Previously, Osama Bin Laden knocked out Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, and President Obama defeated Steve Jobs, but the Google Duo held out until the semifinals, when President Bush liberated them. That is officially the oddest sentence I have ever written. Way to go, Washington Post. This is incredibly weird. [Washington Post via Wonkette]

Those are my favorite charts in the bunch (and probably the most useful ones), but you can follow the links to check out the rest. My only request is that you give me a cozy cabin somewhere peaceful when you use this knowledge to succeed where I've failed. [Flickr via Bibliodyssey via io9]

iSuppli's latest PS3 teardown finds Sony losing a mere $31.27 less than its manufacturing costs. Of course, these figures don't take into account software development, marketing or any of these other not-insignificant costs that go into putting the PS3 on store shelves.

But hey, it's nice to see Sony not absolutely bleeding money, even after a significant price cut. [iSuppli]

In this map, which takes into account all the documented nuclear tests since 1945, two things really stand out. The few days in 1945 that saw the only use of nuclear weapons on humans register, when measured on the unfeeling scale of kilotons, as two small blips, aberrant in their location but unremarkable in their size. Then you see the key: The scale is not linear. If it was, the larger explosions would cover most of the map. That's the thing with nuclear weapons: It's easy to lose your sense of scale when it comes to how powerful they are, or what havoc they can wreak.

It paints (or visualizes) an unflattering portrait of the fifties and sixties not as golden years of postwar recovery and American prosperity, but as the years that the US and the Soviet Union, in blind competition with one another, spent all their time and untold amounts of their money blowing their own countries up. History! [DataVis]

UPDATE: Swapped image for original infographic, from Radial Cartography—Thanks, Adam!

iSuppli's quarterly report on computer shipments is a little dry, but today's report that Dell's shipments declined 5.9% caught our eye. It's easy enough to blame the economy, but not when your major competitors are all growing, and especially not when Acer knocks you out of the number two spot. It's true that netbooks and pricing are big factors in Acer's success, and that Dell's still second—barely—to HP in total shipments. But someone in Round Rock needs to realize that what's true for plants and populations is also true for computer companies: if you don't grow, you die. [iSuppli via Electronista]

That the iPhone is a massive source of online traffic isn't a surprise—that's been apparent since the week it launched. What's interesting here is Android's rise, which is dramatically quickening, already accounting for a fifth of mobile traffic in the US, when the real marketing push for the OS, starting with the MyTouch ads and the massive Droid launch, is only recently starting in earnest. What is a surprise, or at the very least a Sad Thing, is how poorly Palm is faring. Their tiny sliver of market share might seem understandable since they really only had one new phone for the duration of the survey, but this phone was supposed to be their savior; in the year since it was introduced, their mobile traffic actually fell.
Google and Apple's stark gain in the stats, collected by mobile advertising firm AdMob, is a little less spectacular worldwide, mainly because Symbian's established, but waning, 40% smartphone market share helps it snatch about 25% of mobile web traffic. Still though, two things are clear: Android and the iPhone are who mobile web developers are going to have to cater to, and WebKit, which Symbian uses in its browser too, is basically it.

Anyway, how about a bonus chart! Ever wondered how common the different Android handsets are, which is most popular, and which don't register? Well hello, extra pie:

The G1 is the predictable star here, but the Droid is exploding. [AdMob via Techcrunch]

They say that sub-$400 netbooks are 20 percent more likely to fail in the first year. But no real surprises there.

SquareTrade says it randomly selected over 30,000 laptops and netbooks covered by its warranty plans for the study. Brands with a minimum of 1000 laptops included Acer, Apple, Asus, Dell, Gateway, HP, Lenovo, Sony, and Toshiba. Accidental damage and software issues handled by the retailer were not included in the numbers.

Summary below, while the full report can be found at: [SquareTrade]

• Over 31 percent of laptops will fail in the first three years of ownership.
• Of these failures, two-thirds came from hardware malfunctions (20.4 percent) and one-third (10.6 percent) was reported as accidental damage.
• Asus and Toshiba were the most reliable manufacturers, with fewer than 16 percent having a hardware malfunction over three years.
• Netbooks are projected to have a 20 percent higher failure rate from hardware malfunctions than more expensive laptop computers.
• Manufacturers proved to be a more reliable determinant of reliability than the type of laptop and should be a greater factor in making a purchase decision.

Of course, many AAA games are still doing quite well. Just last week. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 launched with the biggest entertainment opening of all time, selling about 5 million copies across platforms and pulling in about $310 million in a single day. [Silicon Alley Insider via Kotaku]

The magazine drew together reader survey results with their own internal data to evaluate peoples' experiences repairing and replacing certain classes of products, and the results aren't terribly surprising: Point and shoot cameras are cheap and difficult to repair, and get noticeably more advanced over short periods of time, you may as well just replace them if they break outside of two years of ownership. LCD HDTVs? Hold on a little longer.

