My approach is a bit different. I always preserve lossless originals (in FLAC), when I can get them of course. Disk space isn't a major problem these days. But I also transcode them into Opus at transparent level (where no difference can be heard) for listening purposes. I.e. there is no point to listen to FLAC when you can listen to Opus with no audible difference, but there is a good reason to store FLAC anyway. Simply because once you transcode into lossy codec - there is no way back if original will be gone. I.e. if for example tomorrow new state of the art codec will come out which will surpass even Opus, you'll still need the lossless original to encode in it. I.e. for me, FLAC serves as a master record for archiving, and Opus serves for all practical listening purposes (and for putting on mobile devices with limited space and so on).

What AMD did with Mantle was to create something to help them compete with Nvidia in selling the graphics hardware. Of course they made it available to developers. Unfortunately, there were not many takers although some noteworthy AAA titles did use it and benefit significantly from it as I suspect you know. While Mantle could work with Nvidia cards, for optimal performance Nvidia would have had to adopt a different GPU architecture which of course was not happening. You just provided a case in the points I've been trying to make to you. AMD did not do this for altruistic reasons. They initially created Mantle in an effort to create a software/hardware GPU solution that would be superior to their competitor Nvidia but not surprisingly if failed to take off where it was a solution tied to their own hardware which to make matters significantly worse did not command majority market share. They only gave Mantle to Kronos once they stopped all development on it themselves. You can be certain that this decision was based in no small part on percieved benefit to the company or else they would not have done it. Again, nobody rides for free. We all have to make a living.

By their own rep's (AMD) admission the above outcome was the "best possible." Meantime, AMD is back to supporting DX 12 as well as Vulkan and thus covering the bases for themselves. You can be sure that if they cut a deal for another round of GPUs in either iMacs or MacBooks or both, they will be supporting Metal as well. There is nothing special about AMD versus Nvidia or Microsoft or Apple or anybody else. Wherever the money is, that's where you'll find them. As I have said before, there is nothing wrong with that either. I hope they do well because competition is a good thing where we all win. This is also true of the current competition for dominance in graphics performance. We need multiple standards for competition to even exist and when it does exist, we the consumers benefit.

You may find this thread interesting. The comment I reference above is on the linked page. It is a current discussion related to Mantle and Vulkan. I did not read it all so I cannot vouch for what is discussed and by whom, etc. but it looked interesting enough and I thought you might enjoy reading it.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?s=22944e7298582452143523e08178a5c6&t=18680682

I think you worry far too much about developers and game ports. This is not going away. Don't worry. They will be just fine. They get paid when they port stuff you know. It isn't a hardship. It is a job that pays well. It's all good. Nobody wants socialism in the world of personal computing where there is one and only one way of doing everything, well except maybe for you but I'd venture a guess most people do not share that view.

Safari uses webkit which is a fork of what is used by chrome and decends from KDE development. Are you aware of that? Steam's client uses webkit. I wouldn't be surprised if GOG's Galaxy isn't using webkit also. For more info about webkit including other major players using it, see this article and of course you can always google for much more although I'd encourage you to use DuckDuckGo which does not track you and by the way so far is only available as a choice within Safari, not that you cannot add it to other browsers yourself via a plug-in as well as simply setting it to your home page or whatever.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit

Here is some real information about Safari including its speed for all users and improved battery life for portable users plus a lot more:

https://www.apple.com/safari/

I have been using Safari for the past three years to access a very broad range of sites and content on the web. I have encountered zero problems. This browser does conform to established standards. Do you run Safari often? Do you run it at all? Do you seriously believe that Apple deliberately would make the browser they provide in both OS X and iOS suck "on purpose" because, I don't know, because why? In what universe does deliberately screwing your own customers make sense for any business that wants to make money?

With creation of Mantle it forced Microsoft to change.. MS used core program from mantle to build there own version called DX12. Mantle is moved to Vulkan. MS is making there own twist to the original concept of Mantle. Which is why AMD isn't worried about DX12 because its similar.

That's what I said above as well. Using open standards is a benefit, and AMD got it. Apple however think that it's not good enough when it benefits them and everyone else. They prefer approaches which benefit them and set others back technologically. And that's exactly how standards poisoning works (in contrast with open standards).

That thread about Mantle, I'm not sure which part of it you wanted me to read, but I don't see anything unexpected there. Of course AMD halted Mantle development, because it's superseded by Vulkan on which they'll be working instead.

