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I have a lot of friends who have sprint phones with voice nav. They all used it for the first week because it was "cool" but after awhile, they went back to traditional methods. Another example is my father; he got the 02 Infinity Q45 which has loads of tech toys built in. The voice nav is really cool but it's not nearly as fast a clicking a button.

"(2) The Secretary of State shall not issue a warrant under this section unless he considers that the warrant is necessary--
(a) in the interests of national security;
(b) for the purpose of preventing or detecting serious crime or;
(c) for the purpose of safeguarding the economic well being of the United Kingdom."

The Intel computer vision library is not the only such resource available. The TINA machine vision system has been developed since 1986 and provides functionality for the machine vision researcher at both the infrastructure level (datastructures and functions for an enormous range of mathematical, statistical and image processing tasks) as well as state-of-the-art solutions to many machine vision problems. These include low-level feature extraction, robust primitive fitting, object tracking, 2D object recognition and 3D object location. Indeed the stereoscopic subsystems in TINA (PMF, Stretch Correlation) have been viewed for many years as the standard for edge based stereo. TINA is almost unique as a resource and living archive of over 70 man years of research and over 200 peer reviewed publications in machine vision and medical image analysis. Functionality in TINA has practical utility in several industrial contexts.
For the past 5 years TINA has been provided as open source under an LGPL license and development is now based at the University of Manchester, UK.

Whilst I am very pleased that Intel recognise the importance of machine vision research and can only commend them on their open source approach I have some reservations regarding the use of OpenCV by the research community at large. Certainly their motives are business orientated (and one cannot argue with this). Therefore, however, the contents of their library are ultimately dictated by what Intel want not necessarily what the research community might need or indeed what is even possible (such as dense estimates of stereo).

Open Source software is vital in research disciplines where there is a significant software component. What better way to disseminate your results than to encapsulate your entire experimental apparatus in a tar file! Why should others in the field waste time reimplementing your algorithms (probably incorrectly) in order to duplicate your results. A process which sits at the very heart of any scientific endeavour.

TINA has recently received direct funding from the European Union for developed as the open source environment for machine vision and medical image analysis research. For more details of TINA visit the website at http://www.tina-vision.net

Sorry to rant a bit but it is not often I read something on here that I know so much about!

I hope that by 2020 we aren't using clocked processors anymore. The clocking of the processor uses a tremendous amount of energy and is one of the major hurdles in the reduction of power consumption. What I would like to se by 2020 is something in an asynchronous processor like mentioned here.

These could be a far more feasible revolution in processing than 30GHz processors. Not to mention that I'd hope we see processors at least equivalent to 30GHz in less than 18 years. Assuming that it took ~7 years to go from 133MHz to 2GHz it seems feasible according to Moore's law that it should be less than a decade to get to 30GHz.

It all began somewhere in California when a student didn't think that pulling a few switches to get a few red lamps to produce the answer was good enough.

With a bit of experimentation he produced a program that did nothing, but when he tuned in the radio next to the old monster a small tune was heard when his program was run.

Other Examples: One of the highlights of our open day display was a music program running on the DS300. This machine has no loudspeaker - the four-part harmonies are picked up by an AM radio tuned to the rf interference generated by the core driver circuits. For best results, pull your PDP-8 processor cabinet right out and place the radio immediately above the core stack.
Resurrection, some kind of antique computer society

Can't find the correct reference, try yourself to search the net for computer, music etc

Whenever the question of asynchronous chip design comes up, everyone points out the Intel work in '97, but nobody mentions the work done by the AMULET group in Manchester. Set up in 1990 they produced the world's first asynchronous chip in 1994, based on the ARM chipset. By the time Intel got their act in order, the second generation AMULET2e had arrived, providing higher performance than a synchronous ARM chip for the same power input.

Hey moderators, did it ever occur to you that this post was just a little suspect? So nicely formatted, with no spelling or grammar errors at all. If you look at the poster's previous comments, this one tends to stand out.

