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Movie review: Star Trek Into Darkness
You reboot a popular science fiction series, but you cleverly restart the series’ timeline too, to give you not only a fresh, clean page on which to begin writing a brand new mythology, but also a fan-friendly way to tie it all in to the established continuity.
That’s the trick director JJ Abrams - he of Lost fame - and …
Star Trek: The original computer game
Antique Code Show Ah, the simple pleasures of the earliest computer games - and you don’t get much earlier than 1971.
As Star Trek: Into Darkness warps onto UK cinema screens this weekend, we look back at not only the first attempt to bring the franchise to computer screens, but what was arguably one of the most popular, certainly the most …
Pirates scoff at games dev sim's in-game piracy lesson
Australian games developer Greenheart Games has released a cracked version of its own product – a games business simulation called “Game Dev Tycoon” – as an experiment in education of pirates and their reaction to a game that tells them their software-pinching ways are evil.
The startup outfit detailed its exploits here, …
Ten ancestors of the netbook
Feature Come 2015, we’re told, the netbook will be dead and gone, out-evolved by the more fleet of foot, more desirable media tablet.
We shouldn’t mourn the netbook’s passing, though. It has had, in one form or another, a good innings. While some folk may look back to the category’s debut in 2007 with the launch of Asus’ Eee PC 701 - …
Can't find your motor? Apple patents solve car park conundrums
Apple has filed a series of patents which will help people find their motors in a crowded car park and then open the doors without using a key.
The patents that emerged today are called "method for locating a vehicle" and "accessing a vehicle using portable devices".
The first sets out a system for anyone who wants to leave …
Mosaic turns 20: Let's fire up the old girl, show her the web today
NCSA Mosaic - marking its 20th anniversary this week - was not the first web browser, but it was the first to be widely used.
Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the web, describes its early days in his book Weaving the Web. Berners-Lee states that the first browser - WorldWideWeb - was text-based, and he had an early version working …
Sord drawn: The story of the M5 micro
Feature It took Japanese micro maker Sord more than six months to launch its M5 home computer in the UK, but in April 1983, the company said the Z80A-based machine would finally go on sale during the following month - half a year after it was originally scheduled to arrive over here.
It was a bold move. Even in November 1982, when the …
Ten Windows 8 Ultrabooks
Product Roundup Stop anyone on the street and ask them for a definition of the term ‘Ultrabook’ and I suspect they will look at you with utter incomprehension. Hardly surprising, since Intel’s effort to create a popular brand for thin’n’light notebooks hasn’t really been a roaring success.
To me, the Ultrabook is the logical evolution of the …
Manual override: Raspberry Pi beginners' books
Feature The Raspberry Pi has been out for just over a year now. It has undergone a couple of revisions during that time, most recently around October 2012, but a short while ago I decided it was time I ought to try it out and see what the diminutive, Linux-running micro can do.
Entirely coincidentally, the Raspberry Pi Owners’ Workshop …
Ten Windows tablets
Product Roundup Twelve months ago the idea of compiling a list of Windows tablets that you would actually want to buy would have been as impossible to do as it would have been farcical to suggest. But with the launch of Windows 8 and Windows RT all that has changed, and we are now faced with a bewildering array of fondleslabs all running …
Sonic the Hedgehog
Antique Code Show Pocket-money saved, game ordered, wait for the postman and... nothing. A friend had the game already – rubbing salt into the wound – yet my journey of anticipation home from school each day still arrived at a big hole of spiky blue hedgehog nothingness. The original Sonic the Hedgehog was especially hyped throughout its long …
WTF is... H.265 aka HEVC?
Feature When Samsung unveiled its next-generation smartphone, the Galaxy S4, in March this year, most of the Korean giant’s fans focused their attention on the device’s big 5-inch, 1920 x 1080 screen, its quad-core processor and its 13Mp camera. All impressive of course, but incremental steps in the ongoing evolution of the smartphone. …
The ten SEXIEST computers of ALL TIME
Product Round-up Does a computer need to look sexy? You might say that the looks of such a pragmatic gadget don’t matter. After all, most of us have, at one time or another, had to make do with bland, beige boxes almost exactly like everyone else’s bland, beige box, and it didn't hinder us from getting the job done, or made play any the less …
WTF is... the Quantified Self?
Feature The woman sitting opposite me on the Tube is reading a book. She turns the page and I watch her hand come up to her face. She strokes her lips, and then the fingertips disappear into her mouth: she’s nibbling the nail of her ring finger.
