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Fast Forward: Fretting over Netbooks

Tom Halfhill — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 08:30:00 -0500

The recession is getting so bad that stock market refugees are snapping up Treasury bills at 0.2 percent interest, and car dealers have tried everything but adding immortality to their option packages. So you would think that a hot-selling product would be universally welcomed.

Netbook computers are a rare bright spot in a dimming economy. They’re selling faster than copies of Foreclosure for Dummies. The Asus Eee PC opened the door. Now there are too many to count.

However, critics say netbooks might be a bad thing. Their reasoning is that most netbooks use Intel’s Atom processor, which costs less and has lower profit margins than Intel’s other mobile processors. Atom’s popularity, they say, might actually hurt Intel and drag down profits for system vendors and their suppliers.

Enough of that. Netbooks are a good thing. In the first place, market surveys indicate that netbooks aren’t displacing notebooks. Most buyers either have a notebook already and want something more portable, or they weren’t considering the purchase of a mobile computer at all until netbooks came along.

Of course, the surveys could be wrong or premature. I’m sure some people are bypassing traditional notebooks for smaller, lighter netbooks. But the choice isn’t easy, because most netbooks aren’t much cheaper than full-featured notebooks with superior screens. Intel, genetically paranoid, is carefully positioning netbooks as less-capable machines suitable for casual email, web browsing, and social networking. When Nvidia recently tried to expand the scope of netbooks into gaming by introducing a chipset with better graphics, Intel responded with aggressive countermarketing. Intel is also trying to limit the screen sizes of netbooks.

It’s inevitable that netbooks will cannibalize sales of larger computers to some degree. Computing is going mobile, a trend no one can stop and that wise companies will exploit. Intel is promoting a “new” class of mobile Internet devices (MIDs)—basically, PDAs reborn. Intel is also pushing Atom into smartphones.

The success of netbooks, Apple’s iPhone, and wireless networking show that people want the Internet wherever they go. If larger notebooks can’t make the grade, too bad. Resistance is futile.

Tom Halfhill was formerly a senior editor for Byte magazine and is now an analyst for Microprocessor Report.

The Game Boy: The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Boring Exploration

Nathan Grayson — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 04:12:18 -0500

Ignoring the absolutely, hilariously awful second movie, the universe of Vin Diesel vehicle Richard B. Riddick is undeniably fascinating. Each of its good entries dishes out only as much juicy info as Riddick and a small cast of supporting characters see fit, creating a potentially infinite playground for Diesel’s be-goggled antihero to bully around. And, as with any well-constructed sci-fi setting, no trip to Riddick’s take on the final frontier is complete without a liberal helping of the four W’s. What’s the deal with this planet? Why is Riddick performing fistic genocide on half of its population? Who made these totally rad mechs? And where can I get one?

The answer to all of these questions is simple in Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena -- explore.

Or at least, that’s the logical solution, and in a universe where even a quick moment of hesitation is liable to end with someone on the receiving end of a knife to the eye socket, it’s probably best to avoid asking too many questions. So, during my still in-progress playthrough, I’ve been plumbing the grimy depths of Alcatraz’s out-of-this-world cousin, Butcher Bay. Unfortunately, as of now, the only reward I’ve received for all my exploration is a pack of smokes. And by “a pack,” I mean somewhere in the upper double digits. Suffice it to say, it’s a good thing Riddick doesn’t use the same cigarette storage methods as Solid Snake.

But for me, this literal smoke stack still presents a problem. Sure, I’m being rewarded for my constant exploration, and yeah, the Special Surprises inside each carton – ranging from concept art to behind-the-scenes tech demos – are pretty neat, but after a while, everything just becomes so predictable. Under those crates? A cigarette carton. On that ledge? A cigarette carton. Behind your ear? Well, you get the idea. And really, isn’t the main appeal of exploration – and, to an extent, gaming in general – discovery and subsequent mastery of the unknown? Why take a hike off the beaten path when I already know what lies just around the corner – especially when, in all likelihood, said main path will provide me with far more varied rewards for my trouble?