A quick look on Goolge show that this guy is a karma whore

And much as I think the project is very cool the fact that many PDAs use StrongARMs and not Amulets tells a story.

From the site:
The power/performance qualities of AMULET were sufficiently encouraging to continue the line of investigation. As the performance of AMULET2 still lagged that of contemporary synchronous devices the next task was to improve the MIPS rate, without sacrificing excess power. This has been addressed by AMULET3i. This macrocell can deliver over 100 MIPS on a 0.35m commodity process - and the processor core is capable of more in the future. The first AMULET3i application is the DRACO DECT radio controller. However AMULET3 based systems will be developed for other application area; we're particularly interested in contactless smart cards for reasons which will gradually be made apparent.

100 MIPS - imagine that!

Don't get me wrong - I still think that the asynch idea is cool, but I don't think that Clockless, or asynchronous, chips work very much faster ... than their synchronous equivalents

And much as I think the project is very cool the fact that many PDAs use StrongARMs and not Amulets tells a story.

From the site:
The power/performance qualities of AMULET were sufficiently encouraging to continue the line of investigation. As the performance of AMULET2 still lagged that of contemporary synchronous devices the next task was to improve the MIPS rate, without sacrificing excess power. This has been addressed by AMULET3i. This macrocell can deliver over 100 MIPS on a 0.35m commodity process - and the processor core is capable of more in the future. The first AMULET3i application is the DRACO DECT radio controller. However AMULET3 based systems will be developed for other application area; we're particularly interested in contactless smart cards for reasons which will gradually be made apparent.

100 MIPS - imagine that!

Don't get me wrong - I still think that the asynch idea is cool, but I don't think that Clockless, or asynchronous, chips work very much faster ... than their synchronous equivalents

Of course I'm used to things getting published a little late on slashdot ;-)

Greets!

The reason that 3D isn't popular or practical - paper. Our current metaphor for information derives from Xerox Parc, a PAPER company. A faithful emulation of an office desk is NOT the best way to represent the complex infoverse we live in.

And the current web is not the best way to represent it either. Go back to hypertextual research before the web - look at Guide, look at Microcosm, before the brain damage of HTML and Mosaic set in.

Even better, go and look at Xanadu and ZigZag - representing information and the relationships between individual pieces of it is a complex task, perhaps made harder by our current metaphors. See ANYTHING by Ted Nelson, such as his technical briefing at the latest Hypertext conference.Read Vannevar Bush's "As we may think"

I would argue that we don't need 3D browsers, but MULTIDIMENSIONAL infoviewers, that can let us define the relationships and properties that we are interested at any moment, AND LET US CHANGE THEM easily and intuitively - I still remember the only good part of Johnny Mnemonic - zooming around cyberspace - also, to a lesser degree Lawnmower Man.

This is the way forward, and we need to learn from the games industry - Look at Homeworld, Q3D, even Elite - these are the kind of intuitive navigational and representational metaphors we ned to adopt to allow people to create, browse, populate and interact with their information.

Let us be imaginative, and move forwards to a representation of information as something we can use, rather than something we write down.

Links:
Microcosm:(Home) http://www.iam.ecs.soton.ac.uk/
(Review)http://www.man.ac.uk/MVC/SIMA/mcosm/toc.ht ml
Guide: http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/hfl0142.html
HyperText Conference: http://www.ht01.org/
GZigZag - http://gzigzag.sf.net
Xanadu: http://www.udanax.com
http://www.xanadu.com
As We May Think: http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/flashbks/comput er/bushf.htm
The electronic labyrinth - a good intro to hypertext, slanted toward literature http://www.iath.virginia.edu/elab/elab.html

Performance: not really from async (there is signalling overhead), but if you save 30% of the chip space you can put in more functional units (integer adders etc.) and do more operations in parallel, hence you get greater throughput of instructions.