The hand returns to the book to turn the page, but before she’s read halfway down it, the …
Reg man bested in geek-to-geek combat - in World War 3 nerve centre
Geek's Guide to Britain During the Cold War, Neatishead in Norfolk was theoretically the worst place in the UK to live: the nearby RAF base would be target Number One if the Russians nuked us.
This was brought home to me in a guided tour by a retired officer, whose old job was to run Blighty’s air defence. Standing in the 1980s-era Cold War control …
Blighty's revolutionary Cold War teashop computer - and Nigella Lawson
Geek's Guide to Britain The Victorian offices were bulldozed long ago for a stack of flats and mirrored offices, and there's not a single indication to the significance of this site - or what happened here.
This isn't the scene of a lost battle, and the bones of a missing Plantagenet king do not slumber beneath the car park serving the offices.
Sixty- …
Experts agree: Your next car will be smarter than you
Feature Forget Google's self-driving car – for a few years, at least. Today's real action in the computer-meets-car arena is in the development of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), as was made abundantly clear at last week's GPU Technology Conference.
"We're not going to find ourselves driving in an autonomous car tomorrow," …
The Lynx effect: The story of Camputers' mighty micro
Archaeologic Not all of the early 1980s British home computers were fated to be as successful as Sinclair’s ZX series or Acorn's BBC Micro. Many were destined instead to be loved solely by keen but small communities of owners. For all these users’ enthusiasm, there were too few of them to sustain the cost of developing, manufacturing, …
Drilling into 3D printing: Gimmick, revolution or spooks' nightmare?
Special report 3D printing, otherwise known as additive manufacturing, is a subject that pumps out enthusiasts faster than any real-life 3D printer can churn out products.
In conventional machining, computer-aided design and computer-aided manufacturing (CADCAM) combine to make products or parts of products by cutting away at, drilling and …
Build a BONKERS gaming PC
Feature There is a select band of gamers who will only be satisfied by a huge amount of graphics and processing power. For them, the only thing to do is build a bonkers gaming PC.
In my opinion, the tricky part of the job is organising the pile of parts that you’ll use for the build. While we ‘Build a Bonkers...’ writers don’t worry too …
SimCity 4
Antique Code Show There’s a prevalent feeling throughout the whole of SimCity 4 that this is the game that Will Wright and Maxis would have liked to have made from day one. That is if graphics technology and PC hardware had been up to the task when the original SimCity was in development.
The 2003 release was expanded in both the macro and the …
Ten pi-fect projects for your new Raspberry Pi
Feature There was an article a while back, in Scientific American I think, that posed the question: given a super-powerful computer, with infinite computing power shoe-horned into a coke can, what would you do with it?*
The arrival of the Raspberry Pi (RPi) prompted a similar sort of question: given an (almost) disposable PC with late- …
Infinite loop: the Sinclair ZX Microdrive story
Archaeologic They would, Clive Sinclair claimed on 23 April 1982, revolutionise home computer storage. Significantly cheaper than the established 5.25-inch and emerging 3.5-inch floppy drives of the time - though not as capacious or as fast to serve up files - ‘Uncle’ Clive’s new toy would “change the face of personal computing”, Sinclair …
Ten ten-inch tablets
Product Round-up Does it make sense to own both a smartphone with a 5-inch screen and a 7-inch tablet? Arguably not. I can’t think of anything that I can do on my Nexus 7 that I couldn’t do equally well on a Samsung Galaxy Note II. Granted, the Nexus 7 makes a perfect partner for my Motorola Razr i, but if I used a Note II as my ‘phone’ I’d want …
Intel's Centrino notebook platform is 10 years old
Ten years ago, Intel decided notebook computers needed a boost. The technology wasn’t new, but while a fair few mobile workers had portable computers, and some even had modem cards or were using Bluetooth-connected phones to reach the internet, laptops weren’t seen as a truly mobile networkable device.
And so the chip maker …
Ten serious sci-fi films for the sentient fan
Feature Zap guns, robots, lightspeed-smashing spaceships and bikini-busting princesses do not real science fiction make. Just ask George Lucas.
Star Wars defined movie SF in the mind of many a mainstream viewer. But while the film and its sequels and, er, prequels certainly provide the sci-fi enthusiast with thrills a-plenty - guilty or …
Multimillionaire Brit games dev wants your cash for Shroud of the Avatar
Multimillionaire games developer, moon rover owner and space tourist Richard Garriott has taken to Kickstarter to try to get funding for his new video game.
Shroud of the Avatar game on Kickstarter
Garriott, aka Lord British, is looking for $1m to make Shroud of the Avatar: Forsaken Virtues, which gamers have been describing …
Intel, Apple forging chip-baking deal?
Analysis Rumors are again swirling that Apple and Intel are in discussions about Chipzilla baking the chips Cupertino uses to power its iDevices.
