The next evolution of OS

All of us had the idea of installing a operating software in our computer. However, time has changed. For instance , we are no longer required to pay telecom operator if we want to make a call, technology has provided us with alternative that are free and reliable. This has been especially true in the operating software market. Microsoft and Mac have been charging consumers to use their operating software for ages. We are forced to purchase them because they are the standard for the industry. Some may argue that we got Ubuntu and OpenSolaris. On the other hand, most of us would agree that it may be free but it was not user friendly and deem as for the 'geeks' only.

Fortunately, Our best friend "Google" came out with something that would free us from this captivated market. Google is going to bring Operating software to the next level when it introduce its Chrome OS, an extended version of Google Chrome.

Advantages of using Chrome OS

• Open source
• Lightweight
• Speed,
• Simplicity
• Security

"Google is designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform."

Posted by Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management and Linus Upson, Engineering Director

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/07/introducing-google-chrome-os.html

The Charm of Mac

As mentioned in our last lecture by Prof Soo, Mac users can be VERY passionate about their Macs(notice i don't associate it with words like laptop/PC? :p )

As one of the only Mac users in class, perhaps it is only fair that i try to introduce a little tempting detail about Mac that makes us love it so much.

The Dashboard

Some of u may have heard before Mac users talk about "Widgets" and "Dashboard" but you always had no idea what it meant? Basically all Macs come default with this interesting thing call Dashboard. At a one button click, u can get another "layer" of screen over your existing one. This "layer" is fully customizable according to your preference.

Let me illustrate this below:

The picture above is me surfing at our favorite web page :D

This is how it looks after i bring in the dashboard. Notice that it dims the background and brings the Dashboard to the foreground? Any widget could appear here and placed according to your liking. For example, u will notice i have wikipedia and dictionary in my dashboard, which is helpful to students like us! i have a translator on standby in case of unexpected needs.

Notice the little blue pad? that's my version of post-it notes :D u can put as many as u need and they will always be available with one button touch.

The sky is the limit to it's application! i could have travel info, yellow pages, espn web tv..etc.

To date there are millions of official widgets(by now u may have guess it, it's the little different programs on Dashboard) on Apple website, with many more by private developers out there.

The motto of Mac isn't to give you what u want.

They give you what you want before u realize that's what you want.

Inventing ahead of generation is a Mac's strongest point.

The physical specs may seem low, but it's efficiency is off the charts :D

Wizard of OS part 2

Most people know what OS stands for, but do they really know what it does and how it works? From this interesting seminar about Operating System (OS), we learnt quite a lot about OS. Before this seminar, we only know that Mac, Windows etc are examples of OS, but we never really know how it functions until we’ve been through this seminar about OS.

OS actually operates in kernel mode, provides abstraction, manage hardware allocation etc. This is something that some of us might not know until we have been through this seminar.

The seminar starts off with some introductions to OS before moving on to brief history of OS on the first computer, ENIAC. From there we get a clearer picture of how program interacts with hardware, advantage, disadvantages etc. After that comes the common feature of mainframe, batch processing of IBM 360 etc.

One interesting topic about this seminar is perhaps how OS does process management. First Come First Serve is not a very good solution when many processes are queuing up, so Round Robin would be a better solution is this case where each process are only assigned a certain amount of time to process regardless of whether they finish their job and they will have to queue up again for their turn.

Another interesting part of the seminar is the king’s story to help us better understands how OS uses physical and logical memory. This gives us a better understanding of how OS performs a task.

This seminar is definitely beneficial to all its audience. After attending this seminar, we have a better knowledge of how OS works and of course, look forward to taking CS2106 in the near future.

Done By: Tan Tai Hock, Zhang Haoqiang

Linux is superior?

I am just curious about why so many people is obsessed with Linux and here is the summary of some reasons I found.

1, COST
Usually we either spend $300 for our operating system, or copy them illegally. The price for a Windows license amounts to an average of one fourth of each new computer's price, whereas we can get Linux completely free of charge. Furthermore, the applications and software are also free for Linux.

