Not as much as you imagine. Compare an Athlon64/Socket939 to an Athlon64/Socket754 with the same clock speed. The Socket939 version has twice the memory bandwidth, but on average only 10% better performance according to AMD's P-Rating. Now consider a dual core Athlon64/Socket939 with the same clock speed, where the two cores share the higher memory bandwidth. I would expect this chip to be as fast as two Athlon64/Socket754, or 80% faster than a single core Socket939 model. Actually, clock speed will be a greater limitation: AMD has announced that the dual core versions will run at 400-600MHz less to reduce the heat output.
Actually, Parliament seems to be quite reasonable in this affair, so we have at least some responsible politicians. On the other hand, the actions of some members of the EU Commission are hard to explain without bribes. Which would be less of a problem right now, if the EU Parliament had the legislative power a parliament should have. In that case, the amendmends made by the Parliament to the software patent directive would be law now, without the commission being able to interfere. The EU has a democratic deficit here that is almost as dangerous as manipulated elections in the US.
That should not be not much of a problem if parliament makes a honest effort in the first place to keep the new law in line with the constitution. Only if they try to pass, for instance, dubious "security" laws with disrespect to civil rights there is the danger of a fast reversal by court.
Now that is remarkably weak and stupid. Parliament should be able to make up its own mind, and if it believes the bill is unconstitutional or simply stupid, simply reject it. After all, parliament is supposed to be the democratically elected and legitimated law making institution.
Yes. It made me NOT buy HL2, despite the superb reviews of the game. Without Steam, I would have no problems spending 50 Euros on it. As it is, I might grab it from the dicount shelves when the price has gone down to 20 or less.
You also make a good point, but if this drives the support costs for Windows up too much, the affected shops might have to raise prices for Windows computers. Eventually, people will have to pay for the greater service workload or deal with the hotline themselves.
EU ponders and conjutates for 3-4 years...."EULAs are contracts *after* a sale and hence unenforceable".
Microsoft lawyers the next day, "sellers of Microsoft software must get the buyer to sign the EULA before taking the payment".
AFAIK german law already contains rules that amount to "EULAs are contracts *after* a sale and hence unenforceable". The proposed reaction by Microsoft might legally stick if done correctly. But it would also be quite an increase in work overhead for shops. Not really attractive from an economical point of view.
3. A lawsuit for such a small amount seems a little bit of an overreation. Unfortunately, there are companies who seem to systematically screw their customers for small amounts of money. If they get taken to court now and then and end up paying large legal fees, this helps to discourage such practices.
Come to think of it, an immense intelligence might well take great pleasure (and not humanly incomprehensible pleasure either--do people not take pride in their art?) in getting/making all the details right.
Of course, that God would hardly match the surly image many established churches paint of God. The parts in the bible that essentially say "worship me or be damned" might also be rubbish. After all, if he gave us all those nice reasons to disbelieve in him, why would he be angry about it?
Come to think of it, I would not have problems with such a god, but the devout groups that usually proclaim things like "the earth is only 5000 years old" might have problems. If said joking God would suddenly reveal himself, their view of life might be shaken much harder than mine.
I can give an equally plausible theory that counters what you have mislabeled as fact. An all-powerful God creates earth, so that it is in a condition to support life and mankind. This is done instantly, but the result is the same as if earth formed from "scratch" 4.5 billion years ago.
So God creates earth and puts in lots of fake evidence, like fossils, so mankind is led to believe that earth is 4.5 billion years old? While that theory obviously cannot be disproved, I would not call it plausible. Instead I think that the evolution theory is most likely correct, and we just have to take unprovable things like the afterlife as a surprise. Something that religious people seem unable to do.
Well, the same arguments that apply to the EULA would apply to the SSA. I'm talking about customer's right here, not about contracts between Valve and Vivendi. When buying a boxed copy of Half Life 2, you don't get to see them beforehand and the SSA is not a valid part of the sales aggreement.
So what happens if you bought the game and find you cannot run it because of Steam problems? Let's assume you bother going to court over the 50 Euros or whatever the thing did cost. My best guess (IANAL, remember) is that the court would find the product defective. The dealer would have to take it back and refund your money. After that, the dealer might have the option of demanding his money back from the place where he ordered the game. But that would not be your problem anymore.
It's simple: by buying HL2, you just haven't bought a game. Not even a user license.
