Go go gadget plaything | Saptarshi Ray
Once we found fun things to do with computers sold as serious machines. Now gadgets are marketed as nothing but toys As a boy I managed, after much persistence, to persuade my parents to buy me a Sinclair Spectrum 48K+ (the one with the black, concave keys). To do this I had to convince them it was not merely a machine on which to play games but an important tool that would teach me computer programming and aid my schoolwork.
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Go go gadget plaything | Saptarshi Ray
A light laptop for Civilization V
Chris Green's wife wants a light laptop suitable for business travel, but she also wants to run the Civilization IV and V games My wife travels a lot for work, and would like as small a laptop as possible that is capable of running Civilization IV comfortably – and hopefully Civ V when it comes out. Chris Green Gaming laptops need lots of power so they tend not to be very portable. Usually they will have a 17in or similar large screen, a separate graphics card, and perhaps even a quad-core processor. Portable business laptops are at the other end of the scale. Usually they have 13.3in or smaller screens, Intel integrated graphics chips, and nowadays may well use slow but power-efficient Intel CULV (Consumer Ultra Low Voltage) processors. Civilization IV is a relatively old game and certainly ought to run on a modern thin-and-light CULV portable, but I suspect it would not be comfortable. I'd look for something with at least a 2.2GHz Intel Core 2 Duo chip and a separate graphics card. There can't be many lightweight laptops that fill the bill, and the one that springs to mind is the Acer Timeline 3810TG running Microsoft Windows 7.
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A light laptop for Civilization V
U-turn on computer games tax relief may lead to a dead end
The games industry is facing a brain drain after the coalition government reneged on its promise to give it tax breaks The British video game industry is in shock. Barely two months ago, Alistair Darling planned a series of tax breaks for the sector in his final budget
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U-turn on computer games tax relief may lead to a dead end
How sports sims became the real deal
Ever wondered how video game characters are able to replicate the unique technique of a David Beckham free kick or a Tiger Woods drive?
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How sports sims became the real deal
Science Weekly podcast: The science of smell; and a newly discovered human ancestor
Odour enthusiast Will Andrews from Proctor and Gamble's perfume creation team tells us about the science of smells and predicts that future perfumes may remind us of PlayStations and warm electronics. Will also teaches us how to smell like an expert, and conducts a fragrance test live in the studio. Next week he will be giving a lecture on the subject at the Royal Institution in London. In the newsjam, the panel discusses what the outcome of Britain's general election could mean for science , and the discovery of the remains of a possible new species of human ancestor, Australopithecus sediba . The Guardian's science correspondent Ian Sample and the Observer's Robin McKie are on hand to lend their wisdom. Nell Boase is your host while Alok is away. Feel free to post your thoughts below. Join our Facebook group
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Science Weekly podcast: The science of smell; and a newly discovered human ancestor
Pass notes No 2,738: the millennium bug
Ten years after the millennium bug scare, there's a new computer glitch hitting users of Sony's PlayStation games consoles Age: 10. Appearance: Surprisingly youthful. You do realise the millennium bug is old news? The clue's in the name. Yes, yes, but it's back! And this time it has come for our children! What are you on about? Remember how a decade ago the bug nearly destroyed civilisation? Planes were going to fall out of the sky, nuclear power stations were going to melt down, clock radios were going to wake us in the middle of the night . . . Unless we paid trillions of pounds to IT specialists . . . That's right. And all because other IT specialists had sold us computers that couldn't handle the switch from 1999 to 2000. That's the kind of organised blackmail even a banker could admire. Still, what has it got to do with 2010, especially now we're several months into it? Something very similar has hit Sony's PlayStation games consoles. On Monday, when February turned into March, millions of PS3 owners had their machines' calendars reset to 1 January 2000, and lost their high scores. Oh, the humanity! Have they been offered counselling?