Various good results have been reported - chuck moore claims his async chip gets 500% better performance for 20% of the power of synchronous designs. The amulet group at manchester have managed to get something like 1400mips/watt with the latest amulet core, despite the article claiming there are no commercial async chips the amulet3h core is being licensed now for embedded apps.

The main difficulty in designing these chips is that current tools dont support async design and verification, and from speaking to synchronous chip designers, they seem to have a real problem understanding it.. maybe a CS background rather than EE helps here. Amulet at manchester have open source tools like Balsa, which they used to design the MMU in Amulet.

Open source methodologies have found it difficult to break into chip design, but the paradigm shift towards asyncronous design invalidates a lot of the commercial tools and gives us a chance to start afresh. Balsa should be quite easy for programmers familiar with threads and asyncronous processes, in fact, I have heard of people designing async cpu cores in a weekend with it (beats vhdl :). Anyone interested should have a look at the open source tools on the Amulet site, check out some of the async tutorials and Suns async site.

Performance: not really from async (there is signalling overhead), but if you save 30% of the chip space you can put in more functional units (integer adders etc.) and do more operations in parallel, hence you get greater throughput of instructions.

Various good results have been reported - chuck moore claims his async chip gets 500% better performance for 20% of the power of synchronous designs. The amulet group at manchester have managed to get something like 1400mips/watt with the latest amulet core, despite the article claiming there are no commercial async chips the amulet3h core is being licensed now for embedded apps.

The main difficulty in designing these chips is that current tools dont support async design and verification, and from speaking to synchronous chip designers, they seem to have a real problem understanding it.. maybe a CS background rather than EE helps here. Amulet at manchester have open source tools like Balsa, which they used to design the MMU in Amulet.

Open source methodologies have found it difficult to break into chip design, but the paradigm shift towards asyncronous design invalidates a lot of the commercial tools and gives us a chance to start afresh. Balsa should be quite easy for programmers familiar with threads and asyncronous processes, in fact, I have heard of people designing async cpu cores in a weekend with it (beats vhdl :). Anyone interested should have a look at the open source tools on the Amulet site, check out some of the async tutorials and Suns async site.

The AMULET group at Manchester University have been developing this for years based on ARM cores.

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/amulet/index.html

The Amulet Group at The University Of Manchester have a clockless ARM (ARMs are used in many mobile phones, the Compaq iPaq and the GBA).

The Amulet Group at The University Of Manchester have a clockless ARM (ARMs are used in many mobile phones, the Compaq iPaq and the GBA).

It was actually the Amulet processor. For more reading check out the Amulet group website.

Kelv :)

(...who read about the Amulet way back when in an old issue of Acorn User)

Richard Heeks states that in dealing with information systems, there are eight areas of responsibility: information systems planning, organisational structures and staffing, data management, computing and data management architecture, information systems development, information technology acquisition, training, and technical support.

In my mind, Heeks makes the point that it takes more than technology to make techology work. It is not a self-licking ice cream cone. Dave is really only talking about protocols and infrastructure. While I say bravo!, this is not enough. Microsoft has both technology and infrastructure behind Passport and .Net, but they also have an organization. Do not discount this. Also remember that they are motivated to win in the marketplace, whereas with a decentralized system, there is no such drive.

While technology is the focus here, and while technology is crucial, I hope that people start looking beyond the walls. This is about economics, not technology. Remember that Microsoft wins not because of superior technology but because they have better marketing. Any attempt to "beat them" will only work if some organziation or some true movement competes against them. Since the forces are divided (because they are decentralized), it will be almost impossible to compete with Microsoft.

Where will the marketing money come from to fight against Microsoft? Or, perhaps that makes no sense. Perhaps you expect there to be three or four authentication mechansism. I suppose that is possible, but where does that leave us? With choice? Don't fool yourself. Large corporations will invariably go with the Microsoft solution. Why? Marketing again. You will probably not be able to cleanse yourself of Micrsoft.

