Thank you. Between this, NVIDIA's Shield, and the various clip-on controllers that already worked on Android, it'll eventually boil down to who wants to buy a $60 controller to play a $3 game.

So how exactly do these successful iOS games emulate buttons without the player ending up pressing the wrong button or whiffing (pressing outside any button) all the time?

"Nobody" is a strong word. Consider these three scenarios:

One could develop an Android-exclusive application and use the revenue to buy a Mac, an iTrinket, and a developer certificate on which to port the application to iOS.

One could develop an Android-exclusive application in one of the categories that Apple is known to ban.

One could develop an Android-exclusive application that requires a gamepad. The forthcoming Ouya game console runs Android, and for game genres that aren't point-and-click, an on-screen gamepad isn't really a substitute for physical buttons. Let me know when Apple even ships a standard game controller for its current iBaubles.

I think the object of publishing an anecdote like this is to encourage someone else to make such an analysis as a response.

Like Windows XP, Android 2 never got the update to Transport Layer Security to allow connecting to web servers that host more than one SSL site on one IP address.

Server Name Indication (SNI) allows name-based virtual hosting to work on SSL sites. The only remaining major web browsers that aren't compatible with SNI are Internet Explorer on Windows XP and Android Browser on Android 2.2 or 2.3. Try visiting SNI Test or Pin Eight on Chrome, Firefox on desktop, Safari on recent Mac OS X, or IE on recent Windows. Then try visiting it on your Android 2.x device.

Not all phone buyers buy a lot of applications. In the early days of Android, Android phones were sold in a lot of countries that didn't yet have Google Checkout. So developers had to make their applications free and ad-supported to serve users in those countries, and users have since come to expect the $0.00 price. So let's assume hypothetically that the average member of the 17% spends four times as much money on priced applications as the average member of the 56%. In such a case, the developer of an iOS app would likely come out ahead.

The upgrade from Android 4.1 to Android 4.2 broke a lot of apps that act as drivers for Bluetooth input devices. It broke "Sixaxis Controller", a driver for Sony's Dual Shock 3 controller. That eventually got fixed. It also broke "Wiimote Controller", a driver for Nintendo's Wii Remote controller. That still isn't fixed.

And now that you point that out, I can't look at that without thinking of Nickelodeon's game show Double Dare .

Host: "What's the capital of Kentucky?"
Team 1: "Dare"
Host: "Now worth 20, or you can double dare them back. What's the capital of Kentucky?"
Team 2: "Double dare"
Host: "Now worth 40. What's the capital of Kentucky? You can answer or take a physical challenge."
Team 1: "Physical challenge"
Host: "The answer is Frankfort." (goes on to describe something sloppy that Team 1 must do in 30 seconds)

"Xbox 360 Turbo Fire 2 Wireless Controller with Rumble by Datel" doesn't look licensed. Datel has a history of cracking cryptographic lockouts to produce its products. I wonder how long it'll take for Microsoft to file the ITC complaint. I get the impression from TBONE1207's one-star review that Microsoft might have already updated the Xbox 360 firmware to refuse to recognize this controller.

Because hosting plans, especially budget shared hosting plans, are more likely to come with a screwdriver than with the particular version of a hammer that your application needs. You could have the best web app in the world written in Perl or Python, but you'll pay more to run it than you might on PHP-only hosting. MySQL is popular for the same reason: ubiquity on entry-level hosting.

That depends. Downscaling and compressing at lower resolution is in theory equivalent to running a blur filter over the whole high-resolution picture and then compressing the blurred high-resolution picture. But in practice, video codecs prefer to handle features of a given size. MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 use 8x8 pixel cosine transform blocks, as do H.263-style codecs such as Spark, ASP (DivX), and Theora. H.264 and VP8 use variable transform block size to efficiently handle both flat areas and detailed areas in the same picture. Video codecs also differ in what sizes of motion they compensate for. Some codecs support precision down to the quarter or even eighth pixel, while others support only half pixels. Other codecs aren't effective at 1080p HD because their maximum displacements aren't big enough.

Royalties for connecting your controller to a particular gaming platform can also be "cost-prohibitive in smaller runs."

Of course, all this depends on a platform capable of using third-party controllers. Xbox 360 used cryptography to lock out unlicensed controllers, and to my knowledge, Microsoft never licensed a third-party wireless controller for the Xbox 360. I've read rumors on the Internets that Xbox One will continue this policy and may end up not having third-party controllers at all.

My rule of thumb is that if the escape function is a method of a database connection object, such as the $conn->escape_string() of MySQLi, it's the real deal. But most of the time, I just use prepared statements, reserving manual escaping for things like the right side of operator IN that would need a large, variable number of placeholders.