2,IT WILL NOT GET SLOWER OVER TIME
For Linux , even five years from now, the system will be just as fast and responsive as the day of installation. Besides there are not many viruses, adwares, trojans, worms, etc., which would force user to reinstall anyway. Linux lets you spend more time working, less time reinstalling over and over again.

3, FORGET ABOUT VIRUSES
Of course, a Linux virus is not impossible to get. However, Linux makes it very hard for this to happen, for several reasons: Most people use Microsoft Windows, and pirates want to do as much damage (or control) as possible: therefore, they target Windows. More eyes make fewer security flaws. Linux is Open source software, which means that any programmer in the world can have a look at the code and help out.

4, ONE CLICK TO INSTALL SOFTWARE
With Linux, everything is much simpler. Linux has what is called a "package manager": each piece of software is contained in its own "package". If you need some new software, just open the package manager, type a few keywords, choose which software you want to install and press "Apply" or "OK". Or you can just browse existing software (that's a lot of choice!) in categories.

Actually there are many more advantages of Linux and I guess I am going to switch soon.


Reference:
http://www.brighthub.com/computing/linux/articles/32166.aspx
http://cityblogger.com/archives/2007/01/24/101-reasons-why-linux-is-better-than-windows

Photos from the session: Wizards of OS (part I)

Getting hands dirty with Mac OS-X, Windows 7, Ubuntu, and Open Solaris...

Blog post on Casual Games…

As mentioned in the seminar on computer games, I was an avid player of 2D online casual games. Thus, I am here to tell you more on online casual games. Online casual games are targeted at a mass audience of casual gamers. Casual games have a broad audience group and the audience is predominantly females. It has been reported that 74% of those who play casual games are female.

Background of Casual games:
Microsoft Solitaire which came together free with the Microsoft Windows was widely known to be the first most successful casual game. Subsequently, Microsoft produced other casual games such as the Minesweeper, Freecell and Spider Solitaire. In 1989, Nintendo’s Game Boy was released with Tetris as a free pack-in game. In 1996, casual games moved online. With the advent of Flash, there is a boom in the web-based games. When having mobile phones with large and colourful display became a norm, casual games received another boom as casual games became portable and can be played anywhere you go using a mobile phone. In 2006, there is an increase in the demand for console-based casual games due to the release of the Nintendo Wii.

Some features of casual games:
- Casual games are mostly 2-Dimensional and only allow single player but now there are more 3-Dimensional casual games and allow for multiplayer.
- Casual games are popular for their simple rules and low commitment level unlike hardcore games which are more complicated and required more commitment.
- Casual games do not require any special skills to win and allow the gamers to reach the final stage of the game quickly. A game usually can be completed in one sitting.
- Casual games can be played continuously without a need to save the game.
- Casual games are usually free online or free to download. Some may have limited trials so as to encourage the addicted gamers to purchase the full version and in turn the developer of the game could earn some profits.
- Casual games can be played on a web browser using Flash or Shockwave or they can be played on the game consoles.
- Casual games are often simulations of traditional games such as Chess, Checkers, Pinball, Poker, Sudoku, Solitaire, and Mahjong.

Some casual games that you might like to try or have played before could be: Zuma, TyperShark, Bejeweled®, Insaniquarium, Dinner Dash, Restaurant City etc.

Recommendation of some websites for casual games:
1. www.miniclip.com
2. www.popcap.com
3. www.mofunzone.com
4. www.onemorelevel.com
5. MSN games
6. Facebook games

Operating System

Most people don’t care about what OS (Operating System) which they are using. Their most concern is can check their email, typing word document, playing games or etc when they switch on the computer. The other reason is because the OS was already bundled when they bought the computer. Nowadays, there are variety of OS in the market and they are either open source (Linux or Ubuntu) or proprietary (Microsoft Window) and each of them also has their own special characteristics and functions.

MS Window is the second most popular software in the market now. For me, I think that’s because lots of people think that MS Window is more stable, more user friendly and it also provides easy support than the others OS; secondly, it is already bundled with the computer when we first bought. (I am one of them).

