Broadband in the US is doing just fine. See the Nielsen/Netratings stats (which that site probably shouldn't be publishing, but so be it.) "As of February 2004 broadband penetration was at 45.15%... we estimate that broadband share in the US should exceed 50% by June of 2004". Comscore shows roughly comparable numbers. Broadband penetration is currently increasing at about 10-12% per year.
For comparison, only about 40% of US households bought a book in the last year. So broadband has already passed books. Only 21% of US households subscribe to a newspaper, while
about 75% of Americans with a phone line have Internet access. Only 66% of US households
subscribe to cable TV, so the Internet has already passed cable TV. Cable TV isn't growing, so, if you take the trends seriously, broadband Internet will pass cable TV within two years.
Historically, Livermore's laser fusion program has been a cover for bomb research. That's been true for decades. How does this new program lead to a useful power source?
It's annoyingly difficult to get to a public safety answering point from a cell phone. In California, 911 from Sprint cell phones usually results in waiting on hold, then reaching the California Highway Patrol. Calling information and asking for dispatch for the appropriate police department routes you to a telco supervisor, and you have to explain what you want to get there.
That article is about how to learn Linux, not how to convert your shop to Linux.
A conversion guide would have more info about how to convert data, which is the real problem.
Grand Theft Auto - Online!
Finally, massively multiplayer comes to GTA.
The bad guys are played by players in South Central LA and Medellin, Columbia. You can do actual drug deals in the GTA world. "Live in your world - deal in ours". Now with fully encrypted voice chat.
Days of Our Lives As the World Turns
The first soap opera video game. Online, but requires only occasional dialup, because the pace is so slow. Includes in-game shopping. Astrology option included.
Rove for President
Try to do Karl Rove's job, manipulating the electorate to get Republicans elected. High-scorers win internships at the Heritage Foundation.
Silent Scope Extreme Edition
Get in touch with your inner sniper. Comes with a light gun that emulates a full-sized sniper rifle.
Choice of M-40A1, Dragunov, or H&K G3.
A press of a single key turns the game into Deer Hunter, in case right-wing parents come in the room. Includes NRA membership application and one-year subscription to Guns and Ammo.
Desert Despot
Tropico for the Islamic world. You're the dictator. Get too oppressive, and there's a revolt. Lighten up too much, and the religious fanatics overthrow you.
Can you develop nuclear weapons before the US catches on?
Donald Trump's Casino Manager
Why just gamble?
Run your own online casino. Take bets, pay off bets, make or lose money. All transactions are fully anonymous and are routed through servers in the Bahamas. A Donald Trump popup gives you advice. Screw up, and he bellows "You're Fired", and your machine shuts down.
My Really Annoying Baby
Now, buy
Baby Think It Over, the doll that teaches you how to care for a baby, at a low, low affordable price. Screams when hungry. Screams when diaper needs to be changed. Screams at threshold of pain if treated roughly. Can't be turned off. Uses special disposable single-use diapers, available wherever toys are sold.
House Music Construction Set Thumpa, thumpa, thumpa, all night long. Set a few sliders, twist a few mix pads, and out comes original house music. Upload your songs to peer-to-peer networks. Subwoofer optional.
Everyone buys their games, if for no other reason than to see what the graphics are like.
That "everyone" is a niche market. "Wow, vertex shaders!" "Real-time displacement mapping".
Not that many people look for that stuff.
If you want to see what's coming in graphics, download a SpeedTree demo.
SpeedTree generates large-scale terrain with grass, trees, and ground, through which you can move in real-time. Each tree is different. There's full level of detail; get close to a tree and examine the bark and leaves. Leaves and branches sway in the wind. There's a library of tree types, or you can define your own. SpeedTree technology will be appearing in mainstream games soon. The demos require a graphics board with a good OpenGL; GEForce 3 or better will work. The demo is Windows-only, although it's possible to use SpeedTree on other platforms.
The big thing at the GDC seemed to be putting decade-old games on cellphones. It's about the revenue model. Cellphone companies charge by the month for gaming. They can thus collect revenue from classics forever.
The basic problem is the one we discovered in the early days of virtual reality - no matter how good the graphics get, all you can really do in there is move around, shoot stuff, point at stuff, and select things from menus.
Well, it's one solution to the "how do I return a temporary" problem. There's elegance there. But it's expressed in an unnecessarily obscure way. The reference-counted Perl model is equally powerful but more comprehensible.
