Keep it right here for live video of the Red Bull Stratos. Launching from Roswell, New Mexico, Felix Baumgartner will ascend to 120,000 feet in a stratospheric balloon then freefall back down to earth at top speeds estimated near …
Reviews & Features
Apocalypse MMO: Death Becomes World of Warcraft
This weekend thousands of players dropped dead where they stood in some of World of Warcraft’s greatest cities, from Orgrimmar to Ragnaros to Stormwind.
Entire populations winked out in a matter of hours, their skeletal …
Why Some 7-inch Tablets Will Eventually Be Given Away Free
About 18 months ago, I was one of the first to write about what I thought Amazon’s business model would be for its tablet that launched last fall. I had heard from my sources in Taiwan that Amazon was looking at selling the …
PlayStation Mobile Is Still a Letdown After All This Time
For a company that once denied the threat of smartphone gaming, Sony showed a lot of foresight when it announced PlayStation Suite in January 2011.
PlayStation Suite, now known as PlayStation Mobile, was supposed to bring …
How XCOM: Enemy Unknown Is Like Bowling
Since the XCOM: Enemy Unknown demo arrived, I’ve noticed an interesting line of criticism develop (or as a longtime PC strategy gaming wonk, I should say reappear) in response to the way Firaxis’s turn-based tactics puzzler …
Will the Android Upgrade Mess Ever Get Fixed?
Over at CNET, Casey Newton and Roger Cheng have a good story on Google’s Motorola division and its decision to renege on its pledge to update some 2011 phones from Android 2.3 Gingerbread to 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.
XCOM: Enemy Unknown — Definitely Not Halo Reach 2
You’d be forgiven for mistaking the new XCOM: Enemy Unknown launch trailer for a Halo Reach 2 teaser. It’s a slick, one minute, 38 second guns-and-aliens action brief — a festival of body armor, jetpacks, green plasma and …
Apple Without Steve Jobs: The First Year Only Tells Us So Much
This is — as you may have figured out by now — an article about how Apple has fared in the year since Steve Jobs passed away. I suspect that it’ll be one of scads of such stories to be published today, the first anniversary …
Nonprofit ScriptEd NYC Teaches Coding to Underprivileged Students
If you read the article in Monday’s New York Times about Microsoft engineers who teach computer science in high schools, then you may be interested in ScriptEd NYC. Led by two New York City professionals and Teach for America …
What’s With All the Dismal Resident Evil 6 Reviews?
Resident Evil 6 is in a pickle, caught in a narrow, lightless corridor of its own design and swarmed by critics using words like hacked off limbs to bludgeon it into Metacritic mediocrity.
I’m probably exaggerating a little. …
FreedomPop’s Free Mobile Data Plans: What You Need to Know
A new company called FreedomPop is offering something that seems too good to be true: 500 MB of free mobile data per month through your choice of a wireless hotspot or USB stick.
The service, which was announced last December, …
Who Cares About Neil Young’s Ultra-High Quality Music Standard?
Neil Young claims he’s going to change the way we listen to digital music by pairing a new iPod-competitive Pono music player (I see “Ponyo” — how about you?) with an audiophile-caliber music download service. The claims are …