electronics

Japanese engineers were quick to pour scorn on the MacBook Air. This critique comes courtesy of Nikkei Electronics, a major Japanese electronics monthly, which did a teardown of the Air.

Here's the seeming challenge: The Japanese PC industry must come up with a reason why their own PC suppliers--NEC, Toshiba, Sony, Fujitsu--don't have a riveting 0.75-inch-thin notebook design on the market in the U.S. The answer, for them, is simple: a Japanese company would never approve of the design.

(Actually Mitsubishi did design an Air-thin notebook called the Pedion back in 1997, but the shallow keyboard … Read more

On February 16th fellow CNET blogger Robert Vamosi wrote an item headlined "With improvements, e-voting could be good, says researcher." I think that e-voting is a very bad thing and that no "improvements" will ever convert it to a good thing. But I'm not an expert on the subject, so I asked Rebecca Mercuri, a specialist in computer security and electronic voting, if she would like to respond to the claim made by the "researcher" in question. Mercuri has appeared many times on the Personal Computer Show to discuss electronic voting, which is … Read more

Ben Mullins' new project might be a vision of bedroom pop's future. Built of choppy drum loops and shiny synth leads, it nonetheless feels soulful in spirit, showing how, with the right melodies and mixing, a "sterile" vocabulary can make music that's far from it.

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If ever there was a time for a famous futurist to be giving a keynote address at the Game Developers Conference, this is it.

When Ray Kurzweil, the author of The Singularity is Near and one of the most noted futurists around, takes the stage at GDC 2008 in San Francisco on Thursday to talk about "the next 20 years of gaming," he'll be weighing in at a moment in the industry's existence when the lines between games and Hollywood and advertising are blurring, when the term "gamer" encompasses 75-year-old grandmothers and when the … Read more

A goddess of contemporary electro, Miss Kittin embodies all that is cold, foreign, and simultaneously sexxxed up. New album "Batbox" sees her lightening up and adding an indie-rock edge. Make no mistake, though: She's still rocking the beats.

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This Montreal DJ makes avant-garde, industrial house-tronica cut in the lean lines of a recovering mimimalist. The thunderous warehouse beats are strangely sparse, a trick further enabled by the slippery rhythms of Poirier's other love: hip-hop.

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Today, we talk about Valentine Day's best and worst dates with ace reporter Caroline McCarthy. Also, Time Warner and Viacom are coming to Hulu, Spielberg's new video game Boom Blox, and EA's GameShow. We also hear from some our loyal listeners about Optimash Prime.

Listen now: Download today's podcast

All of you out there who are eagerly awaiting the fantastical creature-creating delights of Spore will want to get a gander at the latest images from the forthcoming evolution game.

EA on Wednesday made available its broadest set of shots yet of the highly anticipated title, including screenshots from every level, as well as images of the tools used to conjure creatures, buildings, vehicles, and UFOs. This game is clearly a playground for fertile imaginations--your vision will be the only thing standing between you and the giant, triple-eyed, snaggle-toothed purple spider that roams your dreams.

In the latest game from … Read more

At long last, there's a ship date for Spore.

Electronic Arts announced Tuesday that the much-anticipated new game from The Sims creator Will Wright will ship on September 7.

The company announced that the game--which tasks players with advancing a character progressively from primordial ooze to small tribes to cities to civilizations and into space--will launch worldwide on PCs, Macs, Nintendo DS, and mobile phones.

Previously, the company had said it would launch the game simultaneously on PCs and Macs, but had said nothing about timing or that the DS and mobile versions would come out at the same … Read more