Doing something I've not done in a long time ...

… buying a non-NVidia GPU product. Specifically the ATI FirePro W5000 for my desktop. I need to see if this is any more stable than the NVidia GTX series products. Feedback from customers running various flavors of Fermi, Kepler, Tesla, … suggest that the problem that was reported to me, that I’ve run into, is fairly wide spread. It looks like a particular version of the driver (295.33) may not trip this problem. Unfortunately, I cannot find that version. And I doubt it would be compatible with the later model kernels. So I need to see if we can use an ATI card for our desktops. NVidia does need to carefully consider whether their driver really needs to be closed source. The ATI driver appears to be open. No one but NVidia can debug their driver, and they’ve managed to drive off many linux kernel developers with their approach. I hope that this will change, as buggy drivers have a tendency to color peoples perceptions of hardware. And if we cannot do anything to fix this, then we have problems.