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A Microsoft Vista promotional booklet that had an image of the ideal happy family computing on a laptop. What stood out was that the laptop looked awfully similar to the Macbook Pro! In fact I am 90% sure that its a Mac!

The business sector, long wary of Apple, is taking note of Cupertino's latest offering, the iPhone

October was a good month for Twitter. All those election Tweets brought a 25 percent increase in U.S. visitors from the month before...

By now you have probably heard the warning: Playing Mirror's Edge will make you vomit.

The hot new videogame is a sort of "first-person runner": You're a courier who travels across the rooftops of a locked-down, police-state city, delivering black-market messages by using acrobatic feats of parkour. You're constantly leaping over gaps 40 stories in the air, tightrope-walking along suspended pipes and vaulting up walls like a ninja.

It doesn't do justice to call the action in Mirror's Edge "intense": It quivers, like a hummingbird, and your first-person view is constantly whipsawing like a paranoid cameraman hunting for the best shot.

Only 15 minutes into the game, my mouth began overproducing saliva, and I had to pause the action for a few seconds to avoid carsickness. I would feel like a total lamer, but apparently even the Penny Arcade guys wrestled with nausea.

Still, it made me wonder: What makes Mirror's Edge so different? Sure, the action is swoopy and vertiginous, just as it is in many other games. But I've played plenty of first-person shooters that required me to navigate ridiculous, zero-G boss lairs that were suspended over improbable heights, and none of those ever made me feel nauseated.

Why does this game get its hooks into my brain so effectively? Why does it feel so much more visceral?

I think it's because Mirror's Edge is the first game to hack your proprioception.

That's a fancy word for your body's sense of its own physicality — its "map" of itself. Proprioception is how you know where your various body parts are — and what they're doing — even when you're not looking at them. It's why you can pass a baseball from one hand to another behind your back; it's how you can climb stairs without looking down at your feet.

Most first-person shooters do not create any sense of proprioception. You may be looking out the eyes of your character, but you don't have a good sense of the dimensions of the rest of your virtual body — the size and stride of your legs, the radius of your arms. At most, you can see your arms carrying your rifle out in front of you. But otherwise, the designers treat your body as if it were just a big, refrigerator-size box.

Worse, in most games your virtual body cannot do even the most simple things that it ought to be able to do. Every time I'm playing a first-person shooter, I'll inevitably try to jump or walk up onto an object — a ledge, a curb, a railing along a wall — and discover that I can't. The designers decided they didn't need to worry about those subtle physics, and the resulting limitation completely breaks the illusion that I'm in that virtual body.

Mirror's Edge, in contrast, does something very subtle, but very radical. It lets you see other parts of your body in motion.

When you run, you see your hands pumping up and down in front of you. When you jump, your feet briefly jut up into eyeshot — precisely as they do when you're vaulting over a hurdle in real life. And when you tuck down into a somersault, you're looking at your thighs as the world spins around you.

What's more, the Mirror's Edge world feels tactile and graspable. Because the game is designed around the concept of parkour, or moving through obstacles, most times when you see something that looks like you could jump on it, you can. The gameplay requires it.

The upshot is that these small, subtle visual cues have one big and potent side effect: They trigger your sense of proprioception. It's why you feel so much more "inside" the avatar here than in any other first-person game. And it explains, I think, why Mirror's Edge is so curiously likely to produce motion sickness. The game is not merely graphically realistic; it's neurologically realistic.

Indeed, the sense of physicality is so vivid that, for me anyway, the most exhilarating part of the game wasn't the obvious stuff, like leaping from rooftop to rooftop. No, I mostly got a blast from the mere act of running around. I've never played a game that conveyed so beautifully the athletically kinetic joys of sprinting — of jetting down alleyways, racing along rooftops and taking corners like an Olympian. It's an interesting lesson of game physics: When you feel like you're truly inside your character, speed suddenly means something.

The opposite is also true. Without a sense of physicality, speed feels lifeless. In Halo, you're playing as the cyborgically enhanced Master Chief, so your top speed at an open run is — according to Halo nerd canon — 30 mph or something. But it doesn't feel very fast at all, because your avatar doesn't appear to be actually exerting himself. When you run, your body bobs along not much differently from how it moves when you're walking, except the scenery goes by more quickly.

