They really just need to go to a mobile phone store and look at the size of the Sandisk microSD cards now - Anything from a 4 Gigabyte to 8 Gigabyte card are just a set of adapters, with the actual memory unit smaller than a fingernail.
It would be extremely easy just to place that somewhere inside the outer case or inside one of the component covers on a laptop.
Our university sys-admin was determined to keep the overhead costs of the department down - so he insisted that no-one put their PC into turbo mode unless they desperately needed the extra performance. He had used a portable meter to measure what effect turbo mode had on the PC.
There was a cartoon related to the seniority of the different professions in academia, which was something like: psychologists => biologists => chemists => physicists => mathematicians => accountants => actuaries.
Taken to the logical conclusion, World War IV will be won by accountants and actuaries.
Yes, I once tried playing DRAGNFLY.EXE, that helicopter game where you tried to shoot gunboats patrolling the edge of the screen. On a modern day PC, they just zip around faster than the refresh rate of the monitor and zap you in seconds. DOSBox helped solve that problem.
Back then, your 6502/Z80 home computer had around 64K RAM at most. 8K to 16K of that would be for the OS. The screen would take 8K. That leaves you with 32K of bytes to play with. Instructions would take anything from 1 to 3 bytes, so you could write at most 30,000 instructions.
You are going to need to reserve some memory for your graphics library (drawing points, line, triangles, text, pixelmaps, circles and ellipses). You can't use floating point maths, so will need your own fixed point 16-bit library for 3D maths.
More memory will be needed for pixelmaps and fonts. A single font will take from 1K (128 8x8 characters) to 4K (128 16x16 bit characters). You'll have a basic bitmap editor to create fonts, pixelmaps. Your geometry will be calculated by hand, since you won't be able to render too many triangles. Rendering your screen will be a combination of drawing lines, triangles and pasting pixelmaps (not too different from today). You might be able to use page flipping or hardware scrolling to implement double buffering.
Managing player state is simpler - using bytes will be preferred for most variables, but you might need 16-bits or 32-bits for scores and credits. You need to maintain information about the virtual world - the names of the planets/solar systems plus the trading prices. One hundred planets with twenty different commodities might use up 2K of memory.
Because you are dealing with a limit of 32K with resources measured in 1K blocks, it was easy to do bean-counting, especially since a slow disk drive meant you couldn't easily load/save data to disk, except for saving and loading the game at fixed points in the game (eg. on planet side).
A modern PC today will consist of 4 Gigabyes of memory, a large OS (1 Gigabyte+ for IO buffers), a graphics card with 256Mbyte of memory and 100+ stream processors, two or more hyperthreaded cores, fast cached hard-disk drives 250Gbytes+ in size. Instructions for the CPU range from 4 bytes to 32+ bytes in size, giving 134 million instructions. However, with optimizing compilers with parallel instruction execution, code optimization, hyperthreading and multithreading, worrying about individual CPU instruction counts is less important. Using 32-bit integers is more efficient than using bytes or 16-bit integers. The only way to really optimize source code is to use performance tuners and optimizing compilers. With middleware, you might not even have that option.
With data, just a single 3D vertex is going to take up at least 48 bytes (vertex + tangent space). A model might consist of 20K vertices, so that is 500K for a start. A single texture for a 3D model might take up 1 MByte or more (terrain maps especially), but many graphics techniques require multi-texturing, so you might need two or more such textures for a single model. Don't forget the sampled audio and video clips streamed from disk or CD/DVD. Multiple threads will be used to handle user-input events, rendering, virtual world updates from the network server.
Just getting approval to introduce a new character, get the artist/animator time to paint/animate that content is going to take many days of development. It might even require hiring an actor to do some of the motion and audio.
There are a couple of fields of personal data in facebook which state your marital status, and whether you are looking for a man or woman. It might just be possible from analyzing these details, which way you swing.