What I’m proposing, then, isn’t that we rub secret areas and things of the like off the map, but that we simply transform them into a slightly more appealing proposition. The potential benefits, as you’ll soon see, are enormous, as demonstrated by the following example.

When I was a youngster who still believed that videogames ran on magic and some sort of graphical lynchpin located in the middle of level three, I absolutely adored The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. To me, the game’s world wasn’t a set adventure, but rather, some kind of fantastical platform for discovery, fueled by the monstrously creative mind of Shigeru Miyamoto, as inspired by some trees in his backyard. But, like Riddick, exploration was an all-too-limited prospect, with life-granting pieces of heart, in this case, forming a strangely relevant counter-commentary to Riddick’s cigarettes. My sense of wonderment upon booting up a videogame was, after spending many hours with Ocarina of Time, never the same.

That is, until Fallout 3 came along. And while Zelda and Fallout may make a bit of an odd couple, their exploration aspect, at least on a basic level, differs in only one fundamental way: Zelda consistently tosses me the same heart-shaped letdown as a reward, while Fallout 3 mixes things up a little. In measured servings, Bethesda’s recent opus rewarded my exploration with special weapons, kooky characters, special quests, and enthralling fragments of the Wasteland’s past. Granted, when boiled down to that level, even Fallout 3 didn’t actually provide an inimitable amount of variety in its reward system. They key here, then, is that even a little exploration-based reward variety – even in the background of a game that essentially has you performing variations on the same few actions time and time again – is potentially enough to keep players chomping at the bit 50 hours into the experience. Or at least, that’s how things were for me.

Better still, single-player action games need not be the only reapers of a tweak to their reward systems. MMOs, especially, could use a few dashes of color on their largely black-and-white priority lists; after all, loot and experience points aren’t going to cut it forever. Granted, recent WoW expansions have been making some strides in this field, but there’s still room for improvement. And that’s just one possible example. So, what games or genres do you think could benefit from more varied exploration and rewards?

The Game Boy is the soapbox Nathan Grayson stands atop to pass down proclamations about the world of gaming. Installments are posted at least once per week. In the event that expectation isn’t met, it’ll be safest to assume that Nathan became a victim of the ensuing Porkpocalypse. That, or he’s too busy playing the game he’s supposed to be writing about.

Nvidia: It’s Time to Kill CUDA

Will Smith — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 14:22:02 -0600

Like many of you, the first real 3D accelerator I owned was a 3dfx Voodoo card. This was way back in 1995. DirectX and Direct3D had yet to be released to the public, and OpenGL was only used for CAD and scientific rendering apps. In those primordial times, if a game developer wanted to harness the awesome rendering power of the Voodoo hardware, he had to write his game with Glide, 3dfx’s own application programming interface (API). This was all before the open standards movement became a powerful force in development circles, and Glide offered 3dfx a major competitive advantage: If a gamer wanted to see all the kick-ass 3D effects that Glide enabled, he had to play the game on 3dfx hardware—lest he suffer Glideless, in a depressing, busted-up world of jaggy, unfiltered textures.

The 3dfx/Glide domination ended when id Software and other game developers started releasing titles that used the OpenGL API, which wasn’t dependent on 3dfx hardware (but worked with 3dfx chips through a Glide translation layer). OpenGL opened the door for other 3D chip companies to build competitive products, and thus ATI, S3, Matrox, and Nvidia entered the fray with hardware of their own.

With every new OpenGL or DirectX game released, Glide slowly transitioned from an advantage to a liability for 3dfx. As competitors like Nvidia embraced new technology and embarked on a period of incredibly rapid improvements, 3dfx remained tied to its Glide past, and, as a result, was slow to embrace new rendering enhancements, such as 32-bit color and antialiasing. Ultimately, this contributed to 3dfx’s demise, and embracing open standards allowed Nvidia and ATI to flourish.

