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Many people have observed that drawing with a mouse is like drawing with a bar of soap. In conventional computer use, you slide your mouse around until you get the cursor where you want it to go, regardless of where the mouse is on the table (or on your thigh,
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VUDU is an exceptionally easy-to-use alternative to cable or dish video on-demand services and DVD rental and purchase outlets like Netflix, Blockbuster, or Hollywood. For $399 you get the hardware that has a 250GB storage capacity for your downloaded content and the service that vends the movies. The VUDU service
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The inexpensive XO laptop was created for children in underprivileged environments, but for the past few weeks I've been using it as a travel PC, leaving the 17-inch MacBook at home. The XO beats the MacBook hands down in portability. But could I get my work done on a laptop
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The annual Consumer Electronics Show - CES, as it as best known - is a festival of all things electronic: the place where the industry shows retail buyers, distributors, and journalists all things new for the coming year. Trade associations from Europe and the Pacific Rim show off the talents
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Six months ago Monroe Community College and Finger Lakes Community College kicked off a SUNY-wide experiment in the use of virtual worlds in college education.They established a beachhead in Second Life, held a one-day conference, and offered plots of land for educators to play with. More than 30 SUNY institutions
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For the next three weeks you'll have the opportunity to buy two laptop computers developed by some of the greatest minds in the digital era, encompassing ground-breaking advances in screen and battery technology, for a mere $399.What's the catch? There are two, really. One is that you'll have to give
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In just a few short weeks, the iPhone development community created some fantastic software for the iPhone, from the sublime to the ridiculous. Some of the innovations fill holes in the iPhone's functionality. They add tools like the ability to connect wireless GPS to the excellent Google maps on the
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Ok, it's not really the iPhone minus, it's more of an iPod Plus. Apple's recent announcement of the iPod Touch amounted to the company offering an iPhone without phone or camera capabilities. So what do you get, and for how much?You get a WiFi-enabled video, photo, and music player with
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Where can you find a school bus full of digital kids' art and video? Turtle robots that follow projected roads? Musical instruments that play sounds from physical textures?Computer displays made from film as thin as cellophane?And the One Laptop Per Child's XO laptop initiative's "$100 Laptop" for k-12 students in
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Since Apple announced its "Intel Macs," (Macintosh computers with an Intel CPU that would let you run both Windows and Mac operating systems), whole new markets have opened up for the Macintosh. And many people from all walks of life have been excited by the prospect of running two operating
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So I didn't wait in line. I wandered into the AT&T store in Pittsford late Saturday afternoon merely intending to order one. But I got two surprises. One, they still had iPhones in stock. Not the coveted 8-gigabyte model, but the 4-gigabyte model, which would do for my purposes. Two,
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Unlike Godot, Apple's iPhone will appear, and right on curtain time to boot. The venue is Apple and AT&T stores around the country, and the opening is at 6 p.m. on Friday, June 29, the day this piece went up on the web site. Potential customers around the country waited
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Under New York State law, the sale of any "indecent" material to a minor is a "Class E" felony punishable by three to four years in prison. Albany is currently debating amendments to existing laws that specifically target the sale of console games (XBOX 360, etc.) to minors if they contain "indecent"
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Monroe Community College and Finger Lakes Community College are leading a six-month-long, SUNY-wide initiative to explore the educational potential of Second Life. Second Life is a "virtual world" that can be used merely as a chat room, where you are represented in a 3-D space by a 3-D character, or
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While many of us relish the joys of tech, I hope none of us are blind to its down side. A recent book by long-time science and ecology writer Bill McKibben should be on your reading list. McKibben has been writing brilliantly about the negative effects of technology for years.
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At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last month, Sony representatives announced (with much fanfare) a paradigm shift in gaming that they called "Game 3.0." The provided a large list of concepts that made up the characteristic of the next generation of games. If you actively update your MySpace
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Today's hi-tech medical world has an array of support technologies sometimes referred to as "bridge" technologies. These solutions are not meant to be permanent; they're designed to address an urgent medical need and keep patients alive until, hopefully, a more definitive solution can be delivered.One example is dialysis. Patients with
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Ok, perhaps that's an overstatement, but there was a reasonable amount of Genesee-based action at the industry's annual gathering. The Game Developers Conference is the place where video and computer-game programmers, designers, artists, and marketers get together, share their tricks of the trade, and assess the future of the growing
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CEO Victoria Van Voorhis' Second Avenue Software makes games that send rocket ships through mazes and archeologists through virtual dungeons - all in the name of science education. These products end up in museums, on web sites, and in the back of textbooks.But now she and her year-old Pittsford company
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In the last six months or so, there's been an increase in press, buzz, and hype about virtual worlds and online games (often referred to as MMOGs, for Massively Multiplayer Online Games). The most successful of these --- the most popular virtual world, Second Life, and the most popular MMOG,
