We look at such projects with great interest... but I must say, I wish them luck because they will need it.
We have done many statistical analyses of packet traffic over various game genres, and have come to the conclusion that for fast action games such as Kirby's Air Ride, the restriction that the games be played on a LAN is a technically reasonable one. The variability and unpredictability of the Internet, as well as the increasing traffic congestion these days make for a (to say the least) challenge for action games to maintain proper consistency in a high frequency update environment.
We've done extensive studies while formulating our online strategy, and have determined that gamers don't want to sacrifice their smooth 60 fps framerates to play fast action games over the Internet, and/or get rudely kicked off because of lag.
I wish these guys luck, nevertheless. We're not evil like Microsoft, so as long as they aren't pirating stuff, we won't really care.
The BitTorrent protocol apparently relies on a single "tracker" to keep track of hosts currently in the "torrent". Therefore, all the *AA has to do is shut down that tracker. Even Kazaa and Gnutella is more decentralized with their "supernodes".
If only they combined the decentralization tracking of other p2p protocols with BitTorrent's distributed and simultaneous upload and download, we'd have a winner.
Nintendo, SEGA, et al. have been working on this for quite some time now, and have even started to commercialize it. It's one of the emerging trends in MMORPG game design will create interesting interactions and facilitate global play to a greater extent than is now.
Some early results can be seen in the GameCube/DreamCast title "Phantasy Star Online" where you can select from a menu of sentence patterns, subjects, objects, etc. We're trying to get it to the point where you can translate free text, without the awkward results that stuff like Babelfish, et al. yield, maybe augmented by a player-aided cache of words and phrases, with improved using in-game human feedback and machine learning.
I am really looking forward to the time where international players freely interact -- it will be an interesting sociology experiement to see how national and cultural means, norms and paradigms manifest themselves in a virtual world.
While this statement might seem like anathema, I believe that distribution of the latest games through P2P content is a great way to "push" new games as they come about, rather than having to wait for physical media to be manufactured, or strain a single download server.
With increasing number of game consoles connected to the net via broadband connections, I believe the revolution that must be grasped is the fact that games will be online already. Therefore, a viral distribution mechanism whereby gamers download games from each other rather than through the outdated 20th century paradigm of buying physical media for one lump sum will be compelling and open new possibilities for design.
The interest and challenge for game designers will be to segment their games in a way such that one can get "started" playing immediately on a partial game download (and probably pay a little as each game downloads), while the rest of the game continues to download in the background, and in my laboratory, we are currently investigating architectures, both software and economic, for such "game streaming", as we call it. Think of it as the old Apogee/iD games where you downloaded/bought games one episode at a time.
As for issues of payment, authentication and piracy, with games having an online component, people will pay not to get the actual code or the media, but rather a "account", "CD key", or other unique identifier. Because such identifiers are always maintained on the server side, they are a (and the only guaranteed) crack-proof way, since one can't crack them client-side.
We at Nintendo are quite excited about such potential revolutions in game distribution and marketing, and look forward to a future where people are empowered to share their games, rather than stigmatized for it.
In India, Japan, and I'm sure much of the rest of the world, cell phone portability is the norm, and has been for several years.
Can someone please enlighten this genuinely-curious person as to why it's so much more difficult in the states to implement this? A matter of sheer scale? India and Japan have the same order of magnitude of cell phone users as the USA. And I'm sure it's not because of "multiple standards" -- we have multiple CDMA/GSM/PDC carriers in my countries as well.
Working in Japan for one of XBOX's main competitors, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that XBOX's lackluster sales seem to be similar to those of American cars... big, bulky, typical of the American mindset that bigger is better. No one buys them (American cars nor XBOXen) in Japan because size is at a premium.
Whereas, with Nintendo, we have designed the GameCube from the ground up to reflect Japanese aesthetic sentiments of small size, symmetry, and fitting into the big picture without standing out, a fundamental tenet of Zen Buddhist philosophy -- not to mention the practical advantages when considering the size of the typical Japanese home.
