Don't read it as a decimal number. Each point separates whole numbers. 3.14 is simply a way of writing Version "3", subversion "14". 3.4 is a way of saying Version "3", subversion "4". 2.40.9 would be version "2", subversion "40", sub-subversion "9". It would also be equivalent to write 02.40.09 - but that would just be tedious and a waste of space.

Its also worth to remember than for congested systems, a single percentage reduction in traffic will yield a significantly higher percentage improvement in service speed. 90% congestion to 85% congestion gives a huge reduction to average waiting times.

A mess. Google refuses to have anything to do with APNG, preferring MNG instead. Firefox and Opera (up to v12) support APNG - but not MNG. Safari and IE supports neither.
General image software support is poor for both.

Yeah... I'm not leaving the 12.xx branch. Thats for sure.

Sluggish to react to homescreen presses (whether its to return to homescreen or just enter the 'multitasking menu'), and when in the Settings app and tapping one of the sections - it often takes about half a second for the options on the right to load, sometimes upwards a second. Responsive sure as damn hell isn't what I'd call it - and theres not even animations causing the delay. The core OS is just plain slow. It also doesn't respond reliably to swipe-up gestures in order to force-close apps, normally taking several attempts before it gets what I'm trying to do.

What? Its exactly the type of failure that -always- happens. Its wear based failure that doesn't normally happen, since most SSDs have enough endurance to last a typical user a hundred years or more. The electronics (controller chip) however don't have that endurance, and its the electronics that cause these sudden deaths. HDDs are as susceptible to them as SSDs are - the difference is HDDs also encounter mechanical failures, so when a HDD dies - its not as likely to be from this problem.

The problem more lies in that there are several games whose performance is dictated by the per-thread performance of the CPU, and virtually never by the total performance of the CPU.

The video game norm is to have 2 main threads and one GPU driver thread ("3 core utilization"). There'll be a whole bunch of secondary threads as well - but these consume negligible amounts of time (tops 5% or so totalling all of them), and many are only triggered in specific conditions - such as when the game needs to load new resources.

Consequently, even a 4 core CPU can have one of its cores idling pretty much at 100%, and there will nearly always be a fair bit of spare resources on the GPU driver thread, and often on the secondary 'main' thread. Far more than enough to run anything and everything in the background, save recording software in some configurations - backgrounds tasks simply aren't CPU demanding enough to care.

Skype has never been suited for any large decentralized gaming group or organization - thats always been the purpose of dedicated host systems like TS/Mumble.
Skype does however the advantage for smaller, 2 or 3 man groups.

Or as is the use in WoW: Skype for Arenas, Mumble for Raids.

TPM is normally not included in consumer motherboards. You have to purchase a separate TPModule that plugs into the motherboard's TPM header, and thats assuming the motherboard even has that header in the first place (read the specsheet). The Asus Z77 Deluxe in this machine for example - has no TPM header, and thus has no TPM. Newer versions of that motherboard firmware does include SecureBoot support - but older versions do not. However that must be manually activated, as it defaults to disabled (and consequently must be re-activated every time you reflash/update the firmware). In addition, custom keys are supported.

TPM requires (for Intel) support from the CPU - and some consumer level CPUs (notably the K series) lack that support. The extremely common 3570K for example - cannot use TPM. So in the above case, support is missing on the motherboard level, and on the CPU level. The newer Haswell variants (for both) still has the same inability.

You can still see the beacon that the wi-fi network transmits (every 100ms or so); which is also what you use to find the access points with SSIDs in the first place. The 'hidden' networks just don't contain anything in the SSID field, but everything else is still there.

The power cost for transferring a single bit has not really changed over the years (if anything, its increased). The power cost of decoding a set of bits however constantly decreases.

Its always been more power efficient to employ more complex compression (more CPU work) over transferring more bits. Even for non-specialized CPUs this is true, never mind when you have hardware decoders.

It depends on the book, and depends on what you need to do.
I find eBooks a proper pain if you need to go back and fourth between a select set of pages. Theres no convenient or easy way to 'glance' on one page and then quickly return. In fact, you normally can't return at all. You can setup bookmarks, but the process is much slower and clumsier than done with a traditional book. You also cannot scan pages anywhere near as quickly when using an eBook versus a traditional book - for when you need to find a section of text (or a table) of which you are not certain its exact name or placement in the book in question.
eBooks due to their portability do work well though if you mostly need access to a single or specific section(s), where jumps are small or non-existant, or for sequential reading.
For fictional literature, eBooks are convenient. For learning materials, they're often poor.

Steam titles still run natively, all steam does is provide an additional overlay - which a lot of other software (voice-com especially) also does. Performance difference is essentially ignorable when theres nothing to show, it won't have anything to show unless you explicitly trigger the correct hotkey - or on special events like LOW BATTERY or MESSAGE RECEIVED.

It still undergoes a P/E cycle however. The erase process is very time consuming, and SSD performance is severely impacted if it has to do those on the fly. SE on drives with Encryption still has the role to reset the drive so that it performs at peak capacity afterwards, which means draining all the cells. Skipping the P/E cycle would mean that drive performance would be severely reduced.

That said, for SSDs - would not a Secure Erase take care of even remapped sectors? Seeing as its just a blind 'flush all cells' operation.