Best-selling author Daniel H. Wilson on naming robotic villains and high-end gaming PCs

Every week, a new and interesting human being tackles our decidedly geeky take on the Proustian Q&A. This is the Engadget Questionnaire.

In the latest installment of our weekly smattering of queries, best-selling author and roboticist Daniel H. Wilson talks corporate Kool-Aid and the evils of stock market AI. Join us on the other side of the jump for the full gamut of responses.

What gadget do you depend on most?
Like everybody, I'm addicted to looking at my phone every five minutes. Sometimes, I'll just sit hunched in the dark and stroke its gleaming metallic curves. It is... precious to me.

Which do you look back upon most fondly?
I'm nostalgic for that big, stupid, brown TV remote from the 1980s that my brother and I used to call "the box." It was connected to the television with a brown cord, so fighting over it was more of a "King of the Hill" multiplayer mode, rather than the "Capture the Flag" mode that came later with wireless remotes.

Which company does the most to push the industry?
I try not to drink Kool-Aid. It stains your lips and makes you look like a little kid.

What is your operating system of choice?
Once, I was a computer science undergrad and I lived in a wild land of Unix and Linux and dual boots. These days I am a humble man, content to live simply on the parcel of land granted to me by Mac OS X.

What are your favorite gadget names?
In my novel Robopocalypse, I named the villain "Archos." It came from the Greek root Arkhon, which means ruler. Later, I found out that there is an Android tablet maker with an identical, and equally awesome, name. Good for them.

What are your least favorite?
Too many to count. I feel sorry for all the startups that have to play the name game. That's why I'll dump a few here, for free: skankler, spoodly, cryognesis, canbobula, dirbler, mastivore and folliculitus. The last one is an infection you'll get from drinking champagne in hot tubs thanks to the money you made from those product names I gave you.

Which app do you depend on most?
I depend on theScore for my quietly-ignoring-all-humans-while-checking-sports-scores needs.

"I'm nostalgic for that big, stupid, brown TV remote from the 1980s that my brother and I used to call 'the box.'"

What traits do you most deplore in a smartphone?
All these new notifications and reminders and blatant attention-grabs are very annoying. Plus, it makes my phone seem desperate.

Which do you most admire?
I really like the Apple Photo Stream sharing service, because it lets me share pictures of my kids with the six or eight people in the world who actually care.

What is your idea of the perfect device?
There is no perfect device, but anything that gets iteratively better has my respect. Perfect is never good enough for long.

What is your earliest gadget memory?
It's summertime, about 6 o'clock in the morning. I'm sitting cross-legged in my underwear on the cool hardwood floor of my bedroom, playing Super Mario Bros. as birds start to sing outside
my window.

What technological advancement do you most admire?
I'm proud of the roboticists working on autonomous vehicles. Ask yourself, "What could I invent to save the most lives possible in a developed country?" Short of curing heart disease, creating a new world of safe transportation is the answer.

Which do you most despise?
If you have an advanced degree in artificial intelligence and you spend your days crafting trading bots that comb the stock exchanges for exploits, then congratulations! You're officially an evil douche bag.

What fault are you most tolerant of in a gadget?
Fragility. I always feel a sense of relief once my gadget gets its first ding, scratch or crack. I believe in using things up until they are gone, and that means beating the crap out of whatever gadget is within reach.

"I would love it if my phone did not give my butt the same dialing capacity that it gives my fingers."

Which are you most intolerant of?
Any conniving, underhanded corporate BS designed to grab more personal data from my life or money from my wallet. Apple, you can force a whole little wooden bookshelf down my throat, but there isn't crap on it but the New York Times. And there never will be.

When has your smartphone been of the most help?
Lost in a foreign country, you can surreptitiously check the map on your smartphone. Not only do you not look lost, you look like you were smart enough to have a working phone in a foreign country. Or am I fooling myself?

