David Kushner

The real story of stuxnet

The paper discusses how Kaspersky Lab tracked down the malware that stymied Irans nuclear-fuel enrichment program.

Betting the farm on games

This article discusses about FarmVille, the Facebook game which has led a social-game ascendance that will sway the Facebook-Google struggle and threaten the digital gaming industry. Such are the bucolic pleasures of FarmVille, that led the way in a games revolution that transformed how hundreds of millions of people are entertained online.

The wizardry of Id [video games]

The author takes a look at some of the technology that helped make the video games industry as big as Hollywood. Through its technologically innovative games, Id Software has had a huge influence on everyday computing, from the high-speed, high-color, and high-resolution graphics cards common in todays PCs to the marshalling of an army of on-line game programmers and players who have helped shape popular culture.

Virtual reality's moment

Virtual reality has been hyped as the next big thing for decades-and yet, it never seems to deliver. Despite the potential, particularly in the world of gaming, numerous attempts have left players dizzy with disappointment, and just plain dizzy. So why should you believe us when we say that this is the year?

The social life of engineers

IE E E S P E C T R U M • O ct o be r 20 03 S ally Ride, the first U.S. woman astronaut, has parlayed her celebrity into encouraging girls to develop their talents in engineering and science. Having recently marked the 20th anniversary of her history-making space shuttle journey, Ride is now a physics professor at the University of California, San Diego, and chief executive of Imaginary Lines Inc., which sponsors scienceand technology-related activities for girls. She recently spoke with IEEE Spectrum about her mission.

Ticking to eternity

A 10,000-Year Clock, a monument-size mechanical clock designed to measure time for 10 millennia is discussed. Danny Hillis, an electrical engineer with three degrees from MIT who pioneered parallel super computers at Thinking Machines Corp., worked for Walt Disney Imagineering, and then cofounded the consultancy Applied Minds, dreamed up the project in 1995 to get people thinking more about the distant future. But the clock is no longer just a thought experiment. In a cluttered machine shop near a Starbucks in San Rafael, Calif., its finally ticking to life.

The Firefox Kid

Blake Ross, one of the developers of Firefox which is one of the biggest open-source success stories is developing again a new project named Parakey. It is a Web operating system that can do everything an OS can do. It makes it really easy to store your stuff and share it with the world. There are differences between the two projects, however. Although Ross plans to incorporate the talents and passions of the free-software community, hes building Parakey around a for-profit business model

The Insomniacs

At the heart of Sonys new Playstation 3 (PS3) gaming console is the powerful new Cell Broadband Engine microprocessor, which is capable of doing up to 192 billion floating-point operations per second. The biggest challenge for game developers at Insomniac is programming the Cell to create addictive and eye-popping PS3 games that showcase the power of the new processor. Packing nine processors onto a single chip, the Cells real brain resides in the power processor element (PPE) which organizes, schedules, and doles out tasks to the eight processors, preferably in the most efficient way. The eight remaining processors are known as the synergistic processor elements (SPE) and are specially designed to do the kind of fast but not necessarily precise calculations needed for multimedia tasks. For the game developers at Insomniac, the PS3 game has been a metagame of experimentation. With the added muscle power of the cell, they hope to come up with some of the best new game play experiences ever

Living in the Limelight

Napster may be dead, but Mark Gorton and his company are making sure the file-sharing revolution it sparked lives on through LimeWire. LimeWire is transforming the ripple of grass-roots computer networking that began with Napster a few years ago into a cultural and, inevitably, an economic tidal wave. This article briefly discusses the career of Mark Gorton and his involvement with setting up Napster, Gnutella, and LimeWire, and the prospects of the file sharing technology.

From bricks to bits

Lego Universe, an online computer game is due out in October. Lego Universe marks the legendary company NetDevils first foray into massively multiplayer gaming, and for the iconic building-block maker, its a major gamble. Most massively multiplayer games cater to an older crowd, where norms of behavior need not be strictly enforced but Lego Universe seeks to capture the grade school set and the estimated