The combat in Mirror's Edge felt more believable than doing battle in Halo, too. When the cops were shooting bullets at me and I was frantically racing to escape, I kept thinking: "Damn, I'm going so fast I might just escape!" In most first-person games, I usually wonder the opposite: How are these guys not hitting me? So the brilliant physicality of Mirror's Edge isn't just a boon to the game's physics. It also makes the narrative and drama more plausible.

So yes, by all means, I'll keep on playing Mirror's Edge, even though it occasionally makes me want to vomit. In the past, I've often wanted to wretch because a game is so bad — but I've never felt sick because it was so good.

- - -

Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.

Collection of creative and unusual lamp designs from around the world.

50 incredible FONTs which you can use for web or print design. This collection will sure help you improve your typography skills.

For President-elect Barack Obama's plans — which call for millions of new green jobs — to work out, dozens of green tech companies will need to rapidly scale up. The most promising, like the biofuel-making synthetic biology startup Amyris, are marching steadily toward getting to market, but will they arrive in time to save the economy?

Check out 10 incredible animal videos featuring a polar bear, an octopus, a rhino and more.

We pit Apple's browser against five of the best alternatives Most Mac users tend to use the browser that came installed on their computer (Apple's Safari) just because it's there and it's made by Apple. But as a discerning Mac user, Safari isn't your only choice.

Customizing your Windows desktop to get a similar "Enigma" effect on your own system.

Mdway Games today announced that Mortal Kombat vs. DC Universe has arrived on store shelves throughout the US. The standard edition for the Xbox 360 and the PS3 is available for $59.95 (MSRP), and the Kollector’s Edition (no typo) is available for $69.95 ...

The Sony HDR-TG1 is one of the sexiest HD camcorder. It was dubbed the world's smallest full HD camcorder when it was unveiled in April. There are more small HD camcorder available now, but the design of the Sony HDR-TG1 is the most enticing. The Sony...

Cyber-Hackers Break Into IMF Computer System, Cyber-hackers attacked the Washington, D.C.-based International Monetary Fund, which provoked a shutdown of IMF computers that lasted for several days.

Most of the new breed of open source hardware centers on specific products. Bug Labs is taking a different approach. Instead of developing particular devices, Bug Labs' goal is to provide a Lego-like collection of open source hardware and software that customers can use to build their own devices. According to CEO Peter Semmelhack, the result shou

Since last Monday the Wii has been in stock for the $249.99 price on Amazon.com on a regular basis based on my monitoring. It looks like the dry spell has ended and right now the Wii supply is up to par with the demand in the US. This might change again ge...

The gadgetry in the Infiniti EX35 we tested was intense. Not only is there XM Satellite Radio there is a Bose sound system, front and rear curb sensors, and an amazing external viewing system that initially took my breath away. After driving around in a 2000 Beetle for six years, hopping into the $35,000 EX35 was like visiting Epcot Center after riding around on a carnival merry-go-round for most of your life.

My goal in reviewing this car is to talk about how it made me feel as a geek, not a driver. As a car, it got a respectable 24 mpg on the highway and had strong acceleration. It’s powered by a 297-horsepower V6 engine and features all wheel drive. You’ll get about 17 city and 26 highway mpg and a calm, quiet ride without the height of an SUV.

We took a test drive to Columbia, Pennsylvania, taking the car on turnpikes and smaller highways. The drive was quiet and solid with good handling and excellent acceleration when needed - although the car really revved up when you called any of its horses into play.

So what of all these gadgets? First, you have the sound system. It’s a Bose-branded system with CD, optional hard drive Music Box, and iPod/component input for external devices. The model we tested included XM Radio. All of the features are controlled by a touchscreen and set of buttons on the dash and there are a few basic controls on the wheel which changed inputs, volume, and track/channel while driving. I had mixed emotions about the touchscreen/button combo at first. For example, there was one button marked Status and another marked Info. What did they have to do with each other? What was the difference? In many situations, both would fall back to a “status” screen with current track information as well as some other info. The center dash info screen offered the same odd situation. The center OLED read-out could tell you the outside temperature, the miles left on the tank, and your fuel efficiency - but never at once. You also had control over this read-out in a settings menu that offered more oddness. I didn’t want to read the manual so we fumbled our way through and found all there was to find: in short, you’re dealing with a complex car system that has been dumbed-down in UI in order to improve efficiency.

The audio itself was fine - the XM radio sounded better than the music on the iPod but that could have been the bit-rate on both sources. The dedicated iPod cable in the center compartment, between the two seats, connects your iPod and shows all of your tracks on the screen and allows for easy browsing of the iPod while driving.

