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Ah, I get it now. I agree to a point. I'd add that once resolution itself is no longer an issue (because every phone's screen is above 300 dpi), Android still has the advantage of custom aspect ratios.

Regarding the iPad, marketing-wise, they might claim that people typically hold the iPad farther away from their eyes than 12 inches, say 15 inches, which places the "retina limit" conveniently just under 260 dpi.

Of course, but the 10-12 inches they quote as normal operating distance is pretty reasonable as far as I'm concerned. So while clever marketing, I wouldn't call it false advertising.

I don't understand your point. The iPad has a 130 dpi display, if anything, it should be easier to double that than it was to double the iPhone 3GS's 160 dpi. (I know that making larger displays at that resolution is harder and more expensive, but that won't be an issue forever.)

I couldn't find an explanation of why one can't just put a real giraffe in a tank, fill it with water and "see what happens". (Obviously I suggest doing this in such a way that one can quickly rescue the giraffe in case it's not buoyant after all.)

It makes complete sense to me that most land mammals have at least rudimentary swimming capabilities, because it's probably selected for. Not very often, of course, but whenever there's a flood, all non-swimming animals in a region die at once, which is a lot of selection pressure.

AFAIK it's a combination of the hardware not being good enough, and Apple not really trying to optimize for those devices (they'd be happy if you bought a new one). The iPod Touch went through several iterations, just like the iPhone; the latest iPod Touch is actually a bit higher specced than the latest iPhone.

No, they wouldn't. All that they'd compete on is perceived payout. In other words, if you have private competing lotteries, they'd optimize the heck out of the feedback loop explained in the article, ruining people's lives even more.

I think WoW has to do that because it's a very complicated interface with roots in the text-based MUDs of old (for example the combat log). I don't consider it an example of good UI/tutorial design.

Valve's Portal is how game tutorials should be done in my opinion. It introduces an unfamiliar game element (the wormhole gun) gradually: first you walk through pre-made wormholes, then you get to shoot one of the two wormhole entrances, and only then both of them. Even when you have the full portal gun, you get taught the various tricks (like accelerating by falling into a portal) one at a time. None of this is explained by a wall of text, rather, the level design itself suggests the only possible solution. This is all done so subtly that it hardly feels like a tutorial at all. In fact, for the player, the levels just get gradually harder and require you to combine more and more of the skills and tricks you've figured out earlier.

It works brilliantly, and makes for a much stronger experience than any of the text or voice based game tutorials I've seen so far.

Even infinite depth of field wouldn't completely solve the problem. The point is, your eyes have to physically focus on the far away screen the entire time, or the whole movie becomes blurry (obviously). When you're looking at a "near" object, there's always a mismatch between its apparent distance and the focus point of your eyes. And as you pointed out, you can't turn your head.

However, given these limitations, I've found 3D movies to be a great experience. In the case of Avatar in particular, an important point of the movie was how the protagonist becomes part of the alien world, and I felt that the 3D environment really helped the audience to get the same feeling. YMMV of course.

What's really a rip-off is all those movies now that were converted to 3D in post production. It's a bit like manually coloring a black-and-white photo before color film was available -- it may look kind of okay if you don't look too closely, but it's not the real thing. The flat faces in particular make people look like cardboard cutouts.

That's true, many of those pathways are shared between all current species, so they must have evolved in that early period. I wonder how (for lack of a better word) inefficient organisms must have been before they evolved the modern citric acid cycle, for example.

Didn't the Gizmodo article say that he saw the owner's name and Facebook profile while playing around with the phone (before it was bricked remotely)? If so, why didn't he contact him directly?

"Don't fix the UI problem, work around it! Who cares if a good comment is downvoted and a possibly worse one upvoted, as long as the user's total karma is correct?" Is that your suggestion?

Do you have a source? Because 40 billion is the number I've seen quoted most often, for example here: http://www.businessweek.com/technology/ByteOfTheApple/blog/a...

4:3 is also the aspect ratio of almost all digital photographs, and I'm sure that was a consideration.

People, get your names straight. It's Windows(R) Phone 7 Series; leaving out the Series is like calling Apple's desktop computer an iMa.

Not to disagree, but I'd like to mention that you don't actually need full complex number arithmetic to draw a Mandelbrot set. If you translate the Mandelbrot update rule into pairs of numbers, you get the following recursive equations:

    x_{n+1} = x_n^2 - y_n^2 + x_0
    y_{n+1} = 2 x_n y_n + y_0

Friendster? Socializr? This guy has a talent of coming up with the most generic Web 2.0-style names imaginable.

In essence, you say that the Nazi cult that some Pakistanis (supposedly) entertain is no big deal, because they are not responsible for the Holocaust. As a German, who as a matter of fact doesn't feel particularly guilty about things his great-grandfathers did half a century before he was born, I'd like to know how you come to such a peculiar opinion. Evil is less evil if you can blame someone else? It's okay to revere mass murderers as long as you're not the one who let them come into power?

Your point about children's names is almost the textbook definition of a straw man, and I think you know it. Many German children are named Joseph, but that name has a long cultural and religious history, and no one in their right mind would associate that with Stalin. I guess the story with the name Osama in Muslim cultures is similar. However, if Pakistani parents name their children Adolf, a name that has no cultural associations in Pakistan whatsoever except being linked to a brutal mass murderer, then that's at least a little bit cringe worthy.

