General

Japan’s Nuclear Plants

March 12, 2011
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Japan’s Nuclear Plants

  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...
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iPhone vs. Droid: The Authoritative Review

March 26, 2010
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iPhone vs. Droid: The Authoritative Review

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...
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Economist Claims Minimal 2009 Recession in Games

March 25, 2010
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Economist Claims Minimal 2009 Recession in Games

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...
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GDC 2010: The Free Android Phone

March 16, 2010
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GDC 2010: The Free Android Phone

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...
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Chinese Translations are First

March 3, 2010
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Chinese Translations are First

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...
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Civilization Five

February 18, 2010
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Civilization Five

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...
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Avatar Reviews from China

January 12, 2010
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Avatar Reviews from China

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...
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Photo of our CEO – 22 years ago

December 14, 2009
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Photo of our CEO – 22 years ago

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.
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China's Empty City

November 16, 2009
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China's Empty City

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.
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Translation Party

November 14, 2009
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Translation Party

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...
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