Furthermore, we at Nintendo have always been sceptical of the "Everything and the kitchen sink" approach that Microsoft and Sony have taken with their consoles. We do but one thing -- gaming -- but do it well, unlike our other competitors who want to be a DVD player/CD player/PC/Internet terminal/TiVo. Our philosophy is to focus on one thing -- gaming, and make it our core competency, continuing to come out with seminal hits that people synonimize with the video game industry, Mario, Zelda, and so on.
We are continuing this trend with our future game consoles, and I would advise Microsoft to please to more serious market search if they wish to be a serious contender in the Japanese marketplace.
Just like those all-in-one cell phones, or printers/copiers/scanners/faxes, I suspect that they will have to compromise on quality, lest they end up with some bloated software product.
I'd much rather have separate best-of-breed software packages, than an integrated one that does everything OK, but not great.
At Nintendo, we've been excited about clustering applications of game consoles as well, and we've pursued a active program of research within our company.
Internally, we've experimented with large clusters of GameCubes to handle applications such as online games where various game entities in the universe can be logically decomposed into discrete units and processes running on each node of the cluster. This provides a more natural and robust organization to the traditinal setup of a few massive servers, since if one server crashes, it may bring down large parts of the game universe. In our setup, if a node fails, it might affect one NPC at worst, which another node will take over in due time.
While our investigation has targetted the needs of games in mind, I'm excited about using them for sheer computation, since the cost/MIPS of a game console is far less than traditional mainframe, supercomputing, or even PC platforms, and we are in preliminary talks with some large Japanese universities to experiment with using the GameCube as a compute unit.
While I must admit I'm sort of biased:-), we believe that our GameCube makes a superior clustering platform compared to the PS2, computationally (higher CPU speed), physically (its smaller size and form factor, less heat dissapation) and financially (lower unit cost).
Our future game consoles will likely support clustering "out of the box", with expansion as easy as hooking them together, allowing games, such as FPSes, or AI-heavy games like the Sim* series, to seamlessly evolve with the greater "virtual" CPU and memory resources that a cluster provides.
It could be argued in many video games, the enemy is "enforcing" some law for a corrupt or evil government or organization... whether it be the Hammer Brothers in Super Mario Brothers, the Imperial Stormtroopers in Star Wars, to the Republican Guard in a hypothetical Gulf War shoot-em-up.
Absurd -- where do you draw the line?
In the world of games, especially console games, a crash immediately spoils the user's gameplay experience, and it's doubly so if you don't have a mechanism to patch games as in the PC world.
In the GameCube, crashes are alleviated by having only a thin OS layer between the hardware and the game, and restricting only a single task to be run in a single privilege level of the CPU, avoiding context switches and going back and forth between user and kernel mode which introduces complexity and can wreak havoc if malicious data is present.
Furthermore, we have a set hardware configuration, running a well defined consistent set of drivers, which are again, minimal, and this eliminates another factor that often leads to crashes in the PC world.
The most important thing though is robust software design. In our games, we all code exception handlers for the software, so that a single errant NULL pointer doesn't bring the whole thing down with a "Segmentation fault" message as PC users seem to experience with their software, but rather, we gracefully recover, perhaps immediately rolling back to the previous iteration in the game loop and "moving" the player a bit, for instance, in a FPS where the player might have entered into an area in a orientation that happens to create a divide by zero error due to numerical imprecision.
In the future with CPU and memory speeds increasing, we are investigating new designs, such as microkernel based architectures where individual game entities are separate protected "processes" that communicate via some fast IPC mechanism such as shared memory or a "tuplespace", so that a bug in one entity doesn't bring the whole universe crashing to a halt, and I hope that such techniques are adopted by the general computing world.
If their encryption algorithm is really so secure and uncompromisable as they claim, they should have no qualms about letting the details out in public (where they could be presumably subject to peer review), just as is standard practice with other crypto algorithms and the crypto community.
