I do the same as you, i can't stand tailgaters... I'm usually driving a big solid car with no passengers in the back, so if the worst happens they will come off worse than me. Also, legally if you hit someone from behind it's your fault for not keeping proper distance or being sufficiently alert.
Tap your brakes a few times, so the lights come on but you don't actually slow down, they will see the brakes and should back off.. If not, actually brake so that they nearly hit you and it should panic them and make them back off.
Commercial airlines fly at high altitude and are pressurized, you couldn't just open the door because the vacuum would suck everything out quite violently, you would have to gradually equalize the pressure... Also most people would be afraid to jump, even if remaining in the plane meant certain death.
Being a pilot typically requires quick reflexes, but a remote control system practical for planes would be satellite based and have considerable latency... There is also the risk of losing connectivity in the middle of a maneuver - what should the plane do?
If you want to race, go to a racetrack... Otherwise you can't guarantee when another vehicle or a pedestrian might pop up out of nowhere... I'm all for speed limits in populated areas, but i think they should be far more relaxed on highways... As for dampening technology, some of us want to cruise along at high speed while being relaxed, we don't want to feel every bump in the road.
I do agree that license testing should be tougher tho, 99% of the problems on the roads are caused by incompetent drivers.
Incidentally, Germany is in Europe, and there are highways there with no speed limits.
Stop being so cheap, Fly business or first class.. The chair will be more comfortable and you will be able to recline it usually to the point that it's flat so you can sleep, and the food is generally much better too and the staff will give you better service. As for the 12 hours, it's a real shame we don't have Concorde any more, or you might be doing that journey in 5 hours instead of 12.
The point was that a 747 is less likely to lose all 4 engines at once (think raid), and with some engines functioning it won't go down so fast, even if it may not be able to gain altitude... Also, Cessnas are used as training planes so may be flown by less experienced pilots, you would hope that someone qualified to fly a 747 for a major airline would have years of flight experience.
The best most experienced pilots used to fly Concorde... It's a sad state that technology has moved backwards and we no longer have commercial supersonic aircraft.
But there is also the issue of there being a small number of small exit points, and trying to channel 500 people out of a 747 is quite difficult, especially if it's on fire or sinking.
Yes, people driving idiotically like pulling into the outside lane when traveling slowly cause other people to do idiotic things like tailgate and undertake... People who drive fast are usually far more alert than those who cruise at a steady slow speed... It's very easy to fall asleep at the wheel in a modern car doing 70mph.
Look at places such as Germany where there are roads without speed limits...
As the article points out, in a modern car you don't feel like you're going very fast, so cruising along at 70mph will send you to sleep... Cruising along at 150mph on the other hand keeps you alert.
You are right, drivers should keep greater distance between vehicles, especially at speed. If there is sufficient distance then you will be able to stop no matter how fast you were going.
Speed in itself is not so dangerous, most of the danger is caused by poor drivers and poorly maintained vehicles. I would feel much safer travelling at 150mph in a modern car with michael schumacher driving, than doing 20mph in a rustbucket driven by a drunk.
People are lazy, they don't want to go to the effort of shopping around to find the best deal, they will just accept the first offer that comes along and doesn't seem extortionate...
People are impatient, they want the "instant gratification"...
People are gullible, they will fall for the salesmen.
People are impulsive, they will buy stuff on the spur of the moment which they don't really need.
Not many people are calm collected and patient enough to consider why they need an item and where to get the best deal on it, waiting for a good deal if necessary.
How long was the extended warranty? It must have been 3 or 5 years since you get a manufacturer's warranty for 1 year... So how much did you pay for that extra warranty compared to how much an identical machine would have cost when it was 34 or 58 months old? If it was a 5 year warranty you could probably have bought a much superior machine when the original one failed for the same cost of the original warranty.
The chance of a given appliance failing, assuming you have quite a few, is pretty slim... What if you were to open a savings account, and pay into it all the money you *would* have spent on extended warranties... You will find that before too long, that account has more than enough money in it to replace one or two items if they were to fail, but that most failures occur within the first year (covered by the default manufacturer warranty) anyway.
