Japan could be facing its own version of the Y2K bug, with Unicode also affected. It’s all to do with the upcoming abdication of Emperor Akihito.
As The Guardian notes, Japan’s date system resets every time a new emperor take over, marking what’s considered a new historical order. Emperor Akihito announced last December that he’ll be stepping down at the end of April 2019, ending the Heisei era that’s currently in year 30.
The problem is that many computer systems and applications which use the Japanese year system have been designed since the Heisei era began in 1989 and thus there’s never been much reason to think about how computers would handle either the resetting of the date or the way some periods being measures or analysed would straddle two eras. (By way of context, the previous era began in 1929.)
Microsoft has addressed the issue by including a placeholder in Windows 10 in the form of a registry key that simulates a new, unnamed era beginning. The idea is to allow software testing to see if any problems arise; if they do, the registry entry can simply be removed to get everything back to normal working order before starting to develop a fix.
Another problem is that despite the advance warning of the transition, the new era won’t be named until a matter of weeks before the transition. That’s a challenge for calendar and diary makers, but also unfortunate timing for the Unicode system.
While the name of the Heisei era is made up of two characters in Japanese writing, Unicode represents it in a single combined character. That approach will likely be used for the new era’s name, but it will be revealed too late for the upcoming Unicode 12 release. That means not only that not only will a version 12.1 have to be released just a matter of weeks later, but it will need to be supported immediately in any software that could have to handle Japanese dates.
The Xbox power button lights up when turned on; otherwise, it's solid black, not shiny-silver.
Last month, we learned that Microsoft is developing a pair of new Xboxes for release in 2020 under the codename Scarlett. One system will be a full console; the other will be a cloud-connected system for streaming games. Today, Brad Sams at Thurrott.com has more to say about that streaming box.
We know Microsoft has been interested in developing a streaming service for many years. At this year's E3, the company reaffirmed that it's working on a streaming service that will allow games to be run in the Azure cloud and streamed to a relatively simple set-top box. This makes the end-user hardware much cheaper, but it has a consistent problem: latency. Every button press on the controller has to travel over the Internet to the server before it can be processed, and every frame of video similarly has to make the reverse trip before it can be seen. For games that don't rely on twitch reactions (RPGs or turn-based games, say) this is no big deal. But for games like first-person shooters, it's a huge problem.
According to Sams, Microsoft's solution is that the Scarlett Cloud box (as one person called it) will have some amount of processing power of its own. Not enough to run full games, but enough to do collision detection, input handling, and some amount of graphical processing locally without having to wait for the remote server. To do this, games are split into two parts (referred to as "slices" or "splices")—one part runs in the cloud; the other runs on the console.
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It seems the Halo series will not be following the trend, though. In a Halo 5-focused "social stream" hosted on Microsoft's Mixer platform last night, 343 Industries writer Jeff Easterling said the studio is not working on a battle royale mode for the upcoming Halo Infinite .
A viewer plainly asked, "Will there be battle royale in Halo Infinite?" Easterling responded definitively, "I’ll tell you right now, the only BR we’re interested in is Battle Rifle, the original BR. So calm yourself."
When the cosmic eddies of our facile existence gives us a year like 2018, the only appropriate answer is to make vodka inspired by Guinan’s bar on the Enterprise, apparently. Obviously.
A seven-year-old girl was playing the online game Roblox a few weeks ago when her in-game character was assaulted by two other characters in the game. The girl’s mom, Amber Petersen, saw the incident unfolding on the iPad screen—two male characters sexually assaulting her daughter’s avatar as it was lying on the…
The nostalgia revival train keeps on chugging. This time it’s George A. Romero and Stephen King’s ‘80s anthology Creepshow. It’s being turned into a television show this time and it has the perfect creator attached.
If you were confused as to why collectibles-maker NECA bought the company that makes Chia Pets back in February, the reason should be crystal clear now that Stranger Things, Ghostbusters, Golden Girls, Gremlins, Predator, and Rick and Morty topiary sculptures are coming to fill every last window ledge in your home.
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A three-year-old male jaguar named Valerio escaped its enclosure at New Orleans’ Audubon Zoo on Saturday and was successfully sedated and captured, but not before it managed to maul and kill several alpacas, an emu, and a fox, CNN reported.
To help us grok the immensity of the cosmos, the European Space Agency has released a remarkable image of space in which every point is an entire galaxy. If you didn’t feel insignificant before seeing this, you sure as hell will now.
The Herpetologists’ League rescinded its annual Distinguished Herpetologist award after winner Dick Vogt showed racy photos during his acceptance address.
