Think about that for a second. Basically a programmer needs a lawyer in order to use an open source library, because he does not know his rights or liabilities without one. The licenses such as GPL come in multiple substantialy different versions.
The.NET framework is licensed to the end user, not to the programmer leveraging it in his program. The programmer only has to deal with distribution rights when he distributes the framework itself, which is nicely packaged as a redistributable that is intended to be distributed and subsequently leveraged by the program. He does not have to deal with ANY licensing headaches at all.
Substantial difference there. With open source you have to deal with a license, while with the.NET framework you only have to deal with distribution rights.
Of course if you make a mono port, suddenly you are back in licensing hell.
Apple's ipod monopoly is most definately trying to run competitors out of the browser market. itunes update stealth-installs multiple programs. Everything from safari to some stupid thing called "bonjour". They are using their monopoly position in one market to gain unfair advantages in others.
You are backwards. A.NET programmer does not have to worry about the licensing terms of the framework, but if he wants to use something that is open source, suddenly he is in the licensing restriction quagemire.
Says who? You must be talking about the fraudulent paper written by Jones and Wang that supposedly put to rest the notion that UHI was significant.
You know, the paper! Where Wang intentionally commited scientific fraud? You know I'm talking about, right?
Didn't know that?
'k. tx.
CIties are a small fraction of the Earth's surface
Someone who thinks that UHI is about cities shouldn't be discussing this. Heres a thought.. go to surfacestations.org
I havent been there in a month but I bet they got yet another hilariously placed recording station photographed, perhaps right next to an air conditioner again, or maybe next to an outdoor grill (significant because they use the daily high and low values, not the average.. did you know that?) Maybe in one of those "quiet wooded areas" but still constructed on top of common everyday tar-based blacktop, or on the tar'd roof of a building.
The point here is that we dont fucking know shit because the data is fucked up and when it isnt, they go ahead and fuck it up with questionalable "adjustment" methods to make it look just like the average that includes all the fucked up data, where the researchers are often sloppy and out of their field (hire a statistician if you need to use an advanced statisical technique, assholes), and they sometimes even commit fraud.
We got no fucking idea the effects of UHI, of CO2, or even the amount of warming (if any.) We still have no clue as to the significant effects of clouds (which still cannot be modeled), cosmic rays, solar variance, sunspots, the magnetosphere, and so on..
All the while we are being sold a plan by the IPCC to heavily regulate industry, when there are other alternatives that they havent even fucking bothered to look into, such as geoengineering.
The whole thing fucking smells bad. Maybe its warming significantly.. maybe it isn't.. we are simply not in a place to know because nobody really gives a shit about it. The scientists themselves only give a shit about publishing, because publishing equals funding. They havent gone to audit the surface stations, it takes a group of highly skeptical volunteers to actualy figure out that almost the entire thing is bullshit... and STILL nobody is doing anything about it.
The IPCC only gives a shit about power because its a political institution. Thats what they do.
But you have all the facts, right? You KNOW all about global warming, right?
Dragonfly is a perfect example of how Opera continues to innovate.
Sure, inspired by FireBug... but goes much much further. Like everything done at Opera, they do it superior. There is very little that it half-assed comming out of Opera.
As the parent noted.. nearly all of the "killer features" that other web browsers "boast" about these days were in fact first seen in Opera, usualy many years before anyone else.
Tabbed browsing since 1994 (nineteen fucking ninety-four)
I'm sick of hearing about how great Firefox is, when its really just a bloated pig like internet explorer and safari. You need a fucking extensions for this? for that? everyone uses that one too? Jesus Christ. You heard me.. a bloated fucking pig. Deal with it, FOSS worshipers.
As you may already know, all versions of windows now ship with C++, C#, and VB.NET compilers as part of the.NET framework.
Microsoft should immediately file a complaint with the E.U. detailing their fear of future E.U. actions against Microsoft in regards to their obvious competitive advantage in the development tools market.
This complaint should point out that Microsoft is now fully willing to comply with the E.U. courts decisions regarding their competitive advantage with regards to compilers, that Intel must be immediately compelled to allow Microsoft to bundle their $1000 compiler suite with windows, for free. And yeah, GNUCC too.
Netscape murdered netscape. It wasn't exactly suicide in the common sense, but more like that extreme negligence in regards to your own survival is prime darwin prize material.
To quote Joel Spolsky, "They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch."
