One publisher warns that books are “in danger of becoming roadkill” in a digital war.Illustration by Emiliano Ponzi At four o’clock in the morning on January 22, 2010, John Sargent was pedalling furiously on an exercise bicycle in the basement of his Brooklyn brownstone. Sargent, the C.E.O. of Macmillan Books, had a difficult decision to make. In five days, Steve Jobs would announce the first iPad

WASHINGTON — From his first months in office, President Obama secretly ordered increasingly sophisticated attacks on the computer systems that run Iran’s main nuclear enrichment facilities, significantly expanding America’s first sustained use of cyberweapons, according to participants in the program. Mr. Obama decided to accelerate the attacks — begun in the Bush administration and code-named Oly

AS THIS newspaper went to press, Facebook was about to become a public company. It will be one of the biggest stockmarket flotations ever: the social-networking giant expects investors to value it at $100 billion or so. The news raises several questions, from “Is it worth that much?” to “What will it do next?” But the most intriguing question is what Facebook's flotation tells us about the state o

Struggling EV startup Fisker has laid off hundreds of employees in a bid to stay alive, as it continues to search for funding, a buyout or prepare for bankruptcy. Workers…

A third industrial revolutionAs manufacturing goes digital, it will change out of all recognition, says Paul Markillie. And some of the business of making things will return to rich countries OUTSIDE THE SPRAWLING Frankfurt Messe, home of innumerable German trade fairs, stands the “Hammering Man”, a 21-metre kinetic statue that steadily raises and lowers its arm to bash a piece of metal with a ham

SAN FRANCISCO — Google’s harvesting of e-mails, passwords and other sensitive personal information from unsuspecting households in the United States and around the world was neither a mistake nor the work of a rogue engineer, as the company long maintained, but a program that supervisors knew about, according to new details from the full text of a regulatory report. The report, prepared by the Fed

こんな記事を見つけたので、またまた「平清盛ヲタ」の私が湧いて来ましたよ。 朝日新聞『平清盛』記事へのコメントに関して - 春日太一の「雪中行軍な人生」 私は研究家でも評論家でもなく、ここに書くのは完全に根拠のない勝手な自分の想像話であることを最初に断っておく。 上記の筆者が書いているように、確かに平清盛ドラマの「画面の情報量」がハンパでない、ということを最近になって私も理解した。上記では「ハイビジョン」による画面の質のことを主に話しているが、ここで言っているのは、脚本の中に埋め込んであるお話の情報量のこと。時代劇では「史実と違う」という批判がよく出るのだが、ここでは逆に、「いかにもありえない創作の場面なのだが、実は史実がたくさん埋め込んである」ということに気がついたのだ。 例えば、お話が「源氏編」に移るときの信号として、源氏屋敷のペットである猿が最初に映し出されることが多く、これは私は「源

Since April, a hacker with a history of selling stolen data has claimed a data breach of billions of records — impacting at least 300 million people — from a…

The US and China have been discreetly engaging in "war games" amid rising anger in Washington over the scale and audacity of Beijing-co-ordinated cyber attacks on western governments and big business, the Guardian has learned. State department and Pentagon officials, along with their Chinese counterparts, were involved in two war games last year that were designed to help prevent a sudden military

Arvind Jain, a Google engineer, pointed out the loading speed of individual elements of a website on a test application used to check efficiency, at Google offices in Mountain View, Calif.Credit...Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Wait a second. No, that’s too long. Remember when you were willing to wait a few seconds for a computer to respond to a click on a Web site or a tap on a keyboard? Th