Nintendo Revolution

The long-rumored controller for the Nintendo Revolution has been revealed. What a winner.

My understanding is Nintendo was the early innovator of the common features of current controllers. This is another revolutionary advance from the looks of the video from the Tokyo Game Show.

I have been telling my kids for years that once a controller along these lines gets us away from the unnatural button combinations I'll be able to kick their butts. They have a physical memory for modern controllers I have never invested enough time in to become competent. That is why I am competitive with them on games like Mario Kart Double Dash (simple controls), but not on most games.

Now we shall soon see if my words will hold up. This controller looks to make all sorts of actions more directly translatable into the game.

I don't care what else is in the Revolution. I am not a big gamer at all but I cannot wait to try out this controller. Cell wha? 360 wha? Ho hum. I could become more of a gamer with this controller. My 13 year old showed me the video last night. At first I thought, what, the controller is a TV remote?

But watch the video of it in action. I hope they have the virtual drum set ready to go in March!

Finally Integrated Query

Looks like a popular production language design finally will provide a query capability that disregards the kind of data (persistent or not, objects or not, XML or not) being queried. Visual Basic just became somewhat appealing for this and some other new features. I still have reasons not to use it, but this is an appealing step that will benefit many developers for some time to come.

Kudos to Visual Basic. Does C# have *all* these same features? I've not read all the PDC news yet.

Gambit Scheme 4.0 beta 15

Gambit Scheme 4.0 beta 15 is available. Changes include the incorporation of some Termite capabilities, in particular each thread has a mailbox for receiving asynchronous messages.

Beware Dichotomies

Paul Graham's latest essay is making the rounds. My initial reaction reflects my general approach to socio-political issues: beware dichotomies. Really, beware those who would present any complex issue as a dichotomy. Paul's opening paragraph has to be the worst in all his essays unless he was *intending* to present to us a straw man.

By the end of the essay though he makes at least one excellent point: transparency matters. Yes, wealth is power and I think Paul fails to recognize how closely wealth and power are related, let alone to begin recognizing the good and bad of that.

If global capitalism is going to work (I currently give it a mixed review but that's another story) then we need to remember that the theory itself is founded on "perfect knowledge". The closest things we have to perfect knowledge are democracy and transparency.