Why are we talking about this today? Because Nvidia stands at a crossroads, with two closed, proprietary APIs that have mainstream potential: the general-purpose computing CUDA API, and the PhysX physics-acceleration API, which sits on top of CUDA. These are both promising technologies, but only owners of Nvidia hardware can harness their power. Meanwhile, there are two emerging open standards that mirror what Nvidia is doing with its proprietary development. One is OpenCL 1.0, and the other is a general-purpose GPU computing API, which Microsoft will include in DirectX 11. There are a relatively small number of consumer applications that use CUDA, PhysX, or OpenCL right now, but the possible applications for the tech are endless—grossly simplified, these APIs let graphics chips perform CPU-like functions. The question Nvidia needs to be asking is simple: Will developers write their general-purpose GPU computing apps using a proprietary API that works on only a subset of PCs—those stuffed with Nvidia hardware—or will they use an open API that will work on every PC on the market?

Nvidia’s path is clear: It needs to stop trying to convince us that closed APIs are good, and instead embrace OpenCL and Microsoft’s yet-to-be-named solution. It needs to port PhysX to run on one of the open APIs, then use PhysX as a platform to advertise the kind of power that Nvidia delivers (with the recipients of all this messaging being ATI diehards and anyone considering the forthcoming Larrabee GPU from Intel).

By focusing on what its always done well—building kick-ass hardware—instead of force-feeding us closed APIs, Nvidia will thrive. As for CUDA? It’s served its purpose, but its time has passed. It’s time to kill CUDA.

Why Does Hollywood Give Nerds a Bad Rap?

Will Smith — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:51:30 -0500

I just returned from a special theater screening of War Games—quite possibly the only good film Hollywood has ever produced about computers, computer nerds, or hacker culture. Shockingly, the movie, which was first released in 1983, holds up quite well, despite the use of archaic hardware (acoustic couplers and vocoder boxes), a laughable sentient military supercomputer, and an occasional lapse into typical Hollywood lingo.

The abundance of 8-inch floppy disks also gave people in the theater a laugh, as did the fact that characters were practically chain-smoking throughout the entire movie. Our biggest laugh came when the machine running the projector crashed—it displayed a Windows 2000 Start Menu, sending the nerd collective into hysterics—but none of the showing’s pervasive air of yestertech could take away from the fact that War Games remains awesome. It was well-researched, authentic, and sometimes downright prescient. After all, the main premise of the movie is about people dialing into military networks using modems. Who would have thought that just five years after the movie’s release, the military-focused ARPANET would be opened up to commercial interests, and very soon after that, the Internet as we know it would be born.

After the show, I lingered in the lobby with my fellow sweaty nerds and reminisced about good hacker movies. Well, we tried to, anyway. Aside from The Matrix (which was about a nerd but shares more DNA with Hong Kong martial arts flicks than anything else), there haven’t been any good films that explore the geekiest depths of computing—ever. Think about it for a minute: Hackers was at best laughable, a blatant attempt to capitalize on a legitimate underground phenomenon. Even movies that first appear to add a promising element of nerdom always end up doing something dumb, like tarnishing a tense computer-based drama with idiotic and unusable (but oh so very sexy) 3D interfaces. Yes, I’m talking about the IRIX 3D filesystem featured in Jurassic Park.

Where War Games showed a likeable kid who hacked simply because he wanted a peek at new games, the other movies portray computer nerds as socially inept at best. At worst, they paint computer nerds as dysfunctional, “let the world burn” anarchist types. Over the last 10 years, I’ve met thousands of people who, like me, describe themselves as computer nerds, but I’ve yet to meet a single anarchist hacker. Maybe those guys are all holed up in their moms’ basements, but my hunch is they’re just another fictional stereotype, manufactured by Hollywood to explain anything it fears or doesn’t understand.

I want to see some more good movies about people like me, computer nerds. Have I missed any forgotten classics? Is there anything I need to bump to the top of my Netflix queue? Let me know!