Re: the David Nelson story... what's to stop a bona fide from using a fake ID and name for the reservations? It seems the "no fly" and "fly after stringent checking" lists are a list of names only. Maybe if they had photos associated with the names, this might reduce some of this inadvertent David Nelson discrimination, but it still doesn't solve it, if you're a real terrorist and get some plastic surgery.
Totally idiotic, and I for one, am glad that I don't work in the US anymore.
That's not Sony's own model, but rather a hack job someone did to make a handheld playstation by cutting up a PSX circuit board and fitting the drive on just right and interfacing it with a LCD and a battery power supply. The article in English is here.
Our studies here at Nintendo, as well as many independent ones have shown gamers don't want the proverbial kitchen sink when it comes to handheld games. The inclusion of an optical drive, the load times, and the associated mechanical and skip problems that might occur in a handheld device, in my opinion creates more problems than it solves. The stated use of a 90 nano process, which I believe is a first for a consumer electronics device, further will increase cost as well.
In the handheld market, people like to play simple games which can well fit within the confines of solid state memory, puzzles, sports games, and racing to pass the time on trains, planes, or while waiting around in a room, rather than long games such as RPGs, shooters, or the like loaded with cinematics and other elements.
Maybe if they introduced PS1 or even PS2 compatibility, at the cost of a slightly larger form factor for the drives, they might have a winner, but to position this as a comepetitor with GBA with this feature set is misguided marketing at best.
I went into the gaming industry, first SEGA, now Nintendo, from an academic background (previously involved in numerical chemical reaction simulation). As games get more and more complex, it's drawing more and more techniques from traditional "pure" academia, especially when it comes to Artificial Intelligence (neural nets, etc), and Graphics/Physics (physical based modelling and simulation, rather than canned animations).
I count amongst my colleagues, many programmers and researchers, etc. who have Ph. Ds who wanted to do something more interesting than working in a stuffy lab or teaching, madly pursuing tenure, and have entered the games field, and don't regret it one bit.
You must love playing games -- that hasn't changed, but these days, academic qualifications are key, and they will indeed count, just like having a good demo would. While there are still greats like John Carmack, etc. who have learned their skills on their "own", solid theoretical academics (even though they don't teach you the "specifics" of console programming) do matter nowadays as well.
As for the Japanese question, I'm working in Japan now, and while there's definitely racism in a overt level, it's not difficult. You also don't need Japanese strictly to be a programmer, and in fact, English is a good skill, since the vast majority of technical literature out there is in the English language. Myself, I started out speaking English, but slowly, by studying books on my own, I learned Japanese -- a much easier language to learn than English, IMO, believe it or not due to the much more structured rules on sentence structure, grammar, and pronounciation!
I don't think the "monkeys" saying was a real scientific hypothesis, but rather a literary illustration.
In any truly random numeric sequence with a uniform distribution, it can be mathematically proven (among other things) this implies that any finite length string must eventually appear (so, the works of Shakespeare would eventually pop up). But, it's quite difficult to prove that anything is random by a strict mathematical definition, btw, although there are quite a few randomness conjectures that seem to be true at this point, such as that the digits of pi are "random".
Living things and biological or even mechanical processes in general are notoriously non-random -- even though they may not be completely deterministic (I'll leave that one up to the philosophers and theologians to debate). For instance, if you asked a human to generate a random sequence, he/she would have a bias against generating repeated ("11111111111...") or seemingly orderly sequences ("123456..."), so this bias would cause the human sequence to be inherently non-random.
The best random sequence generators have been natural background noise or radioactive decay, and you can actually get hardware that uses such natural processes to generate what seems to be random... so perhaps the monkeys should be replaced with radioisotopes, and maybe you will get that Shakespeare!
I did my undergraduate education in India, where we didn't have the SAT -- but I did take the GRE for graduate study in the USA, and I understand the format of the GRE is like that of the SAT, just harder and with a extra "analytic" section.
