Tag: author_name|Andrew Tarantola

Hitting the Books: Meet Richard Akrwright, the world’s first tech titan

You didn’t actually believe all those founder’s myths about tech billionaires like Bezos, Jobs and Musk pulling themselves up by their bootstraps from some suburban American garage, did you? In reality, our corporate kings have been running the same playbook since the 18th century when Lancashire’s own Richard Arkwright wrote…

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Hitting the Books: The programming trick that gave us DOOM multiplayer

Since its release in 1993, id Software’s DOOM franchise has become one of modern gaming’s most easily recognizable IPs. The series has sold more than 10 million copies to date and spawned myriad RPG spinoffs, film adaptations and even a couple tabletop board games. But the first game’s debut turned…

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Google’s new sustainability APIs can estimate solar, pollutant and pollen production

Way back in 2015, Google launched Project Sunroof, an ingenious Maps layer that combined location, sunlight and navigation data to show how much energy solar panels installed on a home’s roof might generate — it could be your house, could be your neighbor's, didn’t matter because Google mapped it out…

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Hitting the Books: Why AI needs regulation and how we can do it

The burgeoning AI industry has barrelled clean past the “move fast” portion of its development, right into the part where we “break things” — like society! Since the release of ChatGPT last November, generative AI systems have taken the digital world by storm, finding use in everything from machine coding…

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Hitting the Books: Why we haven’t made the ‘Citizen Kane’ of gaming

Steven Spielberg’s wholesome sci-fi classic, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, became a cultural touchstone following its release in 1982. The film’s hastily-developed (as in, “you have five weeks to get this to market”) Atari 2600 tie-in game became a cultural touchstone for entirely different reasons. In his new book, The Stuff Games…

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Hitting the Books: The thirty-year quest to make WiFi a connectivity reality

The modern world of consumer tech wouldn’t exist as we know it if not for the near-ubiquitous connectivity that Wi-Fi internet provides. It serves as the wireless link bridging our mobile devices and smart home appliances, enabling our streaming entertainment and connecting us to the global internet.  In his new…

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