In terms of those claims on the extended warranty, during the first year providers of extended warranties will just refer to the manufacturer's service but still count that as a claim.
Some devices have longer warranties by default too, especially computing related devices... Memory often has a lifetime warranty on the basis that 99% of the memory sold will be discarded long before it fails, and any that is claimed for years down the line will be so worthless by that time that the cost of replacing it is negligible (and you can replace it with "refurbished" stock that someone else has discarded).
Warranty claims are often denied too, companies will often try to worm out of honoring an extended warranty if you actually dare to make a claim. And often they will place unwanted restrictions, such as not letting you open the device (which you may want to do to upgrade it)...
I was offered an extended warranty (for 3 years) on a laptop recently which cost 1/3 of the price of the laptop itself... The first year is covered by the manufacturer's warranty so you really only get 2 years of warranty.. Once the manufacturer's warranty has expired the model is now a year old and available for half the price... After another year it's now available for less than a third of it's original price and by the third year it's virtually worthless and many people will already be considering replacing it.
I have never purchased an extended warranty, and have had various appliances and equipment... The disk failed in my macbook pro within 6 months and was replaced for free under warranty (lucky i keep backups) The disk failed in a Thinkpad 600e after 5 years, by then the laptop was so old i just threw it out. A motherboard (the sata controller on it) failed last week in a desktop i bought in 2003, i just threw it out. 2 Dell latitude C610 laptops from i think 2003-2004 are still working fine. Various old equipment from the 90s still works (routers, switches, sparcs and an amiga etc) My vacuum cleaner still works after 5 years, the extended warranty i was offered at the time would have expired by now. The oven in my house broke recently, it is 13 years old, the previous owner had a 5 year warrant on it and i have no idea if it had any repairs during that time, it ran fine for 5 years until recently. My microwave is now 6 years old, the extended warranty they offered would have expired with no claims. Same for my fridge, tho it's even older. I have several games consoles, all over a year old now, they are modded so the warranty would have been void anyway. I have a TV which is over 15 years old, and still going strong.
The only case where an extended warranty would have been claimed on, is an Intel macbook where the drive failed after just over 2 years, but the cost of the warranty would have been much higher than the cost of the new higher capacity drive i bought for it.
And yes, while it may be good customer service to *offer* customers accessories they might want or need, unscrupulous salesmen will often try to convince them they need stuff that will serve them no purpose... Salesmen are not impartial advisers.
Was his motel even full at the time? A lot of hotel managers would rather rooms sit empty than offer them out at a discount... They'd rather make a loss on the room than the smaller profit they would make from a cheaper room.
This happens in all kinds of businesses too, i knew someone who rented a rack full of servers, most of which sat idle because he was waiting for high paying customers, and wouldn't rent them out cheaper on a short term contract (where they would only be using the power and bandwidth he already paid for which was being wasted). Surely it would have made sense to rent those servers out cheaply month by month until you had a very small number left, and then gradually raise the prices and let the cheaper customers pay more or migrate away as you're finding higher paying customers to replace them.
The trouble is you are taking a long term view... Businesses these days aim for short term profits and big bonuses because the people running them just couldn't care less about the long term success of the business, they are just in it for the maximum gain they can make in the quickest time, and will then move on. That's why small businesses tend to offer a better service, because the people running them usually are interested in the long term viability of the business.
A couple of years ago banks were making huge profits and paying out massive bonuses, this year they're making huge losses and going bust... All because of short term profiteering.
The problem is rewarding staff for short term gains (quick sale now) instead of long term gains (give a good service and the customer is likely to return).. Good service is harder to quantify and many businesses aren't concerned about long term anyway.
