Probably. But that's a big trade-off to make in this era of ever-increasing graphical demands. We're talking about a game that's running at 900p and people aren't happy that it isn't 1080p. If you offload AI tasks to a GPU, those are cycles that you're not getting back for rendering later.

Additionally, it's much too early in the generation for anyone to have any decent libraries that could do such a thing, even if they were willing to make a much simpler game graphically in exchange for something more complicated gameplay/AI-wise.

From a gameplay standpoint, good AI is almost entirely smoke and mirrors. There's no meaningful difference from an agent being smart because they're calculating a lot of different options and picking the best one, and me programming an agent to do something that LOOKS smart. When they worked on the AI for the original Halo, the little grunt guys would throw themselves on grenades so that only one of them would die instead of the whole group. Playtesting revealed that players thought that was stupid (why would he kill himself? That's dumb!) even though that's actually a fairly clever thing to do. In the end, I believe they just upped the HP of everything--that had the most positive effect on the perception of AI. Just taking longer to die was interpreted as something being 'smarter'.

Vacation, probably. I'm sure he earned enough in the last few years to take it easy for a while. :)

Well, like I said, I won't comment on that game. I didn't work on it, and I don't know what problems they were trying to solve. I don't like speaking for other people, and I've never had any contact with them.

Disclaimer: I work for Ubisoft. I did not work on the game in question and I won't comment on it.

Now, the PS3. I have a friend that's made a very good living for the last few years doing nothing but PS3 optimisation. He'd go in 3 days a week and make more than I would in a year. The PS3 setup was fiendishly complicated and difficult to wring real performance out of. Even by the end of the cycle, I'd say there were only a few games that significantly made use of the potential power that was available in the PS3. On paper, it was impressive. In practice, it was a mild nightmare. You had completely different tools than when you were making a 360 game. The compiler was different. You had to be a lot more meticulous about where data was and how you were moving it around.

I worked on the PS4 earlier this year, and it's dead easy to use. The tools integrate well into the environment, and you don't have nearly the same optimisation headaches that you did on the PS3. It's trivially faster than the XBone, and there's virtually no platform specific code (except for the obvious stuff, like connecting to the respective online services, etc.)

From a developer perspective, the PS4 is a lot nicer than the PS3. That'll mean more simultaneous releases on the PS4 and XBone, and this time there's no delay before the PS4 is at or past parity with its competition (which is more important for Sony and Sony fans, really).

That's just my opinion on the matter, but Sony really listened to the developer community when it came to tools and ease of use. It may be less interesting, but interesting generally means 'troublesome', not 'exciting' when you're writing software.

While we're at it, maybe you should share your sources so they can be cross-checked.

Yes, yes I would. Geez, what's in a name? Do you really need it to be called something more aggressive and manly? It's a tool used for chatting with other people. I talk to my Google-employed friends using Hangouts. I chat to my Human-Rights-Lawyer friend using Hangouts. And if it were called "The Pink-Lace Chatroom App" and my friends preferred that, I'd use it. I don't care--my applications are there to get things done, not impress people with their branding.

Are you somehow concerned about the perception people will have of you if you use something to talk to people you know? I figure the only thing my apps say about me is that I know people and I like to talk to them. I'm only a few years away from 40 at this point--maybe it's just my age that makes it so wildly unimportant to me what the name of the application is.

Honestly, I think Hangouts is among the worst of my chat applications. It's among the least reliable, and has the fewest features. If they decided to make it 10 times better and give it the name 'My Little Pink Unicorn' as you suggested, I would 100% keep using it. What's wrong with pink unicorns anyway?

Yes, heavens forfend that you use your communications device to communicate with people.

The things I use most are chat applications. I use iMessage, Hangouts and WhatsApp because that's what the people I want to talk with use. I like iMessage best for various reasons, but the whole point of my phone--by which I mean this little communications computer that I carry with me--is to stay in contact with people throughout the day. I also use it for social media because that's also about keeping in contact with people.

I understand everyone's use case is different, but slagging Hangouts as an app for teenage girls? C'mon.

It's the only meaningful definition, honestly.

Climate scientists are the ones actually doing the work. You have to listen to them. If I say something to you, I URGE you not to take my word for it until you've verified it against some actual science, or at least the work that I'm claiming to get it from.

Pundits and internet commentators are more often a source of noise than signal. I try to be honest and accurate with all of my claims, but at the end of the day, I can't think of a single reason why you'd trust me. Sometimes you develop a level of trust for a science writer and you can use that as a convenient short-hand for actually verifying the science yourself.

They're the ones working on the IPCC reports. Those reports are effectively what the scientists are saying, so they've said a lot, and they say it frequently. Some of those scientists also blog. If you haven't heard anything from them, it's because you haven't been looking. You can definitely see what they say if you want to.

