online

Review: Fly a spaceship, create alliances, & battle enemies in Vendetta Online

Vendetta Online for Mac offers a uniquely designed and well implemented MMORPG, and seems like a can't-miss proposition for the avid gamer. If you're new to this type of game, the basics are surprisingly easy to learn, thanks to its introductory "training mission." The download and setup may take a bit longer but are well worth the wait.

The game's download is 250MB large, so expect to wait a while to play if your connection is slow. Once the download completes and the game is launched, another 31MB of updates need to be downloaded, and … Read more

Apple Store hit with partial outages, but all is well again

Apple's online store was very recently hit with some partial outages in countries around the world.

When customers browsed to the company's online stores in the U.S., U.K., and Germany, they found that several images and page elements were missing. 9to5Mac, which reported on the issue earlier Monday, posted an image of an entirely text-based German Apple Store; no images were displayed.

According to 9to5Mac's report, the partial outage was due to a Content Delivery Network error that nixed Apple's many design elements and left only the page's text.

It didn't take … Read more

NBA star turns to Twitter to sells his bulldog

There's a certain imaginative depth in the relationship between the wealthy and the Web.

Zach Braff, David Fincher, and Kristen Bell are merely three of the star-kissed who have learned how to take back and tried to get money from their fans on Kickstarter.

Kendrick Perkins, meanwhile, also decided that the personal touch might help him out of a tiny bind.

The center for the NBA's Oklahoma City Thunder wanted to sell his bulldog. But not for him stooping to eBay or Craigslist. Those would be a long, long distance for Perkins to stoop.

Instead, as the terriers of Deadspin report, … Read more

Bang & Olufsen H-3: An elegant in-ear headphone from Denmark

I remember the very first Bang & Olufsen product I ever saw, a Beogram 4000 turntable. It was lightyears ahead of the competition's look and feel in the early 1970s. The design hasn't dated one bit -- no wonder it's on permanent display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

It's been ages since I checked out a B&O, so I decided to start small with their brand new BeoPlay H3 in-ear headphone ($249). It's a handsome enough design, but nowhere as striking as B&O's ultrasleek speaker … Read more

Animal Crossing New Leaf: Nintendo's stealth mobile game

In this age of cheap, ubiquitous mobile phone and tablet games, you can't help but wonder what Nintendo would make if the company were ever to enter the space. That future seems unlikely considering Nintendo's investment in Wii U and 3DS hardware, but that doesn't mean there isn't software that could be brilliant in the mobile space. In fact, there's a fantastic mobile game Nintendo has right now -- it's just that it lives on the Nintendo 3DS.

Animal Crossing: New Leaf is the latest in a franchise extending back to 2002 on the … Read more

Study: 35% of new marriages started with online intro (podcast)

More than one-third of all U.S. marriages between 2005 and 2012 involve couples who met online, according to a study commissioned by dating service eHarmony.com.

The survey, conducted by Harris Interactive and analyzed by a University of Chicago professor, found that, compared to people who met offline, these marriages "were slightly less likely to result in a marital breakup (separation or divorce) and were associated with slightly higher marital satisfaction among those respondents who remained married."

The survey, based on a survey of 19,131 married respondents, was published last month in through the Proceedings of … Read more

Coursera partners with 10 universities for online classes

Online learning startup Coursera has formed partnerships with 10 public universities and university systems to develop courses that can be taken for credit either online or in a blended classroom-online environment.

By exploring new uses for massive open online courses (MOOCs), the partnership aims to improve the quality of the education, as well as expand access and increase graduation rates for up to 1.25 million students at the schools, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company announced Wednesday.

The hope is that the program will encourage new teaching methods, as well as enhancing existing approaches by creating a "blended … Read more

Google Checkout to check out

Google plans to shut down Google Checkout, its service for online payment processing, in six months, the company announced in a blog post Monday.

Even though Checkout was replaced by Wallet in 2011, it still has been an option for those merchants who are adamant about using the old service in their operations. But on November 20, that will come to an end. Google said by that time merchants who use Checkout will have two options: (1) move to another service, such as Google partners Braintree, Shopify, or Freshbooks, if they don't have their own payment processing, or (2) … Read more

Report: EA to scrap Online Passes for games

Electronic Arts will be dropping Online Passes from all of its future games, citing lackluster player support, according to a report by Venture Beat.

EA Senior Director of Corporate Communications John Reseburg revealed the news. "Yes, we're discontinuing Online Pass," he said. "None of our new EA titles will include that feature."

EA is not the only game publisher that elects to bundle an Online Pass with new copies of its games. The one-time codes are designed to restrict access to key features, such as online multiplayer. Players who buy a second-hand version of the game are given the option to purchase an Online Pass for a fee, prior to being able to play with others. … Read more