Granted, the general trend here seem to be that it's not worth repairing anything that's more than a few years old, so it's less a guide about when to replace than confirmation that today's gadgets—even the most expensive ones—are more or less disposable. Full chart below. (Click to enlarge) [Consumer Reports via Consumerist]

Designer Christian Swinehart has parsed piles upon piles of Choose Your Own Adventure titles, and rendered them as a series of visualizations, from charts documenting how frequent "catastrophic" endings occur as opposed to "favorable" ones to animated representations of every single permutation of a given book to a digital copy of Zork: The Cavern of Doom, which tracks your every move on a visual graph.


Continue browsing the main site, because you have no sense of whimsy/had a horrifying childhood that you'd rather not be reminded of? Click here.

See your favorite childhood books, exploded into animated data sets? Click here. [via MetaFilter]

Number one is, predictably, Japan, where the average broadband speed is 60mbps and they pay $0.27 per 1mbps. We, in comparison, average 4.8mbps and pay $3.33 per 1mbps, putting us at #15. Be sure to click the above image to see it in its full glory. [Zach Klein]

Before I show these charts, created by Morgan Stanley analyst Mary Meeker, I should mention the obvious: Comparing one gadget to another in a different category is messy and inconclusive. iPhone adoption is different than, say, Wii adoption for lots of reasons: The iPhone is a phone, a gadget which pretty much everybody has and needs, and it combined the capabilities of a phone with that of an established hit, the iPod. In contrast, the Wii is a videogame system, a category with a totally different demographic, requiring different kinds of software and accessories. They're just not the same (and I only mentioned a couple reasons), and comparing unit shipments doesn't necessarily prove anything. However, it is interesting to see exactly what an absolute blockbuster the iPhone has been over its first ten quarters, and while we can't make any sweeping conclusions, we can say that the iPhone/iPod Touch is, as TechCrunch says, "the fastest-growing consumer electronics product of all time."

This next chart is also inconclusive, but pretty interesting: It compares the rate of growth in mobile internet to the rate of growth in desktop internet, in the mid-90s. Caveats apply again, of course, as the adoption of mobile internet is much easier than going from no internet to desktop internet. But certainly the iPhone has introduced easy-to-use mobile internet to the masses in much the same way that Netscape and AOL brought it to the home user a decade and a half ago, and the iPhone is making way quicker work of it.

As I said repeated, these charts aren't exactly ironclad evidence. But they do put the iPhone's remarkable rise to the top of the smartphone game in perspective, and it's hard to show in charts and graphs exactly how much it's changed the game of mobile devices. Those sales records are pretty impressive, after all, and there's no denying the impact it's had on today's gadget landscape. [TechCrunch via Twitter]

Also equally interesting: we have a higher percentage of male readers than the NFL, the NBA or even MAXIM. More women look at softcore boobies than look at gadgets! [Nielsen]

Click on the picture for a closer look.

The higher up in the hierarchy a distractions is, the more of a priority it's supposed to be. I'm not entirely sure I agree about a work email trumping a new pal's Facebook update, but it's a reasonable enough chart. What's your order of priorities? [Information is Beautiful]

Quicktime tests show the amount of CPU being used while playing back the bad ass trailer from James Cameron's Avatar at 1080p. that Quicktime 10, on Snow Leopard, is easily more efficient than old versions of Quicktime. Even on non supported H.264 hardware, like the Macbook Pro's 15-inch 8600GT card, it just works better in QT10. Note: "15-Inch PowerBook" is an error; should read 15-Inch MacBook Pro—all test machines are Intel-based


Geekbench is a synthetic benchmark testing cpu and memory performance. Snow Leopard, Apple claims, runs math much faster and geek bench tells that same story here when we use the 32 and 64-bit versions under Snow. Note: "15-Inch PowerBook" is an error; should read 15-Inch MacBook Pro—all test machines are Intel-based


Xbench is an older piece of software that tests an entire system, from cpu to disks to graphics. Oddly, Open GL performance on the 13inch Macbook was half that of what we saw in Leopard, which caused the score to drop a bit in Snow Leopard. Math processing was faster, however. Note: "15-Inch PowerBook" is an error; should read 15-Inch MacBook Pro—all test machines are Intel-based



Installation times were about 30% less in Snow, but the size of the install also dropped from 16GB to 10GB, so that makes a lot of sense to me. Common sense.


Zipping the same file up we used in our Quicktime tests showed Snow Leopard as faster, perhaps due to the improved math processing performance.
Using Google's v8 suite for javascript speed testing, Snow Leopard was faster using Safari 4 than Leopard. Firefox, for the record, isn't even close. Chrome might be, though.
Initial Time Machine Backups to a USB Drive were faster under Snow, too. Note: "15-Inch PowerBook" is an error; should read 15-Inch MacBook Pro—all test machines are Intel-based

Yes, it's smaller, which I believe is a first for an OS upgrade. How? They lost about 6GB (Apple claims 7GB) by ditching printer drivers and installing them on demand over the internet and all the binaries are now intel-only, ditching the Power PC support for good. Power PC apps still can run, though, by downloading or installing Rosetta virtual support for PowerPC apps from the install disc.

Notice there's no difference in these results between Snow and old Leopard. The reason? Handbrake hasn't been optimized for Snow yet.