"game" entries

Four short links: 30 December 2014

Four short links: 30 December 2014

DevOps Security, Bit Twiddling, Design Debates, and Chinese IP

  1. DevOoops (Slideshare) — many ways in which your devops efforts can undermine your security efforts.
  2. Matters Computational (PDF) — low-level bit-twiddling and algorithms with source code. (via Jarkko Hietaniemi)
  3. Top 5 Game Design Debates I Ignored in 2014 (Daniel Cook) — Stretch your humanity.
  4. From Gongkai to Open Source (Bunnie Huang) — The West has a “broadcast” view of IP and ownership: good ideas and innovation are credited to a clearly specified set of authors or inventors, and society pays them a royalty for their initiative and good works. China has a “network” view of IP and ownership: the far-sight necessary to create good ideas and innovations is attained by standing on the shoulders of others, and as such there is a network of people who trade these ideas as favors among each other. In a system with such a loose attitude toward IP, sharing with the network is necessary as tomorrow it could be your friend standing on your shoulders, and you’ll be looking to them for favors. This is unlike the West, where rule of law enables IP to be amassed over a long period of time, creating impenetrable monopoly positions. It’s good for the guys on top, but tough for the upstarts.
Four short links: 2 July 2014

Four short links: 2 July 2014

Facebook Research, Mountain Game, Dollar Vans, and Eigenmorality

  1. Experimental Evidence of Massive-scale Emotional Contagion Through Social Networks — I suspect many more people have expressed an opinion on the research than have read the research.
  2. Mountain — a new game in which you are (wait for it) a mountain. From the creator of the fake game in Her. (via Chris McDowall)
  3. NYC’s Dollar Vans (New Yorker) — New York’s unofficial shuttles, called “dollar vans” in some neighborhoods, make up a thriving transportation system that operates where the subway and buses don’t. A somewhat invisible economy. (via Seb Chan)
  4. Eigenmorality — caution: linear algebra and morality, two subjects that many programmers struggle with. (via Pete Warden)
Four short links: 15 May 2014

Four short links: 15 May 2014

Pervasive Monitoring, Mozilla DRM, Game Finances, and Distributed Systems

  1. Pervasive Monitoring is an Attack (Tim Bray) — if your ap­pli­ca­tion doesn’t sup­port pri­va­cy, that’s prob­a­bly a bug in your ap­pli­ca­tion.
  2. Reconciling Mozilla’s Mission and the W3C EME — essentially, “we don’t want to put a closed source bolus of evil into our open source unicorn, but you won’t be able to watch House of Cards with Firefox if we don’t.”
  3. The Financial Future of Game Developers (Raph Koster) — Today, a console is really just a hardware front end to a digital publisher/distribution network/storefront. […] Any structure that depends solely on blockbusters is not long for this world, because there is a significant component of luck in what drives popularity, so every release is literally a gamble. […] The median game uploaded to the App Store makes zero dollars. It starts great and just gets better. Koster is on fire! He scores again! GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!
  4. Notes on Distributed Systems for Young Bloods“It’s slow” is the hardest problem you’ll ever debug.
Four short links: 29 April 2014

Four short links: 29 April 2014

Robot Legs, CS in Classrooms, Go Robotics, and Game Programming

  1. Bionic Legs Let Patients Walk AgainThe Ekso costs about $100,000 and was purchased with a grant from Baptist Health Foundation. Chara Rodriguez, a physical therapist and neurologic clinical specialist at University Health System, called the machine “the Maserati of the rehab world.” (via Robot Economics)
  2. Roundup of CS in Education Systems (Economist) — Above all, the new subject will require teachers who know what they are doing. Only a few places take this seriously: Israel has about 1,000 trained computer-science teachers, and Bavaria more than 700. Mathematics and computer-science graduates generally choose more lucrative trades; the humanities and social-science graduates who will find themselves teaching coding will need plenty of support.
  3. gobot — Go framework for hardware and robotics comms, with Arduino, Sphero, (and more) backends.
  4. Game Programming Patterns — free online book with programming patterns for game developers.
Four short links: 22 April 2014

Four short links: 22 April 2014

In-Browser Data Filtering, Alternative to OpenSSL, Game Mechanics, and Selling Private Data