The german courts might not buy that argumentation. We have a law about "terme of service" that says a) Terms of service only become a valid part of you contract if you can check them before closing the deal. Most lawyers seem to agree that a click-through EULA or similar falls under that law. If you have bought the boxed version of HL2 in a store, you might not have seen the EULA before buying. Poof, the EULA is invalid.
b) Terms of service may not contain "unusual and surprising disadvantages" to the private customer(since IANAL, this may be somewhat inaccurate). This is not as clear-cut as the above scenario, but one might still argue that a modem connection should be sufficient if the system requirements only say "Internet connection".
As I understand it, the device will trigger both rods and cones in the retina in the retina by random, if they are only close enough to the individual micro-solar cell. The result might be that you get some sort of "colorful greyscale map", with local RGB noise but overall recognizable shapes. Still, beats seeing nothing.
Of course, that requires having another computer. As I understand the theory, HURD would be able to start a replacement driver on the same machine. Which would help the Joe Sixpack who has only a single machine.
Obviously, there are a few things that would require a backup driver.
If the graphics driver goes out, launch a basic VGA driver. It will look dead ugly, but it should allow you to save your open documents. Then reboot while your buddy next door, who is runnning Windows, is still cursing about his lost data.
I admit that the hard drive controller's driver is more difficult to get right. Maybe you could use a simplified driver as backup that is built for reliability and does without those features (DMA for instance?) that are hard to get right on that particular system.
For anything that is not immediately necessary to an ordered shutdown of the computer: Display a warning message and stop that driver until next reboot.
The single player-part still is, not ? I didn't hear the same uproar when the WON-network went down in the time of HL/CS.
The single player part did not require WON to work. You did not need to authenticate HL online at all to play the single player-part. And a lot of people were not so happy with the switch from WON to Steam. But then again, most people bought HL as a single player game and got CS as a free add-on, so they had less reason to complain.
Concerning the quality of Steam, it used to be extremely unreliable when it was new. These days it mostly works, but the Friends network is still broken most of the time. Overall, I do not trust in Steam enough to pay 50 Euros for a game on the premise that Steam will always be available. Once I find it among the cheap games for 20 Euros or less, I might be persuaded.
Heh. In the company I work for, we have a "Software Quality Assurance" department whose employees don't understand software development. As in, they are not programmers, let alone experienced software architects. All they (can) do is check the documentation for consistency and completeness. Admittedly they are good at that, put in a wrong date or forget a reference and they will find it.
I am running a Radeon 9200 w/ 64MB of RAM (and it does have a fan on it, btw). It plays Half Life 2 nearly flawlessly at 1024x768 with most settings on Max. So, does that mean I don't care about 3D? Come one.
Of course it does not hurt that it CAN do 3D. But if you're just looking for a cheap video card that does -run silent -does not use too much power -has a DVI port you can easily find Radeon 9200 cards that have all of this. I know there are some versions with fan, but there are plenty with passive cooling too. A simple framebuffer card might make even more sense if you just want to look at text. But last time I checked they have mostly disappeared from the market.
As I understand the article, it is a case of "You gave us a license that makes for good marketing on your part, but does not really protect us from lawsuits if you change your mind tomorrow" So the beef is not with "not sharing" as such, but with making empty promises.
If you don't care about 3D, then don't waste money on something more powerful than a Radeon 9200/9250. These cards will do fine for 2D, have passive cooling (quiet, no fan that can die on you) and are available with DVI port. Disclaimer: I don't know about the DVI support of the OSS driver.
I'm gonna ignore HL2 until it gets a lot cheaper, because the stupid Steam requirement makes it a lot less valuable to me.
Currently prices are 50 Euros and more, depending on version. Once it falls to 20 Euros or less, I might buy it anyway. But that is certainly not what Valve was hoping for...
Depends. I'm playing Neocron myself, and while I like the concept and the atmosphere, it still suffers from serious bugs years after launch. Major memory leak, frequent crashes and a somewhat unreliable processing of damage effects on mobs.
If FOMK can do the same but in better quality, I might switch. Gonna check out the open beta...
Slashdot Mirror
Not as much as you imagine.
Compare an Athlon64/Socket939 to an Athlon64/Socket754 with the same clock speed. The Socket939 version has twice the memory bandwidth, but on average only 10% better performance according to AMD's P-Rating.