Peer review doesnt require reviewing the data. In most cases, peer review simply has a peer signing off as if to say "yeah, if he went through the steps he claims to have gone through, then his conclusion is probably reasonable."
Do you HONESTLY think that publications such as Nature and Science have teams of people sifting over supplied data?
Look into what these publications require of the researchers sometime. They do not require the data. They instead require that the data be made available upon request, that in practice their peer review processes never requests the data, and that the editors of these publications ignore complaints from 3rd parties about the data not being made available when requesting it. They only care if the peer reviewer himself got refused the data (but as noted, they do not in practice, request it.)
Remember, the publisher WANTS the article published because it BENEFITS from publishing it.
Remember, the peer reviewer often knows the author personally.
The peer review process does not protect against fraud and incompetance. That is why we need to adopt a policy that the data should be publicly available BEFORE publishing. That a new class of "peer review", perhaps called "open peer review", be adopted. The weight of an "open peer reviewed" study should be greater than that of a contradicting "peer reviewed" study.
Too many times it has come to be known that if the data was publicly available, errors in a study would have been noticed much easlier. I recall a certain problem with the NOAA climate data set overseen by Hansen, having a "Y2K" bug, but because they kept the raw data a secret and only published "filtered" and "adjusted" data, it took *8* years to notice that the "filtering" and "adjusting" software had such a boneheaded bug in it. That when an independent researching finally discerned the serious problem with the data set, the NOAA had to retract many public claims they had made about what year was "hottest" over the last 100 years (not 1998 after all.. more like 1934)
I realize that most of the problems with the peer review process that I know about are climate science related, but thats thanks in part to the diligence and openness of a group of people often called "oil company shills" by the very people they are exposing. That these "shills" use open methodology all the way through is quite possibly the reason that they are so damn good at finding the problems with all the "research" in climate science.
On the subject of reproducibility, I am reminded of a situation with Wei-Chyung Wang, a climate scientist.
He was involved in the paper Jones et al (1990), which is where the situation begins.
After *17 YEARS* of requests, Jones FINALLY released some of the data used in Jones 1990 through demands under the terms of the U.K. Freedom of Information policy on publicly funded research.
Wang himself is free from FOI requests because Wang is an American and operates in America, where FOI requests regarding publicaly funded studies have no legal weight.
The result of the eventual discloser of Jones, is that several researches have concluded that Wang fabricated research steps. That some of the steps could not have been performed, then or even now, and that for many of the climate stations used in his work the existing station histories directly contradict Wang's stated assessments about his data set.
Specifically he claimed that only a few of these recording stations had been moved during the time-frame significant to the research, and that they were free from significant urbanization changes (the research was to measure the "Urban Heat Island" (UHI) Effect.) In short, Wang claimed that the stations histories showed that they were largely "homogeneous."
According to the DOE CAS study, in regards to the quality of Wang's other station data, "details regarding instrumentation, collection methods, changes in station location or observing times are not known." The CAS bills itself as the most comprehensive history of Chinese climate available to date. Note that Wang actualy cited the CAS as one of the sources for his data.
Essentialy both Wang et al 1990 and Jones et al 1990 were fradulent pieces of work that was never independently verified, and could not have been verified given both the straight out fraud and the failure to disclose the data set used.
(Jones denies knowledge of Wangs fabrication of data.)
Sparked by this controversy, new research specifically addressing the UHI based on the Chinese climate record paints an entirely different picture with regards to China, that the effect is in fact much more significant that concluded by Jones et al 1990.
FULL DATA DISCLOSER IS NEEDED.
This is especialy true in some areas of science, where all the big players not only know each other, BUT WORK, PUBLISH, AND PEER REVIEW TOGETHER.
One specific small group of people is directly influencing global policies regarding climate change through their direct involvement with the IPCC, all the while hiding their own work and obstructing validation of their work.
The reason there arent is because when congress was getting ready to create a regulatory body specific to this sort of thing regarding movies, the motion picture industry (MPAA) teamed up with the theater industry (NATO, heh) and quickly created a voluntary regulatory body of its own to deal with it.
..and thus movie ratings were born. Movies don't require a rating, nor do theater owners need to abide by rating restrictions. The entire system is voluntary, but works quite well in practice.
What is at stake isnt just nVidia's chipset business, its their entire business.
They argue that the CPU is just the glue for highly parallel GPU operations, but Intel is planning to turn the CPU itself into a highly parallel monster needing no GPU at all... just some integrated display logic.
If nVidia loses its chipset market then they must drastically scale down their business.