  1. PourOver — NYT open source Javascript for very fast in-browser filtering and sorting of large collections.
  2. LibreSSL — OpenBSD take on OpenSSL. Unclear how sustainable this effort is, or how well adopted it will be. Competing with OpenSSL is obviously an alternative to tackling the OpenSSL sustainability question by funding and supporting the existing OpenSSL team.
  3. Game Mechanic Explorer — helps learners by turning what they see in games into the simple code and math that makes it happen.
  4. HMRC to Sell Taxpayers’ Data (The Guardian) — between this and the UK govt’s plans to sell patient healthcare data, it’s clear that the new government question isn’t whether data have value, but rather whether the collective has the right to retail the individual’s privacy.
Four short links: 31 March 2014

Four short links: 31 March 2014

Game Patterns, What Next, GPU vs CPU, and Privacy with Sensors

  1. Game Programming Patterns — a book in progress.
  2. Search for the Next Platform (Fred Wilson) — Mobile is now the last thing. And all of these big tech companies are looking for the next thing to make sure they don’t miss it.. And they will pay real money (to you and me) for a call option on the next thing.
  3. Debunking the 100X GPU vs. CPU Myth — in Pete Warden’s words, “in a lot of real applications any speed gains on the computation side are swamped by the time it takes to transfer data to and from the graphics card.”
  4. Privacy in Sensor-Driven Human Data Collection (PDF) — see especially the section “Attacks Against Privacy”. More generally, it is often the case the data released by researches is not the source of privacy issues, but the unexpected inferences that can be drawn from it. (via Pete Warden)

7 areas beyond gaming where Kinect could play a role

How Kinect could apply to art, education, health and other domains.

Microsoft's Kinect has implications that go beyond gaming. From medicine to learning to participatory art, Alex Howard considers ways Kinect's interface could shift our computing-based interactions.

Windows Mobile apps are more expensive than iPhone apps

The mean app price for the Windows market is nearly two times higher than the App Store.

The Windows Marketplace for Mobile now has about 1,400 apps spread across 16 categories. In this short post I'll provide some basic statistics and compare it with the grandaddy of app stores: the U.S. iTunes store.

Four short links: 2 November 2010

Four short links: 2 November 2010

Participation, iPhone Games Programming, Mobile Keypad Magic, and Web App Security

  1. Lessons from the Johnny Cash ProjectWhen a participatory activity is designed without a goal in mind, you end up with a bunch of undervalued stuff and nowhere to put it. (via Courtney Johnston)
  2. Doom iPhone Review — fascinating explanation of how the iPhone works for programmers, and how the Doom source code works around some of the less-game-friendly features. (via Tom Carden on Delicious)
  3. The 8 Pen — new alphanumeric entry system for Android.
  4. Salesforce Security — lots of information for web developers, most generally applicable. (via Pete Warden)
Four short links: 20 October 2010

Four short links: 20 October 2010

Bad Game Mechanics, Under NoSQL Covers, the LAN of Things, and the Smithsonian Commons

  1. Pwned: Gamification and its Discontents (Slideshare) — hear, hear! Video games are not fun because they’re video games, but if and only they are well-designed. Just adding something from games isn’t a guarantee for fun. (via jameshome on Twitter)
  2. Redis Under the Hood — explanation of the insides and mechanisms of this popular distributed key-value store. (via tlockney on delicious)
  3. The LAN of Things (Mike Kuniavsky) — Before we can have an Internet of Things, we will need to have a LAN of things.[…] Most of the utility of a LAN came from its local functionality. Thus, before we can build a useful (from a user perspective) Internet of Things, we need to learn to build useful LANs of Things. […] I think it’s important to start thinking about what the highly localized uses of sparsely distributed technology can be. What can we do when there are only a couple of things with RFIDs in our house? What totally great service can be built on having two light switches that report their telemetry in the house? What totally valuable information can you tell me if I only wear my motion sensor every once in a while? Love it. (via Matt Jones on Delicious)
  4. Mike Edson’s Talk at Powerhouse Museum — the Director of Web and New Media Technology at the Smithsonian is smart, articulate, and trying to do something cool with the Smithsonian Commons prototype. (via sebchan on Twitter)