Game On 2.0 Exhibition at the Museum of Technical Science Stockholm

The exhibition Game On 2.0 is organized by the Barbican Center in London and opened last Friday at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm. I experienced it today, moving through more than 100 playable games on consoles, handhelds, arcade boxes and personal computers from the past 50 years of interactive computer games.



GAME ON 2.0 - Ontario Science Centre Exhibition from CNW on Vimeo.
Highlights of Game On 2.0 include an original 'Computer Space' by Nutting Associates (1971) captured in this video of actual play.

 

I was very impressed by the audio used in Computer Space. Computer Space was the world's first commercially sold coin-operated video game and video game system of any kind (predating magnovox odyssey) It's the first coin-operated arcade game to use a video display to generate graphics via video signal (predating Magnovox Odyssey). It was built by Nolan Bushnell (a founder of Atari and Chuck E' Cheese).

Also featuring in the exhibtion is a Magnavox Odyssey, the world's first commercial home video game console. It was first demonstrated in April 1972 and released in August of that year, predating the Atari Pong home consoles by three years. It is a digital video game console, though is often mistakenly believed to be analog, due to misunderstanding of its hardware design. The Odyssey lacked sound. 

Here are a few detail shots of the Odyssey from the one on show in the exhibition.

The following are two examples of Computer Space (1971) in original green and ruby arcade cabinets. Each stand almost 2 meters tall and has an other-worldly feel to them. But I suppose that was the idea back in the day.

Of course as everyone knows, the first real computer game was Spacewar, which Computer Space was based on. This is acknowledges in the exhibition:

 Some of the oldest games in the exhibition are handhelds. 

The other outstanding feature of the Game On 2.0 exhibition are the sketches, models and drawings from some of the biggest games ever made.

Finally, another highlight I want to mention here from Game On 2.0 is a simple piece of nostalgia. It is Galaga in an original arcade cabinet. I played Galaga at skate rinks, shopping arcades, as well as in bus stations as my parents dragged my brother, sister and I around Greece and Turkey on a 6 month hippie odyssey in 1982. Suddenly in the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm I was 13 years old again as I assumed the rapid fire hunched posture I knew all those years ago. This time my two sons were beside me, and we each played a round of Galaga. It was a magic moment.

The Game On 2.0 exhibition runs from 25 October 2013 – 27 April 2014 at the National Museum of Science and Technology in Stockholm. Take the Bus 69 to Museiparken from the stop near Sergels Torg oppostite the Åhlens. I recommend it to all, and plan to return myself. It is a popular account of computer games that avoids any difficulties or the darker sides of gaming. I noticed the absence of the Wolfenstein games, but due to the Nazi imagery maybe this was too difficult.

Be warned that at high demand times (like now) you buy a 50 minute slot of time at the exhibition. These have to be booked once you have purchased your tickets. The staff say this may change later in the year, but it depends on how demand goes. Fifty minutes is not enough to see the whole exhibition. The rooms are not that large and they are filled with games. I could have easily spent 4 hours there.

Inventing Turing

Last night I attended Reflections on Alan Turing's Life (1912-1954), which included "a personal reflection on being a gay logician by Bob Lubarsky" and the showing of the film Codebreaker. The lecture by Dr. Lubarsky was frankly a disappointment, as it centered the life of Turing on his homosexuality. The man himself thought nothing unusual about liking men and did not see any reason to change his orientation, even if he could. He did not belong to any sort of gay clique, but merely went about his life loving men. This status as a man who chose love over what could be described as common sense, due to the illegality of being gay at the time and the problems it could cause, makes Turing an aesthetist in the humanist sense of the term.

"This notion of aesthetics is more closely linked to its early eighteenth century etymology: aisthesis - sense experience, experiences that are both cognitive and evaluative and bodily, sensual, somatic; 'That territory is nothing less than the whole of our sensate life together - the business of affections and aversions, of how the world strikes the body on its sensate surfaces of that which takes root in the gaze and guts and all that arises from our most banal, biological insertion into the world' (Eagleton 13)" Quoted in Kennedy and Giddings, New Media: A Critical Introduction p13 (2003)

CODEBREAKER tells the story of one of the most important scientists who ever lived. Alan Turing set in motion the computer age and his World War II codebreaking helped save two million lives. Instead of accolades and praise, Turing faced public disgrace because he was gay. This drama documentary broadcast in the United Kingdom in late 2011. Now distribution plans are being developed to bring this unique film to a worldwide audience.

