You *may* have worked with Roberts, but clearly you don't know much about him. Roberts' games have always pushed the limits of PC hardware. It's not unexpected to have to upgrade a PC or build a new one in order to play them adequately.

I bought my first PC just to play Wing Commander. I spent about 300 dollars upgrading my RAM from 4MB to 8 and bought my first CD-ROM drive in order to play Wing Commander 3.

Hopefully, in a few months I'll be upgrading my video card in order to play Squadron 42.

None of this is unexpected.

I don't know a lot about the game, true, but from what I have heard, he's promised a LOT and hasn't delivered on much.

I don't doubt that the tech is real and running, but I'd be surprised if that dev is running average hardware. Back in the late 90's when I was working with him, for shows like E3, he'd get top-of-the-line hardware that cost thousands of dollars to run it at a decent framerate.

I used to want to build a "spaceship" with my father when I was a kid. I loved the snow-speeders from Empire Strikes Back. I remember asking my dad where you got the lasers from, and if you could pick them up at the hardware store like everything else.

I wonder where they found a hardware store... haven't seen one of those in forever

Well, no, but it is easier and quicker. You could always put in a simpler controller later once you've worked out the hardware, but microcontrollers are cheap enough that there might be no real advantage.

You could consider the arduino as a prototyping board but some of the smallest ones, at around $10, are cheap enough to just leave in place.

This is an example of what happens when law enforcement are taught sociology and psychology and de-escalation training. Where as in the US many (especially urban) police departments teach little more than how to use their new military hardware which end of a gun fire's the bullets. To many believe that they are soldiers in a war and criminals or even regular people - especially minorities - are the enemy.

So is this just software update on existing cars or were they were some hardware modifications too?

It was always inevitable that the printer industry would shrink significantly as things become more digital, but it's always baffled me that they responded to that by making it harder and less desirable to print things.

Hardware is worse than it was 20 years ago, the drivers are much, much worse, and ink is more expensive. At this point we should have had rock-solid printers that you top up once a year from a litre (or bigger) refill bottle.

But hey, free market, right?

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

This might be reason enough to buy the HTC Vive instead.
http://www.itpro.co.uk/desktop-hardware/24985/everything-you-need-to-know-about-htc-vive-and-steam-vr-release-date-price-1

Interesting talk, but I think he puts way too much stock in the idea that going in guns (or rats) blazing is always the more satisfying approach. Back in the old days of Thief many people prided themselves on ghosting through levels and leaving as little evidence of their passing as possible.
I tend to stealth my way through most games were stealth is a viable option and I have never felt cheated because I didn't use some of the more action oriented systems. In Deus Ex I don't think I ever bothered with that social enhancer augment.

Adam Jensen's "I didn't ask for this" attitude actually seems pretty reasonable to me, what little of his life we saw before his accident seemed pretty happy and he didn't seem like the type to sit around thinking "If only I had a cool cyborg body". This seems more like the player is projecting their own insecurities.

And I could easily see a future where prosthetic limbs were more than just for rich people. Technology advances and becomes cheaper, cellphones used to be carried by rich assholes on Wallstreet, now every asshole has one. And not every prosthetic is going to turn you into Superman either, all a cybernetic leg needs to do is allow you to walk and run like a person with a normal leg, leaping tall buildings with a single bound is not a required feature. So most of those repressed cyber citizens are probably not sporting mil-spec hardware.

That is a *lot* of hardware.

Interesting info, but also kind of false/lame advertising.

How to break the Internet:
1) allow older hardware to keep running; can't really do anything to cause that
2) cut the cords; as he said, you couldn't cut enough to cause a problem
3) allow (?) a solar flare to happen and destroy our power grid; oh, shut up

How about:
4) wait for a huge meteor to collide with Earth and cause a mass extinction and all of mankind; boom, Internet is broken
5) wait for the next ice age

They aren't describing "how to break the Internet." It's just "things that could affect the Internet."

Late to the comment party here, but Slashdot had an interesting explanation of *why* so many of the robots had trouble like this:
"DARPA deliberately degraded communications (low bandwidth, high latency, intermittent connection) during the challenge to truly see how a human-robot team could collaborate in a Fukushima-type disaster. And there was no standard set for how a human-robot interface would work. So, some worked better than others. The winning DRC-Hubo robot used custom software designed by Team KAIST that was engineered to perform in an environment with low bandwidth. It also used the Xenomai real-time operating system for Linux and a customized motion control framework. The second-place finisher, Team IHMC, used a sliding scale of autonomy that allowed a human operator to take control when the robot seemed stumped or if the robot knew it would run into problems."

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/15/06/10/038224/why-so-many-robots-struggled-with-the-darpa-challenge

More info http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/robotics-hardware/origami-robot-folds-itself-up-does-cool-stuff-dissolves-into-nothing

Anyone remember TI graphing calculators, which at the time I was using them (90s) I think ran on 8088 processors?

Quite a bit MORE expensive than this. MUCH less powerful, even factoring in Moore's law. AND, they were in no way intended to be an open, hackable design like this is. And even with all those limitations, they became one of the primary "introduction to hardware and software hacking" devices of my generation.

When I was a 16-year-old HS Freshman, I had a TI-81 that I hooked up to a PC with a serial port and "hacked" zShell onto. I learned a bit of assembly code and put on lots of little programs like games etc. onto my calculator. I even got an image display program where you could load up bitmap images that were converted to a specific size and color depth (4-8 grays if I remember right). I got busted in my Geometry class that year looking at a blurry grayscale picture of a topless Pamela Anderson. On my calculator. If that doesn't put me in the running for biggest nerd ever, I don't know what would.

Anyway, I can only see this "Chip" thing (I agree that I'm not too big on the name) as a very cool idea. Sometimes, something as simple as a hackable platform or a blurry 4-bit picture of some boobs can be enough to push someone towards a lifelong interest in IT and other technology. Raspberry Pi and the others are great too, but the price of this one gives it a real leg up in the universal accessibility department!