Topic - The Verge - All Posts

Whatever era you call it, post-PC or simply PC plus, the Mac vs. PC war has ignited once again today. In a fresh Windows 8 ad, Microsoft is directly attacking Apple's iPad on price, an approach it took during the early Vista days with low-priced laptops. It's also doing it in a way that parodies Apple's own commercial, complete with Siri's voice. Microsoft choses to highlight Windows 8's side-by-side apps, PowerPoint, and the $449 price of the 64GB ASUS' VivoTab Smart as the benefits of Windo...

Prehistoric human artwork is simple but breathtaking, as anyone who has seen some up close or in movies such as Werner Herzog's 2011 documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams can attest. But now archaeologists say that there is more to it than meets the eye: a group of rock carvings in the Italian Alaps act as still frames that become animated as the Sun moves across the sky, according to archeologists at University of Cambridge in the UK. "Watching the sun arc and fall over one of these panels an...

Samsung's been teasing its flexible, full-color display technology since 2011 when it acquired Liquavista, but it never actually shipped in a consumer product. One of the few companies that still has a viable e-reader business, Amazon today confirmed to CNET that it had purchased the company from Samsung, following early reports from The Digital Reader. With tablets, e-readers, and rumored plans to get into the phone game, Amazon should be able to take advantage of Liquavista's electrowetting...

Whether you're a fan of Mad Men, Game of Thrones, or American Idol, you probably know the danger of opening Twitter before you've caught up on the latest episode. Evolver.fm reports that a new Chrome extension, and the winning entry of the TVnext Hack competition, is aiming to quell dedicated viewers' concerns by blocking spoilers before they hit their Twitter feeds. Developer Jennie Lamere's tool removes possibly unwanted TV news from Twitter until you've finished watching a show — and, like...

Microsoft dropped the biggest hint at the return of a Start button to Windows 8 today. Speaking at the Wired Business Conference in New York, Windows chief Julie Larson-Green reiterated that Microsoft is looking to change certain elements of its upcoming Windows 8 update, codenamed Blue, in response to user feedback. "Some of it is about not just about time on task or how quickly they learn it… some of it is just in the comfort level that people have." That comfort level has left some confuse...

Laser aficionado Patrick Priebe has created a scarily realistic working replica of the Plasma Cutter featured in the game Dead Space. According to Gizmag, Priebe spent about 200 hours building the weapon, which shoots a total of five laser beams — three green lasers for aiming, and two blue, 1,500 milliwatt beams for burning. As demonstrated in the video below, the weapon can shift between horizontal and vertical orientations, and even ejects energy packs after every round. It doesn't seem ca...

Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, released in 2002 for the Nintendo GameCube, wasn't a commercial success, but the game became a cult classic because of a clever time-traveling plot and the unique way it horrified its players. Instead of relying on the jump scare, Eternal Darkness would actively screw with player's heads, say by pretending that they had suddenly died a violent death, or even that their save file had been deleted if their avatar's sanity was in question. Now, after years of ...

UNICEF has launched a bold advertising campaign that takes direct aim at perhaps the most ubiquitous form of online activism — the Facebook "like." Late last month, UNICEF Sweden released three commercials that urge viewers to support humanitarian aid not through posts or shares on social media, but monetary donations. The Swedish-language spots each present different variations on this theme, but by far the most harrowing stars a ten-year-old orphan speaking directly to the camera from insid...

Canadian robot money is on the horizon. A new $5 note coming in November will feature famous Canadian-made space robots Canadarm2 and Dextre alongside a spacewalking astronaut. The bill is the latest in Canada’s switch from cotton to longer-lasting, recyclable polymer for its national currency, and was fittingly unveiled aboard the International Space Station by Canadian astronaut, musician, and zero-gravity physics instructor Chris Hadfield. The new bill “highlights Canada’s technological ac...

