NB: This will be updated as I progress through the game
Battleheart is an action RPG which throws away all your d-pads and attack buttons and replaces it with a simple and intuitive touch-based system.
In this guide I will only give tips which aren’t clearly explained or given in the game. Here is a beginner’s guide to playing Battleheart for people who are utterly hopeless with technology and are still very lost after the tutorial given at the beginning of the game OR people who didn’t read through the tutorial properly. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the weekend, we saw the swirling rumors around the specs for the (presumably inevitable) iPad 2 start to come together. One of the most intriguing suggestions, which Engadget claim to have a reliable source for (and MacRumors some corroborating evidence to boot) is a higher resolution screen to match the iPhone 4′s Retina Display — specifically, doubling in both directions, changing from 1024×768 to 2048×1536.
This has prompted some discussion around exactly what Retina Display means, and whether this would count. The iPhone 4′s screen is a mammoth 326 pixels-per-inch (ppi), whereas this rumoured new iPad resolution is a somewhat lesser 264 ppi — quite a bit less. However, I believe it’s just as valid for Apple to call this a Retina Display as it was to call the iPhone 4 screen, and after the break I will explain why with some hopefully convincing mathematics.
Firstly though, it’s important to stress that these are only rumors and that 2048×1536 is an incredible number of pixels — 3,145,728 of them, in fact. That’s only 17% less than the 27″ iMac or 27″ Cinema Display, and it’s 52% more pixels than a 50″ 1080p television screen! This makes the screen expensive to make; it places greater strain on the graphics chipset to drive the screen, which makes that more expensive too; and it won’t do the battery life any favors either. All of this, to my mind, suggests this is one rumor that might come down to wishful thinking. As John Gruber said: “I’ll believe it when I see it“.
Apple could mitigate these problems by choosing some display size between the current one and the rumored twice-in-each-direction increase, but that brings fresh problems. The iPhone 4′s Retina Display increased resolution from 480×320 to 960×640 — so each single pixel on the old screen became a block of 2×2 pixels on the new screen. This means developers didn’t have to do anything to their apps to support this new screen; they would look exactly the same as they used too. Many devs did upgrade their apps to add higher-resolution graphics, of course, but the important thing was that everybody standing in line on launch day could bring every app they’d already bought over to the new phone unchanged. That’s the sort of seamless user experience we expect from Apple, after all.
If Apple used some intermediate resolution for the iPad 2, then all existing iPad apps would have to be scaled by some awkward factor by the hardware, and there’s no good-looking way to do that. If you try to take what used to be two pixels of display, and remap it to fill three pixels instead, then it’s a one-way trip to visual artifact city. The day one user experience for everyone upgrading from the mark 1 iPad would be that their existing apps look worse — which doesn’t make for happy users. So if it is going to increase, it seems likely it will indeed increase by a factor of two in both dimensions — hence the magic value of 2048×1536.
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What makes a Retina Display?
The term “Retina Display” seems to be widely interpreted in the Mac blogging world that as meaning a display that has more than 300 pixels-per-inch, as that’s the limit the human eye can perceive. Hence the iPhone 4′s 326 ppi screen is therefore sufficiently pixel-packed that the naked eye can’t see the pixels, and a 2048×1536 iPad screen wouldn’t be a Retina Display because it only manages 260ppi. This, however, ignores the important factor of viewing distance.
The capability limit of the human eye depends on how close you hold things, and that’s not accounted for in the 300 ppi figure. The usual figure quoted in the literature for 20/20 vision is that the eye can tell the difference between two lines that are more then one arc minute apart — i.e., 1/60 of a degree. Consider two lines a millimeter apart. If you hold it right up to your eye, you’ll see two lines; move it ten feet away, and it’ll look like a single line instead. So if the question is “how small does a pixel need to be before I can’t see it any more,” then the answer has to depend on how far away from the screen you are.
As an aside, it’s also worth stressing that 20/20 vision means average, and is not some sort of gold standard for vision. It means when you’re standing 20 feet back from an eye chart, you can read the same amount of text as a normal person can. If you have 40/20 vision, it means you can be 40 feet back from that chart, and still read the same amount as a perfectly average person who is 20 feet back. Similarly, if Hans Moleman has 5/20 vision, he has to walk just five feet away before he can read the chart. All the calculations below are for people with average vision — eagle eyed users will always see more detail.
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Conclusion
I think it’s fair to say that, for users with average eyesight using their iPad in fairly normal ways (i.e. in their lap, on a desk, or on their chest when lying down), the rumored new display could legitimately called a Retina Display despite having a lower pixel-per-inch figure than the iPhone 4.