Maybe you care, maybe not. Just remember this: The day will come when Microsoft drops the ball and your personal, private data will be exposed. You will wish you thought beyond the technology.

I have been using RiscOS computers for 6 years (and I am not a veteran) and I currently feel quite happy to see that other people tend to agree on its qualities in terms of power consumption, but also modularity, ergonomy...
>A HREF="http://www.riscos.org">RiscOS is IMHO one of the most optimized operating systems ever. It usually comes in 4-8MB ROM from which he boots in a few seconds.
It includes an excellent GUI and whatever you need to start work (TCPIP stack, Draw, Paint, Editor, tools, etc.).
It is the only 100% Plug'n Play Platform I have ever used and, most of all, as it is fully modular, whatever you dislike in this system can have its original ROM module be replaced with one of your RAM modules.
Now, if you consider that RiscOS has only been ported to specific architectures such as Acorn Computers' which implement the excellent ARM processor then it is obvious why this product is so power-efficient.
Now, an even more interesting case would be to implement a RiscOS platform around a forthcoming Amulet asynchronous processor which hardly consummes a single milliwatt when on idle.
--

You're kidding, right?

How often, in every day life, do you notice diffraction and interference? I never do. Consider also that the size of objects which cause diffraction are the same order of magnatude in size as the wavelength of light (i.e. 10^-7m). Which, BTW, is far smaller than you can see. Now imagine you're going to keep track of polygons/voxels 10^-7 in size, for a room that's 10m by 10m by 3m. That's 10*10*3/(10^-7)^3 =~ 3*10^23 voxels to keep track of. Forget it. There are far better ways to simulate diffraction, if you really wanted it.

What I have seen, that's really cool, are Relativistic ray tracing. Do that Nsuck^H^H^H^Hvidia!

--Bob

I remember the Baby's 50th anniversary, and goign to school in Manchester, barely 5 miles from the spot it was created, we had a little competition in the school (part of a larger competition - http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/prog98/)

The SSEM - "baby" - http://www.computer50.org/
First run on June 21st 1948 - 3 years before univac. Less then a year later it was available to the university for general comutation, and had a magnetic "drum".

More information at that url anyway, and at http://www.google.com/search?q=manchester+baby

Here's some back-up:
A book about the Leo: The Incredible Story of the World's First Business Computer
and a bunch of stuff from the National Archive for the History of Computing here
I thought the original article was fishy :)

"What are we going to do tonight, Bill?"

Modern art contains examples of works that take either one of these three properties to the extreme or balance them together in a specific form. Each artists accomplishment can be considered as a specific choice of the balance which is particular to that artist only.

Programmers use ASCII symbols to write their programs. They choose different languages (rules for arranging ASCII symbols) and their programs definetely have content. And each programmer has their own preference of certain algorithms, constructs and formatting. And, of course, each programmer has his/her own preference of what to program.

Not everything that possesses the three properties I mentioned above is an artwork. For example not every mechanical machine is a mobile. However, some machines or their parts, purely utilitarian at the time of their creation, may become an artwork (or part thereof) later, when an artist takes a look at it in new and completely unexpected way. Thus the forth component to an art work is the willingness of people to accept it as such.

People create programs as purely a way to express themselves, to show off their particular understanding of a language (see Obfuscated C contest). Also, sometimes programs deserve to be admired long after their creation (see Programming Pearls, Second Edition (ACM Press) Trade Paperback, 256 Pages, Edition Number 2, Addison-Wesley, October 1999 , ISBN: 0201657880, Author: Bentley, Jon L. / Chan, Patrick )

This demonstrates that a fair percentage of people are eagerly considering programs as an artwork, which fulfills the forth and last property of an artwork in my argument.

Vladimir Dergachev

Here's the lecture notes for HS228/428: computing: history and culture.

There's also the University of Manchester Department of Computer Science history and "50 years of computing at Manchester."

Or the Alan Turing Home Page.