A massive hurricane at Saturn's north pole is coming into sharper focus than ever before thanks to new close-up imagery and video released today by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The storm, which has cloud speeds up to 330 miles per hour and an eye that's 1,250 miles wide — about 20 times the size of an average hurricane eye on Earth, or about half the size of Australia — has been active for an indeterminate number of years, according to NASA. Continue reading…

Apple has released a new, one-minute commercial for the iPhone 5 that puts the focus on the camera. First reported by 9to5Mac, the ad shows people using the iPhone's camera in a variety of situations over the plaintive sounds of a single piano. Fortunately, none of the shots appear to include portait video, though pictures of food and — sadly — concert video both make an appearance. The ad is notable for a few reasons. The first is that it's a return to Apple's classic, heartstring-tugging fo...

Jaguar thinks its new F-Type sports car is sexy enough to be the star of its own movie. So the British automaker (owned by Indian company Tata) went ahead and made one with Ridley Scott Associates, the acclaimed director's production company. The resulting short film that premiered at Sundance London yesterday, titled Desire, is a thriller starring Emmy award-winning actor Damian Lewis, of Showtime's hit series Homeland. He plays a car delivery man who gets caught up in a dangerous chase invo...

SpaceX last night released a video of the latest successful test flight of its Grasshopper prototype rocket, a spacecraft designed to launch and land vertically. We've already seen the Grasshopper hit some impressive marks, flying over 260 feet high in March before landing precisely back on the launch pad at SpaceX's test facility in McGregor, Texas. But this latest test flight, Grasshopper's fifth, continues SpaceX's goal of launching the rocket to ever-increasing heights, this time up to 82...

Syfy has released a haunting new trailer for Helix — the highly anticipated TV series from Battlestar Galactica showrunner Ronald D. Moore. The series, which was officially greenlit last month, revolves around a group of scientists investigating a possible disease outbreak in the Arctic. Their research eventually leads them down a more dystopian path, culminating in what the network describes as "a terrifying life-and-death struggle that holds the key to mankind’s salvation or total annihilat...

You could be forgiven for not having the 57th anniversary of commercial videotape recording marked in your diary, but YouTube is here with a reminder. Certain videos on the site now give you the option to watch them in VHS mode, bringing all the fun of static and fuzz to your modern viewing experience. It's all in memory of the Ampex VRX-1000, which is commonly considered the world's first practical videotape recorder and blew competitors away when it was shown off on April 14th, 1956 at the ...

Facebook has released a new commercial with an unusual star — CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The company's "Launch Day" ad, published to the web yesterday, sees Zuckerberg deliver an address to his employees prior to the release of Facebook Home, Facebook's new Android-integrated mobile operating system. "Guys! This is it," Zuckerberg exclaims upon entering the scene at Facebook's headquarters, before telling his team that Facebook Home is ready to ship. The focus then shifts to Joey, an employee playi...

GE wants you to feel better about going to the hospital now that it's helping "connect" medical machinery and software using...Agent Smith from The Matrix? That's the impression of a new commercial for well, no specific GE product per se, but a larger trend the company and others have taken to calling the "industrial internet," which basically involves adding internet connectivity and applying big data analytics to all sorts of industrial machinery and infrastructure, which have traditionally...

A nice side-effect of President Obama releasing his 2014 budget proposal today: a number of federal agencies, including NASA, have released more detailed information on what they plan to do with their allocations for the coming year. In NASA's case, that includes the news it's starting work on a far-fetched plan to capture an asteroid and bring it closer to the Earth so that astronauts can visit it by 2025. NASA also revealed new details, imagery, and video animation on just how it plans to n...

A still from Burger King Cruelty, produced by Mercy for Animals. Americans love their hamburger, but they hate to see where it comes from. That dichotomy is leading to a rash of so-called "Ag Gag" laws being enacted across the US, as reported on by The New York Times this week. The laws aim to block or severely limit activists’ ability to film inside agricultural facilities, such as slaughterhouses and egg, cattle, and dairy farms. So far, three states have passed such laws, and there are ele...

