Furthermore, we should not expect consumption to shift only among existing products. New ideas often emerge or are developed in response to extreme needs arising during a social crisis. World War II, for example, forced innovation or accelerated development and commercialization of the jet engine, pressurized aircraft cabins, helicopters, atomic technology, computers, synthetic rubber, rocketry, radar, and penicillin, with lasting effects. New needs born in our current crisis will likely drive lasting innovation in other areas, such as mass disease-testing technologies, digital collaboration tools, or affordable home office setups.
In standard “high-throughput screening,” you might take a plate with three hundred and eighty-four wells, each three millimetres wide, and introduce into each well a tiny sample of the same viral protein—in this case, a particular protease—but a different drug candidate. It’s as if you were testing three hundred-odd insecticides against one kind of pest. But Chavez has devised a method that lets him study more than one viral protein at a time. In each well, he will place about twenty coronavirus proteases, plus about forty proteases from H.I.V., West Nile, dengue, Zika, and so on. “I can do as many as I want,” he said. “Why would I stop at coronavirus?” In effect, he’s testing an array of insecticides against a menagerie of pests—aphids, weevils, Japanese beetles—at once.
The PS1’s straightforward hardware architecture, triangle polygons, and more effective development tools and C language support, made it easier for developers to program 3D graphics.
Both the Sega Saturn and the Nintendo 64 were significantly more challenging to develop cutting edge software for. The development firms closest to Nintendo and Sega were the only ones that were really able to get close to harnessing the true power of those consoles.
- [JS] Article about design decisions on the first generation of 3D consoles. The hardware those days was a joke compared to what a regular smartphone has today and even that developers managed to build master pieces.
[JS] Gunpei Yokoi (game boy creator) explains his game design philosophy. Interesting how they made some counter intuitive decisions on game boy design that worked pretty well
[TS] A little bit more on videogames. Inspiration from OskSta.
Have a good and inspiring weekend.