I remember those - our PC's (IBM PC clones that had the monitor on top) had the Turbo Boost button that would give your PC that extra bit of oomph when you needed those spreadsheet tables calculated in a jiffy or that word processor macro processed in a hurry. It would boost the clock speed up from 8 MHz to 16 Mhz. With Later models of PC tower units, there would have a couple of LED digits that displayed the clock speed (20/25/33/40/50/60 Mhz).
I had an uncle who worked in IBM - they were doing lots of interesting work, but the downside was that he found himself being moved all over the world - Glasgow, California, Europe, so the nickname "I've Been Moved" was accurate.
In the past, they had some attractive sounding positions - 3D visualisation engineers/architects. But if they have a policy of shuffling people between different research groups, then what's the point of working for them if they are just going to move you away from your area of expertise?
Resolving the problem of latency over low-bandwidth connections was a major research area. Methods for generic data included establishing multiple port connections, data buffer management. For motion, there are techniques of analyzing the time delay and using that to interpolate an estimated motion path - Some games like 'bzflag' estimates motion as a circle of a particular radius - if a connection is lost, the tank just appears to go round in circles. At a higher level, there are methods of managing distributed scene-graphs so that only the data in one server that changes is broadcast to the other servers, and that only data visible to a particular player is sent to their computer.
Since there is mention of the 'digital environment' it could be the latter.
Try Googling for ZX-81 emulators (not to leave anyone out, emulators for the other 1980's home computers, Atari, BBC, ZX Spectrum, Dragon, Commodore). There will be emulators and sample BASIC/assembly language programs.
Nearly all have a self-contained power supply and transmitter inside a sealed case. Since GPS watches are now available, these units are becoming extremely small:
There was a story (maybe in The Register) about how the Federation against Software Theft was going after large companies who weren't purchasing site licences. One large national company came after investigation. After months of paperwork auditing and tracking purchase receipts for individual licensed software distributions, FAST came to the conclusion that there was no piracy and that in fact there were more licenses than were actually used by the company.
The CIO and CFO than realized that there was a need for a purchase management system. After this was implemented, the company found that they had reduced their software license budget by half simply by reusing existing licenses than constantly buying new licenses.
But how would you have learned all of that? Would you have been made to write essays about these subjects, create a poster with glue, scissors and hand-colored diagrams (alternatively use Powerpoint), write a biography of the researchers, go on school outings to museums and mathematical institutions, or given class assignments to complete real-world experiments or write programs to demonstrate each of these concepts?
Each of these is a valid method of teaching, though to a geek the latter three would probably seem the most interesting, the first sounds the most tedious and the second might be fun for a day.
If someone else republishes out of date legislation,or information packs, then that can be a problem. It's not going to be fun arranging finances only to find that the laws or requirements have changed or are no longer valid.
Anything that is used to handle radioactive materials will be assumed to be radioactive as well. Our local chemistry department actually has a dustbin with a radioactive sign on it. Anything used to handle something with a radioactive sign on it is automatically to have become radioactive as well - technicians gloves, wipes, syringes, tubing, sample containers and dissolved solutions. Other things might include the cobalt in medical scanners and industrial quality control equipment.
The EFF's Fred von Lohman, however, pointed out that there's a certain irony in this widespread public support and Congressional interest. What the bill suggests is that the sort of market created by the DMCA, in which companies are given the right to encrypt and protect information of their choosing, shouldn't apply when it comes to autos. To be clear, there are implementation differences. The DMCA could still apply in that third-party tools that provide access to encrypted data in a car would still run afoul of the law. But the need for these tools would be severely reduced by the fact that the manufacturers would be required to provide an equivalent. That would also, presumably, eliminate most of the incentive for manufacturers to take action against the providers of third-party tools.
ProASIC3 devices are also designed with an on-chip 1024-bit non-volatile flash ROM (FROM) and a built-in 128-bit AES decryption core, which facilitates independent, secure, in-system programming (ISP) of both the FPGA core array fabric and the FROM itself. This allows designers to implement a number of secure features. For instance, an AES master key can be preloaded into the device in a secure programming environment. Users can then ship 'blank' parts to an insecure programming or manufacturing centre for final personalisation with an AES encrypted bit stream.
