Posts

Showing posts from May, 2008

Wii long term strategy

Here's a very long, quite good post on Nintendo's strategy with the Wii: http://malstrom.50webs.com/birdman.html The thesis is that the mainstream video game market arms race of every-more-complicated games ended up overshooting enough of the potential game market to allow an opening for simpler "down-market" games, and that Wii was able to exploit this opening. The article predicts that Nintendo will now move up-market, producing more complicated games over time, pushing PS3 and Xbox 360 into very up-market niches. Sort of how consoles took over from PC games.

OS X will hang if your VPN connection is flakey

OS X is by and large a good OS, but once you get past the sexy UI you find a lot of rough edges. For example, this month I've been working remotely over a flakey DSL connection. I ran into a very frustrating problem: if you're using a PPTP-based VPN, and your network connection is poor quality, the whole Apple UI will frequently freeze up with the "Spinning beachball" cursor for minutes at a time. Luckily for me the work-around is to reboot my DSL modem. But it seems like poor system design for the VPN packet performance to affect the UI of non-networked applications.

Yegge's rant on dynamic languages

Another superb rant by Steve Yegge on dynamic languages: http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2008/05/dynamic-languages-strike-back.html The comment section's good too -- especially the long comment by Dan Weinreb of Lisp / ITA software fame. Steve's got the same problem some of my self-taught friends do (hi Bob, hi Jim!): he'll say something in a strongly opinionated way, without giving supporting evidence. I think that makes people think he doesn't know what he's talking about. So people tend to write him off. But if you talk with him, it almost always turns out his strong opinions are backed by some pretty deep experience and insight. I've learned to give Steve (and my self-taught friends) the benefit of the doubt.