Alan Turing used to drink at the Salisbury Arms, on Oxford Road in Manchester, which although serving a decent pint, is now way too packed in the evenings to be able to think in base 32 anymore.

My only real annoyance at this article is that they make it out as if Sun invented the goddamn thing.

Wanna see who did? Go to:
The Amulet Group.

It's an offshoot of the ARM team.

Simon

• The major commercial excitement about asynchronous hardware derives from the facts that it has much lower electromagnetic emissions (no great big synchronous clock pulse) and it can stop and start on a dime (HALT instructions are cheap and really do save power.) These make asynch. hardware very interesting for people working in embedded and portable environments.
• Amulet3i is a fully asynchronous processor core which provides a standard programming interface by being machine-code compatible with the ARM - you don't notice that it is asynchronous except when you do crazy things like varying the power from 1V to 5V, or by popping a load of dry ice on it, and even then the chip "takes a licking and keeps on ticking!" The speed of the ticks just changes a bit.
• Experience with Amulet at Manchester indicates that asynchronous logic is competitive with synchronous logic of the same generation in terms of speed, though it can be designed by a much smaller team of engineers.
• The hardest part of it all is definitely tools since there are a lot of very good tools out there for synchronous development. I'm working on this, but it doesn't happen overnight!
• There are also a lot of different design methodologies around, so when people say asynchronous, they are really referring to a whole bunch of different technologies as opposed to the single tech that is synchronous design. Some of these technologies scale much better than others. For example, petri-nets are very good at very low-level design, but they don't scale up very well and are a pig to actually use. OTOH, micropipelines (which is what Sutherland is working with, though he's looking more at the low-level end of them) are much less close to optimal at the transistor level (i.e. it takes more effort to squeeze out the last drop of efficiency) but they scale up to whole CPUs and even entire computers much better. Speaking as someone who's designed toy processors that way. (OK, so I've not the patience to go through and implement a whole pre-defined instruction set - I only did it one week as a proof-of-concept. :^)
• It is far easier to compose micropipelines with each other since you have no setup-and-hold timing nonsense. Those restrictions which do exist tend to be pretty easy to spot, and we've developed tools for automatically checking for the main async. design bloopers.
• Did you know that during the design phase for the Amulet3i, benchmarking was done by running real operating systems (RiscOS IIRC; nowadays we'd use ArmLinux instead) and applications (ghostscript, rendering the tiger picture) on it in simulation? :^)

During the last few years, a group has been working upon an asynchronous processor : AMULET.
This CPU uses the ARM core.
It is so power-efficient that it could only rely on the induction power resulting from its pins transmitting information.
Current status specify delivery of the AMULET3i.
--

The Amulet project has been going for over 10 years (it's an asynchronous ARM-like core, IIRC). I remember seeing a circuit that did asynchronous addition (or was it multiplication?) in a lecture about 2 years ago.

Another advantage to power is also the speed; the clock speed isn't determined by the worse case of the most expensive instruction. (e.g. adding 0 and 1 can be done a lot quicker than adding (2^31)-1 and 1, because of no overflow)

For the university's freshers' week, I designed some fliers for the Computer Society on my old Atari ST (running Papyrus and NVDI 4, incidentally...) The fliers looked perfectly innocuous, but the background consisted of a large number of faint, grey ones and zeros, grouped into 8-bit bytes. These of course made up the most important function of the DeCSS code - difficult to read, but it was all there.

Hundreds of copies of the fliers were made and handed out at the freshers' fair - I imagine most of them have been thrown out by now, but somewhere there'll be fliers nestling among other papers, forgotten but still holding the secrets of DeCSS... :-)

You can see a version of one of the fliers here - some of the digits are hidden, but it would probably be possible to figure out what they are, helped by some of the other fliers based on the same background.

