Nothing useful to say here, but since I know this will turn into an AMD vs Nvidia thing, I just wanted to share how sick I am of those frickin' unskippable 3-second-long Nvidia promos that play every damn time I start half of my games. That's the only thing I have against them, but it's starting to be really irritating.[/firstworldproblems]

A person makes the argument that if it weren't for open-source software, proprietary products would likely cost more. You point out that a limited version of Visual Studio is free. How is that a counter-argument? If it weren't for open-source compilers and IDEs (which have existed since before 2003), do you think Visual Studio would still have a free version?

Yeah and just as some say GIMP doesn't compare to Photoshop, Paint.NET doesn't compare to GIMP, which is a lot more than a photo editor. For instance, I draw with the GIMP on a Wacom tablet. Paint.NET, which doesn't have pressure sensitivity, is useless for me.

As for painful to use, well, that's just like, your opinion, man. Me and the GIMP get along just fine.

I agree with everything you say except the part where you have to care what Gnome is doing. XFCE has helped me not care about Gnome for about 3 years now. It's not as feature rich or polished as the last versions of Gnome 2, but it's getting there.

Indeed. People are always talking about job loss, like it's some terrible thing when, if were were dong this correctly, we should be happy. Who doesn't like less work? But if we keep this attitude that if you don't work then you don't eat, we'll go down the same road as in Manna.

So you never care about the rate that things are changing,or weighted averages? Calculus is the rule book for dynamic systems, and you say it's not useful? Shit man, I'm not in IT, but even a layman doing simple personal finances could benefit from knowing calculus.

Or maybe your job is just very applied without much background theory. Hmm.. This page seems to have a bit of calculus involved.

Didn't the original scrolling intro always say "episode 4"?

You've earned the badge of boring, repetitive, unimaginative phone-game player. Here's a preview of the upcoming Angry Birds - Cut the Rope tie-in.

The next console generation disagrees. Sony and MS are both using AMD.

That's ridiculous. If we were the same, you wouldn't have the death penalty.
There would far less incarceration of your own citizens.
You would have had gay marriage years ago.
You wouldn't have started the war in Iraq.
Your literacy rate would be higher.
Your poverty rate would be lower.

These differences didn't just fall out of the sky. These are differences that come about because of our conscious decisions on who and what we vote for. Which makes us different from you. Deal with it.

Wow, from the first city to the next getting it, it was, what, about a year? And now another one in a matter of days. If my calculations are correct, all baryonic matter will be made of google fiber in a month, or so.

Awesome!

I'm surprised by how many people expected it to be so much better than the S3. When does a phone ever completely change in less than a year?

More importantly, who buys a phone in less than a year after their last? This isn't for people with an S3, it's for everyone else. Like me. I can't think of any line of phones where I would want to have each iteration. But I'll get this, and then I'll happily skip the S5, whatever it happens to be. The S3 isn't outdated now, and the S4 won't be outdated for a couple of years when the S6 comes along.

My tx2500 may be hot and loud as hell with a crappy OS. And yes, with a dim screen and inaccurate stylus. But it's still running, dammit!

Seriously though, there are better examples of good convertible tablets the OP could have come up with. Toshiba, Lenovo, Fujitsu all have had good touchscreens for years.

And if it's a slate form-factor that is supposed to be so special about the Surface, well, they're late. Samsung has had a decent slate since before win8. That rhymed.

http://xkcd.com/463/

I did, at least, skim the article, and I still don't know. Didn't X11 just (as in last few years) get replaced with x.org? This is another replacement already? Ok, before posting, I google and see this:

What's different now is that a lot of infrastructure has moved from the X server into the kernel (memory management, command scheduling, mode setting) or libraries (cairo, pixman, freetype, fontconfig, pango etc) and there is very little left that has to happen in a central server process. ... [An X server has] a tremendous amount of functionality that you must support to claim to speak the X protocol, yet nobody will ever use this. ... This includes code tables, glyph rasterization and caching, XLFDs (seriously, XLFDs!) Also, the entire core rendering API that lets you draw stippled lines, polygons, wide arcs and many more state-of-the-1980s style graphics primitives. For many things we've been able to keep the X.org server modern by adding extension such as XRandR, XRender and COMPOSITE ... With Wayland we can move the X server and all its legacy technology to an optional code path. Getting to a point where the X server is a compatibility option instead of the core rendering system will take a while, but we'll never get there if [we] don't plan for it.

which bored me to tears, so I'm no longer interested, but for those who are....