I have a surprising number of friends and colleagues living in and visiting Japan right now. I’ve written some notes on the relevant nuclear issues with links and placed them on my personal website. It’s located here; feel free to pass the link along if you feel it is valuable. I’ll update the site with additional information as time goes on. Best regards, Ed Steussy
I’ve now had the Droid as my defacto cellphone for two weeks. It’s time for a comparison. Which is better? Why? After all, Google handed me a free $600 phone to do a review like this. I feel honor-bound to present it. First of all, this is not a post for the ages. 18 months from now, one or even two generations will have passed in the smartphone market. Almost anything available in 2011 will be better than either of the entries we have today. See the full review here.
The Economist reports today that the videogame industry had a very mild recession in 2009, with strong indications that growth is now firmly back on track. The article appears here (subscription required) and draws heavily from statistics by Piers Harding-Rolls of the Game Intelligence division of Screen Digest. Relevant points are below. There were indeed some very bad months in 2009. There was a year-over-year drop of 31% in June, as well as a 29% drop in July. A record-breaking December, however, particularly with the PS3 price cut brought the year-end totals close to normal. -> US decline in videogame…
Attendees of GDC this year received a free Android phone. After standing in a long, long line to clear all of the documents, attendees were handed a random choice of phone: Verizon Droid or a Nexus One. I, unhappily, received a Droid. And I am not the only unhappy one. There was a line of attendees with Droid in hand at the exit of the Google booth, begging the lucky Nexus One recipients to trade with them. I passed the Google booth several times, but there was always a long line of unhappy new Droid owners. I imagine that Google…
I’ve been working on some statistics for the upcoming GDC conference. One of the stats is the popularity of languages in translation. Since no one keeps such statistics, I thought I’d actually generate the ones from my company. This is not automatically done, so it meant about an hour of crunching numbers into an Excel spreadsheet from our accounting program. The numbers below are the top 12 (of 45 languages) from the last two years of work Apogee has done. There are a few surprises here. Chinese is a full 26% of our workload, by wordcount. One reason for that,…
All is right with the world. Sid Meier is putting out a new update of the classic game. We’ve handled the localization of one of the Civilization variants in the past. With luck, we’ll get to touch on something of this one as well. There was a poll last year that ranked games not by how many people bought a copy, but rather by how much time was actually spent playing them. World of Warcraft was first; Civilization was second. Link to the Civ V website.
The blockbuster of the Holiday Season was Avatar. It opened two weeks later in China, and has accumulated a number of reviews. The main link is here, but I’ll extract a few key observations. —The Na’vi’s system of hereditary rule proves that democracy is not universally applicable. —Dr. Grace Augustine shows the weaknesses of intellectuals, which are not to be trusted. —When (will) Westerners stop seeing foreign cultures as female and themselves as male?
This is a photo recently rescued of me in India. I lived outside of the United States for about ten years, and this was the biggest adventure in many ways. This photo has been lost for over 20 years and just came back to me. The story is here.
So, China has made $600 billion in infrastructure investment? Where has it gone? Is this one of the answers? Click here for the video – the report starts at 1:15 minutes in.
This is a fun exercise in the utility and accuracy of mechanical translation. Go to Translation Party and input a random sentence. I used the opening of Lincoln’s Gettysburg address. The script then does an automatic translation of the English into Japanese. Then it translates the Japanese to English, then back again. It will keep doing this until the English matches itself between iterations. For the Gettysburg Address, it took 19 iterations and mangled it as much as you would expect. Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty,…