Going off on a tangent slightly, what i especially hate are the way traffic wardens are judged... They are *supposed* to ensure that parking regulations are followed, yet they are rewarded based on how many tickets they have issued. The cause of this is that it is now in their interest to encourage violation of the parking regulations as then they can issue more tickets... If someone goes to park illegally they should be encouraged to move on, but instead the traffic wardens will hide, wait for them to park and walk off, and then dive out to ticket or even clamp them thus making making worse the issue they are supposed to be addressing (traffic blockages etc)... If they were prominently present on the streets and moved people on *before* they parked illegally they would be far more effective at what they're supposed to be for.
So a short sighted set of rewards for staff results in corruption and long term detriment.
Yes, sales staff often try to make you buy more expensive products...
I went to buy a mobile phone a few months ago and was told that insurance was mandatory on it and he wouldn't sell me the phone without it. Luckily the law states that you need to have a period when you are entitled to cancel the insurance and get a full refund, which i did... I also sent a complaint at the time of canceling.
Yes, and had any of these companies followed any kind of sensible procurement plan in the first place they'd never have got locked in to these proprietary applications from now-dead companies. And they just don't learn, despite being screwed in the past companies are still buying new proprietary crap that may well suffer the same fate (look how many companies are going bust lately).
Writing portable drivers should not be too difficult, Linux and NetBSD prove it can be done, i used to run all kinds of PCI cards on an Alpha where i doubt anyone ever tested the driver on such hardware before. The problem is closed source driver companies don't want to go to the effort of compiling and testing - if they provide a precompiled driver people will expect it to work... And they don't want to release the source code to let other people do it (people playing with exotic architectures are likely to be technically capable and perfectly willing to compile and debug things themselves).
The Alpha compiler had a 32bit compatibility mode called "taso", in which it restricts all pointers to being 32bit, because unlike other 64bit processors the Alpha has never had a 32bit mode. NT was compiled with this, which is why it was only ever able to support 2GB of ram on the Alpha while Linux, VMS and Tru64 had no such limits. That said, Windows 2000 or possibly the next version were due to have a full 64bit release for Alpha. I have the Beta2/Alpha cd somewhere so i might take a look, so they had come some of the way. Linux on the other hand had been running on 64bit Alpha, Sparc and i believe MIPS and PPC (ie both 64/32 and big/little endian architectures) long before x86-64 even existed.
The lack of a HAL library is a fault of how the install was configured rather than windows itself... If you compile a linux kernel yourself and only include support for the hardware on your machine, it won't boot in a different one either.
The MIPS versions of NT ran on hardware specifically designed to run NT, MS even made some such hardware themselves... It did not sell very well and is extremely rare (i've never seen a MIPS machine capable of running NT in the flesh). I doubt this hardware would be powerful enough to run current versions, and no new hardware has been released. The only MIPS hardware designed to be powerful was made by SGI and even that is discontinued, it had completely different firmware to the NT MIPS boxes and ran in big endian mode instead of little endian. NT never had any support for any of the custom hardware in the SGI boxes either.
Alpha was a slightly different story, DEC and later Compaq did most of the porting effort, MS were forced to allow this having lost a lawsuit to DEC, Compaq decided to drop support for NT and MS prompt followed suit. Compaq had decided to drop the architecture completely.
MS could potentially have continued supporting PPC, but it would have been significant work writing drivers for new hardware as it came out (MS don't write drivers for x86, the hardware makers typically provide them drivers for free).
Out of curiosity, i would like to play with NT3 or 4 on MIPS or PPC based hardware, if anyone is aware of what hardware exactly it's capable of running on...
The Cell is PPC based, can be faster than a Core i7 in some respects and is available cheaply in quantity. If you are willing to order sufficient quantity, IBM can crank out fast and cheap PPC chips quite easily... They did it for both Sony and MS with their respective games consoles.
Emulation on the other hand will always incur a performance hit, sometimes quite a substantial one... Tho it helps if the CPU is designed to handle it. When the Alpha was still fairly new, you could run x86 emulation on it and actually outperform the real x86 hardware that was available at the time, but unfortunately Alpha was never made in sufficient quantities to push the prices down.