Actel also announced today that Delphi Corp., a leading global supplier of mobile electronics and transportation systems, will be using the Actel ProASIC3 FPGA in a production engine control module being designed into a heavy-duty diesel engine. Additionally, Magna Electronics has selected the Actel ProASIC3 FPGA for its automotive vision systems (see release "Magna Electronics Chooses Actel's ProASIC3 FPGAs to Enable Automotive Vision Systems" also announced today).
Magna Electronics discussed plans for what it calls its intelligent power systems group during a news conference at the Rochester Hills City Hall. The expanded unit, which is expected to add 90 employees over five years, will develop hybrid and electric drivetrain systems and electronics that control motors. The parent company, which is working with Ford Motor Co. to develop a battery-electric small car by 2011,...
In the article, it mentions that the "Right to Repair" relates to your right to choose who repairs your car (yourself, your local garage vs. the official car company dealer).
Because cars have so many control units (eg. the Engine Control Unit), specialized (and expensive) dealers are given advanced scanners which have full access to all the computer systems, and have the ability to clear any internal firmware fault bits which make fault lights remain on even after the car has been repaired. Other non-dealer garages don't have access to this information. They may be able to repair a broken headlight, but the computer system won't turn the fault light off, and might even refuse to allow the ignition to start.
Some car companies were using DRM legislation to prevent owners from altering/checking/viewing the state of the system controller.
Back around 2000 there was a complete failure of the SF Bay Area power grid when a couple of engineers activated the grounding switches to a local area of the power line before decoupling it from the main grid.
But did the antibiotics cure the problem or did the steriod nebulizer. Did the doctors attempt to diagnose what the illness was or just take the shotgun approach? Shooting off antibiotics all over the place is just leading to more antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria.
It reminds me of a lawsuit that the BBC got into once back in the 1980's. One of their consumer programs performed a comparison between "officially recommended" telephone units for the disabled and off-the-shelf novelty telephones over the cost/usability ratio. The officially recommended handsets were large, clunky, came in only one color and hand to be wall mounted or bolted to a table.
The best comparison that could be made today would be between this type of phone and a novelty phone with high contrast black/white and a loudspeaker for hand-free calling.
The company that actually made the clunky type threatened to sue because they had to go through all sorts of usability studies for each of the different categories of disability, then get approval to market their product as a disability aid. Because they were intended for use in hospitals, they also had to withstand the wear and tear of being in a public place.
There was Myst. This game didn't really have a plot, but did have beautifully rendered scenes along with background music. Eventually it was turned into a 3D first person perpective game, but which didn't get so good reviews
Interesting to see where price fell into this as well.
The first MUD's ran on university mainframes, and were maintained by sysadmins. As access would either be through a system terminal they were essentially free for students. For other users, it required an annual 25 pound subscription. Here is a link to the original book describing the University of Essex's MUD game.
Back in the days of lousy graphics and limited features, a story had to draw you in. Now there are so many other components that a good story isn't important.
At the time these games were written, they used what the state-of-the-art in graphics and sound technology was. 256 color 320x200 VGA color graphics mode was the "big thing" around the late 1980's/early 1990's for desktop PC's. Having a sampled sound or Adlib sound drivers was also a big deal (Professional Golf "RealSound"). Even having a GUI style menu system at the top of the screen with save/load game was a major innovation.
Slashdot Mirror
They really just need to go to a mobile phone store and look at the size of the Sandisk microSD cards now - Anything from a 4 Gigabyte to 8 Gigabyte card are just a set of adapters, with the actual memory unit smaller than a fingernail.
It would be extremely easy just to place that somewhere inside the outer case or inside one of the component covers on a laptop.
Our university sys-admin was determined to keep the overhead costs of the department down - so he insisted that no-one put their PC into turbo mode unless they desperately needed the extra performance. He had used a portable meter to measure what effect turbo mode had on the PC.
