But they were leaked, in bits and peaces. ADEX, Rex 84 etc. I suppose now we can all safely assume that these are not pure imagination, but simply contorted parts of the real story.

Consumers are fine. The only benchmark that matters to a normal consumer is "How fast does it run my games?" and the answer for the 970 is "Extremely damn fast." It offers performance quite near the 980, for most games so fast that your monitor's refresh rate is the limit, and does so at half the cost. It is an extremely good buy, and I say this as someone who bought a 980 (because I always want the highest end toy).

Some people on forums are trying to make hay about this because they like to whine, but if you STFU and load up a game the thing is just great. While I agree companies need to keep their specs correct, the idea that this is some massive consumer issue is silly. The spec heads on forums are being outraged because they like to do that, regular consumers are playing their games happily, amazed at how much power $340 gets you these days.

They support two prior versions of OS-X and that's it. So OS-X 10.7, released 3 years ago, is unsupported as of October 2014. I guess that works if you have the attitude of just always updating to the latest OS, but it can be an issue for various enterprise setups that prefer to version freeze for longer times, or for 3rd party software/hardware that doesn't get updated. Also can screw you over if Apple decides to change hardware like with the PPC to Intel change.

Have you seen Win10?

The leash has been shortened very significantly compared to Win8 times.

Well it's all they had decades ago, when they used to be on the outside of the mainstream; all they could do is cobble together disparate voting blocs. Which, as I understand it, didn't always mesh, as I seem to recall hearing that some Dem conventions of a while ago weren't exactly models of unity. But the constant beating into their constituents of the message that Republicans hate and are out to get all of them, and that you can't make it without the Left, whether you're Black, gay, trans-this-or-that, Latino, female, drug-addicted, whatever else, finally worked. And the promise to steal other people's money for them, of course.

But I had a question in my previous post that I'd like to offer you a chance to comment on again. You hold out hope that America can be turned around, but how do you envision that possibly occuring:

Once a bunch of people spend all that on alcohol and/or drugs, what are you going to do about them?

More importantly, what are you going to do about their kids?

Have you considered that, if it did get past the lawyers, then they are respecting it to the extent the law requires them to?

One thing of note is that this particular acquisition is not DevDiv, it's Azure ML. But Azure ML is, in some ways, even more F/OSS friendly - at least I don't know anyone else in MS running Linux servers in production for user-facing services, and it's where a lot of ex-MSR guys (like, from those labs that were closed) ended up. It's also where all the Python stuff now is.

Then again, after Satya's takeover, there was a strong push from top down to stop treating open source in general and Linux in particular as pariah, in all divisions. In no uncertain language, like "we've been acting stupid about this for a while now and let competitors eat our lunch; time to catch up while we still can". The recent slew of announcements, from .NET Core officially supported on Linux, to most open MS projects migrating to GitHub, is the outcome.

FWIW, I didn't think I'd ever hear a Microsoft lawyer utter the words "GPL is actually kinda cool" while explaining to developers the company's new open source policy in his official capacity. Yet, here we are.

Long and hard? Yes. But this kind of thing makes it worth it (and also shows that, perhaps, it's not quite all that long if you go fast enough).

And Python and R can work together (rpy2), with Python being the glue.

The forked version is still GPL.

There's one other aspect to it that is obvious when you see who the people on MS side talking about this are. It is, effectively, an acquisition by the Azure ML division - the sole purpose of which is to get the "big data" people to come to Azure and pay for burning CPU cycles.

Between a bit better language design and superior support and tools, CUDA is way easier to do your work in. We've 4 labs that use CUDA in one fashion or another, none that use OpenCL. A number have tried it (also tried lines like the Cell cards that IBM sold for awhile) but settled on CUDA as being the easiest in terms of development. Open standards are nice and all but they've got shit to do and never enough time to do it, so whatever works the easiest is a win for them.

On a different side of things, I've seen less issues out of nVidia on CUDA than AMD on OpenCL for video editing. Sony Vegas supports both for accelerating video effects and encoding. When I had an AMD card, it was crashes all the time with acceleration on. Sony had to disable acceleration on a number of effects with it. I had to turn it off to have a usable setup. With nVidia, I find problems are very infrequent.

Obviously this is one one data point and I don't know the details of development. However it is one of the few examples I know of a product that supports both APIs.

while there were various decent, proprietary, dialects that let you actually write code that did stuff, *standard* Pascal was as much use as a chocolate teapot

And that's still a problem today. There's no standard for OO Pascal, and the ANSI Pascal standards have been moribund since 1990.

That's why I abandoned Pascal (and Modula-2): I didn't want to get locked in to a single vendor.

Because then people don't have any assurance that they won't get sued for using it.