From the Nintendo era onward, the vast majority of video game controllers have named their face buttons after letters in the alphabet — almost always picking from A, B, C, X, Y and Z — with the exception of the Sony Playstation and its progeny.
I never thought to question the Playstation’s combination of square, circle, triangle and X, but the folks at Famitsu magazine did. 1UP relays the magazine’s conversation with Sony designer Teiyu Goto:
We wanted something simple to remember, which is why we went with icons or symbols … I gave each symbol a meaning and a color. The triangle refers to viewpoint; I had it represent one’s head or direction and made it green. Square refers to a piece of paper; I had it represent menus or documents and made it pink. The circle and X represent ‘yes’ or ‘no’ decision-making and I made them red and blue respectively.
ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley 
To discourage people from buying used video games, THQ and EA Sports recently started 
A day after the New York Times wrote about 
Gmail recently added a couple new features that I’m pretty stoked about, as reported by The Next Web. The first is 
If you lack scruples, you might be interested to know that some hackers found an early version of Halo: Reach on Xbox Live, stole it, and put the code on file-sharing websites.
If Google Voice is the Swiss Army knife of call management services, speech-to-text voicemail transcription is the questionable nail file. Google Voice’s transcription failures are well-documented around the Internet–
You needn’t look far to find criticism of Apple’s iPad as a device for consumption, not creation.
Although I never found much utility in Other OS, a Playstation 3 feature that could turn the console into a basic computer running Linux, my heart went out to people who used Other OS before Sony scrapped it.
Like it or not, technology has a vain side, one that strives to make things pretty as well as functional.