Of course, there is a big footnote here — Retina Display is a marketing term. It doesn’t have a scientific definition and it’s not an ISO standard; it means whatever Apple’s marketing folk want it to mean, and they were free to call it a Retina Display anyway — but if you see any anti-Apple bashing for allegedly misusing the term, you can point ‘em here and straighten ‘em out.
Here’s my point: I do not think the hidden message vanishes when the movie goes Hollywood and happy. I believe the resolution of the darker movie is, in fact, still there, wrapped around the happy ending of the classic. Look again at the closing frames — shots of Jimmy Stewart staring at his friends. In most, he’s joyful. But in a few, he’s terrified. As I said, this is a terrifying movie. An hour earlier George was ready to kill himself. He has now returned from a death experience. He was among the unborn, had crossed over like Dante’s hero, had seen this world from beyond the veil. In those frames — “The Night Journey of George Bailey” — I don’t think he’s seeing the world that would exist had he never been born. I think he’s seeing the world as it does exist, in his time and also in our own.
George had been living in Pottersville all along. He just didn’t know it. Because he was seeing the world through his eyes — not as it was, but as he was: honest and fair. But on “The Night Journey,” George is nothing and nobody. When the angel took him out of his life, he took him out of his consciousness, out from behind his eyes. It was only then that he saw America. Bedford Falls was the fantasy. Pottersville is where we live.
I love this interpretation of the film – it made me go watch it.
When WikiLeaks in mid-2010 published documents detailing the brutality and corruption at the heart of the war in Afghanistan, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen, held a Press Conference and said of WikiLeaks (and then re-affirmed it on his Twitter account) that they “might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family.” This denunciation predictably caused the phrase “blood on their hands” to be attached to WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange, in thousands of media accounts around the world. But two weeks later, the Pentagon’s spokesman, when pressed, was forced to admit that there was no evidence whatsoever for that accusation: ”we have yet to see any harmcome to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the WikiLeaks documents,” he admitted. Several months later, after more flamboyant government condemnations of WikiLeaks’ release of thousands of Iraq War documents, McClatchy‘s Nancy Youssef — in an article headlined: ”Officials may be overstating the danger from WikiLeaks” — reported that “U.S. officials concede that they have no evidence to date“ that the disclosures resulted in the deaths of anyone, and she detailed the great care WikiLeaks took in that Iraq War release to protect innocent people.
All I can say now is that school can’t come quicker enough. All I need are school shoes.
Oh wait potato trials D:
I was sitting on the toilet and noticed on the last page of the Chinese newspaper lying in the bathtub the English words ‘iPad2′ and ‘iPhone5′. Obviously, I was curious and the article turned out to say that the second generation of iPad would be out in spring this year, and the iPhone 5 next summer, this year. That’s so early! And then everyone’s going to go get the new iPhone and OHMYGOSH like not enough people have an iPhone already. It’s stupid of me to say this, but some part of me gets annoyed when I see another person with one, even though I used to own one. I was in a train carriage, and FOUR people within a one-meter radius of me all took one out! That’s the power of marketing and design for you I suppose. Like one in three phones I see in people’s hands when I walk in the streets is an iPhone. And yeah, how does Apple keep pumping out these new models so quickly D:
Reminds me of that line in ‘My Blackberry isn’t working’ that Claudia posted xD ’Last week? Hah, they’ve brought out two more new Apples since then.’ That thing has been the funniest thing I’ve come across in ages :D
My dad is such an Apple fanboy.
Something that I found the epitome of rudeness came to me last Sunday. It was before the boring furniture shopping – we were at yumcha, when one of the middle aged trolley ladies (who had already stopped by our table before) came over, stopped and in an offhand tone remarked that I looked like a ‘gwei mui’ [a Western/Caucasian girl]. We all sat there, silently stunned while she just stood there, waiting for a reaction I guess. My parents didn’t say anything, and I just smiled politely and she went on with her trolley pushing.
I think those who spend a lot of time with me realise I might talk about my apparent ethnic looks and rants about people’s comments on my appearance, I’m sorry. I’m kind of sensitive about it, and that’s not really an excuse. But this really niggled me.
No. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, Jobs’ use of his wealth to be listed in multiple areas led to a fairer distribution of livers than would have occurred otherwise.
In the US, all patients on the liver transplant list are assigned a score (based on objective medical criteria) called a MELD which essentially indicates how much they need a transplant at a given time. A patient with a score of 40 will soon die without a transplant, whereas one with a score of 10 can wait a while.