But after the seminar and hands-on session, I realized that actually there are others OS which also user friendly and stable in their functions and User Interfaces, and even more user-interactive than MS Window such as Ubuntu, Linux and Mac. From the session, there are one OS which impressed me, that is “Mac” because it has a interactive and user friendly UI such Qucikload function which enable user to have a quick preview of the media/content.

In conclusion, there are lots more of OS available in the market and each of them has their own characteristic. So sometime I think we should try the other then we will know which one suit us instead of only stick to one.

Digital Media Production

After I listened to the talk by the famous Singapore director, Jack Neo, I knew more about the film industry of Singapore. This talk was more like an interview. In the talk, Dr. Brown and some other lecturers just asked some questions and Jack answered these questions from his own experience. Because of this, the talk almost had nothing to do with technology and the topics were very broad. Because of the broadness of the talk, it seemed a bit messy and this maybe the same problem of this blog. Regard of these things, the talk was really interesting or I should say it was just these things that made the talk so interesting. You know, the formal lectures are always dull and sometimes we just can’t help to skip them. Basically, I will cover the most of the points of the talk and add the experience of me as once I was the assistant director of my class’ drama.
The talk began with Dr. Brown’s interesting introduction. In fact, as I stayed in for about one year and I never watched a Singapore movie before, I didn’t know Jack Neo is such a famous director in Singapore.
After the introduction, Dr. Brown went directly to the questions. I forget what the question really was, but I still remember his answer. He answered the question from his own experience of making films. As first, he was an EP (if I am not wrong, EP is short for Entertainment Partners). EP is in charge of the money. EP should decide the amount of money spending on the film and balance the income and expenditure. Because of this special experience, he talked more about the money. He said that a dilemma of Singapore film industry is the lack of money. He took the fight scene for an example: the fight scene can be a cheap one or a complicate but expensive one; they should always decide whether the scene being a complicate one is necessary because of the lack of money. To make it funny, he said that if you couldn’t find enough money, you can ask money from your mother and put her face on the scene. Also because of the lack of money, the special effect is not satisfactory. He said that he didn’t have enough money employ experts to do the CG (computer graphics). Because of this, he said that if you didn’t like Singapore film or even hate Singapore film, don’t just complain but try to donate some money for us.
He said that the script was the most important one to make a successful film. The film should have a big start, sex and action and dramatic changes to catch the audiences’ eye-ball. When Jack was still an EP, a young director tried to produce a film and he wanted to cooperate with Jack. But after read the script, Jack advised him to change the story. The young director didn’t take it and finally he used his own money to produce film. When he promoted his film, there was no cinema like this film, though the film was an expensive one. Later, he mentioned that the film which was simple but meaningful or complicate and interesting could always catch audiences’ eyes. From my own its experience, I think the complicate one is harder job. Our drama based on a historical story which happened in Han Dynasty of China. When we discussed whether our class drama should be an educative one or funny one, we decided to make a funny one. It is because, if we want to do an educative one, we must have professional directors to understand the characters fully but even myself can’t do this. But making a funny one is easy, we just add irrational things. For example, we let the characters play computer games which can’t happen at that time and we added the background music of the game; there were also some scandals which, in fact, were not the truth. It was easy for my classmates to express such kind of ideas in the drama.
At the end of the talk, he gave some advice for the ones who want to be a director. He suggested that they should start with MTV, because the MTV didn’t need too much logic and was easy for the beginners. He also suggested that when make the MTV, don’t do whatever you want. He said that some directors just killed the people randomly and made the film quite bloody and violent. He suggested that when you get the power, try to control yourself.
I learned a lot from the talk. I began to know the dilemma of Singapore film industry and the digital media production. In addition, I began to watch Singapore film. Yesterday, I just watched I Not Stupid Too, directed by Jack Neo.
It is educative and I found that his film was really good.

Write-up for Wizards of OS (Part 1)

"Unix is basically a simple and powerful Operating System, but you have to be a genius to understand its simplicity." - Dennis Ritchie

The title says it all. OS is what we see/hear/use everyday on our computer. It's definitely a big part of our lives, so this seminar is sure to be informative and interesting.

