Gadgetopia

In his two-star review of "War of the Worlds," Roger Ebert has issues with the design of the three-legged robot invaders: If evolution has taught us anything, it is that limbs of living things, from men to dinosaurs to spiders to centipedes, tend to come in numbers divisible by two. ...

Roger Ebert s Journal: Fanzines beget blogs: Roger Ebert has a blog now, which is crazy cool in and of itself. This week he talks about how the old world of fanzines preceded the current crop of blogs and perhaps even the Web itself. I have always been convinced that the ...

I was reading today about how Wikipedia is going to release a CD or DVD of all its content. Very cool idea. This got me reminicising about "The Golden Age of CD-ROMs." Remember when CD-ROMs were the big thing? From, say, 1996 to 1999 or 2000. Remember when Encarta and ...

Movie critic Roger Ebert recently answered a question from one of his readers regarding the use of Macs by the good guys in movies and Windows use by bad guys. "Since many Windows machines look alike, Apple is one of the few manufacturers that can gain by product placement, which ...

I, ROBOT / ** (PG-13): Wikipedia got a mention in Roger Ebert's review of "I, Robot," posted this morning. Asimov's robot stories were often based on robots that got themselves hopelessly entangled in logical contradictions involving the laws. According to the invaluable Wikipedia encyclopedia on the Web, Harlan Ellison and ...

Social manners: Adam makes a good point about the social networking apps. I’ve been invited onto the friends lists on Orkut and LinkedIn by several people that I don’t really know...Part of me feels awkward when rejecting these invitations, but I think I should know you before I call you ...

rogerebert.com :: Answer Man: At some point, Roger Ebert slammed video games. I don't know when -- I thought it was in the Doom review, but I couldn't find it there. Anyway, some guy emailed his AnswerMan column about it to defend video games. I was saddened to read that ...

SKY CAPTAIN AND THE WORLD OF TOMORROW / **** (PG): Some interesting information in Ebert's gushing review of this movie (it hits theaters today). Apparently there were no physical sets. Much will be written about the technique, about how the first-time director, Kerry Conran, labored for years to bring forth ...

It seems that there's always some consternation in the web design community regarding the styling of form elements. Usability studies and user observation has taught them that they shouldn't be applying styles to form controls; if you change the look of the control, it's less recognizable for novice users who ...