Monthly Archives: November 2006

Interesting article in the New Yorker on why being in 3rd place may be very good news for Nintendo.

The Wii’s simplicity means that Nintendo can make money selling consoles, while Sony is reportedly losing more than two hundred and forty dollars on each PlayStation 3 it sells—even though they are selling for almost six hundred dollars. Similarly, because Nintendo is not trying to rule the entire industry, it’s been able to focus on its core competence, which is making entertaining, innovative games. For instance, the Wii features a motion sensor that allows you to, say, hit a tennis ball onscreen by swinging the controller like a tennis racquet. Nintendo’s handheld device, the DS, became astoundingly popular because of simple but brilliant games like Nintendogs, in which users raise virtual puppies. And because Nintendo sells many more of its own games than Sony and Microsoft do, its profit margins are higher, too. Arguably, Nintendo has thrived not despite its fall from the top but because of it.

Despite my other posting about hating gadgets, I’m definitely getting a Wii.

13 things that do not make sense – New Scientist

8 The Pioneer anomaly

THIS is a tale of two spacecraft. Pioneer 10 was launched in 1972; Pioneer 11 a year later. By now both craft should be drifting off into deep space with no one watching. However, their trajectories have proved far too fascinating to ignore.

That’s because something has been pulling – or pushing – on them, causing them to speed up. The resulting acceleration is tiny, less than a nanometre per second per second. That’s equivalent to just one ten-billionth of the gravity at Earth’s surface, but it is enough to have shifted Pioneer 10 some 400,000 kilometres off track. NASA lost touch with Pioneer 11 in 1995, but up to that point it was experiencing exactly the same deviation as its sister probe. So what is causing it?

Simply brilliant.

Link

Losing Libertarians

Republican candidates are pulling out all the stops to bring disgruntled conservative voters home on election day. Dozens of conservative talk show hosts were invited to the White House to interview Vice President Cheney, political adviser Karl Rove, and other top officials.

President Bush and his colleagues are telling voters that no matter how unhappy they are with Republicans, they’ll like Democrats even less.

But evidence from around the country suggests that even if the conservatives come home to the Republican Party, the GOP could still lose Congress by losing libertarian voters.