The first slide really caught my attention. The number of people playing World of Warcraft in the world is amazing, I being one of the 8 million. Then, when Dr Soo said that there were 800 million worldwide using Windows, I was once again astonished. He went on to introducing us to 4 of the many OS-es out there. They were Mac OS X, Windows 7, Ubuntu and OpenSolaris. We were then given various day-to-day tasks to do on the 4 laptops that were loaded with the different OSes. These tasks are what a casual user may do with a computer - writing a word document, playing mp3/video, editing a picture, downloading programs, logging on to facebook etc.

Spending just 15 minutes on each OS, we tried to rush through the various tasks at hand. The easiest for me was on the Windows 7 machine. I have been using the Windows OS for a long time now and hence I am quite familiar with it. Second was the Mac OS X. The hardest 2 were the OpenSolaris and the Ubuntu. That was the first time I was using the 2 open source OSes. Given only 15 minutes to play around with it, I am in no position to say that they're lousier than the Windows or the OS X. As time comes, I may try to get myself a copy of these 2 OSes and experiment around. Who knows, I might convert to Ubuntu fan one day.

During the last part of the seminar, each of the seniors presented the OS they were "rooting for". I was hoping for a little more flame war to go on between the different OSes but it was quite tame. It was informative and entertaining.

Well, today's seminar can be said to be the 2nd most hands-on seminar so far. The seminar gave me a taste of what a user experiences when using the various OSes and leaves me wanting to spend more time in playing around with the lesser known ones like Ubuntu.

On a closing note, Dr Soo said that understanding an OS is different from using an OS. So I'm definitely looking forward to next week's seminar!

Computer Games roundup

The interesting Computer Games session successfully did a great job in inspiring me of the World of games. Through the simple concepts, Dr Golam Ashraf created the basic idea of the Computer Games, which is proper for us freshmen.
At the first few minutes he broke the ice by asking interesting things about each student in the class and how do they feel about the course so far. Following by asking the types of the games each one plays, gradually he made us build up the general content of a game in general, which includes Characters, Story lines (sometimes optional) and the environment or level of the game. All of these things are called “art work”.
In the matter of Games Design (or Games Mechanic), to ensure that a game work well, the game masters must pay full attention to these properties:
1. Rules
2. Attributes: like the value of things, penalty, any damage or in general how each item changes as the player does some actions.
3. The rate of change, or the gradient
4. HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) UI: means how to play the game. Maybe the game is played with mouse, or keyboard, or remote, or using player’s smile  or gesture, or a character may respond to the player when he talks…
5. The indispensible factor when creating a game is its Balance. It can be restricted number of player in a round, the resource that the character can exploit to survive, and each player is given equal chance to win.
Especially in the game of action types, there must be so-called ‘romantic relieve’, it is the zone between boredom and frustration. It ensures the enjoyment of the game.




Moving on to the real-time Technology used, this includes:
1. Graphics needed
2. Processing Unit (or System Architecture) like power consumption,…
3. Internet/or in general communication: connect to the server. Fast compression tech is needed as the data is huge.
4. Database: the main purpose of it is to store your own characters’ feature, and connecting of players. It’s a quick way to get access to millions of data, and for fast searching.
5. AI
6. HCI
In the topic of Foundation Game, we are given a question: “What concepts make them so ambitious?” Answering this question is analogous to how to survive in 15 days with only 10$ given. Philosophically speaking it is the matter of how to bring the user the best game with lowest price.
To obtain this purpose, the game masters should do the following tasks:
1. Divide and conquer
2. KISS – Keep It Short and Sweet
3. COWYNC – Compute Only What You Need To Compute
4. PRECOMPUTE what you can
-> These techniques keep the game master frugal enough to create an effective game.
In the end of the class, what remains in my mind is not only the basic concepts of a game, the enjoyment of the interesting videos but also an inspiration for the game masters in the future. We owe a big thank you to Dr Golam Ashraf for his enthusiasm.

