James Farrell
Latest from James Farrell
Virtual friends and real rewards: Living with our avatars (Part 2)
This is the second entry of a three-part series exploring heightened technological immersion in the near future. Part One: The Side Effects of Mind Control is here. In 2010 Jesse Schell, CEO of Schell Games, Distinguished Professor of Entertainment Technology, Carnegie Mellon and former Creative Director of the Disney Virtual Reality Studio, gave what became ...
Microsoft’s co-founder Paul Allen treats world to first ever live tour of giant sunken WWII Japanese battleship Musashi
One of World War II’s largest and most advanced battleships, Japan’s Musashi, was sunk by U.S. war planes on October 24th, 1944, and was never seen again, not until an eight year search by billionaire philanthropist, Paul Allen, and his team of researchers discovered the leviathan 4,000 feet beneath the waves of the Philippines’ Sibuyan ...
Back in class with Microsoft’s free online IT classes through edX
Microsoft is now offering free online courses through edX Inc, an online learning platform that works with some of the U.S’s largest organizations and educational institutes, such as Harvard, MIT and Berkeley. “Microsoft has a long history of working within the community to make coding and app development more accessible and rewarding to the growing ...
Microsoft patches FREAK and Stuxnet bugs for Windows PCs
One week after Microsoft released a security warning stating that hundreds of millions of Windows users could be at risk from the FREAK flaw, a bug that could allow hackers to intercept communications by forcing machines into loading weaker encryption, the Redmond company has issued an update (part of 14 updates for patch Tuesday) to ...
How we really want to control personal data: New insight from Microsoft report
In an attempt to understand what the people want in terms of the future of consumer digital technology Microsoft surveyed 13,000 people from Brazil, Canada,China, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Russia, Spain, Sweden, the United Arab Emirates, the U.K. and the U.S., aged 15-54, to compile the Microsoft Digital Trends 2015 report, and the answers ...
The side effects of mind control: Living with Avatars (Part One)
There has been hype for many years concerning world-changing virtual world (VR) technology, but that technology has so far always fallen short of our sci-fi-honed, high expectations, or misgivings. Over the last year, people have started to take the hype more seriously, as one tech critic put it, “this time it actually seems to be ...
Microsoft releases Office 2016 Mac Preview
Microsoft has unwrapped a surprise for Mac users after releasing a preview of Office 2016, available now. Mac users have been waiting sometime for a successor to Office 2011, and the preview, which is a free download for Mac users running OS X Yosemite (Office 365 subscription not required), offers a much improved experience. In ...
Xbox One games coming to Microsoft’s augmented reality headset HoloLens
At the Games Developer Conference this week Xbox Chief Phil Spencer revealed Microsoft’s plans to bring Xbox One games to the AR headset that was talk of the town at the Windows 10 event in January this year and has been since. Speaking at the conference Spencer announced that gaming is going to be “critical ...
Leak: Microsoft’s new web browser Spartan looking good with Cortana
We already know that Cortana will play a big part in the replacement browser for IE, Spartan, after Microsoft revealed plans for the new browser back in January. Thanks to a recent leak discovered by WinBeta, a Microsoft-focused website, we can now see Spartan in use. What the video shows only highlights mostly what we ...
Microsoft’s new ultra-thin foldable keyboard will fit in your pocket and work on any device with Bluetooth
It so often happens when you’re on the go that you want to type out a long message, or jot down an idea, or even wax poetical, but you can’t be bothered tapping it out on your phone. It looks like Microsoft has just come up with a pretty decent solution for such an everyday ...