Archive for the Uncategorized Category

NTT DoCoMo: 300Mbps on your phone

July 14, 2007 by Santaduck.

In Japan, the gigantic cell provider NTT DoCoMo is planning an wireless 300Mbps service experiment for cell phones, a “Super-G” configuration, in another step toward 4G.

Yes that’s an “M” for mega. This cellular service will be faster than wired home internet. By several orders of magnitude. Imagine the iPhone on this.

My ADSL is consumer grade, with 1.5Mbps DL speed, which is pretty standard for much of the US, with some regions at double that speed (3.0Mbps), or half that speed, 768 Kbps.

In related news DoCoMo is helping fund AT&T’s 3G network in the United States, specifically on the island of Oahu in Hawaii, which is a destination for many Japanese tourists, who find they cannot use their handsets because NTT’s 2G is proprietary and incompatible, and GSM is not included on their 3G phones. Read more here at PC World.

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Greatest PCs of All Time

August 12, 2006 by Santaduck.

PC World has written an article to hail the 25th anniversary of the 8086 IBM PC, listing the twenty five greatest PCs of all time. They’ve really done their homework, as the list ranges from old faves such as the MITS Altair 8800, Trash 80 (wups, Tandy TRS-80), Amiga, Atari 800, to models that changed the industry or started popular trends such as the 1986 Compaq Deskpro 386, Shuttle SV24 Barebones, Alienware Area-51, Gateway 2000, and Sony Vaio. Of course Apple is represented, with the Apple ][, Powerbook 100, 2nd gen (Sunflower) iMac, and Macintosh. Even the Apple eMate 300 made the list, and of course the GUI Grandaddy of them all, the Xerox 8010. In case your favorite rig was not listed, they’ve covered themselves by oroviding a list of “near greats” for each of 3 approxiately decade-long spans: 71-83, 84-89, 92-05. Check it out.

UT2004 Santaduck Toolpack update: I’ve heard that the download links at Macologist for this file no longer work. I’ll try to update this ASAP and host it.

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Apple Media Event

February 27, 2006 by Santaduck.

In case you haven’t heard already, Mr. Jobs is hosting another Apple Media Event, in less than 12 hours: 10 AM PST on Feb 28. New Intel iBooks? Touch-sensitive iPods? An Apple-Disney merger? Or something more pedestrian like an Intel MacMini, or portable iPod speaker/carrier? Macrumors.com names these all, and even a movie download service, as possibilities. Check out their live coverage on their Macrumors front page, or the live line by line play by play via irc at irc.krono.net #macrumors.

More on Woz: Hey does anyone know if Wozniak still drives that big Hummer? Some acquaintances used to go to one of his infrequent lunch spots, and I heard the rumor from them he owned a big Hummer, back before they became common.

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The Woz Way

February 26, 2006 by Santaduck.

The Woz Way is an actual street back in San Jose, CA, and I thought of it when I read this interview of the other Steve, Steve Wozniak, as he talked about Apple to the Globe and Mail.

Apparently he’s nominally still on their payroll (I hadn’t realized that), but unlike most normal Apple employees, he can speak his mind, and does he.

He isn’t convinced of the need to jump to Intel, and is skeptical there, but might concede the point.

“
“It’s like consorting with the enemy. We’ve had this long history of saying the enemy is the big black-hatted guys, and they kind of represent evil. We are different, and by being different we’re better… All of a sudden we’re the same in this hardware regard, so it’s a little hard to swallow your words from the past.”

However he is deeply suspicious of the iPod, because according to him, that distracts from Apple’s focus as a “computing company.”

On the possibility of Microsoft entering the mp3 player fray, he says:

“If they do it, they better do it excellent, excellent, excellent because the iPod sure is. Doing something weaker and somehow trying to use your size and market power . . . that’s just not good [enough] if you don’t turn out something superior.”

He’s like the company’s anti-mascot, how great is that? I love it. Read the full interview here.

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Anti Lag Technology Startup: Bigfoot

February 24, 2006 by Santaduck.

The story is I was at this millionaire’s business place (I was about to go flying with him for work), and on the table was Fortune magazine, and on the cover was some startup company contest, and something about gaming lag. A gamer article in a business mag? Intrigued, I picked it up. (Note, I found the online version of this article here, scroll down to the 3rd place winner).

I think the article was about young business school grads who compete to receive some startup seed money from Fortune– one was on an online test prep course (for SATs), one was for a brain pressure monitor, and one was by a couple of MBA CS fans who wanted to fix lag now and forever, so they’ve formed a startup called Bigfoot Networks, and have developed a product, and are, as I understand it, waiting to be bought out.

