Apple doesn't need to cheat because the last phone that was slower than its predecessor was the iPhone 4. Ever since then, every successor has had a faster gpu while rendering the same number pixels and therefore outperforms on the benchmarks and battery life. Above 300 PPI, you are just wasting battery life and hurting performance to display pixels the human eye can't even resolve. I wish more android manufactures had the guts to follow Apple's engineering wisdom here.

As a 12+ year Linux users, I have to give Shuttleworth some rope to hang or prove himself. For example, back in Gnome 2x-3x transition days, Gnome panel was broken for widescreen devices like LCD monitors and netbooks.[1] Unity turned out a bloated for my taste, but I fully understand his frustration with Gnome. In the end, for heavy weight desktops, I prefer Unity over Gnome 3.

PulseAudiois fine for playing music, but a real PITA for many hardcore gamers[2][3] including myself. I found latency was terrible with Wine + PA and later saw the developers had an issue with PA too.[4] After countless hours lost trying to debug some PA issues, I lost all respect for Poettering. The only worse sound server that I’ve encountered is AudioFlinger, and at least that has the excuse of being optimized for battery life over latency. So like Shuttleworth, I'm skeptical about any of Poettering's work.

Now to the meat of the debate, Mir. It's clear X11 is fundamentally broken for modern desktop/GPUs. [5] It needs to die and I don't care if it is replaced by Mir or Wayland. I have been hearing about Wayland for years now, and only after Mir was announced did I start to hear about it actually reaching a usable state. I wish they'd work together but maybe a little competition will help us all to finally rid Linux of X11.

[1] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=86382

[2] http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/linux-and-open-source/pulse...

[3] http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=960195

[4] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTEyODM

[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44

I'm deeply disappointed that this issue was decided over philosophical instead of technical merits. If Clang was superior to GCC in the majority of benchmarks, then I would support this decision. But that’s not the case, GCC is still leading in most benchmarks and can be an order of magnitude faster when the popular OpenMP library is used.[1] Sadly, BSD users are the losers here.

[1] http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=llvm_33svn_competes&num=5

Agreed. All the important edits that I've made, were from a desktop where I could properly research and cite my changes. I could only see this being useful for minor edits and for people in poorer countries that only have smartphones. However, people that can only afford to get online with a smartphone, will probably have more urgent issues than editing Wikipedia. I've also seen quite a bit of vandalism from highschool addresses. Making it easier for bored teenagers in class to graffiti Wikipedia may not be the best idea.

I always thought Alastair Reynolds' "Revelation Space" would make a great series of movies. Lets see how the Hollywood "Ender's Game" turns out.

The key issue here is that these web technologies are being shoehorned into areas they were never designed for. From Document Object Model being used for Applications to the lightweight scripting language, JavaScript, being used for heavy weight programming of course the end result is going to be a poor mobile experience.

If W3C and WHATWG seriously want to compete with Android and iOS Apps, they should consider throwing out the DOM and CSS standards and starting over. JavaScript can be fixed, but DOM/CSS are so technically flawed to the core, the sooner they're depreciated, the sooner the web has a real chance as being a generic platform for applications.

This is one of major flaws behind these Web based Mobile OS’s, you think that after WebOS, beautiful as it was, Mozilla would have learned their lesson. Instead, they’re trying to drive underpowered hardware with a HTML/JS. All the web technologies are being shoehorned into areas they were never designed for. From DOM being used for Applications to the lightweight scripting language, JavaScript, being used for Apps, to a bloated HTML render as the platform's UI toolkit.

JavaScript is a nice little scripting language that’s got some nice functional programming features. When you need to need to write heavy applications that require performance, low memory usage, and multithreading, it’s the wrong choice.

I think BSD/Linux is a brilliant idea. I started off with SOLARIS and various flavors of BSD and have gradually moved over to GNU/Linux for hardware compatibility. Linux has finally reached BSDs rock solid stability, but I still miss the rc scripts, logical parameters, and well written man files of the BSD userland. Have you tried Starch Linux?

And, maybe if you had either
A) RTFA or
B) watched http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44&autoplay=1
You could have added something Intelligent to this conversation.

While these "successful takedowns" are great PR, the dirty secret is that by only taking down the C&C servers, the zomie machines just end up under different servers. MS has no issue applying updates without user permission to healthy PCs, so why not clean these infected ones? That would actually do some long term damage to these bot nets.

Except the user experience that makes Chrome so popular was never its look. It had always been its responsiveness. Instead of copying superficial things like version numbers and menu buttons, Mozilla should have never abandoned Electrolysis, the multiprocess overhaul to Firefox.

My company's president complains about the commute and company pays for Limo and chauffeur, so he can be more productive. Elon pays to get the highway fixed up with his own money. I need to get my resume polished up, so I can find a position at SpaceX or Tesla.

The real Hypocrisy is the government and legal system of China. As someone who's lived in China. they have ZERO respect for IP laws. Just downstairs from my apt I had a better selection of western and Chinese pirated DVDs than blockbuster, DVD's of Movies that are still playing in the Cinema. I'd often see the local cops come in to BUY DVDs. This is not some backwards city. This is Shanghai and Shenzhen I'm talking about.

They only reason this law is being enforced is that it's Apple and the government is trying to "send a message". Any Chinese owned store, especially with Communist connections, these violations would be ignored.

Say what you will about Ubuntu, of all the Linux distros, it has the most polished out of the box experience. In my career, I’ve probably installed close to a thousand Linux images and Ubuntu has consistently provided best hardware compatibly and least issues over the years. When Unity was started, the Gnome 2.x panel, was completely broken and useless in vertical mode, necessary for 720p netbooks and widescreen monitors. Gnome 3.x was looking to be the next KDE 4.0.

So I can understand Shuttleworth's desire for something like Unity, but what I disagree with is how he went about it. Instead of going off on his own with Unity and Mir forks, He should have worked with Gnome and Wayland to fix what was broken. See the Mint MATE project for how Ubuntu should have proceeded with Unity. All of these unnecessary forks just weaken and already stretched thin open source development efforts.

"Where I live helium is ridiculously expensive. So I went with the much cheaper alternative, hydrogen. It’s also more buoyant, about 8% more. Which means a higher burst altitude as you can use less gas."

Bonus points for using hydrogen instead of helium. Hydrogen is not dangerous if handled properly and helium is a scarce resource needed for many medical uses like MRIs.