Original 300dpi GIF produced entirely on an Atari ST, BTW - printing to image files is a really useful feature. :-)

Ford Prefect

For the university's freshers' week, I designed some fliers for the Computer Society on my old Atari ST (running Papyrus and NVDI 4, incidentally...) The fliers looked perfectly innocuous, but the background consisted of a large number of faint, grey ones and zeros, grouped into 8-bit bytes. These of course made up the most important function of the DeCSS code - difficult to read, but it was all there.

Hundreds of copies of the fliers were made and handed out at the freshers' fair - I imagine most of them have been thrown out by now, but somewhere there'll be fliers nestling among other papers, forgotten but still holding the secrets of DeCSS... :-)

You can see a version of one of the fliers here - some of the digits are hidden, but it would probably be possible to figure out what they are, helped by some of the other fliers based on the same background.

Original 300dpi GIF produced entirely on an Atari ST, BTW - printing to image files is a really useful feature. :-)

Ford Prefect

I'm not sure what has been done lately if anyone has some more recent links let us know.

Here are a couple of links to try:
(I can't comment on any of them except PCB, which, although very simple, works fairly well and is quite intuitive to use).
MUCS-PCB
PCB
SATCAD

Also try Scientific Applications on Linux

I remember 5.1 well - lovely white chars on a CLEAN CLEAN blue screen...ahhh. Was there really a native version for Linux ? I've found this link to run WP5.1 for Dos under Linux using dosemu - would that do ?

Actually, I'm working on a set of single-player maps which seem to have acquired quite a bit of the atmosphere described by this infiltration malarkey. Players will get the chance to explore various grimy, semi-abandoned Cold War-inspired buildings and structures, in a quest for survival and escape set in some of the less well known areas of the Black Mesa complex.

I'm trying to give the maps a realistic feel - I think up cool structures, and tailor the gameplay around them. Recently, I've been building a nuclear silo, and I've got ideas for stations, machinery complexes and so on.

It's called Half-Life: Parallax, and it might be released at some point in the next year or so... :-)

Ford Prefect

Alan Turning went to work at Manchester University in the UK after the war and a lot of work on early computers was done there. Check out the History of the Computer Science Department page for some interesting history, including the world's first stored-program computer, which was restored and made operational again a few years back (simulator available!), and the prototype for the world's first manufactured production computer. Manchester was also the birthplace of virtual memory.

D.

Alan Turning went to work at Manchester University in the UK after the war and a lot of work on early computers was done there. Check out the History of the Computer Science Department page for some interesting history, including the world's first stored-program computer, which was restored and made operational again a few years back (simulator available!), and the prototype for the world's first manufactured production computer. Manchester was also the birthplace of virtual memory.

D.

As for the program itself, it's quite an improvement over the 1.0 series. The user interface is a little more consistent, and there's now a menu button in the top left of image windows, in case you don't like the RISC OS-like context menu. It's a lot quicker and easier to change things like the brush and fill pattern, and the new drawing tools are pretty handy. It seems to have a lot greater support for graphics tablets, something I haven't been able to test since I don't have a graphics tablet...

Anyway, it's well worth a download, and is a great set of improvements to an already great program.

Oh, and here's that Half-Life stuff. :-)

Ford Prefect

1. Pros:
   • No more dilemma between RDRAM and DDRAM
   • No power consumption on laptops... Imagine a laptop using this and an Amulet processor
2. Cons:
   • Will new motherboards be required ?
3. Questions:
   • Access time ?
   • Transfer rate ?

Here is a page with a tutorial on pulsars. You can listen to them, too!

This isn't just a "biggest explosion, gee whiz" story. As the article notes, very little is known about the interior of neutron stars, and this explosion probes deeper inside. As explained on this nifty page about neutron stars, there could even be all kinds of exotic stuff inside them, like strange-quark matter.

--

The submission has one detail wrong - the neutron star is orbiting the other star in only 11 minutes. The situation is the same as the Earth going around the sun (the definition of a year) in only 11 minutes.