The SAT verbal section is for the most part, a test of vocabulary word memorization. In India, we aspiring graduate students spent marathon sessions memorizing vocabulary words that we never used again after taking the test. It was quite a joke, really. It favors those with the wherewithal to engage in this mindless brain-stuffing, and disadvantages those who do have the skills to read critically and find meaning, but don't memorize all those esoteric (= a good example itself!) words.
While the math section seems relevant, the verbal section needs much overhaul to not rely so much on pure memorization.
Only detects it, doesn't cure it
on
Sniffing Out Cancer
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think this will just pave the way for more social and economic discrimination for cancer patients (eg, insurance, housing, etc).
I worked in one of SEGA's advanced R&D divisions for over 12 years before moving to Nintendo, and I felt very priveleged to work with some of the brightest minds in the gaming industry. While SEGA is not the bright star it used to be, I do think that they have potential, and they need to approach the issue of acquisition carefully based on their core competencies.
First and foremost, SEGA is for all intents and purposes, two different companies, hardware and software, and should be treated as such.
As far as hardware is concerned, even with the demise of Dreamcast, SEGA has a formidable portfolio of technical IP, mostly in the arcade arena. It'd be a boon for any company to acquire the incredibly talented AM divisions, and continue their pioneering work in arcade machines -- Konami would probably be a good suitor, in my opinion. They are one of the strongest players in the arcade space these days, both technically and gameplay-wise, thanks to Bemani and the mocap games, the AM guys working for them, they'll find quite a good home and a mutually beneficial relationship as they continue to pioneer new ways of arcade gaming. Sadly, our past leadership diverted too much funding towards fighting a war of attrition with Sony and Nintendo in the home space, when our competencies were really arcade machines. So SEGA should put up their hardware group to an appropriate suitor.
But I do think that SEGA's software side is capable of standing quite independtly by itself. With Sonic Team, etc., and greats such as Yu Suzuki and Yuji Naka, they are a formidable software publisher in its own right, and I would hate to seem them become a Xbox exclusive publisher if they were under the Microsoft aegis. SEGA has long had a repuation for avant-garde games that fit outside the cookie-cutter mold, such as Sonic, Shenmue, etc. and they would do well to continue to exist on their own, and not become assimilated into Microsoft, EA or the like.
In any case, I hope SEGA lives on in some way, shape or form. They are really a pioneer of the industry in so many ways that just happened to be outshone at the right time.
While I would love to see this happen, I fear that this may have serious potential implications for health, which should be looked at carefully before moving forward too hastily.
One of the basic consequences of Shannon's Law, a fundamental tenet of information theory, that in order to increase your bandwidth and transmission rate, with a given noise level (which we can't reduce beyond a certain point, due to inherent cosmic background noise, not to mention many other manmade factors), you have to increase your transmission power to compensate.
With all this RF energy floating about amidst space, I am sort of concerned that if ultra high-speed wireless becomes ubiquitous, without the right studies being done, this may cause negative impact to health. While I am not a physician or molecular biologist, I think that we need to investigate this before jumping too quickly.
While the PC is king in the "Developed" world, in places where maintenence of PCs and ruggedness is a serious issue, game consoles, with their inherently simple setup, and much lower cost of ownership and maintenence than PCs are much more viable.
At Nintendo, we've done a lot of research into uses of Nintendo consoles other than gaming, such as using it as a inexpensive terminal for Internet access, or more compellingly, education, and we have done preliminary work with various Laotian and others governmental bodies and NGOs to make games such as Super Marx Brothers and The Legend of Kaysone Phomvihan to teach Laotian youth in new and engaging dynamic ways.
Using older game consoles such as N64 and even SNES/SFC enables schools, particularly in rural areas, to immediately gain the benefits of technology without the cost and maintainence expense and support requirements associated with traditional PC platforms. We look forward to seeing Internet connectivity provided by this project coupled with non-traditional uses of our gaming platforms, and seeing the social impact it could potentially create.