"A source close to one of the companies says Intel and Apple executives have discussed the issue in the past year but no agreement has been reached," Reuters reported on Thursday.
This isn't …
SimCity 3000
Antique Code Show I don’t know if my gaming habits had started to become dominated by RTS and FPS games by the time SimCity 3000 made its delayed debut in 1999, but for some reason I don’t recall it registering on my radar.
Strange, for not only was SimCity 2000 one of my favourite games - as it remains to this day - but its sequel was also a …
Honk if the car in front is connected
Feature Connecting cars to the internet and to each other seems to be inevitable, whether or not you approve - and plenty don’t. Let’s face it, though, everything else is connecting to the internet, so why not your favourite drive? By 2017, according to ABI Research, a market watcher, some 50 million connected cars will be sold every …
Twenty classic arcade games
I’d better say it from the outset: picking 20 all-time arcade game classics is a nightmarish task, not simply because of the almost endless array of titles available to choose from, but because of all the really good ones you have to omit.
Space Invader
Here then, are the titles that made the cut, either because they have had …
Sergey Brin emasculated after HORROR smartphone disaster
Seething mass of testosterone and Google co-founder Sergey Brin has stated that smartphones are emasculating.
Speaking at the Technology, Education and Design TED conference series on the subject of Google Glasses and the future of Google, Brin let drop that he finds the fastest growing technology of the past decade to be " …
SimCity 2000
Antique Code Show The summer of 1995, I remember it well. I was but a slip of lad at the time, slightly console obsessed perhaps, but about to embark on a period of PC gaming that would put me at the forefront of cutting-edge videogame technology, nearly bankrupting my parents as I went.
It was my birthday and I’d just finished hooking up my …
Ten smartphones with tablet ambitions...
Product Round-up How we all laughed when Samsung launched the Galaxy Note toward the end of 2011. Who could possibly want a phone with a 5.3-inch screen? It turned out rather a lot of people did, and the unqualified success of the 4.8-inch Galaxy S III and 5.6-inch Galaxy Note 2 proved that what many punters want is a phone with a really, really …
Four firms pitch hi-def DRM for Flash cards
Panasonic, Samsung, Sony and Toshiba have begun licensing their new DRM technology for memory cards to anyone who feels the world needs yet another copy protection technology for HD content. They hope many content providers do indeed want a new DRM system, specifically one that secures content but doesn’t prevent content …
Review: Britain's 4G smartphones
Product Round-up It’s been a good few months since the first 4G LTE network fired up in the UK, and wiser men than I have already tossed their orbs about the what and the how of EE’s monopoly 4G network. Time then to consider the 4G handsets now available for use in Blighty, and in the process cast a beady eye on speeds and coverage outside the …
SimCity Classic
Antique Code Show Doughnuts. Doughnuts are what I think of when someone mentions SimCity in my vicinity. Not because I used to cram them into my face, Homer Simpson-style, while I played, but rather because, back in my childhood, I was obsessed with arranging my own ‘simmed’ city in perfect concentric 'doughnuts'.
Squares in three-by-three …
WTF is... Miracast?
Less than six months ago, there were just a handful of Miracast-certified products listed in the Wi-Fi Alliance’s kit database. Now there are nearly 150. A spectacular improvement for a little known technology. So what is it?
Miracast was formally launched in September 2012, but it was Google’s announcement a month and a half …
From stage to stream: The unseen tech at the BRIT Awards 2013
Feature If you think you know all about the O2 Arena having visited it when it was called the Millennium Dome, then think again.
When the site was sold to entertainment biz AEG in 2004, it was gutted and turned into a concert venue; all that remains of the original structure is the tent. Today, its owners claim it’s the busiest live …
WTF is... IEEE 1905.1?
Feature It sounds like a solution looking for a problem. A technology that allows networked devices in the home connected by different network media to operate as if they were connected across a single medium. Surely TCP/IP already allows you to do that, routing packets from, say, network attached storage linked to a router over an …
Tesla's Elon Musk v The New York Times, Round 2
There's no love lost between Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk and New York Times reporter John Broder this Valentine's Day, with the debate over the accuracy of Broder's recent review of the Tesla Model S having devolved into a bitter display of online "he said, she said."
The public spat first erupted on Monday, when the paper …
Tesla vs Media AGAIN as Model S craps out on journo - on the highway
Californian electric car maker Tesla Motors - well known for tangling repeatedly with the BBC (and the Register) over coverage of battery vehicles which it did not deem positive enough - is now in a row with the New York Times after one of the paper's journalists wrote a stinging review of its new Model S.
Tesla Model S sports …
