Real time 3D games have been around for well over ten years now. We’ve played them, created assets in
the style of our favorites, and maybe even “mod”ed a few of them. But until recently, the cost of licensing
one of the premier game engines has ranged from several hundred thousand to several million dollars
per title...
Prior to the 1970s, computer and electronics-based technology
was hardly a pervasive part of our everyday lives. Automobiles
were not yet computerized, fax machines were just taking off, and,
significantly, the personal computer had yet to be popularized.
Individuals who dreamed of a career in information technology
departments were...
When Second Life launched in 2003. running on just 16
servers with barely 1 .ÐÐÐdedicated users, it was the
culmination of a kind of dream for me. One of the things
Td always been interested in, ever since I was a young
boy, was how we manipulate the world around us.
The world had so much stuff in it; there was always...
Launched on October 23, 2001, the iPod has become the icon of the decade.
You don’t need much imagination to see why. Imagine no longer needing
to take CDs or DVDs with you when you travel — your favorite music and
videos fit right in your pocket and you can leave your precious content library
at home. With the iPhone and...
Over the last two years, Google’s Android operating system (OS) has gone from a virtually
unknown open source solution to the current mobile OS market leader among all mobile
handsets, with over one-third of the market share, and it’s still climbing rapidly. Android has even
started to dominate the tablet OS marketplace, and...
My interest in oscillators started many years ago when I was an undergraduate
student and one of the laboratory experiments was the design of a Colpitts oscillator.
It was amazing to see how a sinusoidal signal appeared when the power supply
was turned on. What an interesting way of controlling the motion of electrons in
the circuit!...
Just so you’re clear: it was not my idea to give a talk to Microsoft Research. I had learned embarrassingly little about computer science in my 18 years of life, and the last thing I wanted to do is to have that exposed in front of a bunch of genius PhDs in MSR. But my manager thought it’d be a great...
In the five months that I have been researching and writing Cloud Computing Bible, it has become clear to me that most people recognize that cloud computing is a big deal, even if they are not really clear why that is so. Every day newspaper and magazine articles and radio and TV stories report on cloud computing. The phrase “in the...
Many of us wish to create our own video games. For some, gaming is a hobby, and
for others it is something fun to participate in casually. But for the rest of us,
gaming and the dream of making our own games is more like a passion. Chances
are, if you’ve purchased this book, you are looking to turn your desire and passion
into...
UMTS is real. In a continuously growing number of countries we can walk in the stores of
mobile network operators or resellers and take UMTS PC cards or even third-generation (3G)
phones home and use them instantly. Every day the number of equipments and their feature
sets gets broader. The “dream” of multimedia on mobile...
In 1985 I brought home a new shiny Commodore Amiga 1000, about one week after
they were released. Coming with a whopping 512K of memory, programmable
colormaps, a Motorola 68K CPU, and a modern multitasking operating system, it had
“awesome” writ all over it. Metaphorically speaking, of course. I thought it might
make a...
When we began creating Unity, we were just three programmers working on
a beautiful little game. There weren't any good game engines that one could
license without putting down wads of cash, so we created our own. We eventually decided that we enjoyed the challenge of making great tools even more than making games, and after some soul...
