This may be a bit of a departure from our usual fare here at PC Mech, but some things are just too awesome to leave unreported. Everybody remembers IBM’s legendary computer “Watson”, right?  You know the PC that defeated both the legendary Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter in Jeopardy? The system with rudimentary AI that allows it to answer...

LAN parties still happen today, but they’re not like they used to be. The purpose of a LAN party was to get a bunch of friends together, have them bring over their PCs, connect them all together to a single router and play multi-player games. Why? Because it was a “no-lag” environment, and because it was just fun to do. In the 1990s, everyone...

I like to think of The Internet as a city, of sorts. There are certain areas that everyone frequents, central hubs where all the folks online enjoy hanging out. There are centers of commerce, entertainment, interaction, and information. There’s libraries, and cafes, and arcades, and shopping centers. Just like a city, though…there are certain places...

There’s been a whole swath of stories like this one about the Microsoft + NBC split where MSNBC as you know it will cease to exist and be replaced by NBCNEWS.com instead. Before continuing, for those wondering if the cable channel brand of MSNBC will continue to live on, the answer is yes – at least for now. When Microsoft and NBC decided to team up...

Even as I begin to write this, there’s a bit of irony here because very soon people may start sharing movies old-school style by trading ripped discs with each other. I’ll explain that further in a moment. To “rip” a disc simply means to make a copy of it, either to a file (like an ISO) or another disc. When DVD writeable drives starting...

Every now and then you’ll be on the computer in the middle of doing something important, and you get a message. This could be a text message, email, instant message, or what-have-you. But you can’t be engaged in that conversation at the moment because you have things that need to get done. It is at this time you need to employ methods to kill that...

As long as there have been video game consoles, there’s been a debate between gamers over which platform was superior. Everybody likes to think- even if they don’t admit it- that their way is the right way, after all. Most of you who’ve played video games a great deal know at least a little bit about it. But what are the merits of each...

This question isn’t as easy to answer as you might think. When you’re away from home, don’t have a laptop with you and want to check your email for whatever reason, the only two options you have to get to access the internet (without calling in a favor from a friend or family member) is to use your smartphone or use a public computer. The...

Hey there, folks. Today, it’s time for some slightly different fare. First, a brief sociology lesson. Marshall Mcluhan coined the term “Global Village” back in 1964, well before the development of the Internet. He saw what was coming – a completely unified communications network, connected on an entirely unprecedented scale. People from...

I’m not ashamed to say I carry a particularly strong distaste for Internet advertising. It’s irritating and out of touch, and the core premise of most online advertising models is fundamentally broken. For every advertisement I saw that caught my eye; every well-designed, unique, creative marketing campaign, I was treated to about twenty which made...