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...

I once knew this girl who thought she was God.She didn't give sight to the blind or raise the dead. She didn't even teach anything, not really,and she never told me anything I probably didn't already know. On the other hand,she didn'texpect to be worshipped, nor did she askfor money. Given her high opinion of herself, some...

I had been playing the Ultima series of games by Richard Garriott since I was in high school, and I was a die-hard fan. Every game he published, I played all the way through, from Ultima I on the Apple ][ to Ultima V on the IBM PC. Ultima VI came out right as I graduated from college, and I noticed that the contact information for Origin...

John Wilmot, second Earl of Rochester, was born on All Fools’ Day, 1647, at Ditchley in Oxfordshire on the estate that had belonged to his mother’s first husband, Sir Henry Lee. Rochester’s father, Lord Wilmot, was a royalist general; witty, restless and hard-drinking, he was with the exiled court in Paris, and hardly saw...

Iclinically met my fi rst children with Asperger’s and High-Functioning Autism in 1981 at Camp Wediko here in New England. Like many college students before us, my newlywed wife and I had driven north to New Hampshire to spend an intensive summer learning more about the careers we were about to enter: she, special education, and myself,...

Finally the eagerly-awaited next edition of Luke Ahearn's cornerstone game art book: 3D Game Textures is on its way. The book will be refreshed per the latest revision of Photoshop and the latest game industry trends and developments. 3D Game Textures allows next-gen game artists to learn to create everything from bricks to books in...

The 21st-century world is a fundamentally interdependent place. Globalization has expanded, intensified, and accelerated social relations across world-time and world-space. The digital revolution has served as a catalyst for the creation of sprawling information and communication networks that enmesh individuals, states, and businesses alike....

In the three years since the introduction of the first iPhone, we’ve seen a tremendous change in the way that people work with...

VoIP is poised to take over from the century-old public switched telephone network (PSTN). But VoIP telephony does not enjoy the same privacy as the old PSTN. This is because PSTN phone calls were based on establishing a “closed circuit” between the two parties, while VoIP phone calls send packets through the Internet, which...

No one has ever described American democracy with more accurate insight or more profoundly than Alexis de Tocqueville. After meeting with Americans on extensive travels in the United States, and intense study of documents and authorities, he authored the landmark Democracy in America, publishing its two volumes in 1835 and 1840. Ever...

These are the proceedings of the Third IFIP WG 8.1 Working Conference on the Practice of Enterprise Modeling, held in Delft (The Netherlands) on November 9 and 10, 2010. It followed the success of PoEM 2008 and 2009 (both held in Stockholm), which each attracted over 50 participants from all over the world, representing both industry and...

Carrying a BlackBerry used to speak volumes about a person. When you saw someone tapping at that wide keyboard with both thumbs, you could safely assume that the owner was a businessperson, and that the person’s time was so valuable that he or she couldn’t afford to be out of touch from the office for even a moment. Today, you can...