What device do you covet most?
High-end gaming PCs always tempt me with their neon-illuminated windows and ominous glowing logos. I look into their hearts and see gleaming processors, bubbles dancing in liquid-cooling tubes over savagely etched heatsinks, and I start grabbing for my credit card. I'm looking at you Digital Storm -- send me a coupon, why not?

If you could change one thing about your phone what would it be?
I would love it if my phone did not give my butt the same dialing capacity that it gives my fingers.

What does being connected mean to you?
As a freelance writer, I have been trained to cling to my phone in classic Pavlovian fashion -- by occasionally receiving very good news (i.e., a reward preceded by a ringing bell). Being connected means there is a tiny probability of receiving good news -- like playing the lottery on a drip feed.

When are you least likely to reply to an email?
I don't respond to emails when I am drunk or angry or any combination of the two. So if it takes two weeks for me to reply to you, well, I've probably been angry and drunk.

When did you last disconnect?
I disconnect every night between 11 PM and 6 AM. That's healthy, right?

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By: Unknown On 10:10 PM

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In Depth: How it's possible to play high-end games on ultraportable laptops

Gaming on a laptop has traditionally meant using massive desktop-replacement beasts tied to the power socket, with no hope of fun on the road.

On the flip side, trying to play modern titles on a machine with integrated graphics has generally meant staccato frame rates in the single digits.

But what if we told you that it needn't be that way? What if we told you that on an Ultrabook with only HD 4000 graphics we could have Crysis 2 running smoothly, and without too much sacrifice either?

Lucid Logix is a name that will be familiar to most readers as the company that allowed folk with Z68 or Z77 motherboards to use discrete graphics cards and still have access to the funky Quick Sync bits of the Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge chips.

Functional, but not too sexy, right? Its new Dynamix software, though, can double gaming frame rates on integrated graphics, giving laptops without discrete GPUs serious gaming chops. Lucid Logix is a tiny company with big ambitions, and now it's got the software to match that ambition.

We went to see Lucid while we were over in San Francisco for IDF. Usually when we say that we mean we saw a representative, but not this time - we actually saw pretty much the entire company. A good chunk of its small team was in the room with us as Offir Remez, president and MD of Lucid, took us through the demos of the latest goodies.

We saw its Virtu MVP Mobile software running on a laptop and a concept external GPU set up via a hot-swappable Thunderbolt connection - but it was the new software running on an Ivy Bridge Ultrabook that really impressed.

The little laptop, with its relatively feeble HD 4000 graphics, had Crysis 2 sitting on it. While it's not quite the crazy-demanding game its predecessor was, it's still a graphics hog, so on the surface it might seem unfair to put the poor machine through the wringer with it.

And with the machine barely managing to hit 9fps it seemed like a pretty pointless exercise - nobody is going to play at those frame rates. That's where Lucid's Dynamix software comes into play, though.

A quick press of a pre-ordained key to enable it while still in the game, and suddenly the FRAPS frame rate counter jumped up to over 20. Suddenly it was playable and much, much smoother. A credible gaming experience on an Ultrabook - what voodoo is this?

It's a software-based solution, requiring no extra hardware and - in a first for Lucid - operating on a single graphics processor.

"We take everything we know how to do," says Offir. "We know every frame going into the pipeline. We capture it before, we analyse the tasks, we know what it's going to do. We sometimes distribute it between the CPU and GPU, and sometimes different GPUs.

"We said, 'Can we use that in a one GPU environment and walk the fine line between quality and performance?'" he continues. "Would you give up a small percentage of quality - we are playing with pixels here - to double performance? Let's say 2 per cent quality to double performance."

What Lucid is doing here is based on something Intel itself passed around at this year's Games Developer Conference (GDC) back in March - something called Dynamic Resolution Rendering. It was a concept which allowed better frame rates on lower powered hardware, while still retaining much of the visual clarity you want with high-resolution gaming.

But nobody wanted to know. The extra code needed to add this into the developers' game engines obviously wasn't seen as worth it for individual titles on a platform as seemingly niche as the PC.