The car also included built-in GPS that, in its out-of-the-box configuration, stops responding to input while driving. This was, in short, infuriating. It often got a strong signal while driving, but this limitation was unnerving.

Finally, there is the Around View Monitor. This is honestly what sold me on the car’s value as a family crossover. The Around View Monitor consists of multiple cameras - some in the rear view mirrors and two in the front and back - that creates a 360-degree view of your surroundings. This is an amazing addition to a fairly low-priced car and it was a great help while parking in our tight driveway or on New York streets. The system basically creates an extrapolated, fish-eye view of the world and shows you what you are facing and what’s behind you. You can see folks walking around on all sides and the distance sensors tell you how close you are to walls and other obstacles.

All together, this gadgetry package adds quite a bit of pep to what would otherwise be known as a family station wagon. The back trunk is a bit cramped but by pulling down the seats you have enough room to haul almost anything you need - as you see in the photos we were able to lie a buggy flat in there with room to spare. We wouldn’t recommend the Music Box feature - it’s just a hard drive - but the iPod connector was great.

As a vehicle, the EX35 was strong, handsome, and the gorgeous deep brown paint job - a color verging on scarlet - was striking. As a rolling gadget trove the EX35 was something else entirely. It is a road-hugging crossover with acceptable gas mileage with an internal computer system that will keep any geek happy for miles.

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The latest James Bond film "Quantum of Solace," already a big hit overseas, set a new opening record for Bond movies in North America with estimated weekend sales of $70.4 million, distributor Columbia Pictures ...

Which third parties can access sensitive data that users post on Facebook, such as email addresses? It depends on the partner, according to Facebook. So here’s the latest tidbit about how this policy is being implemented.

Facebook just added another extremely useful feature for users, and in doing so took out a slew of applications that do that same thing. You can now get a weekly email telling you, simply, which friends have birthdays coming up.

That’s good news for all of us who want more birthday information. It’s bad news for Birthday Alert and its clones that already do that on Facebook. Birthday Alert has 180,820 active monthly users.

Lest you think this is just some random feature: Birthdays are big business. Bebo founders Michael and Xochi Birch started their social network Bebo with a simple birthday reminder service. That service had 100 million users at one point and still brings in $4 million per year in revenue from ecards and gift purchases. Bebo was funded in the early days from birthday reminder revenue.

The title of this post is meant to be a joke, but it definitely sucks to be one of the very many birthday reminder Facebook apps today. Such is life. With a flick of the keyboard Facebook can make your app redundant and pointless. Meanwhile, I happily turned on the new feature, and I can’t wait to be prompted to send people virtual birthday gifts for a small fee.

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GottaDeals got their hands on the Macy's Black Friday Ads. Macy's is a department store so their Black Friday sales go across many different product categories. We just look at the electronics and video game offers to see if there is a great deal for yo...

Underneath Stockholm, deep in the bedrock exists a data center better than any high tech lair Hollywood could probably dream up. Bahnhof, one of Sweden's largest ISP's has created a bunker of high tech goodness that is surely to astound.

Finally Intel Core i7 processors and the X58 motherboards are on sale. NewEgg lists 3 Core i7 CPUs and 8 X58 Motherboards to choose from. If you do not want to fool around you should of course get the top of the line Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 965 3....

Sorry, Mr. President. Please surrender your BlackBerry. Those are seven words President-elect Barack Obama is dreading but expecting to hear, friends and advisers say, when he takes office in 65 days

When Google ran their big push about their new voice search application for iPhone, the plan was that it would go live Friday and all would be well. TC has word that the app his hitting tomorrow and that Apple inexplicably refused to push the app on Friday. It was, it seems, “in review.”

This is, as they say in the business, absolutel bullshit. While I agree that the iPhone ecosystem must be protected from varmints lest it end up like Windows Mobile - a slatternly tart that HTC and Sony-Ericsson are now forced to gussy up just to take out into the public - I can’t believe that Google couldn’t make a few calls to get this launched when they said it would launch. Is this a power play? A mix-up? A case of bad shellfish eaten by Steve which pulled him away from his desk from 4pm to 4:40 and so did not allow the lackey who carries the key to the golden “Launch to iPhone” button to reach the Pixar King in time? Perhaps we’ll never know.

Our Top 100 Holiday Gift Guide is nearing completion. As you know we started the our main Gift Guide for 2008 100 days before Thanksgiving Day to prepare you for the big Thanksgiving and Black Friday sales. We segmented our 100 tech gift tips in 10 categor...