In what most people would consider to be a perfectly fair system, livers would be distributed based solely on medical need, so people with higher scores would always get preference over people with lower scores.
However, transplants are managed regionally, not nationally, and some regions have a relatively greater supply of donors than needy recipients. Thus, someone in Florida can get a transplant with a MELD of just 18, while someone in California ends up waiting until they have reached a score of 30. California recipients remain sick for longer and have worse post-transplant outcomes, simply because of the arbitrary factor that they live in a different state.
Registering on a hospital’s transplant list requires an expensive series of tests, and Medicare and most insurance only cover listing with one hospital. However, wealthy people like Jobs can pay to be listed at multiple hospitals in multiple regions.
Jobs is still only allowed to receive a transplant if he is the sickest eligible person in a given region where he is listed. In his case, he ended up receiving a transplant in Tennessee, one of the states with a relatively higher supply of organs than California. The impact of this was likely that someone in Tennessee with a score of 20 had to wait a bit longer to receive a transplant, while someone else in California besides Jobs with a score of 30+ was able to receive a transplant sooner.
The argument that Jobs’ actions were unethical stems from the assumption that they gave him an unfair advantage over other Californians. However, his actions actually helped everyone else on the California list (because he was no longer ahead of them), and just put him on the same footing as someone in Tennessee.
His use of his wealth helped correct an inefficiency in the system, and led to livers being allocated based on medical need instead of geography. Until the government corrects this problem, all wealthy people will help themselves and the system as a whole by paying for multiple listings
Jobs’ experience resulted in a greater universal good: passage of legislation in California requiring drivers in California to make a choice about their organ donation preferences.http://blogs.forbes.com/velocity…
His actions will undoubtedly improve the prospects for patients on organ transplant lists and save more lives.
All American Rejects – Move Along- one of the best music videos I have seen in a while, even though it has not-very-good moments of ‘band playing amongst crowd’.
Listening Room is a website for listening to music with your friends. Anyone in a room can play mp3s from their computer, and everyone hears the same thing at the same time.
Who’s afraid of the Verizon iPhone? – Do you ever feel like someone has gone into your brain, taken whatever you’ve thought about and expressed it more eloquently than you ever could?
Sure, Android has moved a lot of volume. But the platform’s various devices seem to lack most of the passionate customer demand that iPhones have always had. Nobody’s lining up the night before to buy them. Even the gadget blogs have a hard time feigning enthusiasm for this week’s hot Android phone because they still haven’t taken the shrinkwrap off of last week’s.
Whenever I’ve overheard conversations about smartphones in real life, by “normal people” (not geeks like us), it has always been clear that the true battle happening in the U.S. phone market wasn’t iPhone versus Android, but iPhone versus Verizon.
The decision that people were discussing wasn’t “Do I get an iPhone or an Android whatever?”
It was always “Do I get an iPhone or do I stay on Verizon?”
I get the feeling that very few people except anti-Apple geeks really care about Android itself. The buying decision for most seemed to be, “I’m on Verizon and don’t want to switch, so which of the phones in the Verizon store looks best? They say this one is just as good as an iPhone. I guess I’ll get that.”
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One effect I expect to start immediately: developers of popular iPhone apps are going to feel a lot less pressure to write Android versions if it becomes apparent, or if we all just speculate in the same way, that Android isn’t in fact going to take any more U.S. marketshare away from Apple and is likely to give back some of what they took over the last year. Android’s marketshare may have just peaked.
I was taking a plane from LA to NJ to see my family and I found this note inside of the menu pamphlet. I was hoping we could help this guy out in hopes that he’s a redditor. Feels fitting for the holiday season.
Here’s the text and pic of the napkin with the note on it.
“I wonder what I’m going to tell you once I get off this plane. It might be something along the lines of about the last time I was home. And about how you said you were a mess and how you cried yourself to sleep everynight. And how I spent a whole night on your kitchen floor with you trying to make you smile. And when you did smile, I found myself saying I could spend the rest of my life finding all the ways I can make you smile until forever and ever. It might be something along the lines of how I don’t care if you don’t believe me when I say you are the most beautiful woman in the world, but believe me when I say, “to me, you are.” Believe me when I say, “I love you.” Because if there is ever a time to be selfish, this is it. I don’t think I could live the rest of my life knowing I never let you know how I feel. But I wonder what I’m going to tell you when you’ll look back at me and say, “but you’re leaving soon.” With my return ticket booked and my life in L.A. starting, I don’t know what I’ll do.” Read the rest of this entry »