Neutron stars actually spin much faster than that. The neutron star B1937+21, discovered in 1982 rotates in 1.6 milliseconds (625 full spins per second). Rapidly spinning neutron stars are also called pulsars, because of the radio pulses they emit. One of the first pulsars discovered was the neutron star in the middle of the Crab Nebula, which rotates 33 times per second.

Obligatory links:
Jodrell Bank
Parkes
Arecibo

The history of computers is an interesting topic isn't there a project cataloging all the different parts of computer history going on?

There most certainly is! Perhaps you missed the story on the Vintage Computer Festival the other day? There are a lot of people involved in preserving the quickly disappearing history of the computer industry, including myself. Check out some of the others, such as:

• Blinkenlights Archaeological Institute
• The Computer Museum of America
• Retro-Computing Society of Rhode Island
• The San Francisco Computer Museum
• and even the Microsoft Museum

or, for a more international view, try:

• Ullrich von Bassewitz's Collection of Old Computers (Germany)
• Silicium: Le musee de l'informatique (France)
• National Archive for the History of Computing (England)
• Bletchley Park (England)
• Australian Computer Museum Society
• The First Computer Museum of Nova Scotia
• Belgian Microcomputer Museum

For tons more, check out the links page at the Vintage Computer Festival, or better yet, come to the VCF at the end of September and experience history in person!

Seriously, take a look at some of the scenarios below:

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~chl/scenarios. html

Consider yourselves lucky you live in an enlightened coutry and not a polic state like ourselves.

I've only played the demo (right through, though, unlike some people) and I was somewhat underwhelmed. I always compare FPS games with Half-Life, admittedly my favourite game ever (have a look here for what I'm doing with it), so be warned...

The game looks alright, although the coloured lighting is overused at points. The enemies look fairly good, although they don't seem to have many triangles compared with other games. They do look reasonably solid, unlike some. Graphically, not bad - but that's not the problem.

It's the enemy AI. The enemies in Doom are more intelligent than these ones. They get stuck around corners. At one point, I stood just round a pillar while a load of robotic mosquitoes piled up, unable to navigate eight world units to their right in order to fly around. They're stupid compared with Doom's enemies, and utterly brain-dead compared with Half-Life's.

When an enemy in a computer game attacks, I don't want it to advance straight towards me where I can gun it down before it reaches me, I want it to show at least some hint of realistic behaviour. I love fights where I have to plan what to do beforehand, and probably take cover and retreat if necessary. Daikatana did not require any such strategy - just mindless standing and shooting. Occasionally I would move to the left or right while shooting, just to add a bit of variation, but it was rarely necessary to do so.

Daikatana's first, swamp-based episode specialises in ultra-annoying enemies that sneak up and nibble on you. Incredibly annoying to kill - they move reasonably quickly and are difficult to see. Contrast this with Half-Life's headcrabs, which move very slowly, then pounce at your face - you can actually see when they're attacking.

The sidekicks aren't quite as bad as some people keep making out - although I imagine they could get pretty stuck in places, and get in the way in others. It's a nice idea, but by no means original. Half-Life had scientists and security guards, while its Opposing Force mission pack put you alongside soldiers which would fight with you. The sidekick AI in Daikatana seemed similar to the Half-Life security guards, which was fine for short periods, but would be pretty annoying for an entire game...

In a way, it's intriguing to compare Half-Life and Daikatana. Both are first games, both were dramatically behind schedule, both attempt to tell a story, and change the way we think about FPS-style games. Unfortunately, while Half-Life succeeds in a spectacular manner, Daikatana fails miserably...