Microsoft had originally been planning to unveil its next-generation Xbox details at an event in April, but The Verge has learned that the company has pushed this back to May. Windows watcher Paul Thurrott revealed recently that Microsoft is planning an Xbox event for May 21st, and we understand this date is accurate. This is the tentative date for a next-generation Xbox announcement, but Microsoft had originally planned an April 24th event. Always-on drama Sources familiar with Microsoft's X...

Facebook seldom airs ads of its own, but the company has released a pair of new TV spots to promote Facebook Home — its new suite of apps that can take control of Android devices, effectively creating a "Facebook phone." One of the company's new ads, titled "Airplane," shows a passenger using Facebook Home to swipe through disparate updates from friends, who then materialize on his plane: like RuPaul's Drag Race darling Shangela, and a nephew with a cake-smeared face. The ad focuses on Facebo...

PETMAN, the creepily lifelike robot from Boston Dynamics, has made some remarkable strides in the last few years. Once nothing more than a headless walker with a penchant for push-ups, PETMAN has now morphed into a veritable Terminator, capable of squatting, swiveling, and celebrating, as evidenced by the company's latest video. But PETMAN's newest, and perhaps scariest feature is its camouflaged wardrobe, replete with gasmask. According to Boston Dynamics, the robot's temperature-regulated h...

Google has given the first indication as to when it will release its first Blink-enabled builds of its Chrome browser, confirming that it will enable its new rendering engine in Chrome 28. Answering questions submitted by the Chrome developer community in a Q&A video panel, Chrome developer advocate Paul Irish explained that while Blink is already integrated in Chrome Canary builds, we can expect to see it in stable versions of the browser "in around 10 weeks." Continue reading…

Following last week's Verge Mobile Show hiatus, we came to understand that skipping a week can lead to some table-flipping. So this week, all that all the rage, vitriol, ennui, and resentment that had been pent-up in a distended mass in the bodies of every smartphone user needs to be vented like a spleen under the knife of a medieval surgeon. Vlad, Dan, and Dieter just happen to have some blades and maybe a few leeches lying around, so we'll do our level-best to ensure that the dark humours a...

iCloud, perhaps more than any Apple software product, is meant to "just work." When Apple introduced iCloud, it made clear its hopes to eradicate settings menus and file systems in favor of automation. Steve Jobs pledged to do a better job than he did on MobileMe, Apple’s notoriously horrible stab at web services a few years ago. With iCloud, changes you make to documents on your computer show up instantly on your iPhone and vice versa. "It just works," Jobs exclaimed when he first demoed the...

A robotic snake developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University has suddenly gained a frightening new power— the ability to hug things. Last week, the university's Biorobotics Laboratory published a new video of its modular snake, demonstrating the robot's ability to reactively latch on to objects. When thrown against a pole, the robot automatically wraps itself around it, securely grasping to it in a constrictor-like hold. The Biorobotics Laboratory has been developing robotic snakes ...

Reddit just launched it first original video series on YouTube, "Explain It Like I'm Five (ELIF)." The series, an educational comedy, consists of three episodes based on one of Reddit's user created forums (subreddits) of the same name, where users (Redditors) strive to answer each other's questions on complex subjects as simply and straightforwardly as possible. "It was more inspired by the content in the thread posts than actually quoting them or using them directly," Erik Martin, Reddit's ...

ESPN is suspending Bill Simmons, the marquee columnist and editor of the network's Grantland site, from using Twitter. The suspension follows Simmons' critical tweets of ESPN's show "First Take" over a recent heated argument between its host Skip Bayless and Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman. ESPN just confirmed the suspension to The Hollywood Reporter after rival sports site Deadspin first reported on it via anonymous sources. The Reporter claims his suspension will end tomorrow. I...

