Really off topic but I'll bite:

1600x900 here, on a one year old Fujitsu Lifebook E 782. Which is overall a nice but not really high end system. Typical prices used to be in the 900-950 Euro range a year ago. Today, the E554 seems to be its equivalent, available with 1.920 x 1.080 display for a bit over 800 Euro.

It seems that your management was just being cheap when they stuck you on laptops with a "720p" display ;-)

Well, GP explicitly mentioned gamers, who are quite the opposite of business users when it comes to upgrading.

Where businesses hesitate to upgrade, often to the point of running unsupported OS versions because "it works" (until it doesn't ;-), gamers tend to err on the side of being overenthusiastic.

That includes stuff like running alpha versions and beta drivers, and since Windows has by far the largest selection of available games, it has to be Windows for most of them. I predict that DirectX 12 really will drive adoption of Windows 10 in the home user market.

If that was true, I might pirate Windows and run Libre Office as my office suite (at home). Gaming is the only thing I still need Windows for...

It would be the only official source for updates for the original version. But if Windows was entirely open source, not just a few components, the third party version could accept whatever the third party wants.

I think it could be similar to CentOS cloning RedHat:
Switch out the trademaked logos, perhaps change a few URLs in the update mechanism to point to the servers of the third party and run the whole thing as "alternative" system...

I guess Intel might eventually get there. For midrange stuff at least. Their Iris Pro GPUs are already getting close to AMD's APUs.

But it is quite possible that they keep it as high price "laptop exclusive". Especially if AMD goes tits up.

Yes, but at least the overall efficiency is similar to Nvidia now.

Personally, I find the Fury too expensive and power-hungry, so I might get a new machine next year or 2017. When Zen and midrange HBM graphics cards are available.

Well, tell your boss about the email stash and how it may still be important. If he agrees, export the whole email stash into an archive. In the same discussion, you should arrange a storage location for the archive. After all, your successor has to know about where to find the archive, and it will probably your boss who has to tell him.

If management doesn't agree about preserving the emails, it's their problem if the mail disappears after 90 days.

Otherwise, I'll quote Rhook's sibling post:

Students are supposed to pay back their loans. Sure, some of them will default, but the assumption is that most of those loans will be paid back.

Defense contractors and healthcare companies usually keep their money.

It is not primarily an ad blocker, but as most ads are served via JavaScript, not allowing domains like ad.doubleclick.something will greatly reduce the flood of unwanted ads and scripts.

The RequestPolicy website also recommends NoScript as additional measure BTW.

Visual Studio being free is nice, but that alone won't help here.

At the very least, one would have to
1) audit the source code for back doors
2) compile the applications and Windows versions to be checked for backdoors from that source
3) and then
-either distribute the self-compiled programs within the organization
-or compare the hash values of the self-compiled programs to those bought from official sources.

Even with switching power supplies, 12v is not optimal because of the losses in the diodes. Even Schottky diodes have a voltage drop of 0.3v or so.

I think it would be a good idea to standardize on something in the 40-50 volt range for the DC grid in the house, with some leeway for adjusting the actual charging voltage to what is convenient for the battery.
A 42-volt electrical system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42-volt_electrical_system#Choice_of_voltage) comes to mind. Even if it did not really take off the first time around.

The Open Source AMD drivers tend to lag a few years behind, especially in performance, so the latest generation of cards (HD 7xxx and its rebrandings) is hardly better under Linux than the HD 6xxx series, despite being more capable hardware in theory. Really new models may not work at all or only in 2D.

Closed source AMD drivers still have an iffy reputation. Personally, I'd avoid them unless I really need the performance or a specific feature.

Sounds interesting, but might be too expensive in the short run and not as urgent. "Normal" system RAM tends to be larger than typical VRAM sizes but not as bandwidth-critical. Also, classical DIMM modules allow upgrading if necessary.

Where HBM as the combined system RAM looks interesting are consoles. The PS4 in particular already has
- an APU based design from AMD
- fast but expensive GDDR5 RAM
- a fixed, non - upgradeable memory size

That looks like a scenario which is just waiting for HBM. Though probably not in the current generation, as one of the main advantages (even higher bandwidth) might be irrelevant to a console with fixed performance requirements.

Well, I'm arguing for "only" sacking them. Unless they actually commited crimes, in which case any other employee would be financially liable too.

There is more in the works (Zen CPU cores), and I hope that will work out too. I have some AMD shares as well, but I'd also love to see serious competition again.

On the CPU side, AMD is even more behind Intel than it is on the GPU side behind Nvidia. If Zen can fix that, it will be even more important than catching up to Nvidia.

And considering APUs, one major drawback in the last years used to be memory bandwidth. Where discrete cards do reasonably well with GDDR5, APUs really get crippled by having to share DDR3 between CPU and GPU. A stack of HBM memory for the graphics RAM should do wonders here ;-)