Slashdot Mirror
We look at such projects with great interest... but I must say, I wish them luck because they will need it.
We have done many statistical analyses of packet traffic over various game genres, and have come to the conclusion that for fast action games such as Kirby's Air Ride, the restriction that the games be played on a LAN is a technically reasonable one. The variability and unpredictability of the Internet, as well as the increasing traffic congestion these days make for a (to say the least) challenge for action games to maintain proper consistency in a high frequency update environment.
We've done extensive studies while formulating our online strategy, and have determined that gamers don't want to sacrifice their smooth 60 fps framerates to play fast action games over the Internet, and/or get rudely kicked off because of lag.
I wish these guys luck, nevertheless. We're not evil like Microsoft, so as long as they aren't pirating stuff, we won't really care.
If only they combined the decentralization tracking of other p2p protocols with BitTorrent's distributed and simultaneous upload and download, we'd have a winner.
It's likely he used the traceroute utility, and correlated hostnames with domain name records, combined that with geolocation systems.
Not too novel or ingenious, just tedious. Will the US ban traceroute now?
It's likely he used the traceroute utility, and correlated hostnames with domain name records, combined that with geolocation systems.
Not too novel or ingenious, just tedious. Will the US ban traceroute now?
Nintendo, SEGA, et al. have been working on this for quite some time now, and have even started to commercialize it. It's one of the emerging trends in MMORPG game design will create interesting interactions and facilitate global play to a greater extent than is now.
Some early results can be seen in the GameCube/DreamCast title "Phantasy Star Online" where you can select from a menu of sentence patterns, subjects, objects, etc. We're trying to get it to the point where you can translate free text, without the awkward results that stuff like Babelfish, et al. yield, maybe augmented by a player-aided cache of words and phrases, with improved using in-game human feedback and machine learning.
I am really looking forward to the time where international players freely interact -- it will be an interesting sociology experiement to see how national and cultural means, norms and paradigms manifest themselves in a virtual world.
It doesn't take too much technology knowhow to grind something up into very fine bits.
While this statement might seem like anathema, I believe that distribution of the latest games through P2P content is a great way to "push" new games as they come about, rather than having to wait for physical media to be manufactured, or strain a single download server.
With increasing number of game consoles connected to the net via broadband connections, I believe the revolution that must be grasped is the fact that games will be online already. Therefore, a viral distribution mechanism whereby gamers download games from each other rather than through the outdated 20th century paradigm of buying physical media for one lump sum will be compelling and open new possibilities for design.
The interest and challenge for game designers will be to segment their games in a way such that one can get "started" playing immediately on a partial game download (and probably pay a little as each game downloads), while the rest of the game continues to download in the background, and in my laboratory, we are currently investigating architectures, both software and economic, for such "game streaming", as we call it. Think of it as the old Apogee/iD games where you downloaded/bought games one episode at a time.
As for issues of payment, authentication and piracy, with games having an online component, people will pay not to get the actual code or the media, but rather a "account", "CD key", or other unique identifier. Because such identifiers are always maintained on the server side, they are a (and the only guaranteed) crack-proof way, since one can't crack them client-side.
We at Nintendo are quite excited about such potential revolutions in game distribution and marketing, and look forward to a future where people are empowered to share their games, rather than stigmatized for it.
In India, Japan, and I'm sure much of the rest of the world, cell phone portability is the norm, and has been for several years.
Can someone please enlighten this genuinely-curious person as to why it's so much more difficult in the states to implement this? A matter of sheer scale? India and Japan have the same order of magnitude of cell phone users as the USA. And I'm sure it's not because of "multiple standards" -- we have multiple CDMA/GSM/PDC carriers in my countries as well.