"Is there life on Mars?" David Bowie crooned in the 1971 glam rock hit of the same name. Four years later, NASA launched the twin Viking missions to the Red Planet in part to help answer that very question. They became the first spacecraft to land on another planet in human history. Almost forty years and 17 attempted missions to Mars later, we still don't know for sure if the planet has or ever had life. Even with this week's exciting news that the Curiosity rover discovered the most conclus...

On Wednesday night, the anonymous videographer behind the infamous "47 percent video" shot at a private Mitt Romney fundraiser in May 2012 revealed himself on MSNBC's The Ed Show. Scott Prouty was a bartender working high-end banquets in Boca Raton, Florida, including Romney's $50,000 per plate dinner. He is a registered independent who brought his Canon camera with him in case Mitt Romney wanted to meet and take photos with the staff, as Bill Clinton had after a similar event. No one had tol...

Age of Empires II is a monument to the glory days of sprites, battlefield evangelism, and real-time strategy, and you'll be able to get another shot at spreading your influence around the world when an HD version of the game arrives next month. Age of Empires II: HD Edition is based on Age of Empires II: Age of Kings, released in 1999, and has been visually remastered with new textures, effects, and support for 1080p displays and multiple monitors. As Eurogamer reports, the reworked version w...

The SXSW Gaming Expo is preposterously loud. At one side of the room, a Starcraft tournament is reaching its climax, but on the other side, one group of guys is yelling louder. They sound like a basement full of adolescents discussing the newest Electronic Gaming Monthly cover story, or like the NINTENDO SIXTY-FOUR kid unwrapping his Christmas present. “Is the Oculus Rift, a virtual reality 3D headset, the future of gaming?” they ask. “Or, is it something bigger — the future of life on planet...

In 1989, when the internet was predominantly ASCII-based and HyperCard had yet to give birth (or at least act as a midwife) to the world wide web, R.U. Sirius launched Mondo 2000. “I’d say it was arguably the representative underground magazine of its pre-web day,” William Gibson said in a recent interview. “Posterity, looking at this, should also consider Mondo 2000 as a focus of something that was happening.” Twenty years ago, it was cypherpunk that was happening. And it’s happening again t...

For most people, the words "Harlem Shake" evoke images of arrhythmic hip thrusts, ridiculous costumes, and cringeworthy choreography. But for Mahmoud Tabei, the irrepressible internet meme carries a far more meaningful connotation. Tabei, 17, is one of many young Egyptians who have begun producing "Harlem Shake" videos not for LOLs or viral fame, but as a means of peaceful protest against his country’s conservative Islamist government. Late last month, he and three other friends formed the "S...

The British indie comedy Pulp is today debuting exclusively on Xbox Live. The release marks the first time a feature-length movie has ever been released exclusively for the platform, but Microsoft tells BBC News it plans to distribute more films this way in the future. Pulp centers on a comic book writer who's unwillingly forced to help the police take down a money-laundering drug cartel. It was was well-received on the film festival circuit last year, but apparently the cost of a traditional...

Since its Netflix debut on February 1st, the political drama House of Cards has prompted a wave of binge-viewing, with Kevin Spacey's machiavellian Majority Whip Frank Underwood proving hugely popular. Now, an enterprising writer-director duo has transported Underwood from one nest of political intrigue to another, taking him off Capitol Hill and placing him at the heart of the Vatican. An extremely well-made spoof trailer, House of Cardinals was uploaded to YouTube yesterday and is the work ...

Gaming-centric online video network Machinima is set to host a new live action web series based on Valve's cult puzzle platformer Portal. Dubbed Aperture R&D, the series will be produced by Wayside Creations, responsible for 2011's popular fan film Fallout: Nuka Break, and will focus on workers at Portal's Aperture Laboratories, starting on March 15th. From the look of Machinima's teaser trailer, embedded below, Aperture R&D will build on the game's characteristic dark humor, providing a sort...

Created during January's 2013 Global Game Jam, Surgeon Simulator 2013 throws out the preternatural strength and skill most games give their player characters and gets back to the basics: moving each one of your clumsy, slippery fingers while you perform open-heart surgery. You'll be lucky to keep from dropping your patient's lungs, let alone give him a new heart before he dies of blood loss. And with Surgeon Simulator's addition to Steam's Greenlight program earlier this week, the developers ...