There was a cartoon related to the seniority of the different professions in academia, which was something like:
psychologists => biologists => chemists => physicists => mathematicians => accountants => actuaries.
Taken to the logical conclusion, World War IV will be won by accountants and actuaries.
Yes, I once tried playing DRAGNFLY.EXE, that helicopter game where you tried to shoot gunboats patrolling the edge of the screen. On a modern day PC, they just zip around faster than the refresh rate of the monitor and zap you in seconds. DOSBox helped solve that problem.
Dos Games
Back then, your 6502/Z80 home computer had around 64K RAM at most. 8K to 16K of that would be for the OS. The screen would take 8K. That leaves you with 32K of bytes to play with. Instructions would take anything from 1 to 3 bytes, so you could write at most 30,000 instructions.
You are going to need to reserve some memory for your graphics library (drawing points, line, triangles, text, pixelmaps, circles and ellipses). You can't use floating point maths, so will need your own fixed point 16-bit library for 3D maths.
More memory will be needed for pixelmaps and fonts. A single font will take from 1K (128 8x8 characters) to 4K (128 16x16 bit characters). You'll have a basic bitmap editor to create fonts, pixelmaps. Your geometry will be calculated by hand, since you won't be able to render too many triangles. Rendering your screen will be a combination of drawing lines, triangles and pasting pixelmaps (not too different from today). You might be able to use page flipping or hardware scrolling to implement double buffering.
Managing player state is simpler - using bytes will be preferred for most variables, but you might need 16-bits or 32-bits for scores and credits. You need to maintain information about the virtual world - the names of the planets/solar systems plus the trading prices. One hundred planets with twenty different commodities might use up 2K of memory.
Because you are dealing with a limit of 32K with resources measured in 1K blocks, it was easy to do bean-counting, especially since a slow disk drive meant you couldn't easily load/save data to disk, except for saving and loading the game at fixed points in the game (eg. on planet side).
A modern PC today will consist of 4 Gigabyes of memory, a large OS (1 Gigabyte+ for IO buffers), a graphics card with 256Mbyte of memory and 100+ stream processors, two or more hyperthreaded cores, fast cached hard-disk drives 250Gbytes+ in size. Instructions for the CPU range from 4 bytes to 32+ bytes in size, giving 134 million instructions. However, with optimizing compilers with parallel instruction execution, code optimization, hyperthreading and multithreading, worrying about individual CPU instruction counts is less important. Using 32-bit integers is more efficient than using bytes or 16-bit integers. The only way to really optimize source code is to use performance tuners and optimizing compilers. With middleware, you might not even have that option.
With data, just a single 3D vertex is going to take up at least 48 bytes (vertex + tangent space). A model might consist of 20K vertices, so that is 500K for a start. A single texture for a 3D model might take up 1 MByte or more (terrain maps especially), but many graphics techniques require multi-texturing, so you might need two or more such textures for a single model. Don't forget the sampled audio and video clips streamed from disk or CD/DVD. Multiple threads will be used to handle user-input events, rendering, virtual world updates from the network server.
Just getting approval to introduce a new character, get the artist/animator time to paint/animate that content is going to take many days of development.
It might even require hiring an actor to do some of the motion and audio.
1500 years ago wars were on a tribal/regional basis
Anglo-Saxon England
Then wars became on country vs. country scale (World War I), then alliance vs. alliance scale (World War II).
The obvious fear was that they would become superpower vs. superpower.
Then there are those who wear beanie caps and believe it will be planet vs. planet.
There are a couple of fields of personal data in facebook which state your marital status, and whether you are looking for a man or woman. It might just be possible from analyzing these details, which way you swing.
I remember those - our PC's (IBM PC clones that had the monitor on top) had the Turbo Boost button that would give your PC that extra bit of oomph when you needed those spreadsheet tables calculated in a jiffy or that word processor macro processed in a hurry. It would boost the clock speed up from 8 MHz to 16 Mhz. With Later models of PC tower units, there would have a couple of LED digits that displayed the clock speed (20/25/33/40/50/60 Mhz).