I've said it before and I'll say it again... nVidia doesnt have anything to offer the other big players in the market in regards to licensing agreements. They have no essential IP to speak of. They are at a big disadvantage, even though they are currently king of the GPU's.
Extending this idea just a little bit further, suppose your kid installs a piece of software specifically designed to detect the presentation of EULA's and automatically agree to them...
...and officialy its presented as a firefox popup blocker plugin and actualy serves that purpose, is open source, and written and distributed by people in a far-away land where U.S. laws cannot touch them... with no mention at all about this other "bonus" feature, which is simply kept "secret"
I see where you are comming from, but it isnt accurate.
If the count is such that basic strategy is -EV for the house, then by definition they are losing money on those hands. It is true that *in general* they want more hands played, but they do not want more hands played when the odds are against them.
How to recover a player who is annoyed at a suprise change of setup:
"Here are some coupons for the buffet... complements of the house"
(Note that they would give out those coupons anyways, rather than have a player go to another casino to eat)
There is one cheat that is more-or-less undetectable, and that is for the house to maintain its own count as the game is played. This should be pretty easy since there are multiple cameras on every table. When the deck is overly favorable to the player they can simply force a reshuffle/change of decks.
I'm not saying that this is happening, but even I could write the software to maintain such a count given a fixed camera. Remember, the count doesnt need to be perfect (players only use hi/low after all).. all you have to do is be sure that of the cards that you do count, you are correct. You can skip a given card if you arent sure what it is.
Such software can also be used to detect certain kinds of cheating by the dealer, such as intentionally paying hands the dealer has beaten.
QueryPerformanceCounter obeys the boot.ini PMTIMER setting, so WTF are you talking about?
As far as making too many calls to a timing API, a game doesnt need to make more than 1 per frame... so, once every 10ms @ 100FPS? I will again ask.. WTF are you talking about?
You seem to be going on incoherently about issues that do not exist in practice. For game/multimedia timing, QueryPerformanceCounter or even timeGetTime (set to 1ms via timeBeginInterval) is MORE than good enough. For very high resolution profiling, RTDSC is good enough.
The "problems" are are addressing are only relevant on windows XP prior to a now 5-year old hotfix, or within software written by stupid people. I dont use RDTSC for timing for the same reason that I dont use my soundcards sample buffer for timing.
Everyone involved with this article is pretending to be smart. Proof is that I can still record fine from Stereo Mix (and Mono Mix for that matter) under windows 7, but those involved here are too stupid to actualy enable that particular mixer line in the options specific to enabling and disabling mixer lines.
Control Panel -> Sound -> Recording -> Right Click -> Show Disabled Devices
You are uninformed. The AMD multi-core "problem" is a software problem.
People who programmed for single-core systems assumed that the processors internal tick count, called the timestamp counter (read with the RDTSC instruction), would be monotonically increasing. The fact is that each core could have its own timestamp counter and if a process is migrated to another core by the OS scheduler, then the monotonically increasing assumption falls flat (time can appear to run backwards.) This is true for AMD multi-core processors as well as ALL (AMD and Intel) multi-processor setups.
The AMD patch does several things, one of which is to instruct windows to not use the timestamp counter for use in its own time-keeping. Windows XP defaulted to using this timestamp counter for timing, because both dual-core and multi-cpu systems essentially didnt even exist when it was released. This is accomplished by a simple alteration to boot.ini telling windows to use PMTIMER instead of its default.
Any modern games that are not fixed by the above patch were programmed by stupid people. Thats right... Stupid. They are accessing hardware directly rather than going through a standardized time keeping layer. Their assumptions about time are wrong when using RDTSC, because it isnt a time-keeper. Its a tick counter specifically associated with a CPU (Intel/AMD) or CORE (AMD)
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"most" copyleft?
.NET framework is licensed to the end user, not to the programmer leveraging it in his program. The programmer only has to deal with distribution rights when he distributes the framework itself, which is nicely packaged as a redistributable that is intended to be distributed and subsequently leveraged by the program. He does not have to deal with ANY licensing headaches at all.
.NET framework you only have to deal with distribution rights.
Think about that for a second. Basically a programmer needs a lawyer in order to use an open source library, because he does not know his rights or liabilities without one. The licenses such as GPL come in multiple substantialy different versions.
The
Substantial difference there. With open source you have to deal with a license, while with the
Of course if you make a mono port, suddenly you are back in licensing hell.
Are you on crack.
