Everyone who's ever intensively played a 'social game' on Facebook knows the simple truth: they're surrounded by fake accounts. For over two years I managed in excess of 40 Facebook accounts without ever being flagged... I presumed most of my 'friends' were fake as well. Even now the accounts are just sitting there, untouched, unused, but inflating FB's user numbers.

I recognize I was cheating. It was wrong and I shouldn't have done it. For my actions, I've chosen to exile myself from FB games altogether. Certainly, not everyone cheats or creates multiple accounts as I did. But I venture that enough 'gamers' do it to seriously distort Facebook's numbers.

When the iPad came out, it had polish and the market to itself. This allowed it to grab a surprising toe-hold in a field that many thought futile. Android 3.0, by contrast, comes to market with a bit less polish and facing stiff competition. The field is no longer empty- Developers must decide whether to focus on Android, WebOS, iOS etc.

The iPad 2 builds evolutionarily on its first-to-market experience... Faster, but with no changes in the physical layout. As a result every iPad 1 app looks as good on the iPad 2 as it did on the original. If you develop for the iPad, you shoot for one resolution (1024 x 768) and one ratio (4:3). While there isn't a guarantee, future displays seem sure to maintain the same 4:3 aspect ratio with a doubling or tripling of resolution. In other words, the transition will be no more difficult than iphone 3 to iphone 4. Screen elements will be no larger or smaller... just the same or clearer.

Because Google doesn't control the hardware (for better or worse) it can't give the same guarantees. Thus, developers face multiple resolutions, e.g., 1024 x 600 (Galaxy Tab 7 and Viewsonic Viewpad) vs. 1280 x 1024 (Galaxy Tab 10.1, Motorola Xoom) and, at the same time, design for different aspect ratios, e.g., 16:9 or 16:10. This will only get worse when Ice Cream Sandwich throws smart phones into the mix. So... assuming you KNOW you're target audience is running a compatible version of Android... what resolution and aspect ratio do you go with? If you let Android do the corrections... can you expect your app to display with the polish you designed into it? The iPad's 4:3 aspect ratio may be limiting and imperfect... but its constancy allows design to move forward with certitude. If you're spending time and money to develop for a platform, you want to deliver something that looks good now, will look good later, and does so on tens of millions of machines.

Absolutely agree. If I were representative of most consumers... Amazon would be reporting that E-books outsold hardcopy by several thousand percent... though the only revenue it was receiving was from hard-copy orders. Amazon's 'revelation' is simply marketing fudge.

There is simply no sword of damocles. MPEG-LA has stated it will increase royalty payments, if at all, by no more than 10% every 5 years. Google currently pays $6.5 million to license h.264. In five years, that could rise to a SHOCKING $7.15 million. Five years after that, Google could be looking at license fees of $7.865 million!!! In other words... it's just silly to argue that Google, is worried it might find itself paying (in 10 years) licensing fees of less than .00005% its current market cap.

- Slashdot allows me to filter information by acting as a specialized and trusted news aggregator. It saves me from wading through news that is
(1) anonymously sourced,
(2) anonymously submitted,
(3) green-lit by the biased department of "oh please let this be true" and
(4) distributed with a flame-bait lead that something is about to "blow up in the face" of a major computer company.

WTF Slashdot?

Wrong. The utility of any tool is judged by what it can do, not by what it can't.

The Economist COULD print hot nude photos. It won't. Club COULD print incisive articles on Pakistan's diplomacy with China and India. It won't.

As for the iPhone, most people I know wouldn't recognize Steve Jobs if he knocked on their door. They buy it because of what it CAN do; which it does better than most phones.

I'm happy to brick my iPhone when Android and the Palm Pre show their everyday superiority. But I'm not going to buy an inferior product just because it's "open". It's the responsibility of handset makers to sell a product that beats the "closed" iPhone.