Microsoft Tries To Flatten Competition With Surface (Part 3) - Dropbox drops Public Folders, SSD Prices Way Down, AMD Adopts Arm for Armor

The MegaUpload fallout continues: While the U.S. government's case for Kim Dotcom's extradition is still slowly winding its way through the New Zealand court system, other file-sharing services are scrambling to preemptively batten down the hatches in an attempt to avoid similar sanctions and woes.

Dropbox drops Public Folders

Dropbox got in on the CYA action by discontinuing public sharing folders for new Dropbox accounts effective July 31.

Basically, new users will still be able to share files with friends, but they'll need to generate and share a link to the specific file first, something Dropbox users can do currently. According to the announcement, ‘This new sharing mechanism is a more generalized, scalable way to support many of the same use cases as the Public folder.’ If you're already a Dropbox user, fear not: Your Public folder is staying safe, sound, and open to all – at least for now.

SSD Prices Way Down

If you watched HDD prices soar after the Thailand floods and found yourself grumbling that SSDs should be cheaper, good news! Using scads of data col­lected by Camelegg, The Tech Report found that SSD prices have dropped nearly 50 percent in the last year, with several models now below the coveted $1/GB price point. That's been sparked by competitive pricing wars between Crucial, OCZ, Corsair, and Samsung, with a lot of cuts coming from SSDs based on Sand- Force's super-popular controllers. The one stodgy holdout is Intel: Various ver­sions of its 520 Series and 320 Series SSDs cost more dollar-for-data-wise than any other SSDs on the market, with the 40GB 320 Series SSD going for a whop­ping $2.31 per GB.

40GB 320 Series SSD

AMD Adopts Arm for Armor

In my February 2007 column, I predicted that PC processors would go beyond inte­grating CPU cores with graphics: ‘PC pro­cessors may have multiple cores for de­coding digital audio and video, running the network-software stack, managing security functions, and performing other specialized tasks. There's no need to dedicate large, complex, general-purpose cores to those narrow jobs. Some cores will be large, some will be small, and some will run at different clock speeds. Some cores may not be x86 compatible.’

Future AMD processors will integrate an ARM Cortex-A5 core to run some security tasks using ARM's TrustZone technology

This concept is called heterogeneous multicore processing, and now AMD is bringing it to PCs. Future AMD processors will integrate an ARM Cortex-A5 core to run some security tasks using ARM's TrustZone technology. Although AMD's Fusion proces­sors already qualify as heterogeneous mul­ticore chips by integrating CPUs with graph­ics, the addition of a completely different general-purpose CPU is a fuller realization of the concept. Expect more to come.

Why not use the existing x86 cores for all security processing? After all, they’re much faster than the Cortex-A5, which is more optimized for small size and low power con­sumption than high performance. And the Cortex-A5 is incompatible with PC security software, because it's based on a non-x86 RISC architecture. But it's fast enough, and its small footprint will add little cost and power to an x86 desktop or server chip. Also, ARM cores are immune to x86-specific malware.

AMD may supplement the Cortex-A5 with a dedicated cryptography engine like those found in today's networking processors. Such engines are even faster and harder to attack than a general-purpose CPU core. The Cortex-A5 could assist with cryptog­raphy, manage a secure boot process, or shadow some critical x86 operations as a safety check.

Whatever AMD has in mind, it's another step toward a future in which virtually all microprocessors will be heterogeneous multi­core designs.

The critical conundrum

There are two problems with creating a context for discussing Portal and Quan­tum Conundrum: the problem of genre and the problem of the designer. Portal and QC are usually lumped in with phys­ics puzzlers. This is completely wrong. Cut the Rope and Incredible Machine are phys­ics puzzlers. Portal and QC are merely the latest variation on the adventure game genre: Objects are used inside a world and within a narrative framework in order to unlock access to new parts of that world. The nature of the world or even the puzzles is not as relevant as the structure of the entire game.

The second question is more interest­ing. Just like Alfred Hitchcock returned to the ‘wrong man’ theme or David Cronen­berg explores themes of transformation, game designers can also develop their pet obsessions and stylistic strengths. In the case of Quantum Conundrum, project lead Kim Swift makes a persuasive case that many of the motifs unique to Portal – on which she also served as project lead – are so rich with potential that they demand to be explored in new and different ways.

Gaming is still young enough that we don't really have our own ‘auteur theory,’ in which a designer can make a credible claim to being the author of a work which is imprinted with that designer's unique sensibilities. You can look at five minutes of a Ken Russell or Stanley Kubrick movie and know who directed it.

Very few game designers can make a similar claim: maybe Tim Schafer, Sid Meier, Warren Spector, Ken Levine, Will Wright, and a few others. In time, we'll probably add Kim Swift to that rarefied company, and Quantum Conundrum cer­tainly makes a good case for her admis­sion, but the whole issue of whether or not games can have a single author (or if even films can) is a complex question. In film terms, we're still in our D.W. Griffith phase. We need more time at our backs to really understand what this medium can do, and whether or not there even can be an Orson Welles of gaming.