Willing to bet the answer to that is "no." Meaningful features are a cudgel used to bludgeon customers into buying new Windows licenses, after all!

At least for the Lumia 820 replacing the battery's trivial. Just pop off the plastic shell and the battery's exposed and removable - in fact you have to take it out in order to replace the SD card or put in a microSD card for expansion. That was a major incentive for purchasing it, in fact: I like having some ability to expand a phone's storage capacity without being subjected to markup, or replace a battery when it starts underperforming. And between Google's increasing resistance to upgradeable storage and how badly I got burned by the Cliq XT I suffered through for two years, I wasn't willing to play in Android's ballpark this time aroud.

That he found stuck to the bottom of his foot.

That's not valid for AMD cards or IGPs because PhysX is Nvidia-only. If companies start using OpenCL to implement physics acceleration that could change.

It doesn't make it right that a Democratic shitnozzle got away with petty politicking either. The main difference comes down to economic damage done, and to the fact that at least one death can probably be laid at the feet of Christie's (office's) misbehavior.

I'd kill for an equivalent to foobar2000 in Linux. "Just run foobar in Wine" isn't really a solution, as it's not quite well-behaved in some particulars, and doesn't solve the root problem. VLC's dependable, but still feels like a stopgap. C'mon, guys - where's loobar2000? *cringes*

How bizarre. (Ooh, baby)

I'll, uh, show myself out then, yeah? Yeah. *cough*

Unless you had a connection to a wholesaler or a very generous refurb / used parts store, I have some trouble believing that. I swung a good deal around 1999 on a 17" CRT that maxed out at 1280x1024 at 60 Hz, and it set me back around $250, and that was a typical price. 1600x1200 was a "professional" resolution, usually isolated (as you say) to 20+" screens, and were basically a pipe dream for most consumers. The cheapest of those cost nearly twice what my model did, and a really good one could set you back substantially more. "Or maybe even" sounds like there's room for confusion in your recollection of events here - there is simply no WAY you got a working 2048x1536 monitor for $200 back when Quake III Arena was the graphical state of the art. Finally, five years ago would have been nearly a decade after the 90s ended, and well into the mass market commodification and development of scale economies that only started in earnest after the release of Windows 95. I can believe you snagged two LCDs at that price with some luck at a Black Friday sale back then. But "circa Y2K" and "or maybe even" suggest that this is either temporally confused or at least a touch disingenuous. Who are you trying to impress?

Yeah, if said PC gamers were completely loaded financially... Most '90s gamers felt pretty lucky if they could manage 1280x1024, especially given the limitations of hardware at the time.

The market segment's gotten mature, and the product releases aren't as exciting any more. I really can't argue with that because it's true. I'm sad to see AMD's per-core performance so low, though my FX-8320's been a gem for the work I do. Here's to Maxwell and Broadwell.

Number crunching with MATLAB on big datasets can eat a lot of CPU time - it's better not to wait longer than you have to, and throttling will hold you back. Ditto video transcoding and other kinds of scientific computing (like oil reservoir simulation...), or distributed computing projects like BOINC. But for most use cases you're right: there's just not that much stuff typical users do that needs to grind on a CPU for even minutes at a time, let alone hours or days.

My sympathies on the RAM. That's the most evil kind of corner-cutting to save a couple of bucks.

Good news: you would notice a HUGE difference jumping from a Conroe/Kentsfield quad to Haswell. I don't say that lightly: the jump from the Core 2 to Nehalem was already on the order of 40+% per clock, and substantially more for embarrassingly multithreaded work, and each iteration of the i* series has squeezed more benefits. In terms of IPC Haswell would be around twice as fast with higher clocks to boot, and would come in at maybe 2/3rds the power usage of the Q6600. I want Broadwell to be good too, but I've got to emphasize how profoundly not sad you would be to upgrade at this point. And the 650 Ti Boost is a decent card, but is already being limited by the Q6600, guaranteed.

I wouldn't say that's strictly true - Mavericks implements OpenCL 1.2 support pervasively, even down to the rinky-dink Intel GPUs that can handle it.

Only in the sense that the Linux 2.2 kernel is the base for modern Linux distributions. A lot of work's happened between here and there.

Isn't the refrain - borne out by numerous financial statements by the sued companies and others besides - that optical drives are pricing themselves into extinction with razor-thin margins due to fierce competition and decreasing demand? It's possible HP has a valid point or has stumbled onto evidence, but this sounds more like flailing before declaring that optical drives will be an optional feature going forward...