I had an uncle who worked in IBM - they were doing lots of interesting work, but the downside was that he found himself being moved all over the world - Glasgow, California, Europe, so the nickname "I've Been Moved" was accurate.
In the past, they had some attractive sounding positions - 3D visualisation engineers/architects. But if they have a policy of shuffling people between different research groups, then what's the point of working for them if they are just going to move you away from your area of expertise?
As one detective once said "Every dumb criminal is a failure of the education system."
Resolving the problem of latency over low-bandwidth connections was a major research area. Methods for generic data included establishing multiple port connections, data buffer management. For motion, there are techniques of analyzing the time delay and using that to interpolate an estimated motion path - Some games like 'bzflag' estimates motion as a circle of a particular radius - if a connection is lost, the tank just appears to go round in circles. At a higher level, there are methods of managing distributed scene-graphs so that only the data in one server that changes is broadcast to the other servers, and that only data visible to a particular player is sent to their computer.
Since there is mention of the 'digital environment' it could be the latter.
Try Googling for ZX-81 emulators (not to leave anyone out, emulators for the other 1980's home computers, Atari, BBC, ZX Spectrum, Dragon, Commodore). There will be emulators and sample BASIC/assembly language programs.
ZX 81 emulators/a
Nearly all have a self-contained power supply and transmitter inside a sealed case. Since GPS watches are now available, these units are becoming extremely small:
GPS devices on cars
There was a story (maybe in The Register) about how the Federation against Software Theft was going after large companies who weren't purchasing site licences. One large national company came after investigation. After months of paperwork auditing and tracking purchase receipts for individual licensed software distributions, FAST came to the conclusion that there was no piracy and that in fact there were more licenses than were actually used by the company.
The CIO and CFO than realized that there was a need for a purchase management system. After this was implemented, the company found that they had reduced their software license budget by half simply by reusing existing licenses than constantly buying new licenses.
But how would you have learned all of that? Would you have been made to write essays about these subjects, create a poster with glue, scissors and hand-colored diagrams (alternatively use Powerpoint), write a biography of the researchers, go on school outings to museums and mathematical institutions, or given class assignments to complete real-world experiments or write programs to demonstrate each of these concepts?
Each of these is a valid method of teaching, though to a geek the latter three would probably seem the most interesting, the first sounds the most tedious and the second might be fun for a day.
If someone else republishes out of date legislation,or information packs, then that can be a problem. It's not going to be fun arranging finances only to find that the laws or requirements have changed or are no longer valid.
Anything that is used to handle radioactive materials will be assumed to be radioactive as well. Our local chemistry department actually has a dustbin with a radioactive sign on it. Anything used to handle something with a radioactive sign on it is automatically to have become radioactive as well - technicians gloves, wipes, syringes, tubing, sample containers and dissolved solutions. Other things might include the cobalt in medical scanners and industrial quality control equipment.
Right-to-Repair Law To Get DRM Out of Your Car
Right to repair proposal
Congressmen want automakers to cough up diagnostic codes
The EFF's Fred von Lohman, however, pointed out that there's a certain irony in this widespread public support and Congressional interest. What the bill suggests is that the sort of market created by the DMCA, in which companies are given the right to encrypt and protect information of their choosing, shouldn't apply when it comes to autos. To be clear, there are implementation differences. The DMCA could still apply in that third-party tools that provide access to encrypted data in a car would still run afoul of the law. But the need for these tools would be severely reduced by the fact that the manufacturers would be required to provide an equivalent. That would also, presumably, eliminate most of the incentive for manufacturers to take action against the providers of third-party tools.
