As Dr Maxwell writes in his preface to this book, his aim has been to instruct through entertainment. 'The general theory is that a wrong idea may often be exposed more convincingly by following it to its absurd conclusion than by merely announcing the error and starting again. Thus a number of by-ways appear which, it is hoped, may amuse...

More than any other companies in the history of electronic gaming, Nintendo, Sega, and later Sony established video games as a lifestyle, a hobby that would endure beyond the “video game craze” of the ’70s. Following the Great Implosion of ’83, as the Age of Atari crumbled, game console and software sales tanked and...

Gaming on the move has become very popular over recent years. With the arrival of the Nintendo Gameboy, people realized that they could take their games with them, and as technology has become more sophisticated these games have grown too, encompassing complex game mechanics, advanced 2D and 3D graphics, and engrossing stories and game worlds...

In the award-winning AMC television series Mad Men, set in the early 1960s, a mysterious and massive machine shows up one day in the offices of the advertising agency Stirling Cooper. The machine is a Xerox photocopier, and the workplace is about to change forever. Previously, document duplication was done with a mimeograph, a hand-cranked...

This is a newly revised, critical text of the fragments attributed to the Roman knight and mimographer Decimus Laberius, a witty and crudely satirical contemporary of Cicero and Caesar. Laberius is perhaps the most celebrated comic playwright of the late Republic, and the fragments of plays attributed to him comprise the overwhelming majority...

Game development is in crisis—facing bloated budgets, impossible schedules, unmanageable complexity, and death march overtime. It’s no wonder so many development studios are struggling to survive. Fortunately,...

Ambient Intelligence lies at the confluence of several trends: the continued decrease in cost and size of computing technology; the increasing availability of networking and communication infrastructure; the growing public familiarity/comfort with computing artifacts; and practical advances in artificial intelligence. These developments make...

The erosion of the traditional voice service, together with the ever-increasing competition between companies, is pushing the telecommunications industry...

Take control of your global game development team and make successful AAA game titles using the 'Distributed Development' model. Game industry veteran Tim Fields teaches you how to evaluate game deals, how to staff teams for highly distributed game development, and how to maintain challenging relationships in order to get great games...

Consumer electronics (CE) devices, providing multimedia entertainment and enabling communication, have become ubiquitous in daily life. However, consumer interaction with such equipment currently requires the use of devices such as remote controls and keyboards, which are often inconvenient, ambiguous and non-interactive. An important...

Rapid development of new technologies is leading to ever more versatile, multipurpose mobile devices, including 3G and 4G Internet-enabled cell phones. Wireless networking and wireless Internet access are developing and expanding on a global basis at a rapid rate. Meanwhile, RFID (radio frequency identification) will revolutionize wireless...

Bypass the limitations of synchronous design and create low power, higher performance circuits with shorter design times using this practical guide to asynchronous design. The fundamentals of asynchronous design are covered, as is a large variety of design styles, while the emphasis throughout is on practical techniques and real-world...