Apple's ipod monopoly is most definately trying to run competitors out of the browser market. itunes update stealth-installs multiple programs. Everything from safari to some stupid thing called "bonjour". They are using their monopoly position in one market to gain unfair advantages in others.
Yeah right.
Please explain what standards MS was holding back with Media Player. The E.U. picks on Microsoft because they can, not because they should.
Open Source doesn't have licensing terms?
.NET programmer does not have to worry about the licensing terms of the framework, but if he wants to use something that is open source, suddenly he is in the licensing restriction quagemire.
You are backwards. A
Urban heat islands don't explain the warming.
Says who? You must be talking about the fraudulent paper written by Jones and Wang that supposedly put to rest the notion that UHI was significant.
You know, the paper! Where Wang intentionally commited scientific fraud? You know I'm talking about, right?
Didn't know that?
'k. tx.
CIties are a small fraction of the Earth's surface
Someone who thinks that UHI is about cities shouldn't be discussing this. Heres a thought.. go to surfacestations.org
I havent been there in a month but I bet they got yet another hilariously placed recording station photographed, perhaps right next to an air conditioner again, or maybe next to an outdoor grill (significant because they use the daily high and low values, not the average.. did you know that?) Maybe in one of those "quiet wooded areas" but still constructed on top of common everyday tar-based blacktop, or on the tar'd roof of a building.
The point here is that we dont fucking know shit because the data is fucked up and when it isnt, they go ahead and fuck it up with questionalable "adjustment" methods to make it look just like the average that includes all the fucked up data, where the researchers are often sloppy and out of their field (hire a statistician if you need to use an advanced statisical technique, assholes), and they sometimes even commit fraud.
We got no fucking idea the effects of UHI, of CO2, or even the amount of warming (if any.) We still have no clue as to the significant effects of clouds (which still cannot be modeled), cosmic rays, solar variance, sunspots, the magnetosphere, and so on..
All the while we are being sold a plan by the IPCC to heavily regulate industry, when there are other alternatives that they havent even fucking bothered to look into, such as geoengineering.
The whole thing fucking smells bad. Maybe its warming significantly.. maybe it isn't.. we are simply not in a place to know because nobody really gives a shit about it. The scientists themselves only give a shit about publishing, because publishing equals funding. They havent gone to audit the surface stations, it takes a group of highly skeptical volunteers to actualy figure out that almost the entire thing is bullshit... and STILL nobody is doing anything about it.
The IPCC only gives a shit about power because its a political institution. Thats what they do.
But you have all the facts, right? You KNOW all about global warming, right?
If you are interrested in a browser that runs on more than mac's and pc's... the most widely ported browser ever is called Opera. Give it a try.
Dragonfly is a perfect example of how Opera continues to innovate.
... but goes much much further. Like everything done at Opera, they do it superior. There is very little that it half-assed comming out of Opera.
Sure, inspired by FireBug
As the parent noted.. nearly all of the "killer features" that other web browsers "boast" about these days were in fact first seen in Opera, usualy many years before anyone else.
Tabbed browsing since 1994 (nineteen fucking ninety-four)
I'm sick of hearing about how great Firefox is, when its really just a bloated pig like internet explorer and safari. You need a fucking extensions for this? for that? everyone uses that one too? Jesus Christ. You heard me.. a bloated fucking pig. Deal with it, FOSS worshipers.
As you may already know, all versions of windows now ship with C++, C#, and VB.NET compilers as part of the .NET framework.
Microsoft should immediately file a complaint with the E.U. detailing their fear of future E.U. actions against Microsoft in regards to their obvious competitive advantage in the development tools market.
This complaint should point out that Microsoft is now fully willing to comply with the E.U. courts decisions regarding their competitive advantage with regards to compilers, that Intel must be immediately compelled to allow Microsoft to bundle their $1000 compiler suite with windows, for free. And yeah, GNUCC too.
Microsoft didn't murder netscape.
Netscape murdered netscape. It wasn't exactly suicide in the common sense, but more like that extreme negligence in regards to your own survival is prime darwin prize material.
To quote Joel Spolsky, "They did it by making the single worst strategic mistake that any software company can make: They decided to rewrite the code from scratch."
Wwen I think of NASA, I think of Massively Multiplayer Online Games.
Peer review doesnt require reviewing the data. In most cases, peer review simply has a peer signing off as if to say "yeah, if he went through the steps he claims to have gone through, then his conclusion is probably reasonable."
