You can look at it as the beginnings of real interactive television — or simply one big episode of the cult comedy TV series “Mystery Science Theater 3000″ brought to life. In any event, thanks to forthcoming plans from IBM and Fox, viewers will soon be able to talk back to their flat-screen televisions via [...]
An Alaska technology company hopes to hit the market with the world’s first laptop boasting two identical 15.4-inch displays by the end of this year. At nearly 12-pounds and equipped with two 15.4-inch screens and a full-sized keyboard, gScreen’s planned $3,000 Spacebook series definitely doesn’t track the “smaller is better” ethos prevailing in the notebook [...]
As the DARPA approaches its self-imposed deadline to make high-tech prosthetics that begin to approach the abilities of natural limbs by 2009, the research communities that have made it happen are beginning to ask, “Can we create companies that can turn a mind-blowing prototype or demo into real products?” Veterans, amputees and other people living [...]
Last week’s big news was that Apple pushed up its Snow Leopard release by a month to provide a 60-day buffer between it and Microsoft’s biggest launch of the decade. Apple can’t match either Microsoft’s resources or price, but the feat of snagging an unchallenged 60 days during the back-to-school and early holiday shopping season [...]
You know it’s a good day when included among all the dry-as-dust press releases that arrive on your virtual desk is one that promises to combine Linux, Twitter and “dangerously outrageous” fun. Sure enough, from none other than the Linux Foundation came the tantalizing announcement of the “Fake Linus Torvalds” promotion, which it kicked off [...]
Digital photography has made sharing photos easy — sometimes too easy. Work posted to the Web by lens-slingers can be misappropriated with abandon by the naive as well as the nefarious. One way shutterbugs try to protect their images is by watermarking them. A watermark is a logo, legend or other sign superimposed on a [...]
Today, young movie-watchers look increasingly like Molly O’Connor. A junior at the University of Dallas, she still goes to the cinema occasionally, but is often just as happy to hunker down on a bed or a couch with friends to watch a downloaded movie on a laptop that’s perched on a nearby desk or a [...]
Pretty much any cellphone you’d buy today comes with a digital camera, but only a few are good enough to take the place of even a cheap point-and-shoot. It can be tricky to sniff out which phones really fall into that category. Highly advertised features, like a mass of megapixels and multiple settings, do not [...]
The idea was to provide some clarity on the issue of searches of computers and other digital devices when travelers enter the U.S. However, while Thursday’s announcement of new Department of Homeland Security policies for border inspections was greeted as a good first step by some, they didn’t completely quiet privacy rights groups. The new [...]
The audience at the Bell Harbor Conference Center in Seattle was full of geeks, and its members would probably have been proud to identify themselves as such. After all, it was the ninth Gnomedex conference, the annual gathering of tech bloggers, business types, private tech enthusiasts — anybody and everybody who has a fascination with [...]