Written by: Dang Dung Ha

Evolution Of Games

I absolutely love games. No matter what genre.. Though it's not a good thing, I have to say games have taken up a huge part of my life so far. Even though I'm 21 this year, I am still addicted to games (trying very hard to cut down). As I grow older, I found out that the games I'm playing now have really evolved from the past. So I'd like to share a little bit on the evolution of games with a lot of personal experiences.

While gaming today is a widely recognized part of our cultural landscape, many of us do not know that electronic gaming is actually a relatively new thing. Early programmers took computers that were slow and prehistoric and programmed simple (and I really mean simple) games such as Tic-Tac-Toe on their electronic systems. But the thing that really started electronic gaming off was the Atari 2600, released in 1977. Ever since then, gaming has taken off and it has never been the same again.

Games started breaking off into several genres - mainly Sports, First Person Shooters, Real Time Strategy, Role Playing Games. Each genre attracted different gamers but as games slowly developed, genres started to merge together and it has really become a blurred line.

I remember my first ever console - THE Nintendo.

Day and night, I was on my precious nintendo playing Super Mario, Donkey Kong Jr. and Circus Charlie etc. Even though I have completed the entire game before, I continued to play it over and over again. It was that addictive. I would call my friends over to play and challenge them (since I've trained over and over again, I was confident of beating them). New and better games were released and I found myself buying a new cartridge almost once a month. It was crazy!

Thanks to the development in technology, new consoles started to pop out and eventually I was spending more and more money on games, controllers, consoles.....

Well, this is only a small little preview which I will try and elaborate more in my presentation. Hope this post has sparked an interest in you wanting to know more about the origins of electronic gaming and how it has evolved through the years. Stay tuned!

Seminar report on search engines

Search engines
According to Wikipedia, a web search engine is a tool designed to search for information on the World Wide Web. We believe most of us are quite familiar with it. Actually, once we connect to the Internet, mostly we will use a search engine (like Google) at first. As for most of us, we have already added Google, Baidu or other search engines to our home pages. However, most of us just know little about how Search engine works so that the lecture by Aaron Tan really makes us get rid of confusion.
1. Web phenomenon
During pre-2000, the number of websites was growing at an exponential rate which resulted in the high value E-commerce systems and the development of technology. The period can be divided into 3 growth stages: 1991-1997: Explosive growth, at a rate of 850% per year; 1998-2001: Rapid growth, at a rate of 150% per year; 2002-2006: Maturing growth, at a rate of 25% per year. During post-2000, the rate of growth is slowing down and the trend towards other media like Youtube, Myspace and Social media like blogs, wikis is becoming the main stream.
2. Web Statistics
At the same time, the amount of information on the web is growing at an exponential rate. Millions of pages are added per month. Billions of unique pages available will double in a year. Moreover, the freshness of updates also becomes the competing goal among search engines: the fresher, the hotter. The most frequently linked sites are changing a lot and we can never guess who will be the next winner.
3. Search Engines
Now, we come to the main point: Search Engines. 59m American adults use search engines on a day, up from 38m a year before – from 30% to 41%, (Pew Internet Project, 2005) a big rising. From iProspec Survey, 2004, we can get it that more than 70% of responders use search engines on the Internet almost every day, and even 20% of them will use it many times a day. We can conclude that search engines are likely to have become part of our lives. Therefore, we should learn more about how the important part of the Internet works. To understand the anatomy of a Search Engine, we have to know Web Crawler. A Web crawler is a computer program that browses the World Wide Web in a methodical, automated manner. (Wikipedia, Web crawler) Next, we learn about problems with Older Search Engines: too much false hits, the old approach which makes it harder to find what we need and always together with a list of rubbish. To make the older ones improve, we need to find out the way to sort the pages by its content more effectively and select what are more important. The importance of each page should be decided by what other pages’ comments on this page and the number of pages pointing to each page but the problem is that others can generate many dummy pages that point to a page. To rank pages, we need apply a more practical method: for example, if there are just three websites and the inlinks among the three, to rank one page, calculate the other two’s inlinks. Therefore, a page becomes important if many important pages link to it. (The method is so practical that we cannot write it properly. If you are interested in it, you can go to the link:
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~fmc1202)


Reflections:
Even though the search engines have already improved a lot, there are still some problems. Instead of the technique, anthropogenic factors have become one of the most serious problems which hamper the healthy development of the Internet. We had better to find the solution to improve the psychological quality of Netizens, rather than just develop the technology.