The Infinium Labs website, under "Special Events", says they were going to be at the Game Developers' Conference this week. I didn't see an Infinium booth there, and they're not on the exhibitor list or the booth map.
A block closure is an object representing an encapsulable context of execution, containing local variables, input variables, the capability to execute expressions sequentially, and finally returns a value to its point of invocation. The default return value for a block is the last expression's value; an early return can override this.
This is a language for people who like obscure semantics.
Yes, closures are useful. I've used them in LISP. I even used one once in production code in Perl, to do some error handling cleanly. But when the manual starts out with closures, it's clear that somebody is getting too cute.
This is a language for "l33t haxxors", of the old MIT AI Lab persuasion. Check out "instance specific dispatch". Now that's designed to totally confuse maintainers.
That's an poor-looking fashion show. None of the outfits fit quite right.
Major fashion shows have people backstage, frantically making alterations so that everything fits perfectly. This is more of a trade-show event. (That, by the way, is what actress/model/waitress types really do. Modelling, as an job, is a few hundred people who make real money, and an army of wannabees with low-paying day jobs. It's like movie extra work.)
Cool-looking wearable devices have been made.
But these aren't it. Gaultier's 80's styles would have been a better base to work from.
Gadgetry fit better with punk style.
With today's more conservative styles, a phone divided into a locket, an earring, and a base unit, using Bluetooth to tie the components together, would have more fashion potential. Small earring speaker, locket microphone. Choice of big, clunky wristband with screen ("sports phone") or handbag-carried base unit. It would be nice to eliminate the base station, but the battery is the limiting factor there. Add a jewelry box which inductively recharges the units placed inside it, and you have a product with fashion potential.
It's not a new observation about war. It's more of a justification for putting far more resources into preparation for the first few minutes of a battle than has historically been the case. There's a truism that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. But for the first few minutes, with sufficient preparation and intelligence, that's often not true.
The classic example is Eben-Emael.
Seventy men took out one of the strongest forts in the world, manned by a thousand troops, in ten minutes. This allowed Hitler's armies to advance into Belgium and conquer France.
Six months of preparation, ten minutes of vulnerability.
The lesson for virus/worm writers is that an attacker needs the capability to rehearse and optimize attacks. This requires two things - general intel about target machines (what percent of targets are vulnerable to each available attack, for example), and a farm of machines on which to test and tune attacks. Many worms/viruses have failed because propagation was too slow, or all the attacks targeted the same machines, or some similar tactical failure in the early part of propagation. The original Morris worm failed for just such a reason. The serious attacker will have a farm of machines on which to repeatedly test the attack plan, without arousing attention until the actual attack.
Virus writers are now developing a tactical doctrine. This suggests that future viruses will be more effective, not for technical reasons, but because the attacks will be organized more like military attacks. We now see virus writers getting inside the OODA cycle of the defenders. This is consistent with modern military tactical doctrine.
Read MCDP-1, Warfighting. This short Marine Corps publication tells you how to think about war and how to win it. This revolutionized USMC doctrine, which previously focused on heroically advancing no matter what the opposition.
A key point of modern tactical doctrine is to act faster than the opposition can react. Special operations types talk about the "period of vulnerability", which begins when the defender notices an attack and ends when the attacker achieves relative superiority. Most attacks fail during the period of vulnerability. So modern tactical doctrine says that it's worth huge amounts of effort and money to cut that time down. This is why special ops people rehearse and train to a level that seems unreasonable. It's not to make them good, athough it does. It's to make them fast, so they get through those first seconds and minutes at the beginning of an attack before the defenders can react.
That's exactly what we saw with this worm. The attack was launched in a way that rendered the usual strategies of anti-virus companies ineffective. Anti-virus companies, (and Microsoft), have known response and patching cycle times. The creators of this worm got inside that cycle time, by building both a fast-propagating worm and by starting it from multiple points.
Military doctrine gives us some insights on what to expect next. This worm invoved a campaign, a series of battles fought to achieve a goal.
One attack acquired machines to be used as bases in a later attack. That's standard doctrine. Other relevant military concepts include mutual support, feints, and diversions. We are starting to see worms and viruses that support each other, so that if one is removed, another attack lets it back in. We may see feints and diversions, where a big noisy attack is launched to divert attention from something more subtle.