Oh well. Time to wait for the release of Half-Life 1.1 and Worldcraft 3.3... :-)

Ford Prefect

1) This is not 'one of the few cases'! As far as straight (civil) libel goes, existing 'cyberlaw' goes back to the 80's, with mailing lists and BBSs and has definitely been upheld internationally. "international" is important, because you can be sued in jurisdiction where the 'damage' occurs or where the 'victim' resides. Here are some cases/sources:

• Here's a Richmond Law Review (Va.) article suggesting unified approaches to cyber-defamation.
• Here's a Harvard Law Review article on cyberlaw.
• Here's a Georgia State review article of Alabama cyber defamation law (for details and contrast with Utah)
• Blakeley v. Continental Airlines is a 1999 case involving a private company-only BBS
• Rindos v. Hardwick was a famous case where an American was successfully sued in Australian courts for defamation on a e-mail list. [Summary] [Judgement]
• A CyberLibel FAQ -- primarily non-US 'British tradition' (Australia, Canada) useful as a basis for further understanding.
• Here's a 1994 Australian review of Defamation laws in cyberspace.
• Here's a course reading list (with links to cases and other resources embedded in the course outline) for a comparison of in the US and Australia with references to other law (Roman, English, Dutch, etc.) It hits some very relevant points in vey few words.
• Here's a review of British cyber-defamation law (incl. BBS and e-mail)
• Similar US Criminal Libel cases against students have been reported widely in the media for years (names are not cited, because they are minors): [Colorado, 1997 (ACLU) and verdict, 1998]
• Nervous? maybe you should be Here's a (English language, published in Denmark) peer-reviewed law journal article on 'Defamation Havens' ('peer-review' is when articles are reviewed by experts before publication)

2) Do a websearch for "criminal libel" and you'll find that its primary use worldwide, historically and currently is against journalists . One of the 'Inciting Abuses' that contributed to the American Revolution was a (then British) court verdict that a newspaper was guilty of defaming the reputation of the Governer-General of New York by (accurately) revealing his corruption.

• Criminal Libel use.abuse is often cited in the annual US State Department Human Rights reports on each country. [Gabon, 1999]
• In Ireland, journalistic websites get away with a great deal that print journalism can't.

3) To address another of Katz's points, here are mini-case studies in dysfunctional human behaviour on the net

Katz was on my 'exclude list' for a few months, not because I dislike his writing, but because his loose use of facts and analogies leads to a sloppy, infuriating discussion. A profesional writer should investigate his facts and limit his speculation to what those facts support; If he doesn't, the readers will certainly go hogwild. This is the first Katz article I've read in a while. I am not pleased.

There's plenty of projects available using the Amulet for students at Manchester University. One guy I know was building a robot control board using one of these (it had a particular lysick offboard communications system - it was self-programming using a Xilinx array, and used the bootstrap code to soft-load it).

One of next years projects is to port Linux to Amulet. Should be interesting, as I don't know as there's an MMU yet.

Anyway, I have seen one of them running and it's quite impressive. It has a genuinely low power consumption (almost literally nothing when not doing anything), and because of the wonderful CMOS speedup effect, you can increase the speed of the thing by wacking up the core voltage. Very cool.

The implementation spec is fairly tightly controlled, though, so don't expect to get hold of it just yet.

Anyway. Come to Manchester! It's got pubs!

Not having been up on the topic, I just never thought that integrated circuit logic was an alternative. And I'm still trying to figure out why asynchronous smaller bandwidth (number of lines) buses are faster than synchronous parallel (more data lines). But I guess the speed has at least something to do with the noise tolerance. Anyway, I'm reading from one of the links followed from the site that seems to be a pretty good explanation/history of the asynchronous logic.

As most of you probably won't realise this, I thought It'd mention it, even though it's kind of semi-off-topic.

The University of Manchester is where the world's first stored-program computer was built.

D.

Impress the dept. and gain the respect of /.! Certainly much more fun than the Java web-trawler I did this year...

Assorted odds and ends which might be of interest...

Yet more Futurama stuff including a clockwork Bender. I want one. :-)

icebox.com which has various Flash cartoons, some of which are created (and voiced by) people behind The Simpsons and Futurama. They seem pretty good - and somewhat politically incorrect.

The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, a blatant plug to my utterly crap web site. Do not expect useful content.

Ford Prefect