On 9 October, everyone in the seminar group presented a topic related to Search Engine. Topics such as cost per impression/cost per click, click spam, web crawlers and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are covered. We find that the SEO presentation is the most interesting and fulfilling as Chunsiong explained clearly how SEO comes about and the workings of SEO. After his presentation, we have learned more about how we can publicize our web sites and hopefully, increase our page rank. In fact, we have never known that link farming is not allowed by Google as a form of SEO until Chunsiong enlighten us during his presentation. However, the weirdest thing is that my web sites have never been blacklisted by Google, although weI use a similar technique as link farming to publicize them. Maybe there are other types of link farming techniques which Google allows? Hmm… What do you think?
In addition to the SEO presentation, we found the presentation about the different types of search engines useful. Thanks to the group’s presentation, we now knew that the name “Baidu” has its origins from the Song Dynasty. It is fascinating to see how the name of a famous search engine comes from a poem back in China’s history.
During the presentation, Zhu Li, Byron, Geck Keat and Li Hua have presented on the topic, Click Spam. We never knew that click spam originated from games until we have started working on this topic.
Overall, we felt that we have benefited from the 2 seminar sessions on Search Engine. Many thanks to my seminar group mates and Dr Aaron Tan for sharing with us what they know about Search Engines.

Posted by Zhu Li and Li Hua

Computer Gaming

What does the terms DOTA, CounterStrike, Final Fantasy, Maple Story,InsaneAquarium, Bejewelled,Virtual Tennis, Fifa, Resident Evil seems to have in common?

Yes. These are all computer games. Computer games here, do not only refer to games playable on a 'computer', but also games playable on consoles such as PSPs, DSlite, PS1, PS2, PS3, Wii, X-box,X-box 360 etc.

To put it in General Term, computer games are computer-made games, running on a virtual platform by recursively requesting input or directions from the users (players)

So in programming, it will be like, i run a programme, and i keep prompting the user for input, then, according to your input, the program will run differently, though, all this is still restricted to a programme, hence, the outcome, most probably, will be similar.

According to Dr Golam, Computer gaming is all about the integration of content, game design , technology buliding on the very fundamental foundations of gaming;

1.Being Short and sweet (so that your psp can have 1 game per UMD instead of 20 UMD per game...),

2.Computing only the required data (Reducing computational powers needed...So that that DS lite can run high quality games AND last for long hours on a single battery charge...)

3.Divide and Conquer-dividing what you need to compute into a number of segments, such that each part will only compute when the adjacent parts are being requested. (Again, reducing computational power..)

4.Minimum Comminication/ Efficient data Representation (So that you wouldnt find that your Wii lagging once you swing your remote about...)

5.Pre-computing what you can (So that you do not find yourself looking at shadows, or a random blur, when you rotate Cloud (A character from final fantasy 7) 360 degree and also , not lagging when you try to access your Attribute status in Diablo 2...)

By understanding the above 5 points, basically anyone with good programming back ground can come up with a game themselves.

How 'sale-able' the game is, would still remains a question...hmmm...

Computer games seminar roundup

Of the many FMC1202 seminar sessions I have attended, I felt that today’s seminar group is the smallest and most interactive. I guess it could be due to imperfect information regarding the seminar’s date and time. Thanks to Dr Golam Ashraf, we are able to learn more about the workings of game development and its difficulties.

A brief introduction about my gaming history… I seldom play games and when I do, the games I played are only those simple, casual, flash games, such as CakeMania and Restaurant City. Yes, I know it is certainly not the type of games that most of you played.

However, from the seminar, I learned more about the different types of games, as well as the workings of such games. In particular, Dr Ashraf has introduced the KISS principle, which stands for Keep It Simple, Stupid (or a nicer name will be Keep It Short and Simple). It is a principle that states that the design simplicity is crucial and unnecessary complexity should be avoided.