No, the decision makes sense for the iPhone 6+ when you consider the impact on developers. The iPhone 6 and 6+ are at resolutions that allow for very simple scaling; the multipliers are easy to work with. If you haven't updated your app, the system scales them up, and the math is super easy. Even still, the 6+ represents a 3x scaling target for developers, but then downsamples the render to fit the display, which actually has fewer pixels than the virtual target that the programmers are working with. It's a bit goofy, but it makes sense if what you're trying to do is balance between developer time and user experience.

If Apple had kept the scaling factor of the 6+ to the same as the 6, they would have been BELOW 300ppi, which obviously wouldn't fly.

Apple put the fewest number of pixels on the screen that they could get away with while still adhering to a few design and usability constraints. They didn't make the density any higher than that because it just burns battery with no advantage.

I keep coming back to this great bit of analysis from Anand when he was reviewing the iPhone 5s:

"In such a thermally constrained environment, going quad-core only makes sense if you can properly power gate/turbo up when some cores are idle. I have yet to see any mobile SoC vendor (with the exception of Intel with Bay Trail) do this properly, so until we hit that point the optimal target is likely two cores. You only need to look back at the evolution of the PC to come to the same conclusion. Before the arrival of Nehalem and Lynnfield, you always had to make a tradeoff between fewer faster cores and more of them. Gaming systems (and most users) tended to opt for the former, while those doing heavy multitasking went with the latter. Once we got architectures with good turbo, the 2 vs 4 discussion became one of cost and nothing more. I expect weÃ(TM)ll follow the same path in mobile.

Then thereÃ(TM)s the frequency discussion. Brian and I have long been hinting at the sort of ridiculous frequency/voltage combinations mobile SoC vendors have been shipping at for nothing more than marketing purposes. I remember ARM telling me the ideal target for a Cortex A15 core in a smartphone was 1.2GHz. SamsungÃ(TM)s Exynos 5410 stuck four Cortex A15s in a phone with a max clock of 1.6GHz. The 5420 increases that to 1.7GHz. The problem with frequency scaling alone is that it typically comes at the price of higher voltage. ThereÃ(TM)s a quadratic relationship between voltage and power consumption, so itÃ(TM)s quite possibly one of the worst ways to get more performance. Brian even tweeted an image showing the frequency/voltage curve for a high-end mobile SoC. Note the huge increase in voltage required to deliver what amounts to another 100MHz in frequency."

In light of this sort of thinking, Apple's decisions continue to make a lot of sense. They can use less power, generate less heat, and still come out on top of most real-world tests and benchmarks. Anandtech's preliminary review of the iPhone 6es shows the A8 being far ahead on most relevant benchmarks, but falling behind on the physics simulation. Realistically, most people programming for mobile don't actually have problems that parallelize very well. My email client or podcasting app might need two threads or processes going on at once (one for foreground processing and another for background downloads, perhaps?) but it's unlikely that it'll need more. Physics simulations parallelize nicely by comparison, and the Android phones with more cores clearly stomp the 2-core A8. But how often do I run that sort of simulation on my phone? Nearly never, even with today's games.

That's not a terribly meaningful observation. Early adopters are always going to be the people most enthusiastic about the company, and in this case, that's far more likely to be people that already own iPhones.

I just got a new iPhone 6 myself because I've been using an iPhone 4 since release, and it was important to me to keep my device on the latest OS. That's not terribly remarkable.

It's important insofar as it speaks to who makes money and who doesn't in this competitive space. Apple selling 10 million phones over a weekend means that there's money to be made selling high-end phones to people, and that contrary to consistent commentary that Apple is doomed because their percentage share of the market is decreasing, they can still maintain a robust business based on absolute numbers of people willing to pay for their devices.

Samsung is the only other player in mobile phones consistently turning a profit based on the hardware sales model. Everyone else gets soaked.

Now you've also got players like Xiaomi that make money by selling hardware at cost but setting up their own app stores and making money off of software.

The numbers game is still important, and Apple stands out from the crowd somewhat because they're the only player that so tightly controls both the hardware and software experience.

Alas. This is honestly something that I see very rarely, but it's worth noting that

a) other climate scientists disagreed with her claim, because at the time it was untrue; and
b) it *happened* to be true in the end (in the sense that climate change DOES seem to be responsible for the weird path of the jet stream). But that doesn't let her off the hook for saying it before there was actually peer reviewed research on the matter to back her up.

They also tend to forget that while it's cold where they are, it's hot where other people are. The winter may have seemed extra cold in North America last year, but they've had to add extra colours to the heat maps in Australia in the last couple of years to indicate just how blisteringly hot its getting now.

Climate is global, folks. Your local weather is not representative of what people around the world are experiencing.

Actually, I've yet to see that come from anyone that's actually in the field of climate science. Don't conflate internet commenters and assorted science writers with people that are actually studying the climate. Every time a big climate event happened, I saw a lot of hedging from climate scientists who were consistently pointing out that one event is impossible to extrapolate from.

If you'd care to provide an example of someone actually in research and not someone that you should probably be ignoring, I'd be interested to see it. (Really, I would--it would be a very unusual event.)