Snake? Snake! SNAAAAKE (Oil)!

Gotta hand it to them, Steorn just won't quit peddling their unproven "free energy" device. Despite not yet achieving a successful public demo in the past (but they sure did boast), Steorn wants you to shell out 399 Euros for an "Orbo Evaluation and Development System," which will let you:

Evaluate the core principle of Orbo Technology, which is that a time-variant magnetic interaction leads to a non-conservative energy result

Le sigh.

Core-Count Wars?

You want singularitarianism? Think of how long ago (answer: not long) the "Giga-/Mega-hertz" wars gave way to multi-core CPUs, and now this:

AMD CTO of servers Donald Newell prognosticated that the number of individual CPUs on a chip won't go up forever: "There will come an end to the core-count wars," he told IDG News. Just as the megahertz race was eventually defeated by thermal restrictions, so too will the number of cores on an chip cease to increase. " I won't put an exact date on it, but I don't myself expect to see 128 cores on a full-sized server die by the end of this decade...

Accelerating returns!

FF14 Uses BitTorrent to Patch Itself

I picked up Final Fantasy XIV this morning, specifically the ginormous collector's edition so that Sora and I can play together during the 30-day trial.

By the time I got home with the box, I had an hour before I needed to leave for somewhere else. No problem, I figure I'd have at least enough time to install the game, watch the opening movie and roll a character. There has been a patch or two since the game came out, but my ISP provides 16Mbps downstream.

Only problem there, is that Square chose to use BitTorrent to update their users. As I write this, 50 minutes have passed, I've downloaded 10% of the patch, and my current U/L is 8.0KB/s to zero.

That's right, I'm uploading this patch to other users while my 16Mbps downlink sits idle. Why Square doesn't have *any* usable seeds running in my vicinity is beyond me, but this has so far been a terrible experience.

Salaries, The World, and You

So, Joystiq is bemoaning Satoru Iwata's low salary. He makes $770,000 per year. Tell me one remotely-reasonable thing that he couldn't afford.

As long as he didn't buy Nintendo stock when I did (Goddammit), he probably makes a hell of a lot more than $770,000 per year. I wish more companies followed Nintendo's model, and gave CEOs, rockstar-employees, and headline-makers far lower salaries, enough to live a very comfortable life, but nothing on the 7-to-8-digit obscene salaries that Western companies pay to their big players.

A company's success should belong to that company. It should NEVER belong to that company's leaders, nor its peons, because neither one is solely responsible for said success. That money should be reinvested into R&D, marketing and customer benefits. It is an insult to all involved parties to see that wealth distributed in unfair ways.

IGF Call for Submissions

So the time has come, once again, for all good indie game developers to...well, to make indie games and submit them to the Independent Games Festival.

My company, Gendai Games, is looking forward to seeing our users submit some awesome work this year. If you're interested in participating in IGF, you could do a lot worse than to head to GameSalad.com and whip up a killer app!

Best of luck to all the participants!

Replace "BP" With X

Hannibal of Ars Technica brings up a good point.



Are we even slapping these guys on the wrist?

The Spammers Win

Gah. Okay. You must now have an OpenID to post here. Too much spam, and I have better things to do than delete that manure.

The Pains Of iPhone OS Development

JWZ has written a pretty scathing (yet very entertaining) indictment of the whole "it runs OS X" aspect of iPhone OS programming. Some choice quotes:

I think it's safe to say that MacOS is more source-code-compatible with NextStep than the iPhone is with MacOS.

That's like, the defining characteristic of OpenGL. So OpenGLES is just a slight variant of OpenGL, in the way that [a] unicycle is a slight variant of a city bus. If you can handle one, the other should be pretty much the same, right?

Granted, most of his gripes are with the APIs, not the environment, but it is pretty lame that you can't, for example, get the HSV version of a color on the iPhone. Like he says, it feels like someone actively sought out and removed valuable API hooks. Le sigh.

Romanizations Go Bye-Bye, Plzthx

I got a request that my romanization-removing userscript for KoreanClass101.com be extended to also remove distracting Romanizations from its sister site JapanesePod101.com. That sounded like a good enough idea, so it's done!

Just head on over to the tool's userscripts.org page to install it. Don't know how to install it? You need GreaseKit for Safari, Greasemonkey for Firefox, or a new web browser if you're using IE.

Update: I realized I hadn't added the other requested feature, namely removing Romanization from the searchable dictionaries. I've added that, and it should work for both JapanesePod101 and KoreanClass101.

Two Cool Things About Google Buzz

Because if you can't say anything nice...

1. Buzz will group together posts that you make in a short span of time. I shared four articles from Google Reader in the space of about a minute, and they appeared as one "Buzz," like so:


2. Buzz on the iPhone gives you two lists: the buzzes of those you follow, and the buzzes of those nearby geographically. I presumed this was done using Google Latitude, but it seems like they're getting the info from elsewhere.

Also, I wrote this post on my iPhone. It wasn't very comfortable, but it wasn't very painful either. Looking forward to trying out the iPad to see if the larger form factor makes it nicer. I'm almost as excited as Mr. Forstall here:



"You don't even think about it! You just....do!"

Preach on, Scott.