Another doctrinal concept is that of combined arms. So far, virus writers generally haven't utilized other hacking techniques, like dumpster diving, social engineering, or wiretapping. That may change.
We may well see an attack that wipes out most of the Internet-connected Windows machines in the world in a single day.
Microsoft's real business is Office. Everything else either loses money (development tools, Xbox), or exists to lock people into Office (Windows). Look at their financials.
If it hadn't been for Microsoft, the leading applications companies would still have the leading applications. Remember Lotus? Ashton-Tate? VisiCorp? MicroPro? The industry would probably be more standards-based, because having incompatible spreadsheets and word processors would be too annoying.
Years ago, I realized that something like this was needed to remove the old pilings that clutter up the SF waterfront.
The usual solution is to get a large barge-mounted crane and pull them up by brute force, but that's expensive. So it tends not to get done until somebody wants to build something and can convince the city to let them. The bayfront clutter of pilings and rotted piers makes open shoreline look less attractive, which encourages "development".
A cheaper way to remove that junk, even if it's slow, would be a big win.
Worth noting is that OpenOffice Draw does simple charts quite well, better than the draw program in MS Word. In the Microsoft world, you have to spend several hundred dollars more just to get something that can draw boxes and arrows.
Impress, for presentations, isn't bad either. It lacks the graphics and templates that come with Microsoft's overpriced PowerPoint, though. (Another example of the "open source programmers don't have artist girlfriends" problem.)
However, our original B&W standard was replaced with a new one when we went to UHF from VHF.
This is becaue the original standard was even more crap than the US system.
Yes, British 405-line B/W TV was awful. Anyone remember the "wobbulator", the thing to jitter the lines up and down a bit to fill in the black space between scan lines?
Unfortunately, when Europe settled on a system, it was 650-line PAL, not 819-line SECAM, the French system. Big mistake. The French actually had to go down to a lower-resolution system. SECAM decoding required a delay line, which added cost to receivers of that era. And the stations required more bandwidth. But it worked great.
Of course, European TV has a 50Hz frame rate, while US TV has a 60Hz frame rate. This despite the fact that TV frame rate has never been synched to the power line.
It's probably time to go to 72Hz 1080p for movies. No more strobing. No more interlace. No more 3/2 pulldown. A better transition to plasma panels. The new generation of DVDs have enough space.
Taking interlace into the flat-panel era is just stupid.
We need a good spoof of Islam, to be beamed at the Islamic world. They need to lighten up.
Mohammed's life makes a great comedy. He married an older women for money. He became a used camel dealer. He had a favorite slave girl, Zaid. Then he went into religion around age 40. For years, he was considered a nutcase. Somehow, he and his followers managed to take over Medina, after which he started invading and conquering neighboring countries.
Visualize the Python version of that.
It would drive the Islamic world nuts.
But it would be worth it.
Make sure it gets on satellite TV and file-sharing networks, so Arab kids see it. In most of the Islamic world, kids are forced to OD on religion, because the religious types run the schools. It's like the Dark Ages in Europe.
The last major film about Islam, Mohammed, Messenger of God, was way too respectful. It doesn't even show the face of Mohammed (played by Anthony Quinn), to respect Islamic tradition. The Saudis use it as a training film. It was pulled from US theaters in 1976 after threats from people we'd today call terrorists. Today, the US wouldn't back down.
Space travel with chemical rockets isn't feasible
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 1
Space travel with chemical rockets just isn't good enough. And it's never going to get better.
There's been essentially zero progress in thirty years. The Saturn V was as good as it ever got, and we had to launch a 50-story building to put something the size of an RV on the moon. Fuels can't improve; LOX and LOH are as good as it gets in terms of mass ratio. Weight reduction reached the point of diminishing returns some time back.
That's why the Shuttle is so fragile.
SSTO craft must be somewhere above 95% fuel, which doesn't leave much for the spacecraft.
We can do political-military ego trip manned spaceflight with chemical rockets, but it doesn't lead anywhere. Going to Mars will be another dead end, like Apollo.
Bob Boyer and Jay Moore, of theorem prover and string search fame, used pair programming back in the 1970s and 1980s. They even had it working remotely. They were both using remote mainframe terminals into a DEC mainframe, and they had their screens slaved together. They also had headsets, so they could talk.