Game Theory: The Alliance of PC Gaming Buzzwords

Thomas McDonald — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 15:23:38 -0500

Does the industry really need another trade organization? Apparently so, judging by the splashy, almost 100-percent content-free launch of the PC Gaming Alliance. Its initial press release promised that the “PCGA and its member companies will work to accelerate innovation, improve the gaming experience for consumers, serve as a collective source of market information and expertise, and get those unsightly rings out of your bathtub.”

OK, so I added the last part, and, yes, I’m being grotesquely unfair. The PCGA is a new entity attempting to do good for the world of PC gaming and includes the participation of most of the major hardware and software developers. So far it’s produced only airy generalities, but that’s to be expected this early in the life of any group.

The question remains, however: What, specifically, does the PCGA hope to accomplish? The website boldly proclaims that the organization is “the Authoritative Voice of PC Gaming World Wide” and promises to “make data that highlights and promotes the PC platform to analysts, press, and the public.”

That makes it sound like its purpose is to issue press releases and keep someone on staff to write snippy letters to editors whenever someone suggests that the PC gaming market ain’t quite what it used to be. If I see that an organization’s goal is to “raise awareness” about a subject, my mind mentally translates the words into “wank off.” We’re a pretty info-intense society. We’re about as aware as we need (or choose) to be.

It’s always nice to have a single, one-stop shop for market and demographic info, but most of the PCGA’s other goals seem either dubious or redundant. It’s nice to talk about creating forums for developers, but don’t we already have both the GDC and the IGF? It sounds very concrete to say the organization can help “simplify hardware specifications and speed the introduction of new technologies,” but both of these goals are beyond the control of any trade group, not to mention its claims about tackling piracy, cheating, and security. If the PCGA has some supersecret solutions to these problems which have thus far eluded the industry, maybe it can share them.

Specifics, please.

Thomas L. McDonald has been covering games for 17 years. He is Editor-at-Large of Games Magazine.

The Future of PC Gaming, Part II

Tom McDonald — Wed, 31 May 2006 17:56:29 -0500

The phrase “Consoles are Better” is on the short list of verboten opinions at any PC magazine, and certainly not one I would have voiced a few years ago. I’m a PC gamer through and through, down to the bone. I didn’t have a hardcore console childhood and then drift into computer gaming as I grew older. I began gaming on computers such as the TRS-80 and Commodore 64.

But tell me: Did the C64 plug into a computer monitor on a desktop? No, it plugged into your TV and you sat on the living room floor. My first desktop PC was an 8088 with a black-and-yellow Hercules monitor, and it didn’t even have a mouse until I added a special mouse board. A bus mouse was exotic hardware, partner.

So when I say the future of PC gaming is in the living room and not on the desktop, I’m not talking heresy. I’m talking about a return to our roots. The Xbox 360, with its Windows Media Center OS and PowerPC core, doesn’t feel like a typical game machine. It feels like a proto-PC that connects to the TV. And because it’s capable of streaming media, can connect to the Internet, and of course, play games, it certainly feels like a PC. But it’s certainly not a full PC yet.

The lack of keyboard/mouse control is a major handicap, but the low player cap for certain Xbox Live games (Call of Duty 2 is limited to eight players) is an even bigger hurdle.

More to the point for gamers, however, is the promise that the distinction between a PC game and an Xbox game will vanish at some point in the next generation. Let’s face it: The PC gaming market is not as vibrant as it once was. PC gamers are more likely to get solid titles for their desktop PCs if games can be PC/Xbox hybrids right out of the box. The 360 isn’t the machine to do that, but it points the way toward a true home-entertainment/PC convergence where the standard desktop/console distinctions fall away, and everyone benefits.

It'sTime to Cross the Final Frontier

Will Smith — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 16:42:25 -0600

I’ve been building computers for more than 10 years now. I’ve built dozens-upon-dozens of desktop machines for friends, family, the Maximum PC Lab, and my own personal use. Odds are if you’re reading this magazine, you have too. Despite being a card-carrying member of the PC-building elite, I still use a laptop that was built on an assembly line somewhere in Texas. But I won’t have to anymore.

