I'd never played a "trading card game" before.... But one of the joys of having children is the excuse to indulge in games and activities that childless adults (unlike childish adults :-) might never have the nerve to attempt.

These games are different from games involving a standard deck of playing cards, in that there are many cards that people collect, but a small subset is selected for one's "deck" to play a particular game. Deck selection is part of the strategy.

My son has some friends that have taken to the "Lord of the Rings" TCG. It is an amazingly complex and strategic game that actually mirror's Tolkien's story line quite well. Two or more players can play. Each person's deck will have 30+ good guy cards (your Fellowship) and 30+ bad guy cards (the Shadow force), a Ring-Bearer, and 9 "Site" cards, which represent locations in Middle Earth.

The object is to get your Ring-Bearer thru site #9 first. You get there first by having your Fellowship of Companions and Allies fighting your opponent's Minions. You can also win by having your Minions kill your opponent's Ring-Bearer, or "corrupting" him. So in a sense, there are two games going on at once.

Each turn has 7 phases, in which you fortify your Fellowship, allow opponents to position their forces, adjust weapons and conditions for battle, perform archery actions, then assign all surviving Companions and minions for combat, and finally perform the actual skirmish, and then regroup for the next turn.

This is a fun game with lots of dynamics and strategy.... And having a 9 year old gives me a good excuse to play :-)

When he was younger, he went thru a "phase" when kids in the neighborhood collected Pokemon cards, sure that their cards would be worth a fortune someday! And not really knowing how to play (if there even was) a game associated with the cards. Now, the "worth" of a LOTR card is its ability to help secure victory in the game, not some hope in future riches or presteige in intrinsic "cuteness" or "coolness". Maybe a sign of maturity? Not to dis all those beany baby collectors out there ;-)

The LOTR  TCG  was developed by Decipher. They publish "free" starter decks you can download, print out, and cut to size. There are a dozen or so strategy articles that discuss each "phase". There are suggested "deck" designs depending on your strategy (swarming orc minions, hobbit or men based fellowship, lots of archers, trolls, etc). There are detailed color images of ALL 1200+ cards on-line. And there are starter instructions, as well as the 22-page Comprehensive Rulebook 4.0.

A $10.00 starter deck (per player) is all that is needed, if you don't want to print out the free decks. But you'll soon want to augment your deck with other card types that assist your Fellowship or your Shadow Minions. Again, purchase 11-card booster packs, or just print out high-res card images from Decipher and cut to size.

There is a video tutorial, as well as a downloadable interactive tutorial for the PC. The release schedule for new expansion packs goes thru 2007:

http://www.decipher.com/lordoftherings/index.html

Click on "card list", "strategy", "rules", etc.

BTW, the new extended version of the last LOTR movie (Return of the Kings) will be available next week. I've put off buying the DVDs. Now I should be able to buy a package with all three extended versions.

December 09, 2004 07:08 PM EST Permalink

Bill Joy, in a Wired Mag article about a year ago, thinks Moore's Law will last another 10  years at least. With algorithmic work, those processors will have 1000x more power than today (he wrote that in Dec 2003). That's "about" the timeframe as general use of Jim Mitchell's DARPA derived systems using a proximity interconnect. Hmmm. Is that possible? What has history taught us?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.12/billjoy.html

And Ray Kurzweil (yep - same Kurzweil famous for his MIDI keyboards and synths), wrote a fascinating book in 1999 called "The Age of the Spiritual Machine". On page 22, he charts the evolution of compute power since the 1900-era "mechanical" devices, thru the 1940's relay based devices, thru the 1950's vacuum tube computers, thru today's modern computers. Looking at the calcs/sec available for $1000.00 and plotting this on log paper results in an almost perfect straight line!!! Moore's Law simply tracks the 5th paradigm of computing. If the IC's useful life ends around 2020 (as suggested by some scientists)... a 6th paradigm will emerge and likely continue to sustain the exponential curve that started in 1900 and has continued for over 100 years and across 5 compute paradigms. Hard to argue with this historic consistency. Yet, exponentials always (must) tail off at some point.

If we were to extrapolate (just for fun) to the year 2020 (when Ray thinks the 5th Paradigm will end), using recent trends in H/W (CPU, storage, networking, etc...), an affordable home computer will offer the follow characteristics! Of course, as Jonathan points out [http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/jonathan/20041203], the personal desktop computer is not that interesting anymore: "...hardware is nearly identical, and the value's moved to services available through the device. Over the network. Battery life matters more than processor speed. Size of display more than disk...". However, this extrapolation might well apply to a 1 RU server blade in 2020!

   4THz                   Processor!! (or the equiv in throughput power, as we now understand)
   10TB                   Disk (via NFS v6?)
   64GB+                RAM
   100Gbps             Wired Network (photonic?)
   1Gbps                 Wireless Network (the client/consumer end points)
   3D Holographic     Video (the presentation side of the net)

Read more on Ray's thoughts on Technology at:  http://www.kurzweilai.net/articles/art0134.html?printable=1

A friend replied to this.... While meant to be humorous, there is a grain of truth in this sarcasm. Enjoy...

Greg replies:
You have incorrectly assumed that Moore's law is the only law at work and have completely overlooked "Greg's Law".  While Moore's Law follows a geometric progression, Greg's Law is an inverse log relationship.  Further, one of the dependent variables is a function of Moore's Law there by making it a trinomial - inverse logarithmic function.