From Car Makers Put FPGAs In The Driving Seat
ProASIC3 devices are also designed with an on-chip 1024-bit non-volatile flash ROM (FROM) and a built-in 128-bit AES decryption core, which facilitates independent, secure, in-system programming (ISP) of both the FPGA core array fabric and the FROM itself. This allows designers to implement a number of secure features. For instance, an AES master key can be preloaded into the device in a secure programming environment. Users can then ship 'blank' parts to an insecure programming or manufacturing centre for final personalisation with an AES encrypted bit stream.
Actel Drives FPGAs 'Under the Hood' Into Critical Automotive Powertrain and Safety Systems
Actel also announced today that Delphi Corp., a leading global supplier
of mobile electronics and transportation systems, will be using the Actel
ProASIC3 FPGA in a production engine control module being designed into a
heavy-duty diesel engine. Additionally, Magna Electronics has selected the
Actel ProASIC3 FPGA for its automotive vision systems (see release "Magna
Electronics Chooses Actel's ProASIC3 FPGAs to Enable Automotive Vision
Systems" also announced today).
Magna Electronics expansion in Rochester Hills to focus on developing electric car program for Ford
Magna Electronics discussed plans for what it calls its intelligent power systems group during a news conference at the Rochester Hills City Hall. The expanded unit, which is expected to add 90 employees over five years, will develop hybrid and electric drivetrain systems and electronics that control motors. ...
The parent company, which is working with Ford Motor Co. to develop a battery-electric small car by 2011,
Magna Powertrain and Hyundai announce joint venture
In the article, it mentions that the "Right to Repair" relates to your right to choose who repairs your car (yourself, your local garage vs. the official car company dealer).
Because cars have so many control units (eg. the Engine Control Unit), specialized (and expensive) dealers are given advanced scanners which have full access to all the computer systems, and have the ability to clear any internal firmware fault bits which make fault lights remain on even after the car has been repaired. Other non-dealer garages don't have access to this information. They may be able to repair a broken headlight, but the computer system won't turn the fault light off, and might even refuse to allow the ignition to start.
Some car companies were using DRM legislation to prevent owners from altering/checking/viewing the state of the system controller.
Back around 2000 there was a complete failure of the SF Bay Area power grid when a couple of engineers activated the grounding switches to a local area of the power line before decoupling it from the main grid.
But did the antibiotics cure the problem or did the steriod nebulizer. Did the doctors attempt to diagnose what the illness was or just take the shotgun approach? Shooting off antibiotics all over the place is just leading to more antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria.
It reminds me of a lawsuit that the BBC got into once back in the 1980's. One of their consumer programs performed a comparison between "officially recommended" telephone units for the disabled and off-the-shelf novelty telephones over the cost/usability ratio. The officially recommended handsets were large, clunky, came in only one color and hand to be wall mounted or bolted to a table.
The best comparison that could be made today would be between this type of phone and a novelty phone with high contrast black/white and a loudspeaker for hand-free calling.
The company that actually made the clunky type threatened to sue because they had to go through all sorts of usability studies for each of the different categories of disability, then get approval to market their product as a disability aid. Because they were intended for use in hospitals, they also had to withstand the wear and tear of being in a public place.
There was Myst. This game didn't really have a plot, but did have beautifully rendered scenes along with background music. Eventually it was turned into a 3D first person perpective game, but which didn't get so good reviews
Interesting to see where price fell into this as well.
The first MUD's ran on university mainframes, and were maintained by sysadmins. As access would either be through a system terminal they were essentially free for students. For other users, it required an annual 25 pound subscription. Here is a link to the original book describing the University of Essex's MUD game.
Back in the days of lousy graphics and limited features, a story had to draw you in. Now there are so many other components that a good story isn't important.
At the time these games were written, they used what the state-of-the-art in graphics and sound technology was. 256 color 320x200 VGA color graphics mode was the "big thing" around the late 1980's/early 1990's for desktop PC's. Having a sampled sound or Adlib sound drivers was also a big deal (Professional Golf "RealSound"). Even having a GUI style menu system at the top of the screen with save/load game was a major innovation.