If it's for a life partner, it's the result of a gross misconception. Your profile in dating sites is supposed to restrict your responses to those from people you might get along with, not to maximize responses. Of course you want to maximize responses from people suited to you, so you might want to refrain from posting pictures in unflattering lighting or of, say, your penis being inserted into a meat grinder (even if well lit). Unless it's really important to you that your would-be partner approves of that kind of thing, I suppose - in this case, it might be justifiable. At least you'll be getting messages to ask if the grinder was turned on. And you could respond with "no, but you'll be". You know what? Screw my hasty reproach, it sounds like the best idea I ever had.

I'm also confused by all the bashing. This Ubuntu phone is firmly grounded on Moto G levels of price and hardware specifications, and that phone was a major hit. It's not 2010 - you don't *need* a flagship phone for browsing the web or the UI decently. Flagship GPUs are incredibly overspecced for everything except HD gaming, which is not something most people would want to do on their phones, especially since they drain the battery pretty heavily. The screens are also overkill. QHD screens on phones look beautiful, but what's their point? Are you going to watch a movie on a 5" screen? Do they even release movies on QHD? That'd be a heck of a big file. No, you're mostly going to stare at a beautifully rendered UI for brief periods. Even briefier considering those screens tax the battery like mad.

Rant aside, what I mean is bashing a new phone for having sensible specs just seems weird to me.

You know what? You're right. I guess my brain rose-tinted the first film in comparison to Into Darkness, in very much the same way as it seems like a good idea to eat someone's dry shit than for my mouth to be blasted with diarrhea from three truckers who live on a strict diet of grilled cheese. Or, for an even grosser metaphor, how it seems The Phantom Menace isn't that bad when compared to Attack of the Clones. At least I can find amusement in seeing Rob Roy "pull out his little laser sword and go to town".

Agree with you on pretty much everything. As for JJ Abrams's, there's a distiction to be made: the first one was actually somewhat enjoyable, despite the absurdities (red matter? WTF?). In Into Darkness, absolutely nothing made sense. Really, plot and character-wise, it was worse than Yor.

They really, really are. My god, this Spock is SO MUCH better than Quinto's it's embarassing. All the cast is pretty great (with the exception of Grant - he's not an actor, and it unfortunately shows), with the new Scotty being the highlight of the series. Really, they god pretty much everything - pacing, writing, acting - right. Which is the main problem, I guess, since they enter uncanny valley territory. The new Kirk is great, very well done, very well researched, fights like a drunk Wrestlemania participant, exactly like the original... which seems to highlight the minuscule differences left in speech and body language (he should talk louder and faster, for instance). But really, a great, great job. I think we're all impressed and they'll surely get some of my money.

That's a gross misconception, to say the least. It has managed to attract lots of auto manufacturers, especially in the last decade, coupled with a global recession and a boom in purchasing power. Even Foxconn has brazilian factories for serving the local market, which is saying something.

It does. Either Anand or Ars, I can't recall, tested 5.0 on a Nexus 5, with encouraging results. So I upgraded, and found out the worst bugs were related to power management. While the number of wakelocks seems to have been reduced - props to Google for that -, my Nexus 4 just refused to sleep while plugged in, which meant longer charging periods when plugged to the wall and heavy discharging when plugged to a 0.5A USB port. As the only way to charge whilst in the car is via USB, I was very dissatisfied. Also, the new battery monitor is a major regression both in the way that it represents drain per app and on bugs. Wifi is listed as being always on, for instance. Add to that the unpleasant extra steps to unlock your device, such as having to swipe up to then enter the unlock pattern. Very annoying when it's an extra step that serves no practical purpose, especially considering how many times we tend to reach into our pockets to use smartphones nowadays. So, while Lollipop is indeed prettier, the major, showstopper charge bug and questionable UI deisgn choices made me revert to KitKat.

Well, what you say is actually related to the truth. Very vaguely related. It's like truth's second counsin's wife's nephew. They met once, in passing, when you had the idea of saying Catalyst on Windows isn't hard to surpass, then never saw each other again. Considering how crass, dismissive and injust what you said was, it's no wonder truth didn't want to see it again. Which is funny, since pretty much everyone, after some thought, seems to think truth has those exact same characteristics.

But I digress. It's not hard to surpass Catalyst on Linux... in OpenGL workloads. Try running an application that uses DirectX in Windows, then compare its performance to OpenGL in Windows, then compare it to Linux. The problem is games are mostly tuned to DirectX, and Catalyst is mostly tuned to those games. Despite AMD's latest efforts, OpenGL on Windows, and for open source games nonetheless, is pretty unimpressively optimized. Even the open radeon driver can surpass Windows. Were a different game, like, say, Left 4 Dead 2 used, you could investigate more throughly, but Phoronix doesn't really do that.

As for nuking a system install due to Catalyst... that's certainly not the case. Hasn't been since at least 2010, I'm afraid. Not that the installer is good or user-friendly, but removing Catalyst is quite a brain-free operation, even if your distribution doesn't provide it already packaged.

Could be. However, I can attest to Firefox not playing well with nVidia drivers on Windows. Firefox stutters and freezes often when scrolling unless I disable HW accel. It's fine on Linux, for some reason. Also fine were Catalyst on Win and Linux, and the open Radeon driver on the latter (I replaced an old 5570), which rules out a bad HW component. Another change I saw was the Windows logo animation - Catalyst would freeze it for two seconds and then resume normally. Nvidia seems unable to load it, showing a black screen and skipping to the desktop. Other than that, though both cards and drivers seemed to work flawlessly. Even fglrx, since about 2011, unless trying to use Wine.

Legged in just to bitch about how depressing it is for AMD when "newer (but still not the most recent) kernel support" is the highlight of their much-touted special edition OMEGA driver. I'd like to know if performance for Linux users of older cards is better, though I think performance improvements are being the focus only for the SI cards and above. If that's indeed the case, I think the open Radeon driver will surpass Fglrx very soon, at least for the 5000-6000 series.

The jedi were cool and popular. So they based the whole prequel trilogy around them, and we all know how that turned out. Sometimes the best thing you can do if leave the coolest chacter in the sidelines.

Well, /. is filled with news of smartphones - announcements, rumours and whatnot. New tech reviews also appear pretty heavily. And this isn't just a smartphone review. It's a piece about how little manufacturers, as a whole, value their customers for low end devices, taking advantage of their historically low expectations. Pretty much every manufacturer sells absolute crap on the low end. The only exceptions I can think of are Apple, since they simply don't deal on the low end spectrum, Motorola, who has been churning out genuinely good products like the E and G, and Microsoft/Nokia, on select devices such as the Lumia 520. This is followed by a brief economical commentary on the failure of the market to provide us with good products.

Given that tech and economy are the two most proeminent topics of conversation here (well, that and indiscriminate flaming), I don't see why it shouldn't be here, even if I didn't particularly like the piece.

It depends. If you add about 30 mins of cycling to work and back every day, that adds 600 calories to your list, but then you could remove about 25.000 calories that would be used in driving a car. And, since you're talking calories per capita, if enough people did that and less cars were needed, you could subtract the savings from the whole auto industry, which include energy needed to power factories, extract raw materials, build factories and retailers, shipping... I can't really estimate, but it would be pretty significant if you consider it takes about 240.000 calories just for the welding of a single car in the assembly line (source: www.energystar.gov/ia/business/industry/LBNL-54036.pdf ). Now think along these lines about heating, too, and you'll see the enourmous savings we get by adding some manual effort.

I'm sorry this isn't xkcd.

I thought, in Microsoft's case, the CEO was the Chairman.