Attempts to do this with PCs have been less successful, because synchronizing the displays tends to require huge bandwidth.
This sounds more like a renaming of Direct-X version N+1.
I just came back from GDC, and this wasn't a major topic, except in Microsoft-sponsored sessions.
The big thing at GDC seemed to be games for cell phones. But they're mostly old games from about two generations back, resized for the small screen.
We're not, for example, seeing games that use player location information, or involve play in the real world. Cell phone games remain time-fillers.
At the high end, the graphics continue to get better, but the game ideas remain the same. ("What makes this different from Everquest?")
Everything is slightly better ("Now, 7 channel sound!" "Our audio compressor does voice chat with less bandwidth". "Our tree generator now does flowers, roots and grass!". "Now, with 64 bits!") but nothing looked like a breakthrough. The conference seemed smaller than two years ago.
The Really Big Seamless World problem seems to be under control. Level of detail and regioning are now in good shape, not just for graphics but for AI and physics. (If nobody is in the forest, do trees still fall? No, but if you go there, things may have changed since you were there last.) It's not all perfect yet in shipping games, but the major problems have been solved. Planet-sized virtual worlds work. But they're less interesting than people expected before they worked.
Technically, I'm interested to see that somebody finally got implicit integration to work for game physics. I spent some time on that problem in 1998, and made some progress, but the performance wasn't better than explicit integration. Somebody seems to have gotten past that problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, at least he goes out shopping. Remember when Bush I went to a supermarket and was surprised to see a checkout scanner?
For comparison, only about 40% of US households bought a book in the last year. So broadband has already passed books. Only 21% of US households subscribe to a newspaper, while about 75% of Americans with a phone line have Internet access. Only 66% of US households subscribe to cable TV, so the Internet has already passed cable TV. Cable TV isn't growing, so, if you take the trends seriously, broadband Internet will pass cable TV within two years.
What's the problem?
Historically, Livermore's laser fusion program has been a cover for bomb research. That's been true for decades. How does this new program lead to a useful power source?
It's annoyingly difficult to get to a public safety answering point from a cell phone. In California, 911 from Sprint cell phones usually results in waiting on hold, then reaching the California Highway Patrol. Calling information and asking for dispatch for the appropriate police department routes you to a telco supervisor, and you have to explain what you want to get there.
That article is about how to learn Linux, not how to convert your shop to Linux. A conversion guide would have more info about how to convert data, which is the real problem.
Finally, massively multiplayer comes to GTA. The bad guys are played by players in South Central LA and Medellin, Columbia. You can do actual drug deals in the GTA world. "Live in your world - deal in ours". Now with fully encrypted voice chat.
The first soap opera video game. Online, but requires only occasional dialup, because the pace is so slow. Includes in-game shopping. Astrology option included.
Try to do Karl Rove's job, manipulating the electorate to get Republicans elected. High-scorers win internships at the Heritage Foundation.
Get in touch with your inner sniper. Comes with a light gun that emulates a full-sized sniper rifle. Choice of M-40A1, Dragunov, or H&K G3. A press of a single key turns the game into Deer Hunter, in case right-wing parents come in the room. Includes NRA membership application and one-year subscription to Guns and Ammo.
Tropico for the Islamic world. You're the dictator. Get too oppressive, and there's a revolt. Lighten up too much, and the religious fanatics overthrow you. Can you develop nuclear weapons before the US catches on?
Why just gamble? Run your own online casino. Take bets, pay off bets, make or lose money. All transactions are fully anonymous and are routed through servers in the Bahamas. A Donald Trump popup gives you advice. Screw up, and he bellows "You're Fired", and your machine shuts down.
Now, buy Baby Think It Over, the doll that teaches you how to care for a baby, at a low, low affordable price. Screams when hungry. Screams when diaper needs to be changed. Screams at threshold of pain if treated roughly. Can't be turned off. Uses special disposable single-use diapers, available wherever toys are sold.
Thumpa, thumpa, thumpa, all night long. Set a few sliders, twist a few mix pads, and out comes original house music. Upload your songs to peer-to-peer networks. Subwoofer optional.
That "everyone" is a niche market. "Wow, vertex shaders!" "Real-time displacement mapping". Not that many people look for that stuff.