This month, Editor Gordon Mah Ung shows you how to build your own laptop. At first we weren’t sure it was a good idea to run the story, even in Maximum PC. After all, it’s one thing to build an easily serviced desktop machine without a benevolent manufacturer to handle broken parts and software snafus. When you build your own laptop, though, you’re really on your own. Before he started, even Gordo questioned the wisdom of a DIY laptop—and the story was his idea!

When he got a look at the variety of parts he could use to build the laptop, his tune quickly changed. He purchased exactly the components he needed to get the most bang for his laptop dollar. He built a kick-ass laptop with a super-fast 2.1GHz Pentium M, a 100GB hard drive, and a GeForce Go 6600, for about $1,500. I spec’d out a comparable laptop from an online retailer and the total cost was over $2,300—with a pokey 5400rpm hard drive instead of the 7200rpm one Gordon used!

The laptop manufacturers limit your configuration choices so they can extract the maximum cash from you for premium hardware. If you start with a vendor’s cheapest machine, you might be able to make some small configuration changes, but you won’t be able to add a huge hard drive, first-class CPU, or 2GB of memory. Some of these are actual limitations in the hardware—many notebook mobos don’t support tons of RAM or the fastest GPUs—but mostly the limitations are artificial. By building your own, you can get the most powerful hardware at a better price. I don’t know about you, but that’s precisely the reason I started building my own rigs.

Keen-eyed readers will also notice that we’ve devoted nine pages to backing up, copying, and converting all of your digital media. I’ve pissed and moaned about the anti-consumer DRM technologies enough, so we decided to do something about it. Starting on page 22, you’ll find our most complete guide to converting your media into consumer-friendly, DRM-free formats that work anywhere. Enjoy the story, but please use your unlocked media responsibly. Don’t steal.

Now I’ve got to get back to the Lab; it’s time I built my laptop!

The Worst-Case Scenario

Will Smith — Fri, 17 Feb 2006 15:14:44 -0600

I’m sure there are worse things that can happen, but from where I sit, this is pretty damn disastrous. It’s 1:00 in the morning, and since I got home, I’ve gone into my computer room no fewer than 14 times. I turn the corner, take a quick peek at the lights one last time—no change. I want this to be my last check for the night, but I know it won’t be.

As I write this, I’m on day eight of the longest broadband outage I’ve ever suffered through, and I don’t know how much longer I can take it. As long as I’ve had broadband, I’ve subscribed to one of the smaller, boutique ISPs, simply because it doesn’t prohibit me from running servers on my connection, and because I’d rather deal with a smaller company when I have problems than a hulking multinational, like the phone company.

Over the last six years, I’ve had really good luck with Speakeasy—no unscheduled downtime longer than a few hours, and great speeds in both directions. But this outage might break me.

On day two of the outage, I played some single-player games, did a little work, and watched some movies. On day three, I started walking around my apartment with my laptop, trying to find the perfect place to hook onto an unsuspecting neighbor’s wireless network. On day four, I read up on the basics of cracking WEP encryption. On day five, I gave up, vowed to move to a monastery, and never use technology again. It’s gone downhill from there.

This downtime has really brought my dependency on high-speed Internet access into sharp relief. My desperate need for bandwidth isn’t just a monkey on my back—it’s a 20-foot gorilla, and he’s riding me like a pony every moment I’m disconnected! Everything from my day-to-day banking to paying bills to my phone service happens over that twisted-pair of copper wires. I really can’t function as a contributing member of society without a steady stream of data.

Supposedly, an authorized phone company representative will grace me with his presence sometime between 8:00 am and 5:00 pm tomorrow. With a little luck, I’ll be back online in time to pay my bills and engage in online bloodsports by early evening. If he fails me, I’ll be the guy wandering around downtown San Francisco, with a laptop and a directional antenna, muttering about unprotected hotspots, uneven loop lengths, and ILEC difficulties.

It seems like a hassle, but at least I didn’t have to call the phone company.