Computing

Google goes for quiet comprehensiveness; Apple chooses charisma. Which strategy ensures success?

Adam Rothstein ponders hardware betas, connections between the world and the cloud, and products that aren't products, in the second post reviewing Google's Cr-48 Chrome Notebook.

If I were to equate gadget blogging to some occupation in a slice of modern cinema, the film that most immediately comes to mind is The Human Centipede: First Segment. That 2010 parable, directed by Tom Six, focuses on the misadventures of three people who, through a wacky series of missteps, are each sewn... shall we say... input-to-output to one another. Gadget blogging, you see, is primarily an act of chain digestion.

Adam Rothstein is a blogger, tech thinker, unemployed philosopher�and now, a beta tester of one of the coveted Google Chrome notebook computers. In the first of four posts about the beta experience, Adam finds that the unnanounced arrival of the device makes him feel like a combination of The Matrix's Neo and a Milo from The Phantom Tollbooth.

A Data-viz lab headquartered in the "mythical birthplace of HAL 9000" produces both eye-popping IMAX animations and rigorous modelings of scientific data. In fact, these things are one and the same. Video after the jump.

Remember how we used to say that when the machines start reproducing, we'll know we're in trouble"? Well maybe it's time for a gut-check on that one. Video after the jump.

The Sunday New York Times' thrilling coverage of the uncovering of the Stuxnet worm prompts questions that complicate images of the coming Internet of Things.

"App" isn't just a shortened word and a new slang term; it's a word for a shortened, slang application, says game designer and critic Ian Bogost. It's breaking the dominance of applications suites of old�and perhaps shattering the aesthetics of computing along the way.

To demo their Javascript framework for the Kinect, this MIT Media Lab team made a gestural web browser interface. Insert gratuitous tech-blogger Minority-Report rave here.

A documentary that helps us glimpse one of modernity's unlikeliest and most enticing of possible ends: the open-source cracking-open of industrial society.