Up until now the games released on the PS4 have not been especially great, but this was largely to be expected. As with most next-gen consoles, the first thing developers do is simply beef up the graphics of previous games and rush them out. Hence, the graphically-superior-but-essentially-the-same, releases like Tomb Raider and Call of Duty.…
It would seem like an obvious idea. The planet needs to wean itself off fossil fuels, so why haven’t we built solar power plants in the deserts, to give us the energy we need? After all, in just six daylight hours, the Earth’s deserts soak up more energy than the entire planet uses in a…
It seems strange that technology has progressed in almost every field, but in supersonic travel things have seemingly regressed. Concorde was flying people faster than the speed of sound back in 1976, but since its retirement in 2003 there has been no commercial supersonic flight. Why not, and please can we have it back? The…
Nokia was the world’s number on cellular phone maker for more than fourteen years in a row As recently as 2008, it commanded about forty percent of the global market share. The odds are, you owned or knew someone who owned a Nokia phone. After all, if you look at the top thirteen best-selling phones…
The exact details are disputed, but yes, this is one of the stranger stories from the world of games and it stands as a subterranean monument to the hubris that caused the great console crash of 1983. Back in 1982, E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial was a huge box office hit. Released in June of that…
[For Esquire magazine, October 2011] The idea of Wikipedia is a huge one – putting the sum of all human knowledge in one place and making it accessible around the world. Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, Sue Gardner, is the person who ensures it remains, in every sense of the word, free. She’s increasingly…
At last, The Middle East has its own equivalent of iTunes. Recently, a musician was making a personal appearance at a Dubai Virgin Megastore and a young girl went up and handed over a piece of paper to be signed. “Don’t you have a CD you want signing?” the musician asked. “No, I don’t need…
Why the new iPad may provide a revolution in piracy as well as literature. For all the anticipation surrounding Apple’s latest hardware, the iPad doesn’t really offer us anything we haven’t already got on laptops and iPods. There is one feature, however, that Apple believes will be revolutionary: digital reading. The iPad goes on sale…
Matt Pomroy 