James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Looks like Facebook users might soon get paid for their posts?
Getting paid for your posts on Facebook would sure come as a relief to avid users of the social network whose large number of followers creates fantastic revenue, that goes one way only. A recent survey that has been circulating points to the possibility of this coming true – the survey was found by The ...
An Apple Original Series: Tech giant secretly schmoozing A-list celebs to drum up talent for slew of shows
Is Apple Inc. secretly turning up at big movie events, sidling up to A-list Hollywood actors in a bid to get them onside before the tech giant launches a handful of series designed to match or outrun the magnificence of Netflix, Inc. and Amazon.com, Inc.? It seems so, according to a recent detailed report by ...
New York, 5 minutes in the future: AR for creating virtual bed partners, according to new film Creative Control
Director (also co-writer) Benjamin Dickinson’s recently released film, Creative Control, is one of few movies over the past several years to take recent technological advances seriously, inasmuch as the technology isn’t far from what we already have. The filmmakers have said that the setting is New York, “5 minutes in the future”. In Creative Control’s case the technology ...
Microsoft and Facebook say they have ended the gender pay gap
The issue of the gender pay gap, in the tech industry, and many other industries, is still a huge issue – and one that won’e be solved for a long time. The American Association of University Women says equally qualified women earn 78 percent of what equally qualified men earn, although it looks like some parts of the tech ...
Trust a (digitized) woman to do all the hard work
“Siri, you know that being a woman makes you subservient, don’t you?” “Hey Cortana, can you wear that sexy skirt to the office tomorrow?” This is not how you should speak to your secretary, but is it what tech companies have in mind when choosing a female voice (and name) for their digital assistant? You ...
Inside the Exclusion Zone: Experience the Chernobyl disaster through virtual reality
Almost 30 years to the day, one of the world’s worst disasters took place at the Chernobyl (Ukrainian spelling is Chornobyl) Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine when an explosion sent radioactive particles across much of the former western USSR and parts of Europe. Thirty-one people died shortly after the initial explosion, but soon people living within ...
Microsoft’s Windows 10 update brings tons of goodies including Cortana making herself a lot more useful
Only a week after Microsoft promised at Build 2016 it would be giving its OS a bunch of appealing new features, Redmond has made good on that promise after announcing the latest Windows 10 upgrade (Windows 10 Build 14316) for Windows Insiders in the Fast ring. One of those promises was that the Ubuntu Linux ...
Digitizing sex with virtual reality headsets is going to be huge
Considering that more than a 10th of websites on the internet are pornographic, and those websites combined get more traffic than Netflix, Amazon and Twitter, we can deduce that when a new, or vastly improved medium of porn consumption comes around – one that vigorously ups the viewer’s level of intimacy with the actor(s) – ...
Missing: Windows Phone at Build 2016
Microsoft may have wooed us with its ambitious vision of the future at this year’s Build conference, but there has been one notable absence throughout the entire event: Windows Phone. Microsoft’s Executive Vice President of the Windows and Devices Group, Terry Myerson, did say that Microsoft’s focus was not on Windows Phone this year, but ...
It’s wasn’t so much boys in tech behaving badly but more a consequence of inequality
“F**k you Xbox” and “F**k you Microsoft” were parting remarks in a series of Tweets lately, following what turned out to be a disastrous decision by Xbox to hold an after-event (GDC16) party that featured dancing girls clad in school uniforms. Unlike the majority of tech-related stories, this was one of those that broke out ...