No it doesn't. Good programmer != good build engineer. You can be a superb code architect without knowing anything about CMake, or you can be an expert in the build process whilst being a merely competent software engineer. Every so often you'll find someone who is superb at both. Software development is a team exercise, so it doesn't really matter if some people are better at one than the other, the only thing that is important is that your team can cover both bases.

Bletchley park called, and they'd like their place in computing history back.

So long as you are prepared to use a noticeably different GLSL version to GL3+ (with differing syntax), and don't mind designing your code around pre-HW instancing, and don't mind doing lots of work on the CPU that could be done using transform feedback, and don't mind the lack of vertex array objects, and don't mind manually setting every individual uniform param separately (instead of loading them in a uniform buffer), and don't mind the inability to manually specify the vertex attribute layouts from within the shader, and don't mind the inability to specify the fragment shader outputs (since GL2 only specifies gl_FragColor); then yes you could do 'clean shader-based programming' (albeit a variation of shader based programming that has none of the functionality you'd expect to find in a clean shader-based programming API, thereby forcing you to do far more in C than should really be necessary). The AC was bang on the money, but I fear you've missed the point by quite some margin....

Chrome libs includes a free cloud based backup solution for your data and passwords, all paid for by the NSA.

They've had the same QC issues with Nvidia chips in MBP's in the past (GT8600M). Last time they extended the warranties. This time.... ?

Theoretically that's the situation in the UK, although in practice there appears to be collusion between the big six companies to effectively fix prices....

Hopefully when the tech has matured and mutated for 15 years or so, it'll be swimming in sewers. I imagine it will have developed a love of renaissance artists by them....

The UK is a member of the EU, and as such the European Court of Justice has a higher authority than any UK court, or the government.....

Find an EU law that the UK government has broken (shouldn't be too hard!), and then file a case. If the case is from an individual, then the European Court of Human Rights may be an alternative. (IAANL, so YMMV)

I have written the 3D renderers for a number of commercial software packages for the film VFX and games industries. The parent is right. PEBKAC. The drivers are fine. You are a shitty developer (who needs to make sure your code conforms to the GL/D3D spec properly).

Nvidia drivers are shittier than AMD. End of story. AMD drivers implement the graphics API's to the letter. Nvidia lets any old crap through. The result, is that apps developed on Nvidia GPUs, rarely conform to the target graphics API, and as a result end up failing on AMD/Intel hardware (although admittedly Intel can also fail due to either a lack of resources, or the occasional bug). If an app fails on AMD, blame the shitty software you're running, not the drivers. AMD releasing mantle would appear to me to be nothing more than a way of forcing Nvidia to adhere to an API spec for a change, rather than routinely ignoring it (as they do now)

Although the fact that elapsed time is in minutes whilst the other times are in seconds, might have something to do with it....

Last time I checked, 11 minutes was greater than 250 seconds. ('%e' is the default format for user/system time [seconds], '%E' is the format time for elapsed time [minutes]. The different formatting should have been a big hint).

I agree. He's not testing compiled code performance, he's just created a set of tests which will all be memory bandwidth limited. FTA:

That's all I needed to read to ignore him completely. Completely and utterly pointless. If g++ won, it is likely because it utilised stream intrinsics to avoid writing data back to the CPU cache, which would have freed up more cache, and minimised the number of page faults. This will not in anyway test the performance of the CPU code, it will just prove that your 1333Mhz memory is slower than your 3Ghz processor . This is why you don't profile code (wrapped up in a stupid for loop), but profile whole applications instead. From my own tests (measuring the performance of large scale applications using real world data sets), intel > clang > g++ (although the difference between them is shrinking). The author of the article hasn't got a clue what he's doing. FTA:

No it isn't. It's because your CPU is sat idle whilst it waits for something to do.

Most tech companies prefer to hire experienced engineers from overseas, than inexperienced graduates from next door. (Certainly that's what we did when I worked for a tech company in Oxford anyway....)

I imagine they're blocked by patents.