This is a book about making 3D games in Macromedia Director Shockwave Studio. Expect it to be a book about code, interface tricks, and wacky game ideas. Along the way, I will share my experiences, life, and attitudes about games and game development. I have always tended to swim upstream, so I doubt that much of this will seem comfortable or...

Digital sculpting is the use of tools to push, pull, smooth, grab, pinch or otherwise manipulate a digital object as if it were made of a real-life substance such as clay. Mudbox is the premier sculpting solution for digital artists, allowing them to naturally and easily sculpt detailed, organic characters and models in a way that feels like...

Products using microprocessors generally fall into two categories. The first category uses high-performance microprocessors such as the Pentium in applications where system performance is critical. We have an entire book dedicated to this topic, The 80x86 IBM PC and Compatible Computers, Volumes / and //, from Prentice Hall, in the second...

Rapid advances in communication, sensing and computational power have led to an explosion of data. The usefulness of this resource for human knowledge is determined by its accessibility and portability, which present fresh challenges to existing techniques in terms of transmission, storage, querying, display and numerical manipulation. As a...

PowerShell is a scripting language built into Windows Server 2008 R2 servers. PowerShell is designed to help you perform routine and repetitive tasks in a scriptable fashion. PowerShell helps alleviate many of the time-consuming and tedious tasks administrators have had to do in the past. You may have used various scripting technologies over...

The origin of queueing theory and its application traces back to Erlang’s historical work for telephony networks as recently celebrated by the Erlang Centennial, 100 Years of Queueing, Copenhagen, recalling his first paper in 1909. Ever since, the simplicity and fundamental flavour of Erlang’s famous expressions, such as his...

There is probably no invention in the history of mankind that had such a profound impact on our lives in such a short time as the World Wide Web. Twenty years ago, Tim Berners-Lee has developed the first versions of HTML which allowed to weave documents into the large hypertext document that we know today. It was soon realized that...

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The goal of this book is to provide an overview of the current state of knowledge of educational data mining (EDM). The primary goal of EDM is to use large-scale educational data sets to better understand learning and to provide information about the learning process. Although researchers have been studying human learning for over a...

Recently, the rapid and fundamental advances in computing technologies have been driving the role and scope of software systems to a new level. A number of new types of software systems are emerging, among which service based systems, cloud computing, pervasive computing, and Internet of Things are eminent examples. For these systems,...

You have just bought your new Windows Phone 7 device and would like to start developing applications. You need to know the device’s hardware characteristics such as screen resolution and memory capability—but also which sensors and services it provides. Finally, you need to understand what the Windows Phone 7 operating system...