heat posts

A few years ago it was reported that Gearbox Software was going to create a game based on the terrific Michael Mann crime drama movie Heat. You can't much better than Al Pacino, Val Kilmer and Robert De Niro shooting each other in the streets of LA. Since then there's been little to no news on the project and now Gearbox head man Randy Pitchford, in a chat with Gamespot, states that for now they are done with the project.

Pitchford states, "Because of the situation, we're not keeping the IP locked down anymore. So if somebody else were in a spot where they could do it, and everybody was comfortable with that, then conceivably that could happen." He also goes into detail about meeting with Mann himself, the possibilities of signing up the movie leads for the game and the fact that in the end Gearbox got too busy with other project to continue to develop the Heat game.

I must not overheat.
Heat is the chip-killer.
Heat is the thermal death that brings total obliteration.
And when it comes, I will turn the fans on to speed its path.
Where the heat has gone, there will be processing.
Only my FPS will remain.

Last week, we talked about the importance of feeding enough watts to your components to allow them to perform their best. The other side of that coin is dealing with the waste heat that is a byproduct of all that high-speed math. Heat's pretty much as far down the entropy scale as you can get -- most of what we do turns organized energy, one way or another, into heat. The problem with this state of affairs, at least for electronics, is that they are happier the colder their environment is.