Lucid though has taken this away from the games themselves, and is creating an ecosystem that it can add to a machine to enable the resolution switching in any game on the fly.

The essential idea is to dynamically adjust the resolution of the 3D scene so that it can run smoother and faster, while still keeping the GUI/HUD of the game rendered in the native resolution. That way the overlay doesn't expand and end up taking over the screen - as it would if you dropped resolution as a whole - and remains clear and crisp and out of the way of the 3D scene.

As Lucid's demonstration showed, dropping the resolution of the actual 3D scene itself this way doesn't harm the image quality too much, and adds a whole heap onto the performance side. You can also, as Lucid is doing with Dynamix, offset much of the image degradation of dropping resolution by using less GPU-intensive post-processing effects to help smooth things out.

The trade-off then is visual clarity. Because the new technology is enabled on the fly, you can immediately see the loss of fidelity - there's a faint smudging visible around the edges, like you'd see anyway running the game in a non-native resolution.

But when you're switching from unplayable-but-sharp to smooth and a little less clear, it's a pretty easy choice. And Lucid hasn't finished optimising yet and is confident it can sharpen things up more in future iterations.

If you want a completely high-end, high-resolution gaming experience then you're still going to need a discrete GPU. But if you just want to play a 3D title with smooth frame rates on your Ultrabook/integrated graphics processor, you're not going to be that bothered about a little loss of clarity.

At the moment Lucid is only looking at this in the mobile sphere, but we also spoke about whether the same could be applied to small form factor machines, the sort of little PCs you stick under your TV for media functionality.

From the sofa the slight smudging is going to be barely visible, and with Valve and its big-screen gaming Steam initiative gaining traction, having a wee PC capable of gaming on your TV is actually quite desirable. This could really open up PC gaming to a whole new section of the PC world.

Now Intel is starting to take notice again and so are the laptop manufacturers. Lucid didn't fully realise just how well-received the software would be and is now being tasked with using it in the first round of Haswell laptops due for release in the middle of next year.

And if the 2x GPU performance of the 4th Generation Core Architecture holds true that could mean 40fps in Crysis 2 on an Ultrabook. Now that's tantalising.

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By: Dilusha On 8:38 PM

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MSI ships GX60 gaming laptop to the US, gives us high-end AMD gaming for $1,300

MSI Makes High Performance Portable Gaming Affordable with AMD Powered GX60 – Available this Week

Battle-ready and outfitted with AMD HD 7970M graphics supporting AMD Eyefinity, Steel Series Keyboard, and Killer™ E2200 Game Networking for under $1,300

City of Industry, Calif. – November 12, 2012 – MSI Computer Corp, a leading manufacturer of computer hardware products and solutions, unveils their newest AMD powered gaming notebook, the GX60. Armed with state of the art components, including AMD Trinity A10 Quad Core processors, AMD Radeon™ HD 7970M GPU, Killer™ E2200 Game Networking and Steel Series Gaming Keyboard, the GX60 is the ideal choice for gamers seeking a high-performance, yet affordable unit.

The GX60, part of MSI's award-winning G Series of gaming notebooks, delivers exceptional gaming experience through a combination of high-performance components and proprietary technology. MSI's exclusive TDE (GPU Overclocking) Cooler Boost Technology delivers one-touch performance boost while AMD's Eyefinity, a stereoscopic 3D technology, allows users to run multiple independent display outputs simultaneously.

"MSI spared no bells and whistles in creating the GX60, packing it with cutting-edge components including the latest AMD processor," said Andy Tung, vice president of sales for MSI US. "MSI is committed to the gaming community and we believe that exceptional performance leads to unparalleled gaming experience."

Available this week, the GX60 also comes with Blu-ray Disc reader, a 1920x1080 anti-reflection screen that reduces eyestrain while widening the field of view, 9 cell battery for extended mobile gaming pleasure, gold coated audio jacks (Audio Boost) for crystal clear and high fidelity sound, and more.

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By: Dilusha On 3:42 PM

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