Even more so, Linux is usable with a full suite of applications on PPC, IA64, MIPS, ARM, Alpha and others right now... Windows would have to start from scratch on an alternate architecture building a user and application base. With no apps users wouldn't switch, and with no users very few commercial developers would consider porting their apps.
Remember, Windows used to run on MIPS, PPC and Alpha, and still runs in a limited fashion on IA64... These architectures died or are dying because they had little or no closed source apps ported to them. Compare that with linux where most apps can simply be recompiled, and the source code for 99% of apps is available so that people with a vested interest (ie the company making and promoting the hardware) can port the apps if noone else will. Look how many of the IA64 contributions in the linux kernel come from HP/Intel, and how many of the PPC contributions come from IBM.
It's mutually assured destruction, x86-64 has become ubiquitous enough now alongside x86 that neither side would be stupid enough. In fact, you would end up with VIA being the only manufacturer who has agreements with both parties and thus legally allowed to manufacture x86 compatible processors
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I do the same as you, i can't stand tailgaters...
I'm usually driving a big solid car with no passengers in the back, so if the worst happens they will come off worse than me. Also, legally if you hit someone from behind it's your fault for not keeping proper distance or being sufficiently alert.
Tap your brakes a few times, so the lights come on but you don't actually slow down, they will see the brakes and should back off.. If not, actually brake so that they nearly hit you and it should panic them and make them back off.
And motorcycle riders tend to be far more alert to their surroundings than car drivers, because the risk is much higher.
Commercial airlines fly at high altitude and are pressurized, you couldn't just open the door because the vacuum would suck everything out quite violently, you would have to gradually equalize the pressure...
Also most people would be afraid to jump, even if remaining in the plane meant certain death.
Being a pilot typically requires quick reflexes, but a remote control system practical for planes would be satellite based and have considerable latency... There is also the risk of losing connectivity in the middle of a maneuver - what should the plane do?
If you want to race, go to a racetrack...
Otherwise you can't guarantee when another vehicle or a pedestrian might pop up out of nowhere...
I'm all for speed limits in populated areas, but i think they should be far more relaxed on highways...
As for dampening technology, some of us want to cruise along at high speed while being relaxed, we don't want to feel every bump in the road.
I do agree that license testing should be tougher tho, 99% of the problems on the roads are caused by incompetent drivers.
Incidentally, Germany is in Europe, and there are highways there with no speed limits.
Stop being so cheap, Fly business or first class..
The chair will be more comfortable and you will be able to recline it usually to the point that it's flat so you can sleep, and the food is generally much better too and the staff will give you better service.
As for the 12 hours, it's a real shame we don't have Concorde any more, or you might be doing that journey in 5 hours instead of 12.
The point was that a 747 is less likely to lose all 4 engines at once (think raid), and with some engines functioning it won't go down so fast, even if it may not be able to gain altitude...
Also, Cessnas are used as training planes so may be flown by less experienced pilots, you would hope that someone qualified to fly a 747 for a major airline would have years of flight experience.
The best most experienced pilots used to fly Concorde... It's a sad state that technology has moved backwards and we no longer have commercial supersonic aircraft.
But there is also the issue of there being a small number of small exit points, and trying to channel 500 people out of a 747 is quite difficult, especially if it's on fire or sinking.
Yes, people driving idiotically like pulling into the outside lane when traveling slowly cause other people to do idiotic things like tailgate and undertake...
People who drive fast are usually far more alert than those who cruise at a steady slow speed... It's very easy to fall asleep at the wheel in a modern car doing 70mph.
Look at places such as Germany where there are roads without speed limits...
As the article points out, in a modern car you don't feel like you're going very fast, so cruising along at 70mph will send you to sleep... Cruising along at 150mph on the other hand keeps you alert.
You are right, drivers should keep greater distance between vehicles, especially at speed. If there is sufficient distance then you will be able to stop no matter how fast you were going.
