I think you're right. I've overclocked my i5 750 from 2.66 to 3.15, and the speed increase is.. well hard to spot. In benchmarks I certainly see it. It was much easier to do than in the good old days where it was jumper settings.

I think the gist of it, at least for me, is that there's fun in it anymore. I have relatively high end gear, at least at time of purchase, and it all basically guides you to overclocking. It's not as bad ass as it used to be.

This may be a bit biased since I now have much larger sum of disposable income compared to when I was overclocking.

I find the syncing feature in chrome the selling point. I had used firefox for years, but since they went to 4.0 the change was just too much.

Memory usage shouldn't really be a benchmark in modern browsers, sa RAM is basically free.
Memory leaks should, of course, be considered in the tests.

The advantages chrome gives me is speed on my laptop, the chrome-to-phone extension and ReadItLater.
All probably replicable on Firefox, but in the end it's just a piece of software. Just like KDE vs. GNOME, or MS Office vs OpenOffice.

Any good open source project has corporate backing. Look at Firefox, Linux, whatever.

Without funding you don't get the dirty work done, because nobody wants to investigate that tedious race condition when they can be implementing some new fancy feature.

KDE should have called 4.0 for 4.0 alpha, and focused all their energy on making it stable across platforms. The 3.5xx versions were power hungry, but innovated in so many other aspects.

Their focus seems to be diffused. They spread themselves too thin even though the GNOME 3 issues people are having is the greatest opportunity they've had in years. Bad management I say, that's all.

I run Windows Basic, because the transparency kinda pisses me off. I chose basic over classic because you can use arrow keys while holding ALT+TAB.

As for TFA, the writer has a point. For my linux machines I have chosen Trinity (re-incarnation of KDE 3.5), which looks like a cartoon drawing of todays desktops, but has all the functionality one could want.

OS X (not to mention the rest of the iProducts) is much worse in condescending than MS Office is. The OS assumes you are a retarded chimp, and the filemanager is inconfigurable (what's with the automatic unzip???).

I think this is a general development that is partly caused by our parents and grandparents all going online, not to mention every kid from the age of 7-8 and upward. In the old days there were only geeks and computers were seen as tools, today they are seen as a medium of expression through which users can punish developers by requesting retarded UI changes.

Maybe they should look at viruses and the immune system when designing spam filters.

It could also be the categories have merged in to fewer more general ones.

JavaScript has the corner cases where it kind of sucks. Many start out thinking it's object-oriented, it's in fact functional. New programmers have a hard time grasping the advanced scoping rules of it, the automatic statement termination, == vs === etc.

So in that sense it's really a hard language, not because of syntax or libraries, but due to the at times seemingly arbitrary behaviour.

But at least programmers would get the bad boy status with the ladies, and lets face it: It's worth all the coffee machines in the world!

Prisoners should learn to debug code, and take on some of the real issues in this world.

Android is as 3.0 not open, but linux still is. Tablets running android of any sort will be more open for that reason. The kernel is exposed, and you can flash any kernel you want on it.

It's true most units need to be "jailbroken" is some device-specific fashion, just like the iDevices, but what about freedoms such as running unsigned code? Developing apps for the devices using a non-Apple OS? Developing apps in something that isn't objective c?

For every device I buy, that has the opportunity to run user installed code of some sort I ask following questions:
- Will I be able to program it using my current hardware and/or with the hardware shipped with the product?
- If not will I be able to break it so I can program it using my current hardware?

iPads just don't meet that criteria. I don't like OSX and don't wish to use it, too bad for Apple they lock me out of the rest of their lineup.

Just play the game.

Choose a class you find appealing, try to level it, complete quests etc.

I am not a beta tester, but have tested betas before, and you're supposed to just play the game.

One might view the testing and breaking of security as a valuable contribution. How else will companies like RIM learn?

The icons are ugly and the styles never seem to get there. The layout does though.

KDE has the same issue. So many things done right, but missing the polish.

The two should really merge and create a desktop that doesn't suck. KDE 4.x is buggy, and mediocre at best. Gnome 3 is, from what I have experienced, trying to hard. Both rip off OSX instead of ripping off KDE 3.5 and Gnome 2x.

If you have the contract on your computer, assuming you have written it yourself or someone in your company has, I doubt you'll exceed the 10-20 MB of max attachment size on the most email servers. You just export it to PDF or something that is readable.

As for snooping I think it's easier to get data from an attack on a phone line (don't know about encryption on them?), than it is on an SSL encrypted e-mail server.