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Pass notes No 2,738: the millennium bug
In praise of… Tetris
Since it was first invented 25 years ago, the video game Tetris has undertaken an epic journey. Developed deep inside the Soviet Academy of Sciences by a 29-year-old artificial intelligence researcher, Alexey Pajitnov, who was playing around with mathematical puzzles, it has become, more than a quarter of a century later, the king of casual games . Tetris has travelled from the computing equivalent of the stone age – a Soviet copy of an American minicomputer – to the Nintendo Game Boy and now to the phone – recently celebrating its 100 millionth download to a mobile. The concept is so simple – a series of differently shaped blocks fall from the top of the screen, which the player has to arrange in a line without gaps – that its durability has taken everyone by surprise, not least its inventor, Mr Pajitnov . There was no scoring or levels in the original version, but once you start playing you can not stop. Operating on the basic commercial principle that if he was addicted, others would be too, Mr Pajitnov began what became a mammoth quest to get the game marketed internationally. Initially the rights were owned by the Soviet state, and without a deal with Nintendo – and the help of Henk Rogers, a Dutch game designer – the game could have faded into obscurity, as many other games of the 1980s did. Mr Pajitnov remains surprised to this day about the success of his computer doodling. But no one in 25 years has come up with anything better. Tetris Games Computing Mobile phones PC guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
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In praise of… Tetris
Susan Greenfield sacking: Now the Royal Institution can focus on science
The Royal Institution is better off without Susan Greenfield, writes Martin Robbins . It can now concentrate on its core purpose: communicating science That the Royal Institution is experiencing financial difficulties will come as a surprise to anyone who has made the mistake of offering to buy a round of drinks in its fancy new bar. But the reality is that Baroness Susan Greenfield's departure comes after the 211-year-old charity plunged more than £3m into the red after an expensive renovation of its premises. I've visited Albemarle Street twice since the revamp. Every event finishes the same way – a long, shuffling queue running the length of the building to the auditorium from the understaffed bar. Boredom at one end of the queue turns into panic at the other as the punters realise that a bottle of beer and a glass of white wine is going to leave them with the debt burden of a small African nation. Conversation inevitably gives way to anxious whispers about adjourning to a convenient pub up the road. One wonders if, rather than ploughing £22m into yet another London "event space", Greenfield couldn't have simply bought that pub. Plenty will be written about the institution, the renovations, the budget overruns, and Greenfield's management of the world's oldest independent research body. But the Royal Institution is first and foremost about science communication, and it is for her media work that the Baroness has attracted the fiercest criticism. Some of it has come from the stuffy old fart brigade, with comments about her fashion sense or skirt length belonging to a previous century, but much of it has been valid. In particular, Greenfield has triggered a string of media scare stories about the supposed dangers of the internet. She has been responsible for provoking articles with daft headlines such as "Social websites harm children's brains: chilling warning to parents from top neuroscientist" and "Computers could be fuelling obesity crisis, says Baroness Susan Greenfield" . These are bold and serious claims, yet they have not been backed up by any published research. The Guardian's Ben Goldacre has suggested that rather than continue to use the media as a platform for her various hypotheses about the evils of technology, she should formally write up and publish her claims with evidence to back them up
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Susan Greenfield sacking: Now the Royal Institution can focus on science
There’s no need for a new Xbox, says Microsoft
Microsoft is developing Project Natal plus new software and content services to prolong the life of the Xbox 360 games console, rather than introduce a new machine We all know that the games business goes in cycles and that a new generation of consoles always comes along to replace whatever is popular today. In fact, we should now be talking about the Xbox 720, Sony PlayStation 4 and Wii II, or whatever they might be called, because game developers need a couple of years to create new games to exploit the new hardware capabilities that justify the launch of a new generation. But we aren't, and Microsoft doesn't want us to. "I think it's important to say that the Xbox 360 is the console of the long future for us. There is no need to launch a new console, because we're able to give this console new life either with software upgrades or hardware upgrades like Project Natal ," said David Hufford, senior director of Xbox product management in a briefing at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. "The Xbox 360 was designed for a long life, and I don't even know if we're at the midpoint yet." Rather than release a new console, Microsoft is developing Project Natal to enhance existing systems.
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There's no need for a new Xbox, says Microsoft
Stay tuned for technology of the future
Predicting the technology that wins out is hard work, but scientists and engineers are searching for the right answers A few years ago, people who felt betrayed by the future suddenly gained a new rallying cry. After a lifetime of promises about robots and flying cars, we started to wonder: "Where's my jetpack?" Since then, the jokey slogan has found itself appearing everywhere from T-shirts to songs. It's a jab in the eye of every futurist who made firm predictions about what we'll see in generations to come, and it's easy to laugh at the fools who dreamed of such frivolities. After all, merely guessing at the future is a fundamentally foolish business. That doesn't mean that we can't understand what is coming tomorrow, however, and prepare for the most likely futures by understanding how things happened in the past. That is where the rich history of the Guardian's technology pages becomes more than just an archive of old newspapers. Over nearly 30 years, there have been titanic changes in the way we view and use technologies. We've seen computers move toward the centre of our lives, much of our food is engineered, families can be created in a lab and keeping in touch is cheaper and easier – regardless of whether we do it physically or virtually. So what should we expect from the next decade? Of all the trends that will dominate our lives in the coming years, computing is the one that has set the standard – and followed distinct rules along the way. The unending influence of Moore's law (a formulation that is both so beautiful and so ubiquitous that it has taken on an almost Shakespearean quality) dictates that our computers will become more powerful and less expensive as time goes on. This will mean, for starters, machines capable of ever-increasing feats of power: lifelike graphics, smarter understanding, greater intelligence. "Singularity" advocates such as Ray Kurzweil believe this will end in sentient computers – and while that is almost certainly excessive, we are already seeing extraordinary leaps in what machines can do.
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Stay tuned for technology of the future