Working in Japan for one of XBOX's main competitors, the prevailing sentiment seems to be that XBOX's lackluster sales seem to be similar to those of American cars... big, bulky, typical of the American mindset that bigger is better. No one buys them (American cars nor XBOXen) in Japan because size is at a premium.
Whereas, with Nintendo, we have designed the GameCube from the ground up to reflect Japanese aesthetic sentiments of small size, symmetry, and fitting into the big picture without standing out, a fundamental tenet of Zen Buddhist philosophy -- not to mention the practical advantages when considering the size of the typical Japanese home.
Furthermore, we at Nintendo have always been sceptical of the "Everything and the kitchen sink" approach that Microsoft and Sony have taken with their consoles. We do but one thing -- gaming -- but do it well, unlike our other competitors who want to be a DVD player/CD player/PC/Internet terminal/TiVo. Our philosophy is to focus on one thing -- gaming, and make it our core competency, continuing to come out with seminal hits that people synonimize with the video game industry, Mario, Zelda, and so on.
We are continuing this trend with our future game consoles, and I would advise Microsoft to please to more serious market search if they wish to be a serious contender in the Japanese marketplace.
Just like those all-in-one cell phones, or printers/copiers/scanners/faxes, I suspect that they will have to compromise on quality, lest they end up with some bloated software product.
I'd much rather have separate best-of-breed software packages, than an integrated one that does everything OK, but not great.
Internally, we've experimented with large clusters of GameCubes to handle applications such as online games where various game entities in the universe can be logically decomposed into discrete units and processes running on each node of the cluster. This provides a more natural and robust organization to the traditinal setup of a few massive servers, since if one server crashes, it may bring down large parts of the game universe. In our setup, if a node fails, it might affect one NPC at worst, which another node will take over in due time.
While our investigation has targetted the needs of games in mind, I'm excited about using them for sheer computation, since the cost/MIPS of a game console is far less than traditional mainframe, supercomputing, or even PC platforms, and we are in preliminary talks with some large Japanese universities to experiment with using the GameCube as a compute unit.
While I must admit I'm sort of biased :-), we believe that our GameCube makes a superior clustering platform compared to the PS2, computationally (higher CPU speed), physically (its smaller size and form factor, less heat dissapation) and financially (lower unit cost).
Our future game consoles will likely support clustering "out of the box", with expansion as easy as hooking them together, allowing games, such as FPSes, or AI-heavy games like the Sim* series, to seamlessly evolve with the greater "virtual" CPU and memory resources that a cluster provides.
It could be argued in many video games, the enemy is "enforcing" some law for a corrupt or evil government or organization... whether it be the Hammer Brothers in Super Mario Brothers, the Imperial Stormtroopers in Star Wars, to the Republican Guard in a hypothetical Gulf War shoot-em-up. Absurd -- where do you draw the line?
In the world of games, especially console games, a crash immediately spoils the user's gameplay experience, and it's doubly so if you don't have a mechanism to patch games as in the PC world.
In the GameCube, crashes are alleviated by having only a thin OS layer between the hardware and the game, and restricting only a single task to be run in a single privilege level of the CPU, avoiding context switches and going back and forth between user and kernel mode which introduces complexity and can wreak havoc if malicious data is present.
Furthermore, we have a set hardware configuration, running a well defined consistent set of drivers, which are again, minimal, and this eliminates another factor that often leads to crashes in the PC world.
The most important thing though is robust software design. In our games, we all code exception handlers for the software, so that a single errant NULL pointer doesn't bring the whole thing down with a "Segmentation fault" message as PC users seem to experience with their software, but rather, we gracefully recover, perhaps immediately rolling back to the previous iteration in the game loop and "moving" the player a bit, for instance, in a FPS where the player might have entered into an area in a orientation that happens to create a divide by zero error due to numerical imprecision.
In the future with CPU and memory speeds increasing, we are investigating new designs, such as microkernel based architectures where individual game entities are separate protected "processes" that communicate via some fast IPC mechanism such as shared memory or a "tuplespace", so that a bug in one entity doesn't bring the whole universe crashing to a halt, and I hope that such techniques are adopted by the general computing world.