Do you HONESTLY think that publications such as Nature and Science have teams of people sifting over supplied data?
Look into what these publications require of the researchers sometime. They do not require the data. They instead require that the data be made available upon request, that in practice their peer review processes never requests the data, and that the editors of these publications ignore complaints from 3rd parties about the data not being made available when requesting it. They only care if the peer reviewer himself got refused the data (but as noted, they do not in practice, request it.)
Remember, the publisher WANTS the article published because it BENEFITS from publishing it.
Remember, the peer reviewer often knows the author personally.
The peer review process does not protect against fraud and incompetance. That is why we need to adopt a policy that the data should be publicly available BEFORE publishing. That a new class of "peer review", perhaps called "open peer review", be adopted. The weight of an "open peer reviewed" study should be greater than that of a contradicting "peer reviewed" study.
Too many times it has come to be known that if the data was publicly available, errors in a study would have been noticed much easlier. I recall a certain problem with the NOAA climate data set overseen by Hansen, having a "Y2K" bug, but because they kept the raw data a secret and only published "filtered" and "adjusted" data, it took *8* years to notice that the "filtering" and "adjusting" software had such a boneheaded bug in it. That when an independent researching finally discerned the serious problem with the data set, the NOAA had to retract many public claims they had made about what year was "hottest" over the last 100 years (not 1998 after all.. more like 1934)
I realize that most of the problems with the peer review process that I know about are climate science related, but thats thanks in part to the diligence and openness of a group of people often called "oil company shills" by the very people they are exposing. That these "shills" use open methodology all the way through is quite possibly the reason that they are so damn good at finding the problems with all the "research" in climate science.
On the subject of reproducibility, I am reminded of a situation with Wei-Chyung Wang, a climate scientist.
He was involved in the paper Jones et al (1990), which is where the situation begins.
After *17 YEARS* of requests, Jones FINALLY released some of the data used in Jones 1990 through demands under the terms of the U.K. Freedom of Information policy on publicly funded research.
Wang himself is free from FOI requests because Wang is an American and operates in America, where FOI requests regarding publicaly funded studies have no legal weight.
The result of the eventual discloser of Jones, is that several researches have concluded that Wang fabricated research steps. That some of the steps could not have been performed, then or even now, and that for many of the climate stations used in his work the existing station histories directly contradict Wang's stated assessments about his data set.
Specifically he claimed that only a few of these recording stations had been moved during the time-frame significant to the research, and that they were free from significant urbanization changes (the research was to measure the "Urban Heat Island" (UHI) Effect.) In short, Wang claimed that the stations histories showed that they were largely "homogeneous."
According to the DOE CAS study, in regards to the quality of Wang's other station data, "details regarding instrumentation, collection methods, changes in station location or observing times are not known." The CAS bills itself as the most comprehensive history of Chinese climate available to date. Note that Wang actualy cited the CAS as one of the sources for his data.
Essentialy both Wang et al 1990 and Jones et al 1990 were fradulent pieces of work that was never independently verified, and could not have been verified given both the straight out fraud and the failure to disclose the data set used.
(Jones denies knowledge of Wangs fabrication of data.)
Sparked by this controversy, new research specifically addressing the UHI based on the Chinese climate record paints an entirely different picture with regards to China, that the effect is in fact much more significant that concluded by Jones et al 1990.
FULL DATA DISCLOSER IS NEEDED.
This is especialy true in some areas of science, where all the big players not only know each other, BUT WORK, PUBLISH, AND PEER REVIEW TOGETHER.
One specific small group of people is directly influencing global policies regarding climate change through their direct involvement with the IPCC, all the while hiding their own work and obstructing validation of their work.
Is the prosecution secretly against copyrights?
You are correct. There are now laws in the books.
..and thus movie ratings were born. Movies don't require a rating, nor do theater owners need to abide by rating restrictions. The entire system is voluntary, but works quite well in practice.
The reason there arent is because when congress was getting ready to create a regulatory body specific to this sort of thing regarding movies, the motion picture industry (MPAA) teamed up with the theater industry (NATO, heh) and quickly created a voluntary regulatory body of its own to deal with it.
What is at stake isnt just nVidia's chipset business, its their entire business.
They argue that the CPU is just the glue for highly parallel GPU operations, but Intel is planning to turn the CPU itself into a highly parallel monster needing no GPU at all... just some integrated display logic.
If nVidia loses its chipset market then they must drastically scale down their business.
