Every time this subject comes up, someone wheels out this line and it is simply not true. On a crappy iPod it may be the case, but one day you may earn enough to get a decent stereo (I've got a Cyrus DAC and amplifier for example) and you will bitterly regret not having bought or kept a lossless copy of all your music. I can very easily tell the difference between 256kbs or even 320kbs and lossless in a blind test, and so could anyone else on a decent system in a quiet environment.

Ok, I'm a verbose git. But yes - where 'fast' is a critical requirement of the system, or people may die.

I've been writing C++ for 20 of those years and produced an awful lot of performance critical systems code in that time. To this day I find it the most liberating language, whatever is in your mind, you can express it, without the language compromising your intent. I can't see myself moving on until D becomes mainstream, and that may not be before I retire in ten years. I check out all the pretenders as they come and go, nothing else comes close.

My mistake, getting my NVidia parts confused, I blame senility. Does make you wonder what a Tesla would make of their sorting algorithm though doesn't it?

The GTX480 can actually do a double precision op per clock cycle. Fermi was designed with DP supercomputing in mind which is why it's so bloody expensive. To get the price down for consumer cards they removed that ability since graphics doesn't generally need it. Consumer cards need four ticks to do the equivalent DP op.

Windows at least, does. Look up WM_COMPACTING.