While vacationing in France, you find a DVD of Ishtar. Score! (It’s never been released on DVD in the US). But when you get home, you discover that you’ve purchased a Region 2 disc, which, in your Region 1 player, is as useful as a coaster. This raises two questions: Why do you want to watch Ishtar? And why do we still have region codes?

The answers: taste and money, respectively. Though there’s no accounting for the former, those codes may soon be gone.

Regional restrictions began in 1997, as DVD technology was rolling out. They have nothing to do with the NTSC and PAL...

Si tu me montres le tiens, je te montre le mien ! Dans un renvoi d’ascenseur prévisible, l’équipe juridique de Samsung a demandé à Apple de lui remettre la version de la prochaine génération de l’iPhone et iPad pour s’assurer que ses propres dispositifs futurs ne seront pas soumis à la même infraction d’imitation (dans le cadre de la poursuite exécutée par Apple le mois dernier).

A cloud. Photo Karen Ka Ying Wong / Flickr

Apple has confirmed maybe the worst kept secret in Silicon Valley: it’s been working on a cloud service, and will announce it at the June 6 Worldwide Developers Conference.

So now we know annual developer’s conference will unveil “iCloud®, Apple’s upcoming cloud services offering,” but we don’t know yet what it is, or what exactly will reside at the domain name it may have bought for $4.5 million in April.

Thought military tracking technology couldn’t get any creepier? Hold onto your tinfoil hats and hide behind the nearest curtain because the next generation of manhunting gear just took another step closer to reality.

What would happen if your future arrived too early? If you got the keys to your first car when you were eight? Landed your first big management job at 15?

I’ve been asking those questions while playing with the Cr-48 laptop, the first implementation of Google’s cloud-based Chrome operating system. After a few months with it, I feel like it’s important, but I also think it’s from a future we’re simply not ready for.

Asus risque de faciliter la tâche aux personnes qui n'arrivent pas à se décider entre un smartphone et une tablette. Selon des fuites en ligne, le fabricant taïwanais est sur le point de présenter le Padfone au salon informatique Computex 2011, qui se déroule du 31 mai au 4 juin. Le site PocketNow a en effet révélé des images d'un nouveau concept de tablette. Après le Motorola Atrix, qui permet de transformer un smartphone en netbook lorsqu'il est connecté à un dock, le Padfone se présente comme une tablette numérique dans laquelle vient se loger un smartphone. Ce dernier devrait tourner sous...