Stories by Robert X. Cringely

Invitation to obsession: Apple's iPad 2

Spitting into tea cups, poking goat entrails, tracing the movements of the stars across the heavens, dialing up the Psychic Friends Network -- these things pale in comparison to today's preferred method of divination: Parsing the invitations to Apple special events.

IBM's Watson makes it official -- humanity is toast

"I for one welcome our new computer overlords" -- that's a quote from Ken Jennings, the guy who used to be the world's biggest "Jeopardy" egghead until IBM's Watson supercomputer waxed the floor with him and Brad Rutter, his fellow puny human.

2011: The year hacking goes mainstream

I've said it before and I'll say it again.This will be the year of the hacker --- or rather, the year hacking goes mainstream.

Microsoft Bing: Powered by Google?

It doesn't get much better than this: two tech giants playing a game of "cheater cheater pumpkin eater" and "I know you are but what am I?" in public for all the world to see.

Can Apple survive without Steve Jobs?

Stop me if you've heard this one: Steve Jobs is taking another medical leave from Apple.

The world according to Michael Arrington

Ah, AOL -- just when it looked like you were about to slip into boring mediocrity, you surprise us yet again with your antics.

CES 2011: Where tablet PCs and 3D TVs ruled

My pockets are stuffed full of business cards from people I do not remember meeting, my head is thumping like a flamenco dancer, there's margarita salt on my laptop, and I can't seem to locate my pants. That can mean only one thing: I just returned from my annual pilgrimage to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas.

Is the Microsoft-Intel marriage finally over?

Cringely here, reporting from CES in Vegas, where rude beasts walk the earth (at least, the ones that don't crawl or slither), impeded in their forward progress only by hip-deep mounds of tablet PCs. Everyone appears to be tapping, swiping, and gesturing on some kind of sleek black touch-sensitive device, when they're not squinting at blurry 3D screens waiting for their turn with the polarized glasses.

RIP, AltaVista and Google Wave; we hardly knew ye

Today a lot of people are mourning the possible loss of Delicious (or, as it used to be known, del.icio.us), following news that Yahoo is planning to sell or otherwise dispose of the popular Web bookmarking service five years after acquiring it.

Geek of the Year: Mark Zuckerberg

The ballots have been cast, the votes have been counted, the results are in, and once again, I was robbed. Instead of being named Time's Person of the Year, they gave it to that sweaty creep Zuckerberg.

Something Wiki this way comes

It's been All WikiLeaks, All the Time here in Cringeville lately. And why not? As I noted last time out, this is the biggest thing to hit the WebberNets since Tim Berners Lee dreamed it up 20 years ago. We're still unraveling the implications and probably will continue to do so for months if not years.

The Web will eat itself over WikiLeaks

We are at war, and I don't mean the literal kind. It's the first all-out cyber war, not between nations but between factions: those who agree with what WikiLeaks is trying to do, and those who oppose them.

WikiLeaks: A terrorist's best friend?

If WikiLeaks' Julian Assange were in memoir-writing mode, I'd bet "How to Win Friends and Influence People" would not be among the likely titles.

You've got Facemail! Now what?

I'm fascinated by how technology's center of gravity shifts over time. For a long time Microsoft was the 900-pound gorilla (careful where you stand -- it's got a bad case of gas). More recently Apple and Google have taken turns dominating what we talk about when the topic is tech. Now it's all Facebook, all the time.

Google vs Facebook: Adult supervision desperately needed

You'd think the drinking water in Silicon Valley has been replaced with baby formula, given how childish some of the biggest companies in tech have acted this year. First on the Romper Room roll call is Steve Jobs, who has thrown tantrums over Adobe Flash, Android, lost prototypes, the tendency of his uberphone to lose its signal when held the wrong way, and various other prickles that have lodged in his big boy pants.