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.

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.

A report released by the Nielsen Norman Group shows that many iPad apps are confusing users by being too subtle about the gestures needed to navigate them, and some are not sensitive enough to the accuracy limit of fingertips. The authors also found that many companies with perfectly functional websites are wasting their time making a less-functional iPad app.

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.

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...

Les rumeurs allaient bon train sur les nouveaux produits Apple qui seraient présentés la semaine prochaine lors de la WWDC (Worldwide Developers Conference) de la firme à la pomme. Eh bien, Alors que ce n’est pas franchement l’habitude de la maison, un communiqué de presse officiel annonçant à l’avance certains produits vient de tomber. iOS 5, OS X Lion sont donc au programme ainsi que l’énigmatique  « iCloud ».