Misconceptions over computer games

Sometimes a story appears about how an unlimited data plan was throttled after surpassing a certain amount of usage, though these are few and far between, and are not likely to be the norm in the future as more and more people need access to data.

The fear that one may pay for games on a streaming platform only to see them disappear in the future is a valid concern, but it has already been one for many years. Sometimes a game is delisted due to a licencing agreement that only granted the use of a game for a certain amount of time, as occurred in early August with DuckTales Remastered.

They may return at some point in the future but there is no guarantee. Other games as a service simply cease to exist because they are no longer profitable and shutdown. Marvel Heroes Omega was a free-to-play action role-playing game that launched in , but struggled to survive, shutting down officially in In the aftermath, players who had paid for cosmetic items in game were simply out of luck since the servers were shutting down.

There is nothing to stop such failings within the gaming industry, but we should be clear in affirming that it would not be in any way a unique threat to games that we would stream. Nothing in life is free, and of course there will be a fee associated with game streaming, just like there is with all other gaming, but it is not simply to access purchased games.

When you stream a game, you are only seeing the result of their powerful hardware at work. Many misconceptions — such as only nerds study computer science; you have to be excellent in math to do well in Computer Science; programmers work in cubicles and do not socialize — have kept many women away from computing in recent years. If you seek the truth, you will find the female programmers who created the modern tech.

Computer Science is a fascinating example of how a discipline initiated by women turned into a massively male-dominated one. Trends come back over time. Hopefully, pretty soon, both women and men will work as equals without associating Computing with a gender. By the way, my wife is a Computer Scientist.

I, too, have those degrees, but we are not talking about men in this section. Therefore, please ignore my degrees. It was a necessity to shatter some misconceptions. You can build anything — a piano software, or guitar software. Can you help your mom by writing software to cook for her? Yes, you can. You can program a robot to do that.

Unfortunately, robots still do not have enough controllable limbs. Have patience and wait another decade. Can you develop games? Why on earth do you prefer to make games after studying Computer Science or learning to program while you can do so much more? You can write software to save household energy by automatically controlling electronic devices. You can build smartphone apps to help elderly people shop or help visually impaired individuals reach a destination by providing instructions via their cellphones.

If you still have the question in mind whether you will be able to develop games after learning to program, probably you are a teenager. If you are not a teenager, then I have only one suggestion for you. Please, grow up. Your email address will not be published. In general, cookies are helpful things — for example, they can keep you logged in to your favorite websites saving you from having to enter your login data every time you visit.

While it is true that Macs almost never get viruses, it is also true that there are some in existence. Because Word and Excel are available for the Mac also, this means that they can be potentially harmful on Macs as well thanks Microsoft. As of writing, Apple recognizes four possible viruses for Macs, though they are seldom seen. The reason for the low number of viruses is that the Mac operating system is based on a Unix subsystem which usually prevents the average user from running software with sufficient privileges to allow harmful software to cause damage.

Many people believe that Hitler and the Nazis conceived of the idea of the first Autobahn essentially a large motorway in Germany and the first laned free public motorway in the world. But in fact the autobahn was built in and opened by Konrad Adenauer, the Mayor of Cologne.

This was two years before Hitler became Chancellor of Germany. Interestingly, however, the very first motorway unlaned was the pet project of a dictator: the Autostrada dei laghi was inaugaurated on the 21st of September in Milan during the rule of Benito Mussolini. Not only do planes not dump their waste mid-flight, it is also impossible for them to do so short of some kind of catastrophe which causes the waste tanks to explode open because the valve is on the outside of the plane.

When toilets are used on a plane, the waste is dumped into a special tank. The waste remains in the tank until the plane lands, and then special ground crew members pump the tanks. In case you are wondering about the sucking noise toilets on planes make, a vacuum is used to allow the toilet to be flushed with less water and because plumbing cannot rely on gravity alone in an aircraft in motion.

Computers are much older than many people think and when you talk about the very first game, most people tend to think of Pong. Pong was invented in by Atari and it was an arcade style game that featured two opposing paddles and a ball with which you played virtual tennis. What's important to note though is that ARM doesn't actually make physical chips. Rather, they design the blueprints for how these chips should operate, and let other companies build them. It's like giving an author a dictionary and having them write something.

The author has the building blocks and has to adhere to guidelines about how the words can be used, but they are free to write whatever they want. By licensing out their intellectual property IP , ARM allows Apple, Qualcomm, Samsung, and many others to create their own chips best suited to their own needs.

This allows a chip designed for a TV to focus on media encoding and decoding, while a chip designed to go into a wireless mouse will focus on low power consumption. Because all processors based on ARM use the same core set of designs and blueprints, they can all run the same apps.

This makes the developer's job easier and increases compatibility. ARM is the king of mobile and embedded systems, while x86 controls the laptop, desktop, and server market. There are some other architectures, but they serve more niche applications. When talking about an instruction set architecture, that refers to the way a processor is designed on the inside. It's like translating a book into another language.

You can convey the same ideas, but you just write them out in a different way. It's entirely possible to write a program and compile it one way to run on an x86 processor and another way to run on ARM. ARM has differentiated from x86 in several key ways, which have allowed them to dominate the mobile market. The most important is their flexibility and broad range of technology offerings.

They can pick and choose whatever components they want to build the perfect CPU for their application. Need a chip to process lots of video? You can add in a more powerful GPU. Need to run lots of security and encryption? You can add in dedicated accelerators. ARM's focus on licensing their technology rather than selling physical chips is one of the main reasons why their architecture is the most widely produced. Intel is most commonly associated with x86 and while they did create it, AMD processors run the same architecture.

If you see x mentioned somewhere, that's just the bit version of x If you're running Windows, you may have wondered why there is a "Program Files" and a "Program Files x86 ".

It's not that programs in the first folder don't use x86, it's just that they are bit while programs in "Program Files x86 " are bit. One other area that can cause confusion between ARM and x86 is in their relative performance. It's easy to think that x86 processors are just always faster than ARM processors and that's why we don't see ARM processors in higher-end systems. While that is usually true up until now , it's not really a fair comparison and it's missing the point.

The whole design philosophy of ARM is to focus on efficiency and low-power consumption.