Summer PC-Buying

Smart shoppers are stuffing cash under their mattresses until August.

POSTED // Sep 6,2007 - The computer market has been pretty quiet for the past six months. Aside from Intel pretending to sell processors it can’t deliver, and lots of excitement surrounding wireless technologies that are years away, things have been still. Thanks to...

Miscellaneous

Shun the Outdoors

Summer fun means air conditioning and a copy of the clever MDK2.

By Eric Jacobsen

POSTED // Sep 6,2007 - The best games of the year come out in summertime. This must be by accident, because parents buy large amounts of games for their kids at Christmastime—parents don’t usually look at the boxes, so even crap games sell pretty well. Game programmers...

Miscellaneous

The Good Ol’ Days

Eight-mhz processors and 1,200-baud modems had a few things going for them.

By Eric Jacobsen

POSTED // Sep 6,2007 - “Eh? You kids and your fancy neuro-digital uplinks. Goshdarnit, back in my day we used our fingers to get on the web. We pounded keys and squeezed mice. Animal rights be damned, we liked it! And when the power went out, we’d boot up the old...

Miscellaneous

Home Work

The operating systems of the future might even make computers easier for your parents.

By Eric Jacobsen

POSTED // Sep 6,2007 - When I think about interface design, I think about my parents. My father is an engineer. One of my earliest memories is of him taking apart a remote-controlled Radio Shack tank, turning the controller into an ISA expansion card, and then writing a Basic...

Miscellaneous

House of Style

Attractive computers are easier to use, so why are we still on beige boxes?

By Eric Jacobsen

POSTED // Sep 6,2007 - Recently, this column examined Microsoft’s and Apple’s next stabs at creating a better user interface through style. Apple is taking the high road with OS X, an interface that Steve Jobs has described as “something you’d want to...

Miscellaneous

Right and Right

By Ben Fulton

POSTED // Sep 6,2007 - After finally getting around to viewing Napoleon Dynamite at the local theater—yes, I am the spittin’ image of him, just as Music & TV Editor Bill Frost maintained during my brief absence—the only other event I’m looking forward...

Miscellaneous

Bothered and Bewildered

Why bury Will Ferrell’s comic brilliance just so the movie can be called Bewitched?

By Scott Renshaw

POSTED // Sep 6,2007 - I’d like to give Nora Ephron credit for taking the high-concept comedy into the realm of the meta-high-concept comedy with Bewitched. That, however, would require the assumption that Ephron knows what she is doing as a filmmaker. And anyone who...

Miscellaneous

The Plame Game

By Ben Fulton

POSTED // Sep 6,2007 - In case you didn’t know by now, Karl Rove began his political career in Salt Lake City as chair of the University of Utah’s College Republicans in 1973 and 1974. And who would have ever guessed that, after dropping out of the University of...

Miscellaneous

Celebrate Independence

By Mary Dickson

POSTED // Sep 6,2007 - We just celebrated a very significant holiday'the Fourth of July. Significant not because of fireworks, flags, off-key renditions of “The Star Spangled Banner” and other trumped-up displays of patriotic fervor, but because of what the holiday...

Miscellaneous

Terror on the Tube

Freeing ourselves from terror is as unlikely as President Bush forging an eloquent sentence.

By D.P. Sorensen

POSTED // Sep 6,2007 - I kept flicking the remote, but the pictures were just the same: the mangled red double-decker bus; people dazed or bandaged; faces smudged with black smoke; ambulances wailing and flashing; reporters badgering beleaguered officials; solemn commentators...