tequila bomb

According to research firm, Telegeography, the following cables have been damaged:

• APCN-2, which is an intra-Asian cable, forms a ring linking China, Hong Kong, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Taiwan.
• Pacific Crossing West and Pacific Crossing North, which are out of service.
• PacNet has reported outages on segments of its East Asia Crossing network.
• Korea Telecom reports that a segment of the Japan-U.S. Cable Network is damaged
• NTT has reported damage to some segments of the PC-1 submarine cable system.

A report from Dow Jones Newswires suggests most companies are working hard to fix the network problems. The Dow Jones report has the following additional details:

• KDDI says its cable between the U.S. and Japan is broken and it cannot transmit signals.
• NTT is using back-up cable systems.
• PCCW says the Internet traffic to the U.S. is slow.

In a story on Friday, Stacey Higginbotham pointed out that Chunghwa of Taiwan had reported an outage on the APCN-2 system, while China Unicom had reported some unspecified damage to “two or three cables.” There is clear decline in Japan’s Internet performance, according to the data from JPNAP.

If there were a Mt. Rushmore of computer gaming, John Carmack’s head would not only be on it, it would have the highest polygon count.

An interview of particular interest to those wanting, thinking about designing, or working on more exotic and ambitious titles for iOS.

Carmack also ran through id’s decision process on pricing…

Every release that we’ve done on here has been an experiment with price point, and with different strategies. So far, we’ve had the most commercial success with Doom: Resurrection, which launched at $9.95. But we don’t have enough datapoints to really draw conclusions from this. We had great success with Wolfenstein Classic and Doom Classic, but they’re sort of riding the nostalgia buzz. So they can’t necessarily be evaluated in isolation.

With Rage, we intentionally went with a much lower initial price-point, because to some degree this is marketing and promotion for the big title.

This is something I touched on when Rage first hit. And I wrote elsewhere that it is clear that id see Rage on iOS as mainly marketing at the moment…

So in that sense I get too much of a feeling overall that Rage is a piece of marketing for the Rage franchise as a whole. And I am disappointed that I didn’t get to have a true FPS experience in a mobile Rage sandbox like I was expecting.

Wide ranging interview with Julian Assange of wikileaks… Well worth reading.

We have one related to a bank coming up, that’s a megaleak. It’s not as big a scale as the Iraq material, but it’s either tens or hundreds of thousands of documents depending on how you define it.

[I]t could take down a bank or two.

We have some material on spying by a major government on the tech industry. Industrial espionage.

One thing is very clear in this interview. Assange is not just about going after the US, as some would have us believe. And his primary concern is exposing massive corruption that affects people’s lives.

So from my perspective Assange’s stated motivations are admirable…

[S]pying is also stabilizing to relationships. Your fears about where a country is or is not are always worse than the reality. If you only have a black box, you can put all your fears into it, particularly opportunists in government or private industry who want to address a problem that may not exist. If you know what a government is doing, that can reduce tensions.

Great little interview with the guys behind Super Meat Boy.

From the guys behind Indie Game: The Movie.

Another great interview. This time with John Sculley. Love this quote about Jobs..

“Steve said: ‘How can I possibly ask somebody what a graphics-based computer ought to be when they have no idea what a graphic based computer is? No one has ever seen one before.’”

Makes perfect sense to me on one level. And yet on another it is gloriously myopic.

The full transcript…