Briefly, Greg's Law states "The mass and volume of software, (i.e.  LOC size, memory demands, and processor loading) increase in an inverse natural logarithm relationship to the available processor resources".

 SWmass = e^(PR),
    where PR follows Moore's Law {PR[1] = PR[0]*2^(t/18),
    where t is in months

combining the equations we have:

 SWmass = e^(PR*2^(t/18))

solving for the SW increase in an 18 month period we have:

 SWmass = 7.39X

If we use your example of 20 years, processors will be roughly 1M times as powerful, yet software will be e^1M times as massive which equates to "-E-" using my calculator.

Now consider MTBF.  With processors containing 1M times the circuitry, hardware failures will increase at a staggering rate.  Most will go unnoticed however, since the software will have grown by e^1M causing applications and/or Windows to hang every 23.7ms on average and masking true HW failures.  This is conservative since I have assumed the SW failure rate to be equivalent to the HW rate.  Empirical data puts the SW failure rate at about 3 orders of magnitude higher.

In the near future:  The DLL to support graphical display and interfacing to the file system will require 1 GB of memory alone. Single instruction operations will be replaced with object oriented classes that consist of 1000 LOC and consume 1 M of RAM.  The program will require the transfer of several GB's of data and library calls to the point where the I/O will consume the first 1GHz of the processor power.

The bottom line is it will still take 30 seconds for the CNN webpage to come up - even though you will have a gazillion times the processing power of the Saturn V that took man to the surface of the moon and back.

It's all in the bloatware.

December 09, 2004 06:39 PM EST Permalink

December 09, 2004 06:34 PM EST Permalink

Our corporate evolution demonstrates that Sun has a rare ability to predict, perceive, and navigate the time-compressed shifts, competitive pressures, and demand dynamics that have sent many of our peer "organisms" to their grave. Was it just dumb luck and fortuitous timing that has allowed us to re-invent ourselves and thrive? Let's consider this.... and our future...

One of our Distinguished Engineers asked:

"The big question in the coming years is are we selected for or selected against?"

I offer a few thoughts... linking them to how they apply to Sun. And why I'm encouraged by the answer to the question he asks above.

First, many scientists no longer believe that organisms can "evolve" into a different type. A mouse didn't turn into an elephant. A protozoa didn't eventually turn into a botanist :-) What does seem to be encoded into life is an ability to adapt and evolve within a species. Sun is an example of this. We had the right DNA from the beginning... Networked Computing. We survive because we don't need to re-sequence our DNA and turn into something we are not... We simply have to adapt our existing nature to the dynamics of our changing environment. We remain the same fundamental species. Some current competitors will not find the journey along the Networked Computing evolution as natural, due to less robust or complete DNA. Many will die.

If we ever find that Networked Computing is no longer viable, *then* Sun is in trouble.

Second, micro evolution depends on 1. an efficient process for discarding capabilities that have become a burden, and 2. a knack for inventing new capabilities, quickly, that provide for advantages as the environment shifts. Sun has, historically, been very good at this process. If we ever find ourselves spending more time on our appendix or tonsils (eg: Eagle / US-V), rather than investing in the areas that we'll need for the next age, then we are doomed. We need to encourage our leaders to make the hard decisions and take risks. They have proven themselves in the past. But we are responsible for being their eyes and ears, letting them know when subtle changes are occurring to which strategic adjustments might be needed.

Finally, Darwin would have suggested that surviving species were just lucky. That evolution and adaptation is based on huge numbers of random mutations over billions of years. Rabbits that started to evolve such that they glowed in the dark quickly died out, being a bad choice in fashion :-) However, Darwinism is pretty much discarded these days by many scientists. Many are convinced that there was some kind of "Intelligent Design" involved in the variety and complexity of life, over the limited time that Earth has existed. The good news is that Sun Microsystems demonstrates this as well. We aren't just at the whim of random choices in innovation, with the hope that these random capabilities produce an advantage that somehow helps us thrive. No, we have some of the brightest Intelligent Designers working to ensure that we invest in the right areas, and that we prune the baggage (no matter how useful that baggage was in the past). The ranks of our Intelligent Designers include our execs (eg: McNealy, Schwartz, etc), our DEs/TDs, and every other cell in our collective body (SEs, SRs, etc).

In summary, we started with the right DNA, tuned for long-term survival in a changing world. We have Intelligent Designers working on an active process of fasttrack microevolution within our species. And we've optimized the process of focusing our energy expenditure to those areas that matter most, looking forward. As long our eye-sight remains clear to our changing environment, and our DNA remains viable (Networked Computing), and our corporate culture continues to be efficient at pruning and focusing on the right use of our energy, then the following question becomes rhetorical, with the answer clear to every cell in our body.

We need to keep asking the hard questions, and driving towards the needed changes. But on the topic of basic viability and survivability, we need every cell in our body to be able to answer this question, in the affirmative, with confidence.

We do need to adapt to a new strategy for hunting (revenue capture). Our basic DNA remains unchanged. We remain focused on Networked Computing. But our behavior must adapt in the capture of food. We can no longer wait for opptys to present themselves. If we sit at the cave entrance, we'll starve. We must hunt in teams, carefully planning our strategies, allowing each member of the hunting party to do what they do best... organizing into lethal (to our competitors) bands that know what we need to accomplish for a particular mission, and seeing it through to the end. This shift in behavior will cause a reshuffling of the tribe, but the species will survive if leadership will support the effort needed to make the change. And it is clear that our leaders are 100% committed to this brave new world.

December 09, 2004 01:54 PM EST Permalink