During the seminar, he also showed us how to can generate fur-like and muscle-like computer graphics. It is fascinating to see how computer graphics can look so real, just like real fur and muscles. Who knows… Maybe in near future, we are going to see a life-like human being as a computer graphic. You may end up thinking that the computer graphic is a real human. That would certainly be a great jump in the quality of computer graphics in gaming. I am sure that gamers will love it.

He also showed us a preview of the making of Oblivion, The Elder Scrolls, an award-winning RPG game at the end of the seminar. Now I truly understand why some game developers find it hard to enjoy computer graphics as a user and might end up thinking of how the computer graphics are generated out.

Posted by Li Hua

Invisible Software and Embedded Systems

With the rapidly-evolution of computer engineering technologies, Invisible Softwares, or widely known as Embedded Systems, has inevitably become an essential and significant aspect in various areas of our modern life today. During last week’s seminar, Dr. Tulika has provided us with a great introduction and insights into discovering the lesser-known facets of these widely-used and important technology and its applications.

Embedded Systems all around us

Invisible Softwares and Embedded Systems exist in many varieties and there are many other examples of their use. Just like 95% of all life forms in this planet are insects; with only animals, mammals, reptiles and many others making up a mere 5% of the remainder, only 2% of the embedded systems produced in the world are computer processors, dominated by many other convergent products and technologies.

Ranging from telecommunication systems, computer networking to even consumer electronics, we are in fact surrounded and interacting with different forms of embedded systems in our day to day activities, including your new iPhone, your dad’s convertible sports car, the upcoming PlayStation 3 gaming console and even simple household applications such microwave ovens, coffee maker or refrigerators.

Characteristics

• Wholesome Task Dedication & Performance Constraints. Embedded systems are often designed to perform some specific tasks rather than for general uses or multiple tasks and may also have some real-time performance constraints such as immediate response and guaranteed reliability for safety and usability reasons. Others may have low-end or entirely unbounded by such requirements, allowing their hardware to be simplified for optimal cost reductions.
• Strength in numbers. Embedded Systems are not always standalone devices. More than often, they consist of numerous small, computerized parts within a larger device that serves a more generic purpose. Take the Coffee Maker for instance, it features an embedded system for keeping your favourite Brazilian Coffee piping hot but its overall purpose is, of course, for brewing coffee!
• Firmware. Various embedded systems comes with programmed instructions commonly known as Firmware and are stored in read-only memory or Flash memory chips that runs at very little hardware resources.
  
  

Reliability

Embedded Systems often make up critical and indispensable components of the machines and are expected to perform continuously and indepedently for long-term usage such as periods of 10-50 years without errors, and in unfortunate cases, recover by themselves when errors really occur. Therefore, such invisible softwares are tested more rigorously and developed extensively than that for personal computers. Unreliable and fallible mechanical parts such as disk drives, switches or buttons are usually avoided.

Some reliability issues may include:

• Systems cannot be shut down for repair or too inaccessible for maintenance servicing.
  (E.g. Space systems, Automobile, Undersea Cables )
• Systems must be kept running and timely response to user inputs must be guaranteed for safety reasons.
  (E.g. Aircraft navigation, safety-critical chemical controls in factories, emergency braking systems in cars and trains)
• Systems will cause organizations large amount of monetary losses in event of shut down or disability.
  (E.g. Factory Controls, Funds Transfer, Automated Sales & Services etc.)

In a nutshell

Invisible Softwares and Embedded Systems are important applications of computer engineering and information technology in our day to day life and exist in a variety of shapes and sizes, from your little geeky automated Oral-B toothbrush to even sophisticated space navigation controls! More than often, efficient algorithms and programming is the core essentials of such systems to ensure their promised reliability, timely response and effectiveness, performing at their very best even after decades of use.

The next time you think that mere coding efficiencies in your programming assignment make little or almost no difference, think again!

May my spark light a fire,
Wong Kheng Leong =]