(I wonder if Godwin's Law applies to a discussion that's already about Hitler in the first place, and if a factual discussion about such a topic is even possible...)

I'm sure there's a cute mathematical trick to calculate the missing digit, but Raphael is right, with numbers limited to 1 billion, this can be easily brute forced. You need a few gigabytes of disk space and a few days of precalculation at most.

What's more interesting to me is that the missing number is actually unique, i.e. that this trick is possible at all. Maybe it actually isn't, maybe it doesn't work in 0.1% of the cases, which is good enough for a magic trick.

I'm not going to comment on patents here, but you're absolutely wrong in assuming that implementing an optimized algorithm is trivial, especially in real-time graphics.

Sure, coding up B-trees from a textbook description is easy. But in a video game, 10fps and 30fps is the difference between unplayable and perfect, which means that your "by the book" implementation likely won't cut it. Video game developers spend months squeezing the last 1.1x improvements out of their inner loops, using clever bit coding techniques, cache alignment, often even hand-optimized assembler.

You have no idea what you're even talking about. Both Diablo 1 and 2 used pre-rendered sprites. Yes, technically they're "polygonic", but in the same sense that a Pixar movie is polygon-based: the amount of detail is only limited by the time they were willing to give their render farms. This page has a nice animated comparison's between D1's and D2's sprites for Diablo himself, you'll see how small the difference actually is. http://diablo.wikia.com/wiki/Diablo If anything, the models they used for D2 were more detailed, better lighted, and encoded with more colors.

That's a good point, however, might be solved by making the charger introduce itself as one of the well-known USB device classes.

Most cars here in Europe are stick shift though. A stick shift car can't go berserk on you, you simply press the clutch pedal, as you do anyway when braking, and the acceleration is gone.

Citations can be gamed as well unfortunately.

The conspiracy theorist part of me suggests that the reason for this proposal has something to do with the MiniMSFT blog.

This part of the article is most likely intended as a funny anecdote, not as an accurate description of a scientific experiment. Rest assured that Niels freaking Bohr would have thought of that.

This would be a much stronger finding if they had found any correlation between vowel sounds and the success/failure of actual brands, not just the perceived appeal of fantasy brand names. Does the fate of a brand really depend on what people think in the first five seconds after they hear the name without context? This is the same kind of thinking that makes Microsoft spend millions on compelling one-word domain names like Live or Bing, which haven't been hugely successful. In my opinion, brands are built through trust and reputation, and in comparison to that, any effect of vowel sounds is a rounding error.

(Maybe this was supposed to be a reply, instead of a top-level post?)

Anyways, as little as 20 years ago, you'd routinely need adapters when traveling from one European country to the next. That's hardly an issue anymore, and I consider this a vast improvement.

You say you have problems when traveling to "other continents", without saying which continent you start from. I'll assume you're from North America, because then you're indeed a bit out of luck, as this map shows: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d7/WorldMap_... However, that's a North American problem, not an international one.

As to your other point, I didn't cherry pick the examples, I addressed the examples from an article that argues the exact opposite.

From the article: "The fancy shmancy argument is that dominant design repels most attacks. There are lots of bad ideas that were adopted first, became dominant, and have been impossible to shake. The DVORAK vs. QWERTY keyboard debate is a canonical example. It doesn’t matter if DVORAK is actually 5x better that QWERTY, the cost of relearning is perceived to be prohibitive, so most people never have the motivation to try, and there are huge reinforcements of the status quo (e.g. people who teach typing classes). Metric system vs. English in the U.S. is another good example. A particularly retarded example of dominant design is electric plugs. Studying why the world has 50 different plugs and voltages explains much about resistance factors against innovation. Or world peace."

This is a actually a favorite nitpick of mine. I don't really buy the argument that established standards dominate even after they've been proven to be inferior. First of all, the Dvorak vs. Qwerty situation isn't as clear cut as it is commonly made out to be -- while there's lots of anecdotal evidence, the few independent studies (i.e. those not done by Dvorak himself) aren't very conclusive. At the very least they don't show a 5x improvement.

The cost of switching to the metric system likely isn't as great as commonly believed, and there's no harm in running both side-by-side for a while. There are many precedents for this from other countries. While as a European, I consider the imperial system to be clearly inferior, I think the real reason why the U.S. doesn't adopt it has more to do with emotional attachment and xenophobia than with cost. The point here is, if Americans genuinely consider the imperial system to be better, switching would not be an improvement.

The electric plug situation is rapidly improving, in part because of homogenization pressure, in part because electronic devices don't particularly care what kind of voltage you feed into them. (Be careful with adapter plugs and hairdryers though, you might start a fire if the voltage is too high.) Also, this is a case where none of the existing standards is inferior to any other, so it's not even an example of a bad design becoming dominant.

In short, my point is that if a new convention is clearly better, it's usually possible to switch gradually, and that this is usually done. The effect of "dominant design" is greatly exaggerated.

Google says that they will do the right thing (in their opinion) and stop collaborating with the Chinese regime, and your first comment to that is about the lost opportunity for profit. I'm shocked.

Now, I agree that Google probably does this for rather selfish reasons, abandoning a market that's not profitable to them anyway in a PR effective way. However, I wonder: Is there no room in American capitalism for consideration of the morality of helping evil governments oppress their people? Is this not a discussion we should have had years ago?

I can play first-person shooters all day long, but this makes me motion sick, and I had to stop after a few minutes. It's a shame, because I really like the concept.