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...

Where most slider phones have a keyboard, Sony Ericsson's Xperia Play sports Playstation controls. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com.

And while it’s a bit on the chubby side, we think that, for Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Play, big is beautiful.

You could almost call the Xperia Play the shorter, fatter cousin to the svelte Xperia Arc, which Sony Ericsson once described as the “world’s thinnest smartphone.” At .62 inches, the Play looks positively bulky compared to its Xperia-line relatives — a veritable Jan Brady to the Arc’s Marcia.

Ce qu’il y a de bien avec les techniques d’optimisation de référencement dans les moteurs de recherche (SEO), c’est que l’on en apprend tous les jours, que l’on soit un cador de la discipline ou un simple amateur curieux. Ce qu’il y a de moins bien c’est que l’on apprend parfois à ses dépens.

Ainsi ai-je découvert via un article sur The Next Web qu’un truc qui parait aussi déconnecté du web qu’une newsletter peut avoir un impact négatif sur le classement de votre site dans les moteurs de recherche. C’est Jake Ludington qui révèle et explique en détail la chose dans Lockergnome.

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.

2006: Swedish police raid The Pirate Bay website and shut it down.

“Pirate Bay was a huge source of pirated films for people around the world, and today they are no longer.”

That was a statement issued exactly five years ago Tuesday by Kori Bernards, a spokeswoman for the Motion Picture Association of America.

After all, Swedish police that day had just raided the file sharing site’s offices and carted away a boatload of servers.

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.

AMD is laying the foundation for its Socket AM3+, Bulldozer-based Zambezi processors with the 990FX chipset, functionally identical to 890FX. The big news is that motherboard vendors are licensing SLI again, and we want to compare performance to Intel.