If you want to see what's coming in graphics, download a SpeedTree demo. SpeedTree generates large-scale terrain with grass, trees, and ground, through which you can move in real-time. Each tree is different. There's full level of detail; get close to a tree and examine the bark and leaves. Leaves and branches sway in the wind. There's a library of tree types, or you can define your own. SpeedTree technology will be appearing in mainstream games soon. The demos require a graphics board with a good OpenGL; GEForce 3 or better will work. The demo is Windows-only, although it's possible to use SpeedTree on other platforms.
Any time there's no price variation across companies, as is seen in the music industry, that should be considered proof of illegal price-fixing.
The basic problem is the one we discovered in the early days of virtual reality - no matter how good the graphics get, all you can really do in there is move around, shoot stuff, point at stuff, and select things from menus.
Well, it's one solution to the "how do I return a temporary" problem. There's elegance there. But it's expressed in an unnecessarily obscure way. The reference-counted Perl model is equally powerful but more comprehensible.
The Infinium Labs website, under "Special Events", says they were going to be at the Game Developers' Conference this week. I didn't see an Infinium booth there, and they're not on the exhibitor list or the booth map.
A block closure is an object representing an encapsulable context of execution, containing local variables, input variables, the capability to execute expressions sequentially, and finally returns a value to its point of invocation. The default return value for a block is the last expression's value; an early return can override this.
This is a language for people who like obscure semantics.
Yes, closures are useful. I've used them in LISP. I even used one once in production code in Perl, to do some error handling cleanly. But when the manual starts out with closures, it's clear that somebody is getting too cute.
This is a language for "l33t haxxors", of the old MIT AI Lab persuasion. Check out "instance specific dispatch". Now that's designed to totally confuse maintainers.
Cool-looking wearable devices have been made. But these aren't it. Gaultier's 80's styles would have been a better base to work from. Gadgetry fit better with punk style.
With today's more conservative styles, a phone divided into a locket, an earring, and a base unit, using Bluetooth to tie the components together, would have more fashion potential. Small earring speaker, locket microphone. Choice of big, clunky wristband with screen ("sports phone") or handbag-carried base unit. It would be nice to eliminate the base station, but the battery is the limiting factor there. Add a jewelry box which inductively recharges the units placed inside it, and you have a product with fashion potential.
The classic example is Eben-Emael. Seventy men took out one of the strongest forts in the world, manned by a thousand troops, in ten minutes. This allowed Hitler's armies to advance into Belgium and conquer France. Six months of preparation, ten minutes of vulnerability.
The lesson for virus/worm writers is that an attacker needs the capability to rehearse and optimize attacks. This requires two things - general intel about target machines (what percent of targets are vulnerable to each available attack, for example), and a farm of machines on which to test and tune attacks. Many worms/viruses have failed because propagation was too slow, or all the attacks targeted the same machines, or some similar tactical failure in the early part of propagation. The original Morris worm failed for just such a reason. The serious attacker will have a farm of machines on which to repeatedly test the attack plan, without arousing attention until the actual attack.
A key point of modern tactical doctrine is to act faster than the opposition can react. Special operations types talk about the "period of vulnerability", which begins when the defender notices an attack and ends when the attacker achieves relative superiority. Most attacks fail during the period of vulnerability. So modern tactical doctrine says that it's worth huge amounts of effort and money to cut that time down. This is why special ops people rehearse and train to a level that seems unreasonable. It's not to make them good, athough it does. It's to make them fast, so they get through those first seconds and minutes at the beginning of an attack before the defenders can react.
That's exactly what we saw with this worm. The attack was launched in a way that rendered the usual strategies of anti-virus companies ineffective. Anti-virus companies, (and Microsoft), have known response and patching cycle times. The creators of this worm got inside that cycle time, by building both a fast-propagating worm and by starting it from multiple points.
Military doctrine gives us some insights on what to expect next. This worm invoved a campaign, a series of battles fought to achieve a goal. One attack acquired machines to be used as bases in a later attack. That's standard doctrine. Other relevant military concepts include mutual support, feints, and diversions. We are starting to see worms and viruses that support each other, so that if one is removed, another attack lets it back in. We may see feints and diversions, where a big noisy attack is launched to divert attention from something more subtle.
Another doctrinal concept is that of combined arms. So far, virus writers generally haven't utilized other hacking techniques, like dumpster diving, social engineering, or wiretapping. That may change.
We may well see an attack that wipes out most of the Internet-connected Windows machines in the world in a single day.