I found their website, which has not had any news updates since november of last year, so perhaps they are just waiting. It looks like a network interface card, but I’m not sure if it’s for clients, or the gameserver, or somewhere else inline. Here’s a short quote:

“A chip architect at Intel until 2004, Beverly had already developed technologies to accelerate the speed of Intel’s servers by offloading some of the computers’ processes onto a storage card. After researching how to fight the dreaded lag, he realized that he could speed online games similarly. Beverly’s breakthrough: a computer card that communicates with servers, downloading some of the processes that they perform online and allowing them to run faster, thus speeding up online games.
…they formed Bigfoot Networks and developed a prototype called NetBlazer, a gaming accelerator card that can eliminate disruptions caused by server lags. Assuming that Bigfoot can raise more money, it hopes to begin selling NetBlazer by July for $300…Although computer manufacturers such as Dell are luring online gamers with ultrafast processors, none, says Cole, has offered a solution for lag disruptions.”

OK whatever. But what is really cool is their research on lag. I mean we all know lag, different kinds of lag– warping, stuttering, dropouts, etc., but you haven’t thought about it like these guys. I present to you:

Bigfoot Network’s White Paper on Lag (pdf)

whoa. I’ll keep an eye on these guys to see if they get bought out, and begin shipping a product.

It makes me wonder if, in the future of gaming, if network demands will rise as fast as graphics demands have been rising with each generation– this has certainly not been the case so far– UT2004 has much the same network demands as UT99– but would could a game do with a world in which we had a lot more bandwidth and less latency? hmm. I remember when I couldn’t imagine what we’d do with more than 128K RAM, or the yawning abyss of a 10megabyte hard drive in the 8088 IBM XT– it simply changes the parameters of what is possible.

Anyways, here’s a brief quote from the Intro of the Lag White Paper:

“One of the most annoying things for an online gamer is “lag”…This paper will first explore what is Lag in today’s gaming world; what is a fair definition? Lag will be defined as one or more of the following in-game events:
* Game Freezing and Stuttering
* Warping and Rubber-banding
* Ghosting and Vanishing
* Slash-Slash-Pause
* Delayed Responses
* Frames-per-Second Loss

After Lag and the above terms are defined clearly, this white paper will discuss what the causes of Lag are in today’s internet system using broadband connections of the above phenomenon. The causes will be clearly shown as:
*Server Slowness/Congestion
* Internet Packet Loss/Spikes
* Client Slowness
* Network Latency

Several case studies and research will be used to illustrate the concepts explored here. The case studies will include:
* Sony Everquest Client Test
* Sony Star Wars Galaxies Client Test
* Star Wars Battlefront Client+Server Test
* Battlefield: Vietnam Client+Server Test
* Counterstrike Source Client+Server Test

Finally, the obvious question would be what can be done about Lag?

Defining Lag
Lag has no definition. It is a slang term that online gamers have been using since the early days of online gaming to represent anything ‘funky’ going on in an online game. Today, anything bad that happens in an online game is called Lag… Lag could be loosely defined today as everything bad that happens in an online game. It’s become like an online curse word. The only way then, to define Lag, is by looking at those perceived events which gamers attribute to Lag. Those events vary in type and cause, but they are collectively called Lag.

First among these perceived events are the movement or action related events. Game Freezing, Game Stuttering, Warping, and Rubber-banding are terms commonly associated with movement or action based Lag events. Game Freezing occurs when the game appears to suddenly pause for no reason, then after some perceivable time, resume. Game Stuttering is the same as Game Freezing, but happens in rapid succession one right after another. Warping is a movement action weather 3rd person or 1st person perspective, where the character or persona is suddenly in a new position on the screen/in the game world than was expected. When the warping is back to a location that the gamer believed he just left, it is called Rubber-banding.

The next category of Lag is those events where other users or computer controlled characters exhibit strange perceived behaviour. Ghosting, Vanishing, and Slash-Slash-Pause fall into this category. Ghosting is when…”

Okay, you get the idea. We’ve all experienced it, and here are guys who take it seriously, and are trying to tackle it with a boatload of startup capital. Read more at the PDF yourself, and take a look at their site:

Link:
Bigfoot Networks

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Macologist in MacAddict

September 13, 2005 by Santaduck.

Macologist: We got mentioned again, in this month’s (October 2005) MacAddict magazine! It was a tiny blurb about download Doom3 mods, but I’m excited. That was the work of our staffer Adamward, who also does some betatesting for Aspyr, but he can never tell me what he’s testing atm. The X-Plane (flight sim) interview I was working on with creator Austin Meyer is going out in days (maybe tomorrow), it’s awesome. I mean you’ll actually learn a lot just reading the interview. This guy is a genius, and he has a secret weapon. And nooo, despite what the photo implies, he doesn’t touch XCode, he’s a Metrowerks man. Ahh read the interview and you’ll see what it’s about, and learn all about supersonic flow.

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