2011 Games I Forgot

I said at the end of my Games of 2011 post that I knew I had forgotten some games I played. Here are two:

• Pushmo - The first must-have on the Nintendo 3DS's eShop, this is easily my favorite puzzle game of the year (and favorite in a while). The game mechanism starts simple but ramps up in difficulty very quickly. It also uses the 3D to great effect, the game becoming easier when you have the effect turned on. If you have a 3DS this is easily worth the money. (And I have to reiterate that Super Mario 3D Land is worth the system alone--so go buy one.)
• The Binding of Isaac - For Windows/Mac, this is an interesting one-man game. The story is really morbid and the art is downright creepy, but the game play is fun. You basically go through randomly generated dungeons picking up random powerups (from an absolutely enormous list). With inspiration pulled from the original Zelda and rogue-likes, but with keyboard control similar to dual-stick shooters (think Geometry Wars and Stardust HD) it's worth the cheap purchase price if you like playing games that are different every attempt in order to collect oodles of things and can handle a bit of blasphemy.

Now I still suspect, but am not sure, there are still more.

→ MPAA Attacks Ars Technica for "challenging efforts to curb content theft"

MPAA Attacks Ars Technica for "challenging efforts to curb content theft"

Nate Anderson at Ars Technica:

The Motion Picture Association of America doesn't like us. According to the MPAA blog on Tuesday, "Arts Technica" is a "tech blog with a long history of challenging efforts to curb content theft." (If so, we're the only such tech blog that actually encouraged a now-current MPAA lawyer to do copyright coverage for our site and that recommended the pro-rightsholder book Free Ride in this year's holiday guide.)

Two points:

1. The MPAA didn't even bother to get the site's name right. (I admit this is cheap and not really of any value. Typos happen.)
2. Just because someone opposes you does not mean they oppose your stated goal. Sometimes they simply think your methods are absurd. This is like saying that someone who has long opposed enacting a policy of police offers shooting all suspects of any crime on sight has a long history of challenging efforts to curb murder, even if that person also promotes discussion with police leaders and additional funding of the departments specific to handling murder cases.

→ The Dead Kindle And What Warren Ellis Learned About Amazon Customer Service

The Dead Kindle And What Warren Ellis Learned About Amazon Customer Service

Found via Daring Fireball

This shows how Amazon is like Apple and different from Google: focused on the customer experience rather than the experience of business partners. You could argue Google is focused on customer service too, but users aren't Google's customer--advertisers are. The user (you and me) is Google's product--so the user's experience matters less to Google than to Amazon and Apple.

Stylistic Choices On Post Titles

On this site I have two different types of content: Posts focused around content from external sources and posts primarily focused on my own content. There is some overlap, but everything can be pinned in to one or the other without much difficulty. I was initially only giving my own original content article titles but the way that is handled in RSS is unsatisfactory. Instead, I'm stealing something out of Maro Arment's book. My own primarily original content posts will stay the same with normal article titles. Posts focused mostly on external information with perhaps some editorial commenting, though, will now have this symbol before the article title:

→

Carry on.

Missing The Point on Apple's Anobit Acquisition

Before I start on my exposition, here's some brief background from Bloomberg:

Apple Acquires Anobit

Apple Inc. (AAPL) said it acquired Anobit Technologies Ltd., an Israeli company that makes a flash-memory drive part for the iPhone and iPad, confirming a press report from last month.

The deal helps Apple secure supplies of a key component for its top-selling devices. Anobit makes high-performance controllers used to optimize the memory capabilities inside products such as the iPhone and iPad. Apple is the world’s largest buyer of NAND flash memory, accounting for about 23 percent of consumption last quarter, according to a Jan. 6 report from Sanford C. Bernstein & Co.

What people seem to be missing here is the same thing people are still missing about Apple's P.A. Semi acquisition: This isn't about securing supplies. If Apple hadn't acquired P.A. Semi it wouldn't be any more difficult for the company to get enough CPUs built for iPhones and iPads. Apple's purchase of Anobit might reduce its prices on flash memory a bit, but Apple is already the plurality of NAND flash consumption and with its bulk guaranteed purchases would have no problem assuring it gets first priority on flash shipments in the industry (as it does now).

No, this isn't about securing supplies. First, this is about design. Specifically, this acquisition is about acquiring expertise so that Apple can integrate things into its design. Second, this is about independence of design. Apple doesn't want to have to bend to the design whims of others in the industry.

Think about the P.A. Semi acquisition and what it has produced. The only thing in the iPhone and iPad we can be sure Semi's engineers have influenced is probably the A5 processor. Critics can scream and shout all they want that the A5 is nothing special, that it's simply a combination of parts available elsewhere that Apple has put together. These critics would be right to a large degree, but they'd be wrong to a larger one. P.A. Semi's expertise was in designing specific processors. Its engineers can, while working in conjunction with other experts at Apple, tailor the design of the processor to exactly the performance demands of Apple's specific software and hardware profiles. Tailoring the hardware and software together allows for getting more efficiency out of lesser-on-paper hardware. It's what will allow the iPhone 4S to stay competitive with just a dual-core 800MHz A5 processor whlie its compeitors start approaching dual-core 2GHz processors. A more integratedly designed whole allows for getting the same performance out of a less power hungry device (thereby requiring less battery life) or more performance out of the same power consumption profile.

A bigger point: If Apple had simply chosen to get an outside vendor to come up with their design for iOS device processors with some involved design, but the iOS devices' specific design decisions were contrary to what the designers' other clients wanted in high enough volume, Apple would be at the mercy of the design firm's changing expertise. With its own in-house processor design engineers Apple can focus on learning and excelling at core design ideas or principles important to Apple's roadmap which others might overlook. While they're unlikely to shatter the core of processor design, they can at least give Apple an extra edge in specific areas that add up.

Coming back to the Anobit deal: This isn't about securing flash supplies, though that is certainly a side benefit. This is about acquiring experts in flash management circutry. Processors have over time integrated more and more on to a single die with recent years accelerating the trend (memory controllers, graphics processors, larger amounts of cache memory). Instead of looking to what Apple can do with what Anobit provides right now, people should be looking at what Apple will be able to do with Anobit's expertise as technology advances. Incorporating flash memory and flash memory controllers more tightly with the cpu can lead to power savings and performance improvements even with the same exact flash technology. Integration at the design level means Apple can create a product designed from the top down to perform exactly as they need with traditional specs much lower than the same performance would require from other vendors with less integrated design.

This isn't about products and supplies. It's about expertise, design, and integration.