We haven't heard a peep out of OnLive since the company's near-collapse last year, but the cloud gaming service has never stopped. Today, the company's bringing its first new title to the platform since September, and it's a pretty good deal to boot. You can now purchase a streaming copy of The Witcher 2: Enhanced Edition to play via OnLive for $19.99, and get a full downloadable PC copy of the game from Good Old Games, too. Even if you decide not to stream the game, you're still getting your...

Ahead of Microsoft's annual TechForum event, the company is sharing its latest vision of the future. Focused on home and work, Microsoft puts forward a vision of multiple giant displays powered by devices and services. In one particular scenario a Surface tablet attaches to a touchscreen to link and transfer data. Touchscreens are persistent throughout and the idea of voice activation and convenience of using multiple devices and services is apparent. Microsoft's latest vision is focused on t...

Recent years have seen viral videos receive increasing coverage from traditional media outlets, but as Mathew Ingram writes in a piece for paidContent, they're not always thoroughly vetted. Last year, for instance, several major TV outlets reported on a YouTube video of a pig rescuing a drowning goat, without first investigating to determine its authenticity. (It was later proven to be part of a clever marketing campaign.) As Ingram argues, this enthusiasm for viral content threatens to blur ...

US Army Private First Class Bradley Manning has pleaded guilty on 10 counts involving disclosing information to an unauthorized person, but has pleaded not guilty to 12 charges, including "aiding the enemy." The guilty pleas cover less serious offenses of misusing classified information and carry a combined maximum sentence of 20 years. If convicted of aiding the enemy, Manning could be imprisoned for life. This week, word began to leak that Manning would plead guilty to some charges but not ...

Cookie or creme? It's a question that's divided Oreo fans and households for decades, and it's at the center of a brilliant new ad campaign from the blue-boxed cookie maker. Released on the heels of the company's stellar Super Bowl campaign, the spot stars self-proclaimed "physicist" David Neevel — advertising creative and purported mastermind behind a complex machine that automatically removes divides and de-cremes any Oreo. Continue reading…

Massive Attack was one of the more successful "trip-hop" groups of the 90s and 2000s, with their album Mezzanine selling nearly four million copies and spawning the hit track "Teardrop." Even if you're not a Massive Attack fan, chances are you've heard it as in the opening of Fox's doctor drama House. You probably haven't heard a version quite like this, however. Electronic musician j.viewz recently released a video of him performing the classic track using a variety of fruits and vegetables ...

As this year's Mobile World Congress approaches, Asus has already snagged the prize for Weirdest Teaser. Following up on Wednesday's initial video, in which an unidentified flying objects "docks" with Barcelona's famous Sagrada Família church, the company's latest offering involves a statue of Christopher Columbus coming to life and taking a phone call. A joke about phone-tablet hybrids — the narrator decribes Columbus as "the guy with the tablet in his hand" — the video seems to promise some...

If we took issue with The Hobbit, it wasn't because of the special effects. Peter Jackson's Weta Digital studio is known for its stellar effects work, and has released a video showing how some of the movie's scenes were composed. It's stunning to see entire environments conjured from thin air, and, as /Film points out, Weta Digital's work makes the CGI cityscapes of Looper look tame in comparison. The effects company has a few more "behind the scenes" videos on its YouTube page, so if you're ...

When will we see a transparent smartphone? It's a question that's been circulating for years, thanks to films like Minority Report and Iron Man 2, which sparked dreams of a diaphanous mobile future. And now, more than a decade later, we still don't have an answer. Sony Ericsson's Xperia Pureness fell flat when it hit the market in 2009, and subsequent concept designs never came to fruition, leaving only a trail of dashed hopes and semi-transparent feature phones in their wake. Now, Taiwan-bas...