Now consider a dual core Athlon64/Socket939 with the same clock speed, where the two cores share the higher memory bandwidth. I would expect this chip to be as fast as two Athlon64/Socket754, or 80% faster than a single core Socket939 model.
Actually, clock speed will be a greater limitation:
AMD has announced that the dual core versions will run at 400-600MHz less to reduce the heat output.
Actually, Parliament seems to be quite reasonable in this affair, so we have at least some responsible politicians.
On the other hand, the actions of some members of the EU Commission are hard to explain without bribes.
Which would be less of a problem right now, if the EU Parliament had the legislative power a parliament should have. In that case, the amendmends made by the Parliament to the software patent directive would be law now, without the commission being able to interfere. The EU has a democratic deficit here that is almost as dangerous as manipulated elections in the US.
That should not be not much of a problem if parliament makes a honest effort in the first place to keep the new law in line with the constitution. Only if they try to pass, for instance, dubious "security" laws with disrespect to civil rights there is the danger of a fast reversal by court.
Now that is remarkably weak and stupid. Parliament should be able to make up its own mind, and if it believes the bill is unconstitutional or simply stupid, simply reject it.
After all, parliament is supposed to be the democratically elected and legitimated law making institution.
Yes. It made me NOT buy HL2, despite the superb reviews of the game. Without Steam, I would have no problems spending 50 Euros on it. As it is, I might grab it from the dicount shelves when the price has gone down to 20 or less.
You also make a good point, but if this drives the support costs for Windows up too much, the affected shops might have to raise prices for Windows computers.
Eventually, people will have to pay for the greater service workload or deal with the hotline themselves.
Here are two links:
http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/19650
http://www.golem.de/0307/26462.html
Both in german, however, because the lawsuits were in Germany and probably not big news in english speaking countries.
And the Deutsche Telekom has actually sued other companies over the letter T and the color Magenta. They are just as bad as Microsoft.
EU ponders and conjutates for 3-4 years...."EULAs are contracts *after* a sale and hence unenforceable".
Microsoft lawyers the next day, "sellers of Microsoft software must get the buyer to sign the EULA before taking the payment".
AFAIK german law already contains rules that amount to "EULAs are contracts *after* a sale and hence unenforceable".
The proposed reaction by Microsoft might legally stick if done correctly. But it would also be quite an increase in work overhead for shops. Not really attractive from an economical point of view.
Which office applications monopoly?
There is something like Open Office...
3. A lawsuit for such a small amount seems a little bit of an overreation.
Unfortunately, there are companies who seem to systematically screw their customers for small amounts of money.
If they get taken to court now and then and end up paying large legal fees, this helps to discourage such practices.
Come to think of it, an immense intelligence might well take great pleasure (and not humanly incomprehensible pleasure either--do people not take pride in their art?) in getting/making all the details right.
Of course, that God would hardly match the surly image many established churches paint of God. The parts in the bible that essentially say "worship me or be damned" might also be rubbish. After all, if he gave us all those nice reasons to disbelieve in him, why would he be angry about it?
Come to think of it, I would not have problems with such a god, but the devout groups that usually proclaim things like "the earth is only 5000 years old" might have problems. If said joking God would suddenly reveal himself, their view of life might be shaken much harder than mine.
I can give an equally plausible theory that counters what you have mislabeled as fact. An all-powerful God creates earth, so that it is in a condition to support life and mankind. This is done instantly, but the result is the same as if earth formed from "scratch" 4.5 billion years ago.
So God creates earth and puts in lots of fake evidence, like fossils, so mankind is led to believe that earth is 4.5 billion years old?
While that theory obviously cannot be disproved, I would not call it plausible. Instead I think that the evolution theory is most likely correct, and we just have to take unprovable things like the afterlife as a surprise. Something that religious people seem unable to do.
Well, the same arguments that apply to the EULA would apply to the SSA. I'm talking about customer's right here, not about contracts between Valve and Vivendi. When buying a boxed copy of Half Life 2, you don't get to see them beforehand and the SSA is not a valid part of the sales aggreement.
So what happens if you bought the game and find you cannot run it because of Steam problems? Let's assume you bother going to court over the 50 Euros or whatever the thing did cost. My best guess (IANAL, remember) is that the court would find the product defective. The dealer would have to take it back and refund your money. After that, the dealer might have the option of demanding his money back from the place where he ordered the game. But that would not be your problem anymore.
