In 1984, Apple launched an ad campaign based on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which depicted IBM users as mindless followers and Mac users as visionaries and rebels. Now, the man behind it, Regis McKenna, has explained that he think it was more successful than the product it attempted to sell.
Great ideas for band names pop up all the time. Just last week, Vapour Rush was suggested as a possible name for my future Brit Rock project — a phrase stolen from a medical device designed to treat emphysema. But those weird little phrases, previously tossed aside and forgotten about, actually get put to use these days: as Tumblr sites.
Sony has had a rough time being hacked in the past. But now hackers have reportedly downloaded its Michael Jackson back catalog, consisting of 50,000 tracks, many of which have never been released.
Sadly, even though digital pirates are anarchic on one level, they do still need rules and, in fact, the overlords of torrent sites often meet to establish quality standards. Sadly, their latest decisions have the torrent community up in arms.
Ahead of Wednesday's iPad launch, Apple has just announced that it's hit a staggering 25 billion downloads from its App Store. That puts Google's total of 10 billion in the shade. [Apple]
Try sending a text message at midnight on New Year's Eve, and you'll struggle: there's too much data and not enough bandwidth to cope with it. But now a team of researchers have developed twisted radio waves inspired by pasta, which could allow a "potentially infinite" number of channels to be broadcast simultaneously.
There's something extremely compelling about seeing a person covered in fire; it's simultaneously terrifying and mesmerising. Fortunately, it's possible to take pictures like this without permanently scarring your friends. Here's how.
Even though HTC makes some admirable phones, there has long been one common complaint about its handsets: Sense. The UI, that the company insists on plastering over the Android OS, is bloated, slow and a pain in the arse. Turns out HTC agrees, and it's changing it.
If you spend a lot of time in Photoshop, chances are you use — or would benefit from — a tablet instead of a mouse. Wacom's offerings tend to be some of the best, and their new Intuos5 range seems no exception.
We take clean drinking water for granted, but in the developing world it's a big and expensive problem. Now, scientists are turning to a plant known as the Miracle Tree to create a new way of purifying water.
It's been a rough ride for webOS of recent times. But despite the OS continuing to survive, HP has decided to ditch a large chunk of it's development team.
Google is fond of reworking existing concepts in modern ways; you only need to look at HUD glasses and autonomous cars to know that. But at one point in time, it was also mulling the idea of revolutionising the economy by creating its own currency.
If you thought emperor penguins were big, this prehistoric cousin put them to shame. In its day it stood over four feet tall and was 50 per cent heavier than the already pretty massive emperor we know today.
If you can dimly remember the concept of refraction from school, you're doing better than most. Perhaps if you'd been taught using this video as an example, you'd have paid more attention.
