The Windleverse

Last Monday I went back again to the Nintendo employee store. I have spent far to much money on Nintendo stuff in the last two weeks but I am now caught up on Nintendo game system releases for the US. This does mean I finally own a gamecube. It’s probably a good thing that Jeff (Nintendo Guy) is leaving Nintendo because having regular access to the employee store there would be very dangerous to my bank account. Needless to say I’m a sucker for really good prices on electronic devices.

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Last Monday the 17th I had the opportunity to take a private tour of Nintendo’s Redmond headquarters. The tour was facilitated by Jeffrey Kalles (aka The Nintendo Guy at PAX) who is the Associate Producer for Nintendo of America.

Nintendo had a much smaller area then I was exspecting. Of course my only other corporate tour has been of Microsoft. Needless to say Microsoft’s headquarters are much like their operating system, ridiculously bloated and large. As far as I could tell Nintendo consisted of only two buildings which were connected by a nifty suspended walkway.

Our tour guide Jeff seemed very much out of place for a guy holding such a high corporate title as Associate Producer. His personality type fit that more of a geeky IT gamer then a corporate hardass. During the tour he told us that after 11 years with Nintendo he was leaving soon for a much smaller company. I think this would probably be a good thing as it seems like he needs to get out of the office a little more.

The highlights of the tour included an awesome glass case display of Nintendo game systems, a demo showroom floor to help vendors showcase Nintendo products, and of course last but not least the Nintendo employee store. There were a couple things that bothered me durning the tour. One was the pictures of land that Nintendo owned. In the Windleverse ownership is not a well understood concept anyway but why we allow corporate entities that could possibly live forever to own something as valuable as land is beond me. Not that I’m naive enough to think that this sort of thing doesn’t go on all the time, it’s just something that bothers me. The other thing that bothered me was the secrecy surrounding everything there. It’s one thing to protect yourself from piracy by implementing some simple security measures but it’s quite another to hide information. The leaking of information is only going to lead to hype about the product thus improving sales when it is finally released.

For those of you interested I did ask Jeff a little about the Nintendo Revolution which I will provide commentary on in episode 10 of n37radio’s the hardware show.

In the windleverse we have done away with lossy codes for the most part. People have realized that more then enough loss takes place when capturing analog signals in a digital form that loosing even more from the file format is not desirable. The people of earth have not yet come to grips with their choices.

In the windleverse we not only have a high speed global wireless network but a massive decentralized storage system. All content is stored in a lossless format which everyone can have access to. Some high resolution video is still streamed in a lossy format to conserve bandwidth but all audio and still picture formats are streamed in lossless. No digital media is ever archived in a lossy format.

The amount of lossy media that is consumed in the real world disturbs and worries me. We are slowly locking ourselfs into media formats that are quickly outdated even if people like to pretend they are not. The MP3 format is a perfect example of an outdated codec still in strong use today.

Lossless codecs are different in that nothing is thrown away. When a new lossless codec comes out you can always decompress and recompress with the new codec without any loss to your orginal file. Once compressed with a lossy codec you are forever doomed to that format.

So please stop using lossy formats for archiving and stop buying lossy media. You are only dooming yourselfs.

I am now the proud owner of a gameboy micro (the black model of course). In the windleverse we test all products using the smash head model. In such each product is repetitively smashed into a human skull until either the product or the skull break. If the skull breaks first the product is considered to have passed the smash head test and is worthy of future use. The gameboy micro comes very close to passing these standards.

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