It's simple: by buying HL2, you just haven't bought a game. Not even a user license.
The german courts might not buy that argumentation. We have a law about "terme of service" that says
a) Terms of service only become a valid part of you contract if you can check them before closing the deal. Most lawyers seem to agree that a click-through EULA or similar falls under that law. If you have bought the boxed version of HL2 in a store, you might not have seen the EULA before buying. Poof, the EULA is invalid.
b) Terms of service may not contain "unusual and surprising disadvantages" to the private customer(since IANAL, this may be somewhat inaccurate). This is not as clear-cut as the above scenario, but one might still argue that a modem connection should be sufficient if the system requirements only say "Internet connection".
As I understand it, the device will trigger both rods and cones in the retina in the retina by random, if they are only close enough to the individual micro-solar cell.
The result might be that you get some sort of "colorful greyscale map", with local RGB noise but overall recognizable shapes. Still, beats seeing nothing.
Of course, that requires having another computer. As I understand the theory, HURD would be able to start a replacement driver on the same machine. Which would help the Joe Sixpack who has only a single machine.
Obviously, there are a few things that would require a backup driver.
If the graphics driver goes out, launch a basic VGA driver. It will look dead ugly, but it should allow you to save your open documents. Then reboot while your buddy next door, who is runnning Windows, is still cursing about his lost data.
I admit that the hard drive controller's driver is more difficult to get right. Maybe you could use a simplified driver as backup that is built for reliability and does without those features (DMA for instance?) that are hard to get right on that particular system.
For anything that is not immediately necessary to an ordered shutdown of the computer:
Display a warning message and stop that driver until next reboot.
The single player-part still is, not ?
I didn't hear the same uproar when the WON-network went down in the time of HL/CS.
The single player part did not require WON to work. You did not need to authenticate HL online at all to play the single player-part.
And a lot of people were not so happy with the switch from WON to Steam. But then again, most people bought HL as a single player game and got CS as a free add-on, so they had less reason to complain.
Concerning the quality of Steam, it used to be extremely unreliable when it was new. These days it mostly works, but the Friends network is still broken most of the time.
Overall, I do not trust in Steam enough to pay 50 Euros for a game on the premise that Steam will always be available. Once I find it among the cheap games for 20 Euros or less, I might be persuaded.
Heh.
In the company I work for, we have a "Software Quality Assurance" department whose employees don't understand software development. As in, they are not programmers, let alone experienced software architects.
All they (can) do is check the documentation for consistency and completeness. Admittedly they are good at that, put in a wrong date or forget a reference and they will find it.
I am running a Radeon 9200 w/ 64MB of RAM (and it does have a fan on it, btw). It plays Half Life 2 nearly flawlessly at 1024x768 with most settings on Max. So, does that mean I don't care about 3D? Come one.
Of course it does not hurt that it CAN do 3D. But if you're just looking for a cheap video card that does
-run silent
-does not use too much power
-has a DVI port
you can easily find Radeon 9200 cards that have all of this. I know there are some versions with fan, but there are plenty with passive cooling too.
A simple framebuffer card might make even more sense if you just want to look at text. But last time I checked they have mostly disappeared from the market.
As I understand the article, it is a case of
"You gave us a license that makes for good marketing on your part, but does not really protect us from lawsuits if you change your mind tomorrow"
So the beef is not with "not sharing" as such, but with making empty promises.
If you don't care about 3D, then don't waste money on something more powerful than a Radeon 9200/9250.
These cards will do fine for 2D, have passive cooling (quiet, no fan that can die on you) and are available with DVI port.
Disclaimer: I don't know about the DVI support of the OSS driver.
I'm gonna ignore HL2 until it gets a lot cheaper, because the stupid Steam requirement makes it a lot less valuable to me.
Currently prices are 50 Euros and more, depending on version. Once it falls to 20 Euros or less, I might buy it anyway. But that is certainly not what Valve was hoping for...
Depends. I'm playing Neocron myself, and while I like the concept and the atmosphere, it still suffers from serious bugs years after launch.
Major memory leak, frequent crashes and a somewhat unreliable processing of damage effects on mobs.
If FOMK can do the same but in better quality, I might switch. Gonna check out the open beta...