The film Codebreaker is a moving tribute to Turing who really was very ahead of his time and a brilliant thinker. Turing also came across as an original, humorous and kind man, if not somewhat naive. One of the thoughts I took away from the lecture and film was that Turing was precariously balanced between so many separate forms of knowledge, social circles, professional affiliations, classes, and institutions of power during the final decades of his life. I believe this, along with the barbarism of the enforced hormone treatment he underwent following his conviction for 'gross indecency', led Turning to commit suicide at the age of 42 after years of legal, social and professional harassment arising from his homosexuality. But what of Turing's inbetweenness? His role in history sits with his pattern-reading mathematical work. But in thinking further about what he did, I see Turing as an interdisciplinary humanist in the body of a mathematical scientist. The genius of Turing was his ability to use a ordered system for a creative ends. His work challenges C. P. Snpw's 'two cultures' idea.

[Snow] diagnosed the loss of a common culture and the emergence of two distinct cultures: those represented by scientists on the one hand and those Snow termed 'literary intellectuals' on the other. If the former are in favour of social reform and progress through science, technology and industry, then intellectuals are what Snow terms 'natural Luddites' in their understanding of and sympathy for advanced industrial society. In Mill's terms, the division is between Benthamites and Coleridgeans. —Simon Critchley

Turing was not a 'natural Luddite', but at the same time he was a visionary scientist. His vision was within a common culture of innovative science that resulted in a new and creative symbolic order.

"Turing was hooked on this idea of heuristic problem solving, and that he speculated on building sophisticated machines by “making use of guided search.” Well before the breakout of war, Turing had conceived of a general computing machine that stored programs in memory. The world’s first large-scale, electronic computer, Colossus was used at Bletchley to break other Nazi codes, and Turing found additional inspiration for pursuing ideas of machine intelligence. “Nowadays when nearly everyone owns the physical realization of a universal Turing machine, Turing’s idea of a one-stop shop computing machine is apt to seem as obvious as the wheel,” says B. Jack Copeland"

And what about those today who persist in the idea of the 'two cultures'? How does the work of Alan Turing and its obvious legacy (i.e. "nearly everyone owns the physical realization of a universal Turing machine")? The Sokal Affair is one example of the two cultures paradigm still defining the boundaries of interdisciplinary research.

The Sokal affair, also known as the Sokal hoax, was a publishing hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at New York University. In 1996, Sokal submitted an article to Social Text, an academic journal of postmodern cultural studies. The submission was an experiment to test the publication's intellectual rigor and, specifically, to investigate whether such a journal would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if it (a) sounded good and (b) flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions.

The Sokal Affair is primarily an example of bad scholarship, but the idea that a scientific fact can be applied to social reality is a total reversal of the vision Alan Turing seem to have in his work. The division between the technology and its meaningful application is not present in a binary system where computation is the underlying code of practice. By practice I mean that the technology in Turing's Automatic Computing Engine was a system of systems, a principle rather than an object. the technology Turing envisioned ordered the understanding that was necessary to operate the technology. This Saturday 23 June 2012 is the 100 anniversary of the birth of Alan Turing.

TCPA - Trusted Computing Platform Alliance

The Trusted Computing Group (TCG), successor to the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance (TCPA), is an initiative started by AMD, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Infineon, Intel, Microsoft, and Sun Microsystems to implement Trusted Computing. Many others followed.

TCG's original goal was the development of a Trusted Platform Module (TPM), a semiconductor intellectual property core or integrated circuit that conforms to the trusted platform module specification put forward by the Trusted Computing Group and is to be included with computers to enable trusted computing features. TCG-compliant functionality has since been integrated directly into certain[specify] mass-market chipsets.

TCG also recently released the first version of their Trusted Network Connect ("TNC") protocol specification, based on the principles of AAA, but adding the ability to authorize network clients on the basis of hardware configuration, BIOS, kernel version, and which updates that have been applied to the OS and anti-virus software, etc.[3]

Seagate has also developed a Full Disk encryption drive which can use the ability of the TPM to secure the key within the hardware chip.

