ABOUT Alistair Clarke
Alistair worked in technical support for a while and emerged a frightened layabout wholly unprepared to deal with the realities of adulthood. He now dreams of being given some money to do stuff with words. He’s a huge PC gamer, and in the time he’s spent playing Team Fortress 2, he could have eaten at least ninety thousand cupcakes or acquired rudimentary juggling skills. He’d love to play console games but can’t justify the expense.
It’s already been a good year for followers of the burgeoning VR industry, and we’re not yet a month into it. Those who got a taste of the latest Oculus Rift prototype at CES 2014 heaped praise upon it, then a Valve-built headset at Steam Dev Days inspired rapturous reviews. While we now know that…
Digital filming has been the method of choice for major pictures for some time now, barring instances of auteur producers or directors throwing their weight around, yet only now has the first movie studio allowed the 35mm of yesteryear to slip into a much deserved retirement. Having announced that Anchorman 2 (I haven’t seen it…
Diligence, discipline, and self-control; all qualities I lack, for the most part. I work best in heady chunks, urged along by my desperate fear of failure and the rumbling momentum of oncoming wordy outpourings. Indeed, once my brain gets up to speed and my fingers start punching the keys, it’s dangerous to stop. Still, it’s…
Somewhere in the halls of the Eindhoven University of Technology, a fake hospital room was recently assembled for the purpose of using a program called RoboEarth to see how several robotic assistants can share information in order to help patients. While this is a logical development, and a natural extension of the existing functionality of the…
Radionomy—a sizeable digital broadcast network from Belgium—has completed its purchase of Winamp and Shoutcast, which means the time has come to wrap up my Winamp-related textual tour de force. After all, every up-and-down back-from-the-brink story deserves a solid trilogy. As world-renowned chemist Walter White once taught us, there’s something wonderful about the sequence of growth,…
This year’s installment of the Consumer Electronics Show concluded on Friday, but not before showing the world’s press a bevy of eye-catching gadgets and gizmos that will provide them with material for weeks of keyboard-based clicking and clacking (possibly even dull thudding for those with shedding and persistently workstation-adjacent animals.) As is inevitably the case…
Changes in the immense fabric of the internet tend to sneak up on us. Nascent systems that seem like impractical curiosities can gather momentum, developing by gradual increment, until one day we suddenly realize the progress that has been made. Microsoft’s Bing has been around for nearly five years, and in that time it has…
The Bitcoin bandwagon is proving to be extremely spacious. Dogecoin already popped up to show everyone what happens when the reasonable inclination to have an online currency without a shady history somehow meets the ludicrous desire to latch onto the latest rip-roaring side-splitting meme. Sweet, precious memes. Now comes Coinye West, set to drop at…
Another year, another round of sobering reminders that we might as well have all the information that flows through our internet endeavors neatly inscribed on our foreheads for all the good standard online security protocols do. 4.6 million users of the carelessness-enabling temporary photo service Snapchat have had their account details partially distributed, while some…
I’m hardly a Netflix expert, having only ever used it to watch the revived Arrested Development, but I’ve heard that some people use it to watch all kinds of things and I’d like to address said people. Pay attention, you shivering media junkies; there’s a big heap of content about to expire as I write…
Most websites function primarily through advertising revenue, and there is typically no decent alternative. That something can be so pervasive yet function with such questionable efficacy is a source of great intrigue, and the sketchy metrics that abound regarding the specifics of its financial justifiability make me wonder if the whole system is fundamentally shaky….
After the smartphone matured and exploded in popularity, it wasn’t long at all before most teenagers had practically unlimited access to information at any time. Now that it seems like the same can be said of children not even close to their teens—with forgoing that kind of immediate connectivity seen as peculiar—the calls for regulation…
I worked for some time in technical support, remotely accessing computers and resolving issues, or at least attempting to resolve them. Antivirus suites have come a long way in recent years, and there are various excellent free programs available. Furthermore, for the most part, viruses, Trojans and pieces of malware tend to be pretty similar…
When I wrote last week about the fundamental issue with YouTube’s knee-jerk Content ID system, I noted that Google could redeem itself to some extent with a strong and reasonable response to the mess it has created. That hasn’t happened; in fact, it’s pretty much doubled-down on its policies. To play it so coolly, it…
We’re seeing somewhat of an arms race when it comes to cheap Android tablets, with retail outlets of all shapes and sizes pumping out slates aplenty to offload at eye-catching price points. In the US, there have been offerings from Best Buy, Walmart, Sears, and Target, and you can even save more with a Kohl’s…