If it hadn't been for Microsoft, the leading applications companies would still have the leading applications. Remember Lotus? Ashton-Tate? VisiCorp? MicroPro? The industry would probably be more standards-based, because having incompatible spreadsheets and word processors would be too annoying.
The usual solution is to get a large barge-mounted crane and pull them up by brute force, but that's expensive. So it tends not to get done until somebody wants to build something and can convince the city to let them. The bayfront clutter of pilings and rotted piers makes open shoreline look less attractive, which encourages "development". A cheaper way to remove that junk, even if it's slow, would be a big win.
2) Yeah, they didn't take over Medina until later.
3) I know that his face is never shown in the film. I thought that Anthony Qunnn was his voice, but apparently not.
4) It was called "Mohammed, Messenger of God" in theatrical release.
5) It's always been controversial, but it's really very respectful of Islam.
Impress, for presentations, isn't bad either. It lacks the graphics and templates that come with Microsoft's overpriced PowerPoint, though. (Another example of the "open source programmers don't have artist girlfriends" problem.)
Yes, British 405-line B/W TV was awful. Anyone remember the "wobbulator", the thing to jitter the lines up and down a bit to fill in the black space between scan lines?
Unfortunately, when Europe settled on a system, it was 650-line PAL, not 819-line SECAM, the French system. Big mistake. The French actually had to go down to a lower-resolution system. SECAM decoding required a delay line, which added cost to receivers of that era. And the stations required more bandwidth. But it worked great.
Of course, European TV has a 50Hz frame rate, while US TV has a 60Hz frame rate. This despite the fact that TV frame rate has never been synched to the power line.
It's probably time to go to 72Hz 1080p for movies. No more strobing. No more interlace. No more 3/2 pulldown. A better transition to plasma panels. The new generation of DVDs have enough space.
Taking interlace into the flat-panel era is just stupid.
Mohammed's life makes a great comedy. He married an older women for money. He became a used camel dealer. He had a favorite slave girl, Zaid. Then he went into religion around age 40. For years, he was considered a nutcase. Somehow, he and his followers managed to take over Medina, after which he started invading and conquering neighboring countries.
Visualize the Python version of that. It would drive the Islamic world nuts. But it would be worth it. Make sure it gets on satellite TV and file-sharing networks, so Arab kids see it. In most of the Islamic world, kids are forced to OD on religion, because the religious types run the schools. It's like the Dark Ages in Europe.
The last major film about Islam, Mohammed, Messenger of God, was way too respectful. It doesn't even show the face of Mohammed (played by Anthony Quinn), to respect Islamic tradition. The Saudis use it as a training film. It was pulled from US theaters in 1976 after threats from people we'd today call terrorists. Today, the US wouldn't back down.
We can do political-military ego trip manned spaceflight with chemical rockets, but it doesn't lead anywhere. Going to Mars will be another dead end, like Apollo.
Attempts to do this with PCs have been less successful, because synchronizing the displays tends to require huge bandwidth.
I just came back from GDC, and this wasn't a major topic, except in Microsoft-sponsored sessions.
The big thing at GDC seemed to be games for cell phones. But they're mostly old games from about two generations back, resized for the small screen. We're not, for example, seeing games that use player location information, or involve play in the real world. Cell phone games remain time-fillers.
At the high end, the graphics continue to get better, but the game ideas remain the same. ("What makes this different from Everquest?") Everything is slightly better ("Now, 7 channel sound!" "Our audio compressor does voice chat with less bandwidth". "Our tree generator now does flowers, roots and grass!". "Now, with 64 bits!") but nothing looked like a breakthrough. The conference seemed smaller than two years ago.
The Really Big Seamless World problem seems to be under control. Level of detail and regioning are now in good shape, not just for graphics but for AI and physics. (If nobody is in the forest, do trees still fall? No, but if you go there, things may have changed since you were there last.) It's not all perfect yet in shipping games, but the major problems have been solved. Planet-sized virtual worlds work. But they're less interesting than people expected before they worked.
Technically, I'm interested to see that somebody finally got implicit integration to work for game physics. I spent some time on that problem in 1998, and made some progress, but the performance wasn't better than explicit integration. Somebody seems to have gotten past that problem.
This is actually a rehash of a 19th century classic by, perhaps, Mark Twain. Anyone have the correct reference?