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/ 25 January 2008
"No longer are you a rogue street racer competing for pink slips or dodging cops and oncoming traffic at speeds in excess of 200km/h. You are now Ryan Cooper, an underground street racer recently gone legal and legitimate." Vincent Maher reviews <i>Need for Speed: ProStreet</i>.
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/ 5 November 2007
André Schlemmers project might not have earned him the coveted Microsoft Innovative Teachers Award this year, but educators can certainly learn a thing or two from him.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu recently entered a thriving virtual world called <i>Second Life</i> to be interviewed by Reuters bureau chief Adam Pasick. Somehow this doesn’t seem as strange as it would have a few years ago. Pasick explained that <i>Second Life</i> has a real economy and real culture, and therefore real news.
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/ 7 February 2007
I am an education specialist for foundation phase learners at a rural primary school called Matjeni in Mpumalanga. I come into contact with many children with varied problems in this depressed and vulnerable community.
The announcement of a $3,5-billion takeover of Macromedia by Adobe Systems has sent a shockwave across the web development community. It would seem, on the surface, that this is a match made in heaven — two of the most powerful companies in the industry finally pooling resources, skills and strategies. But as one scratches the surface, it becomes clear that Macromedia product users should be concerned.
”Whenever someone talks about bringing better technology to Africa I can’t help thinking to myself that you can’t eat bandwidth, and that you can’t use the internet to filter water. I am not suggesting communication infrastructure is unimportant for development, which would be foolish. My criticism of this process is the mood and style of it all,” writes Vincent Maher.
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/ 11 January 2005
The Recording Industry Association of America and the Motion Picture Association of America have recently drawn more blood with a massive drive against server administrators running Peer to Peer (P2P) file sharing services. But the P2P community has responded by stepping up the levels of encryption and anti-detection mechanisms, and the near future will probably see a breed of P2P file sharing tools that make detection virtually impossible.
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/ 15 November 2004
In the olden days, when life became complicated, you would probably have written a poem, ploughed a field or poisoned someone. But ever since the advent of the internet and MTV’s reality shows, watching someone else’s reality seems to have become the most common pastime. If the passive voyeurism of watching cops drive around Los Angeles suburbs wasn’t enough, computer gaming has given us even more interactive options.
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/ 19 October 2004
The beheading of Kenneth Bigley was made public via the internet, as have many of the previous beheadings in Iraq. This story is a summary of the many discussions I have had with online editors, journalists, journalism students and academics on the ethical, political and emotional questions regarding links to such video footage on news websites.
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/ 30 September 2004
Last week users of the Wikipedia.org published its one-millionth article, making it the world’s largest and fastest growing encyclopedia according to the Wikimedia Foundation. A "wiki" is a website that allows users to edit and contribute to its contents with no limitations. This means, practically speaking, that any person can go onto a wiki and change the pages and save them with little or no technical knowledge at all.