The owner of a TPM-enabled system has complete control over what software does and doesn't run on their system This does include the possibility that a system owner would choose to run a version of an operating system that refuses to load unsigned or unlicensed software, but those restrictions would have to be enforced by the operating system and not by the TCG technology. What a TPM does provide in this case is the capability for the OS to lock software to specific machine configurations, meaning that "hacked" versions of the OS designed to get around these restrictions would not work. While there is legitimate concern that OS vendors could use these capabilities to restrict what software would load under their OS (hurting small software companies or open source/shareware/freeware providers, and causing vendor lock-in for some data formats), no OS vendor has yet suggested that this is planned.

Furthermore, since restrictions would be a function of the operating system, TPMs could in no way restrict alternative operating systems from running , including free or open source operating systems. There are several projects which are experimenting with TPM support in free operating systems - examples of such projects include a TPM device driver for Linux, an open source implementation of the TCG's Trusted Software Stack called TrouSerS, a Java interface to TPM capabilities called TPM/J, and a TPM-supporting version of the Grub bootloader called TrustedGrub.

Reprap

RepRap from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

Reprap is an example of how sharing has the potential to change the society we live in.

Look at your computer setup and imagine that you hooked up a 3D printer. Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you're in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the parts up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn't even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €500). That way it's accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can use it to make another and give that one to a friend...

Eclectic Tech Carnival (/ETC) in Umeå 8-12 June 2009

/ECT 2007, Linz

/ETC is a week long gathering for women interested in technology, art and grass roots activism. At /ETC you can share experiences and search out opportunities for international collaborations through the use of technology and arts.

We will be exploring how we can use technology and art to connect with each other, deepen our understanding of each other's political contexts, develop strategies for grass roots activism to engage public and raise awareness on gender issues in correlation to usage of technology. In short we will explore new ways of interacting by means of technology and art.

/ETC is an "on the road-event", that is it is held in a new place each year. It was started by the organisation Genderchangers that aims to break stereotypical roles related to technology and encourage and support women to use technology, art and grass roots networks as a tool for social change.

During this 5 day long gathering there will be workshops, inspirational corners, panel discussions, field trips to local NGO's and much more. Come to Umeå, Sweden to be a part of this dynamic platform for exchange!

Activities will take place during the afternoons and evenings at HUMlab (Umeå University). You choose if you want to get a 5 day pass or 1 day pass. A 5 day pass costs 200 SEK (18 Euro) and a 1 day pass costs 50 SEK. Dinner will be served for a reasonable (inexpensive) price...

If you want to come to /ETC, give a workshop at the Carnival, make this happen as a volunteer. If you have any questions...don't hesitate to contact us!

On Facebook

Or mail the organisers /ECT

Windows XP Expansion Pack 3 Danger...Danger!!

Anyone who has installed or is about to install Windows XP Expansion Pack 3 and uses remote desktop to network between computers beware!! I installed it on my office computer which I often remote to from home PC and my laptop and now it is no longer functioning. This is extreamly irritating as I store my thesis text on my office PC as it is backed up twice a day by the university IT people. As well the university computer has access to journals and periodicals from the library's online collection as well as a lot of texts stored on its own drives. Now it seems Microsoft has stuffed up with the service pack and people are beginning to notice:

The latest service pack for Windows XP continues to cause problems for users. According to an online user forum, the latest glitch in Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) causes problems with the remote desktop access feature of Windows Home Server.

On the We Got Served U.K.-based Windows user forum, Windows XP users running Windows Home Server, Microsoft's home storage and local networking server, report that SP3 is cutting off their access to the server from their PCs. The remote desktop access feature would ask users to add their home server's Web site address in order to access it even after they already had, users reported.

According to a user on Microsoft's Windows Home Server forum, the problem arose because Windows XP SP3 by default disables Terminal Services Active X control as part of its security model. The user, ColinWH, posted a fix for the problem that outlines how to enable the Terminal Services ActiveX control in Internet Explorer.
PC World: Users Report More Trouble With Windows XP SP3

"Linux is a Cancer"

"Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches," Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, during a commercial spot masquerading as a media interview with the Chicago Sun-Times Friday. (The Register)

Computer Museum Online

Alto from Xerox, 1973 (© PC World, courtesy of Digibarn Computer Museum)

This is one computer from the Digibarn, a project led by Bruce Damer who is an advisor to HUMlab. More from the Digibarn can be seen on the msn slide show In Pictures: The Most Collectible PCs of All Time.