If their encryption algorithm is really so secure and uncompromisable as they claim, they should have no qualms about letting the details out in public (where they could be presumably subject to peer review), just as is standard practice with other crypto algorithms and the crypto community.
Totally idiotic, and I for one, am glad that I don't work in the US anymore.
It's not like there's a single company Linux Inc. or something with a single database or something.
That's not Sony's own model, but rather a hack job someone did to make a handheld playstation by cutting up a PSX circuit board and fitting the drive on just right and interfacing it with a LCD and a battery power supply. The article in English is here.
Our studies here at Nintendo, as well as many independent ones have shown gamers don't want the proverbial kitchen sink when it comes to handheld games. The inclusion of an optical drive, the load times, and the associated mechanical and skip problems that might occur in a handheld device, in my opinion creates more problems than it solves. The stated use of a 90 nano process, which I believe is a first for a consumer electronics device, further will increase cost as well.
In the handheld market, people like to play simple games which can well fit within the confines of solid state memory, puzzles, sports games, and racing to pass the time on trains, planes, or while waiting around in a room, rather than long games such as RPGs, shooters, or the like loaded with cinematics and other elements.
Maybe if they introduced PS1 or even PS2 compatibility, at the cost of a slightly larger form factor for the drives, they might have a winner, but to position this as a comepetitor with GBA with this feature set is misguided marketing at best.
I went into the gaming industry, first SEGA, now Nintendo, from an academic background (previously involved in numerical chemical reaction simulation). As games get more and more complex, it's drawing more and more techniques from traditional "pure" academia, especially when it comes to Artificial Intelligence (neural nets, etc), and Graphics/Physics (physical based modelling and simulation, rather than canned animations).
I count amongst my colleagues, many programmers and researchers, etc. who have Ph. Ds who wanted to do something more interesting than working in a stuffy lab or teaching, madly pursuing tenure, and have entered the games field, and don't regret it one bit.
You must love playing games -- that hasn't changed, but these days, academic qualifications are key, and they will indeed count, just like having a good demo would. While there are still greats like John Carmack, etc. who have learned their skills on their "own", solid theoretical academics (even though they don't teach you the "specifics" of console programming) do matter nowadays as well.
As for the Japanese question, I'm working in Japan now, and while there's definitely racism in a overt level, it's not difficult. You also don't need Japanese strictly to be a programmer, and in fact, English is a good skill, since the vast majority of technical literature out there is in the English language. Myself, I started out speaking English, but slowly, by studying books on my own, I learned Japanese -- a much easier language to learn than English, IMO, believe it or not due to the much more structured rules on sentence structure, grammar, and pronounciation!
I don't think the "monkeys" saying was a real scientific hypothesis, but rather a literary illustration.
In any truly random numeric sequence with a uniform distribution, it can be mathematically proven (among other things) this implies that any finite length string must eventually appear (so, the works of Shakespeare would eventually pop up). But, it's quite difficult to prove that anything is random by a strict mathematical definition, btw, although there are quite a few randomness conjectures that seem to be true at this point, such as that the digits of pi are "random".
Living things and biological or even mechanical processes in general are notoriously non-random -- even though they may not be completely deterministic (I'll leave that one up to the philosophers and theologians to debate). For instance, if you asked a human to generate a random sequence, he/she would have a bias against generating repeated ("11111111111...") or seemingly orderly sequences ("123456..."), so this bias would cause the human sequence to be inherently non-random.
The best random sequence generators have been natural background noise or radioactive decay, and you can actually get hardware that uses such natural processes to generate what seems to be random... so perhaps the monkeys should be replaced with radioisotopes, and maybe you will get that Shakespeare!
I did my undergraduate education in India, where we didn't have the SAT -- but I did take the GRE for graduate study in the USA, and I understand the format of the GRE is like that of the SAT, just harder and with a extra "analytic" section.
