on to hint that Microsoft's Zune Marketplace digital music download service will eventually be rolled into the Windows … Read more

The iPhone commercial parody on YouTube with genius filmmaker David Lynch hit the mark for me. His insight about people watching movies on iPhones, I'm paraphrasing--"You think you've seen the movie after watching it on your iPhone, but you'll be cheated. You haven't seen the movie."--could also be applied to music.

Just because you were listening to music while text messaging your boy/girlfriend doesn't mean you've actually heard the music. Exposure to music, art, film, what have you, is not the same as active engagement. It's kind of … Read more

Forget old car alarms with their annoying "whoop whoop whoop" sounds, GPS Snitch uses GPS, cellular technology, and the Web to help you locate your car. Unlike with traditional car alarm systems, installation merely requires that you put the GPS Snitch somewhere in the car and attach it to a 12 volt power point. With its motion detector and cell connection, it can send you a text message when it feels your car being moved. Whenever you want to find your car, you can either go online to see where it is on a map, or send a … Read more

When the iPhone first shipped, I thought it was pretty cool that there wasn't a way for developers to write software for it. It forced people who wanted to build iPhone "apps" to create Web apps instead, which were then delivered to the iPhone via its browser. It was a great day for Webware.

But it couldn't really last. The Web is too slow, browsers too limited, AT&T's paranoia (about third-party apps running on their network) too Orwellian, and the iPhone too powerful to force developers to fit everything into Safari. Hence, Jailbreak … Read more

As expected, Apple is announcing a software developer's kit that will allow programmers to write native iPhone applications that also access the iPhone's Web connections. See the live blog, now underway over on Tom Krazit's One More Thing blog.

When I was a kid in the 1960s I was obsessed with the future. The space program was in all its glory, the moon landing was within our grasp, and that, combined with rock music being at its creative peak, what more could a teenage boy ask for? The future looked bright, science would soon feed the starving, cure all disease, and technology would bring prosperity to the entire world. Once those humdrum needs were satisfied we could get to the fun stuff and develop personal flying gear, teleportation machines, and start colonizing other worlds. For kids, at least nerdy … Read more