I've said it before and I'll say it again... nVidia doesnt have anything to offer the other big players in the market in regards to licensing agreements. They have no essential IP to speak of. They are at a big disadvantage, even though they are currently king of the GPU's.
Extending this idea just a little bit further, suppose your kid installs a piece of software specifically designed to detect the presentation of EULA's and automatically agree to them...
...and officialy its presented as a firefox popup blocker plugin and actualy serves that purpose, is open source, and written and distributed by people in a far-away land where U.S. laws cannot touch them... with no mention at all about this other "bonus" feature, which is simply kept "secret"
I see where you are comming from, but it isnt accurate.
If the count is such that basic strategy is -EV for the house, then by definition they are losing money on those hands. It is true that *in general* they want more hands played, but they do not want more hands played when the odds are against them.
How to recover a player who is annoyed at a suprise change of setup:
"Here are some coupons for the buffet... complements of the house"
(Note that they would give out those coupons anyways, rather than have a player go to another casino to eat)
There is one cheat that is more-or-less undetectable, and that is for the house to maintain its own count as the game is played. This should be pretty easy since there are multiple cameras on every table. When the deck is overly favorable to the player they can simply force a reshuffle/change of decks.
.. all you have to do is be sure that of the cards that you do count, you are correct. You can skip a given card if you arent sure what it is.
I'm not saying that this is happening, but even I could write the software to maintain such a count given a fixed camera. Remember, the count doesnt need to be perfect (players only use hi/low after all)
Such software can also be used to detect certain kinds of cheating by the dealer, such as intentionally paying hands the dealer has beaten.
All the competiting FTP clients are next on the bandwagon of "anti-trust" cases.
It is not a soundcard problem. The problem is clearly somewhere between the chair and the keyboard.
Control Panel -> Sound -> Recording -> Right Click -> Show Disabled Devices
Tech savvy people in the audio-visual field know how to click:
Control Panel -> Sound -> Recording -> Right Click -> Show Disabled Devices
It is onyl asshat anti-MS craptards that do not know how to click:
Control Panel -> Sound -> Recording -> Right Click -> Show Disabled Devices
Just to be sure you understand what I am saying, all you have to do is click:
Control Panel -> Sound -> Recording -> Right Click -> Show Disabled Devices
QueryPerformanceCounter obeys the boot.ini PMTIMER setting, so WTF are you talking about?
As far as making too many calls to a timing API, a game doesnt need to make more than 1 per frame... so, once every 10ms @ 100FPS? I will again ask.. WTF are you talking about?
You seem to be going on incoherently about issues that do not exist in practice. For game/multimedia timing, QueryPerformanceCounter or even timeGetTime (set to 1ms via timeBeginInterval) is MORE than good enough. For very high resolution profiling, RTDSC is good enough.
The "problems" are are addressing are only relevant on windows XP prior to a now 5-year old hotfix, or within software written by stupid people. I dont use RDTSC for timing for the same reason that I dont use my soundcards sample buffer for timing.
Everyone involved with this article is pretending to be smart. Proof is that I can still record fine from Stereo Mix (and Mono Mix for that matter) under windows 7, but those involved here are too stupid to actualy enable that particular mixer line in the options specific to enabling and disabling mixer lines.
Control Panel -> Sound -> Recording -> Right Click -> Show Disabled Devices
FUCKING RETARDS.
You are uninformed. The AMD multi-core "problem" is a software problem.
People who programmed for single-core systems assumed that the processors internal tick count, called the timestamp counter (read with the RDTSC instruction), would be monotonically increasing. The fact is that each core could have its own timestamp counter and if a process is migrated to another core by the OS scheduler, then the monotonically increasing assumption falls flat (time can appear to run backwards.) This is true for AMD multi-core processors as well as ALL (AMD and Intel) multi-processor setups.
The AMD patch does several things, one of which is to instruct windows to not use the timestamp counter for use in its own time-keeping. Windows XP defaulted to using this timestamp counter for timing, because both dual-core and multi-cpu systems essentially didnt even exist when it was released. This is accomplished by a simple alteration to boot.ini telling windows to use PMTIMER instead of its default.
Any modern games that are not fixed by the above patch were programmed by stupid people. Thats right... Stupid. They are accessing hardware directly rather than going through a standardized time keeping layer. Their assumptions about time are wrong when using RDTSC, because it isnt a time-keeper. Its a tick counter specifically associated with a CPU (Intel/AMD) or CORE (AMD)