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“Apple denied that its Irish companies were meant to cut the company’s tax bill, saying they were meant to enhance its international presence.”

They must’ve got a long way down the org chart before they found someone who could say that one with a straight face.

2 days ago on Senate probe accuses Apple of avoiding billions of dollars in taxes with offshore havens

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And Obama sets the agenda of a permanent Senate subcommittee…how, exactly?

It always amazes me how few Americans appear to understand how their own government (barely) works.

2 days ago on Senate probe accuses Apple of avoiding billions of dollars in taxes with offshore havens

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Here, why don’t we let the co-director of the movie and creator of the character explain it:

“Filmmaker Brenda Chapman, who won an Oscar for writing and co-directing Brave, called Merida’s redesign “a blatantly sexist marketing move based on money.”"

“When little girls say they like it because it’s more sparkly, that’s all fine and good but, subconsciously, they are soaking in the sexy “come hither” look and the skinny aspect of the new version. It’s horrible! Merida was created to break that mold — to give young girls a better, stronger role model, a more attainable role model, something of substance, not just a pretty face that waits around for romance.

[Disney] have been handed an opportunity on a silver platter to give their consumers something of more substance and quality — THAT WILL STILL SELL — and they have a total disregard for it in the name of their narrow minded view of what will make money. I forget that Disney’s goal is to make money without concern for integrity. Silly me."

7 days ago on Disney abandons sexualization of 'Brave' heroine after public backlash 1 reply 1 recommend

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If you haven’t tried it, you really should. It’s pretty hard to understand just what it’s like unless you try it. Whatever user-level tweaks you use, it’s very very difficult to make a Windows or Linux desktop look quite ‘right’ on a very high DPI display. (I should know, I’ve been using ‘em for years). And when you get to 200+ DPI, it’s problematic whether you have a visual handicap or not.

9 days ago on Toshiba Kirabook review: finally, a flagship Windows 8 laptop

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1680×1050 at 17" is 116dpi. 2560×1440 at 27" is 109dpi. 1920×1080 at 21" is 105dpi. Those are all very similar. If you calculate just about any ‘standard’ monitor size / resolution combination – there’s a handy site at http://members.ping.de/~sven/dpi.html which helps – you will get an answer between 90 and 120 dpi, usually between 95 and 110.

2560×1440 at 13.3" is 220dpi. That’s just about exactly 2x the resolution (properly understood) as all your other monitors.

If you draw 10 pixels in a line on any of the monitors you cite, the line will be about the same length. If you draw the same 10 pixels on this system, the line will be half the length. Any interface element of any app or website which is a fixed size in pixels – and there are a lot of them – will, without some kind of tweak, be a quarter the size (half vertically, half horizontally, so a quarter) it would be on a ‘normal’ screen.

For a long time, earnest engineers have been working on ways to design computer interfaces that are ‘resolution independent’ – so they will look the same, or at least usable, no matter the resolution (in terms of DPI) of the screen they’re put on. But we’ve never really quite got there. Linux and OS X are better at it than Windows, but still a long way away from 100%.

Apple, being Apple, use a kind of dumb but also kind of ingenious hack, instead of a proper engineering solution: they make sure their ‘retina’ displays are a handy integer multiple of the resolution of a ‘normal’ display. Then they set things up so apps can display elements either natively – one pixel of the element maps to one pixel on the display – or effectively magnified, so each pixel of the element is rendered as four elements on the display. It’s easiest to see this on the iPhone; when that went ‘Retina’ it was exactly 4x the resolution of the previous model, and for anything which wasn’t updated to be ‘native’ Retina, the OS just uses scaling, so it takes up the exact same amount of physical space on the display.

There’s similar functionality in OS X, now, for Retina display Macs; a lot of the tweaking they’ve done is just about what elements of what apps should be displayed ‘native’ and what should be zoomed. Windows doesn’t have any of that tweaking, and it doesn’t have such an obvious central authority to do it, and it has a much bigger mess of legacy software to try and ‘tweak’. It’s a bit of a problem.

So yeah, if you run Windows on a high resolution (in terms of DPI) system, lots of things will look pretty tiny and it can be hard to use. The Vaio P ran into this problem a long time ago. There are settings you can fiddle with to try and mitigate the problem, but it’s a bit of a pain.

10 days ago on Toshiba Kirabook review: finally, a flagship Windows 8 laptop 2 replies 5 recommends

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This app was clearly designed to alleviate something that’s really only a problem for socially retarded straight men.

Fixed further.

12 days ago on Forget sex: how the idea behind Bang with Friends could revolutionize social interaction 3 recommends

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“But the double-blind Bang With Friends formula could bridge that lonely anonymity with real, human interaction.”

Well, no it doesn’t, because it’s trivially easy to lie.

Say someone brings out Dressing Up Like Sailor Moon And Doin’ It With Friends: seriously, who’s going to resist the temptation to just download that and check off everybody on their contact list, just to see who else did?

So ultimately for any sufficiently titillating interest the pool would be pissed in from day #1, and any interest sufficiently boring enough not to suffer from that problem is one you may as well just stick in your profile and be done with.

It’s a neat idea, but doomed to founder on the rocks of human nature.

12 days ago on Forget sex: how the idea behind Bang with Friends could revolutionize social interaction

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“Huawei had previously refuted these claims”

Once again (I’ve written to the Verge about this before), please don’t use this formulation. If you use the term “refute” you are implicitly affirming that the party doing the refuting is correct. It is not a neutral formulation. The correct term to use in this type of sentence is “reject”, which is a neutral term. If you say “Huawei rejected the claims” you pass on the information that Huawei says the claims are false, without passing judgement either way. If you say “Huawei refuted the claims”, you are passing on the information that Huawei says the claims are false and implying that they are correct to say so.

14 days ago on Huawei CEO breaks 25 years of silence to deny US espionage allegations

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“E! Online struck by hackers; reliability of E! Online tweets increases dramatically”

19 days ago on E! Online struck by hackers days after Twitter warns of ongoing threats (update) 5 recommends

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That’s spelling, not grammar.

/pedant out

21 days ago on Fraudster jailed for 10 years after earning millions through sale of fake bomb detectors 5 recommends

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Best spelling snark ever.

21 days ago on Fraudster jailed for 10 years after earning millions through sale of fake bomb detectors

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“The massive bezel around the Yoga 11’s display and keyboard makes me think the device could be considerably smaller, but in fairness there’s no real evidence that’s the case; at 11.8 inches it’s almost exactly as wide as the 11.6-inch MacBook Air.”

Why do you assume Apple is the best thing possible? The XPS 13 fits a 13.3" screen in a case only very slightly larger (12.5" by 8"). You can say it’s just as good as the MBA, but there’s no good reason to assume it couldn’t be made smaller if someone tried.

22 days ago on Lenovo IdeaPad Yoga 11 review: a netbook by another name 1 reply 1 recommend