About Safari. "Using WebKit" is not a guarantee of standards compliance. Apple use their own custom version of WebKit and they don't support many features.
That's nonsense. Developers are paid, but money are spent by those who fund the development. Imagine you are a studio which has to spend x3 times the resources on different APIs support, just because some have a NIH syndrome when it comes to APIs. Instead those resources could be spent on improving the game. So don't say it's all good and it's supposed to be so messed up.

Apple's choices have been good for Apple users. I am one of them. I can vouch for this. Metal works the same way as advances in Direct X 12 and Vulkan will, in terms of offloading work from the CPU to enhance performance, etc. Again, Metal already was developed for and existed on iOS therefore, bringing it to OS X was a rather obvious choice that benefits Apple users in general and people playing games on Apple Mac systems in particular. We are happy about this. You don't have to be. That's fine. But don't tell me whether the company I am doing business with is not cutting it for me because they absolutely are more than you know or that I am going to bother going on about here. That's all the counts too. Just like you are happy with whatever you are using and I think that is just fine. I'm not here to tell you to buy into the Apple ecosystem, etc. I don't care what you buy into. Do whatever you like. If you are happy, that works for me. About the only thing I ask in general in conversations such as this one is the same degree of respect for my wishes and preferences too. This should not be so hard for people but for some reason it is.

A long time ago in one of his many great songs Bob Dylan penned the line, "everybody wants you to be just like them." Truer words were never spoken. The song is "Maggie's Farm" by the way.

I didn't want you to read anything. I just linked and said I thought you might enjoy reading it along with providing you a source where I'd quoted an AMD rep as having said something in particular.

You say, "Of course AMD halted Mantle development, because it's superseded by Vulkan" which tells me maybe you would benefit from reading further about this. I'm not here to play teacher and do research for people who imagine things rather than educate themselves before operating on assumptions. So I'm done and wish you the best. Have fun playing whatever you want on whatever you want written by whoever you want. I'll be doing the same thing. :D

Not really. As the saying goes, something must be seriously wrong with the product, if in order to make it work one has to break it first (a pun on jailbreaking).

You know, I am trying to be nice here but you just won't quit.

I love my iPhone. I don't need to jailbreak it for any reason. I don't need root access on a phone. lol

If other people want to do this stuff, that's their problem but I would have a hard time believing they are anything more than a small minority vs all iPhone users. Feel free to link me some data and educate me if you know I am wrong and can prove it. Or don't. I don't care about this either. I am starting to care less and less about all of this stuff.

Stop pinging me so I can finish pruning my wish list here because thanks to how fucked up galaxy and the site are, I am done buying stuff on GOG for the foreseeable future until and if one fine, sunny day these guys pull their heads out of their asses and fix all of this.

You don't, others do. Since you said "Apple's choices are good for their users", I showed you how they are not. You can say "Apple is good enough for me", that I could agree with. But their choices aren't good for many both users and developers. Ask various engine developers what they think about Apple slacking on OpenGL support for instance. They don't even support OpenGL 4.5. It's just barely 4.1 if I'm not mistaken: https://developer.apple.com/opengl/capabilities/

You got it backwards: Chrome’s base (named "Blink") is a fork of some WebKit component, not the other way around.
KHTML (what would later become WebKit) was published something like ~14 years before Blink.

well, dowe have a choice?

Do you mean developers? That depends. On open platforms they have. On locked ones they don't.

If you mean users - the choice can be limited to what your system supports. For instance DriectX is normally limited to Windows, but Wine allows running DX9 applications on Linux and OS X (and supposedly DX11 support is coming in the end of 2015). But that's just a workaround, developers should really make proper cross platform releases.

At least Microsoft allows Windows open to other API's, not open source, but at least open. Microsoft allows OpenGL, Mantle, and Vulkan on Windows including on Windows 10.

I don't know if Apple allows Vulkan on Mac OS X yet. Do they?

Yes, at least so far. But it easily can change. It was the main driver for Valve to actually push SteamOS (at least according to them).

So far there is no information about it, so we'll have to wait and see. For starters, Apple are at least listed in the Vulkan working group, but MS are not.

as a user we mostly don't have a choice, for example the arma2 and arma3 are directx windows games, i can't play it on opengl and linux

Yes, that's developers' fault in such case. Projects like Wine can help to a degree here, but it's a hit and miss situation.