Speed in itself is not so dangerous, most of the danger is caused by poor drivers and poorly maintained vehicles. I would feel much safer travelling at 150mph in a modern car with michael schumacher driving, than doing 20mph in a rustbucket driven by a drunk.
People are lazy, they don't want to go to the effort of shopping around to find the best deal, they will just accept the first offer that comes along and doesn't seem extortionate...
People are impatient, they want the "instant gratification"...
People are gullible, they will fall for the salesmen.
People are impulsive, they will buy stuff on the spur of the moment which they don't really need.
Not many people are calm collected and patient enough to consider why they need an item and where to get the best deal on it, waiting for a good deal if necessary.
How long was the extended warranty? It must have been 3 or 5 years since you get a manufacturer's warranty for 1 year...
So how much did you pay for that extra warranty compared to how much an identical machine would have cost when it was 34 or 58 months old? If it was a 5 year warranty you could probably have bought a much superior machine when the original one failed for the same cost of the original warranty.
When you think you can con the customer into buying a more expensive alternative instead.
The chance of a given appliance failing, assuming you have quite a few, is pretty slim...
What if you were to open a savings account, and pay into it all the money you *would* have spent on extended warranties...
You will find that before too long, that account has more than enough money in it to replace one or two items if they were to fail, but that most failures occur within the first year (covered by the default manufacturer warranty) anyway.
In terms of those claims on the extended warranty, during the first year providers of extended warranties will just refer to the manufacturer's service but still count that as a claim.
Some devices have longer warranties by default too, especially computing related devices... Memory often has a lifetime warranty on the basis that 99% of the memory sold will be discarded long before it fails, and any that is claimed for years down the line will be so worthless by that time that the cost of replacing it is negligible (and you can replace it with "refurbished" stock that someone else has discarded).
Warranty claims are often denied too, companies will often try to worm out of honoring an extended warranty if you actually dare to make a claim. And often they will place unwanted restrictions, such as not letting you open the device (which you may want to do to upgrade it)...
I was offered an extended warranty (for 3 years) on a laptop recently which cost 1/3 of the price of the laptop itself... The first year is covered by the manufacturer's warranty so you really only get 2 years of warranty.. Once the manufacturer's warranty has expired the model is now a year old and available for half the price... After another year it's now available for less than a third of it's original price and by the third year it's virtually worthless and many people will already be considering replacing it.
I have never purchased an extended warranty, and have had various appliances and equipment...
The disk failed in my macbook pro within 6 months and was replaced for free under warranty (lucky i keep backups)
The disk failed in a Thinkpad 600e after 5 years, by then the laptop was so old i just threw it out.
A motherboard (the sata controller on it) failed last week in a desktop i bought in 2003, i just threw it out.
2 Dell latitude C610 laptops from i think 2003-2004 are still working fine.
Various old equipment from the 90s still works (routers, switches, sparcs and an amiga etc)
My vacuum cleaner still works after 5 years, the extended warranty i was offered at the time would have expired by now.
The oven in my house broke recently, it is 13 years old, the previous owner had a 5 year warrant on it and i have no idea if it had any repairs during that time, it ran fine for 5 years until recently.
My microwave is now 6 years old, the extended warranty they offered would have expired with no claims.
Same for my fridge, tho it's even older.
I have several games consoles, all over a year old now, they are modded so the warranty would have been void anyway.
I have a TV which is over 15 years old, and still going strong.
The only case where an extended warranty would have been claimed on, is an Intel macbook where the drive failed after just over 2 years, but the cost of the warranty would have been much higher than the cost of the new higher capacity drive i bought for it.
And yes, while it may be good customer service to *offer* customers accessories they might want or need, unscrupulous salesmen will often try to convince them they need stuff that will serve them no purpose... Salesmen are not impartial advisers.
Was his motel even full at the time?
A lot of hotel managers would rather rooms sit empty than offer them out at a discount... They'd rather make a loss on the room than the smaller profit they would make from a cheaper room.