An Ohio school district is gearing up for a surprising security upgrade for the new year: smart pepper spray. Beginning in the fall, schools in the Columbiana Exempted Village School District in Ohio will begin using devices called ‘Threat Extinguishers.’ Modeled after fire extinguishers, these are pepper spray…
A burglar in Vancouver, Washington, made four panicked 911 calls after breaking into an "escape room" business last weekend—and having trouble getting out.
Escape rooms are timed challenges that let groups of customers test their wits against a series of intricate puzzles. But NW Escape Experience's three escape rooms apparently so unnerved accused burglar Rye Wardlaw that he called 911 on himself.
The company offers customers three different rooms to choose from, including the "Kill Room,"described by TheWashington Post as "blood-spattered and designed to look like a serial killer’s basement hideout."
When Fox approached William Gibson to write a script for Alien 3 back in the late ‘80s, the studio imagined that the lauded author would bring his distinct cyberpunk vision of the future to the franchise. Instead, Gibson turned in a complicated, politically-charged script influenced by the Cold War. Due to a number of…
From a rare unearthed Stanley Kubrick interview with Jun’ichi Yaoi:
I’ve tried to avoid doing this ever since the picture came out. When you just say the ideas they sound foolish, whereas if they’re dramatized one feels it, but I’ll try.
The idea was supposed to be that he is taken in by god-like entities, creatures of pure energy and intelligence with no shape or form. They put him in what I suppose you could describe as a human zoo to study him, and his whole life passes from that point on in that room. And he has no sense of time. It just seems to happen as it does in the film.
They choose this room, which is a very inaccurate replica of French architecture (deliberately so, inaccurate) because one was suggesting that they had some idea of something that he might think was pretty, but wasn’t quite sure. Just as we’re not quite sure what do in zoos with animals to try to give them what we think is their natural environment.
Anyway, when they get finished with him, as happens in so many myths of all cultures in the world, he is transformed into some kind of super being and sent back to Earth, transformed and made into some sort of superman. We have to only guess what happens when he goes back. It is the pattern of a great deal of mythology, and that is what we were trying to suggest.
Holy shit, it’s finally happening. After years of Y: The Last Man adaptation reports, Agent 355, Hero, Yorick, and the gang are officially being brought to life.
Hi, do you see that long red thing? It belongs to that wasp. Its function is to both sting and lay eggs inside of another creature, which is eventually killed from the inside by the wasp’s horrifying offspring. I do not like this wasp and hope that I never meet this wasp.
In video games, updates are such old news that it’s weird when a game isn’t consistently tweaked for months or years on end. Other mediums, however, are only just catching on to the magic of patches—and patch notes.
With the Sega Genesis edging out Super Nintendo sales in the heated 16-bit console wars of the mid ‘90s, Nintendo decided it was time to unveil their groundbreaking secret project.
As the U.S. prepares for war in space, China’s bringing the space war home. Its ZKZM-500 laser assault rifle is reportedly capable of hitting a target from a kilometer away, igniting flammable objects, and burning through human skin. And it’s ready for production, the researchers behind the project claim.
The Overwatch Nendoroid figures are supposed to be cute, so I don’t know what the hell is going on with this Junkrat. Maybe it’s the best they can do with the character.
Watch the demonstration video. It's only 40 seconds. Badass lookin
Following the debut of the Donald Trump robot that perfectly captured the soul of its namesake, many people are wondering what Disney’s Imagineers will do next. The answer turns out to be autonomous stunt double bots that bring us one giant leap closer to IRL Westworld.
It looks like Overwatch’s newest hero might be who—but not what—we thought. Fans speculated that the first-person shooter’s 28th hero could be Hammond, a Lunar companion to the genetically-engineered gorilla Winston. What came as a surprise this morning is the fact that the game’s new champion appears to be a rodent:
After nearly four years of traveling through space, the Hayabusa2 spacecraft has successfully rendezvoused with the Ryugu asteroid, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency confirmed Wednesday. Let the next stage of this historic sampling-and-return mission begin!
Kojumbo lol "Everyone knows Kojumbo genius. Therefore, the game is brilliant."
Hideo Kojima? Never heard of him. Now, Hodeo Kojumbo—that guy’s a legend. This is what I would say if the only video game I’d ever played was Deadly Standing, an unbelievable but somehow extremely real mobile game that’s clearly parodying the upcoming game Death Stranding.
Todd McFarlane wants a wild Spawn/Venom crossover movie. Laurence Fishburne offers an intriguing connection between his Ant-Man and the Wasp character and the film’s villain. HBO’s Watchmen has cast a huge star. Plus, what’s to come on The 100, more hints about Arrow’s new status quo, and teasers for Nightflyers.…
One of the most distinctive features in the Moto X4 -- its ability to stream music to multiple Bluetooth speakers at once -- came from Tempow, a small Paris-based startup. That's particularly useful for those of us who've collected several Bluetooth...
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