The SAT verbal section is for the most part, a test of vocabulary word memorization. In India, we aspiring graduate students spent marathon sessions memorizing vocabulary words that we never used again after taking the test. It was quite a joke, really. It favors those with the wherewithal to engage in this mindless brain-stuffing, and disadvantages those who do have the skills to read critically and find meaning, but don't memorize all those esoteric (= a good example itself!) words.
While the math section seems relevant, the verbal section needs much overhaul to not rely so much on pure memorization.
I think this will just pave the way for more social and economic discrimination for cancer patients (eg, insurance, housing, etc).
I worked in one of SEGA's advanced R&D divisions for over 12 years before moving to Nintendo, and I felt very priveleged to work with some of the brightest minds in the gaming industry. While SEGA is not the bright star it used to be, I do think that they have potential, and they need to approach the issue of acquisition carefully based on their core competencies.
First and foremost, SEGA is for all intents and purposes, two different companies, hardware and software, and should be treated as such.
As far as hardware is concerned, even with the demise of Dreamcast, SEGA has a formidable portfolio of technical IP, mostly in the arcade arena. It'd be a boon for any company to acquire the incredibly talented AM divisions, and continue their pioneering work in arcade machines -- Konami would probably be a good suitor, in my opinion. They are one of the strongest players in the arcade space these days, both technically and gameplay-wise, thanks to Bemani and the mocap games, the AM guys working for them, they'll find quite a good home and a mutually beneficial relationship as they continue to pioneer new ways of arcade gaming. Sadly, our past leadership diverted too much funding towards fighting a war of attrition with Sony and Nintendo in the home space, when our competencies were really arcade machines. So SEGA should put up their hardware group to an appropriate suitor.
But I do think that SEGA's software side is capable of standing quite independtly by itself. With Sonic Team, etc., and greats such as Yu Suzuki and Yuji Naka, they are a formidable software publisher in its own right, and I would hate to seem them become a Xbox exclusive publisher if they were under the Microsoft aegis. SEGA has long had a repuation for avant-garde games that fit outside the cookie-cutter mold, such as Sonic, Shenmue, etc. and they would do well to continue to exist on their own, and not become assimilated into Microsoft, EA or the like.
In any case, I hope SEGA lives on in some way, shape or form. They are really a pioneer of the industry in so many ways that just happened to be outshone at the right time.
While I would love to see this happen, I fear that this may have serious potential implications for health, which should be looked at carefully before moving forward too hastily.
One of the basic consequences of Shannon's Law, a fundamental tenet of information theory, that in order to increase your bandwidth and transmission rate, with a given noise level (which we can't reduce beyond a certain point, due to inherent cosmic background noise, not to mention many other manmade factors), you have to increase your transmission power to compensate.
With all this RF energy floating about amidst space, I am sort of concerned that if ultra high-speed wireless becomes ubiquitous, without the right studies being done, this may cause negative impact to health. While I am not a physician or molecular biologist, I think that we need to investigate this before jumping too quickly.
While the PC is king in the "Developed" world, in places where maintenence of PCs and ruggedness is a serious issue, game consoles, with their inherently simple setup, and much lower cost of ownership and maintenence than PCs are much more viable.
At Nintendo, we've done a lot of research into uses of Nintendo consoles other than gaming, such as using it as a inexpensive terminal for Internet access, or more compellingly, education, and we have done preliminary work with various Laotian and others governmental bodies and NGOs to make games such as Super Marx Brothers and The Legend of Kaysone Phomvihan to teach Laotian youth in new and engaging dynamic ways.
Using older game consoles such as N64 and even SNES/SFC enables schools, particularly in rural areas, to immediately gain the benefits of technology without the cost and maintainence expense and support requirements associated with traditional PC platforms. We look forward to seeing Internet connectivity provided by this project coupled with non-traditional uses of our gaming platforms, and seeing the social impact it could potentially create.