This happens in all kinds of businesses too, i knew someone who rented a rack full of servers, most of which sat idle because he was waiting for high paying customers, and wouldn't rent them out cheaper on a short term contract (where they would only be using the power and bandwidth he already paid for which was being wasted). Surely it would have made sense to rent those servers out cheaply month by month until you had a very small number left, and then gradually raise the prices and let the cheaper customers pay more or migrate away as you're finding higher paying customers to replace them.
The trouble is you are taking a long term view... Businesses these days aim for short term profits and big bonuses because the people running them just couldn't care less about the long term success of the business, they are just in it for the maximum gain they can make in the quickest time, and will then move on. That's why small businesses tend to offer a better service, because the people running them usually are interested in the long term viability of the business.
A couple of years ago banks were making huge profits and paying out massive bonuses, this year they're making huge losses and going bust... All because of short term profiteering.
The problem is rewarding staff for short term gains (quick sale now) instead of long term gains (give a good service and the customer is likely to return).. Good service is harder to quantify and many businesses aren't concerned about long term anyway.
Going off on a tangent slightly, what i especially hate are the way traffic wardens are judged... They are *supposed* to ensure that parking regulations are followed, yet they are rewarded based on how many tickets they have issued. The cause of this is that it is now in their interest to encourage violation of the parking regulations as then they can issue more tickets...
If someone goes to park illegally they should be encouraged to move on, but instead the traffic wardens will hide, wait for them to park and walk off, and then dive out to ticket or even clamp them thus making making worse the issue they are supposed to be addressing (traffic blockages etc)... If they were prominently present on the streets and moved people on *before* they parked illegally they would be far more effective at what they're supposed to be for.
So a short sighted set of rewards for staff results in corruption and long term detriment.
Yes, sales staff often try to make you buy more expensive products...
I went to buy a mobile phone a few months ago and was told that insurance was mandatory on it and he wouldn't sell me the phone without it. Luckily the law states that you need to have a period when you are entitled to cancel the insurance and get a full refund, which i did... I also sent a complaint at the time of canceling.
Yes, and had any of these companies followed any kind of sensible procurement plan in the first place they'd never have got locked in to these proprietary applications from now-dead companies. And they just don't learn, despite being screwed in the past companies are still buying new proprietary crap that may well suffer the same fate (look how many companies are going bust lately).
Writing portable drivers should not be too difficult, Linux and NetBSD prove it can be done, i used to run all kinds of PCI cards on an Alpha where i doubt anyone ever tested the driver on such hardware before. The problem is closed source driver companies don't want to go to the effort of compiling and testing - if they provide a precompiled driver people will expect it to work... And they don't want to release the source code to let other people do it (people playing with exotic architectures are likely to be technically capable and perfectly willing to compile and debug things themselves).
The Alpha compiler had a 32bit compatibility mode called "taso", in which it restricts all pointers to being 32bit, because unlike other 64bit processors the Alpha has never had a 32bit mode. NT was compiled with this, which is why it was only ever able to support 2GB of ram on the Alpha while Linux, VMS and Tru64 had no such limits.
That said, Windows 2000 or possibly the next version were due to have a full 64bit release for Alpha. I have the Beta2/Alpha cd somewhere so i might take a look, so they had come some of the way.
Linux on the other hand had been running on 64bit Alpha, Sparc and i believe MIPS and PPC (ie both 64/32 and big/little endian architectures) long before x86-64 even existed.
The lack of a HAL library is a fault of how the install was configured rather than windows itself... If you compile a linux kernel yourself and only include support for the hardware on your machine, it won't boot in a different one either.
The MIPS versions of NT ran on hardware specifically designed to run NT, MS even made some such hardware themselves... It did not sell very well and is extremely rare (i've never seen a MIPS machine capable of running NT in the flesh). I doubt this hardware would be powerful enough to run current versions, and no new hardware has been released. The only MIPS hardware designed to be powerful was made by SGI and even that is discontinued, it had completely different firmware to the NT MIPS boxes and ran in big endian mode instead of little endian. NT never had any support for any of the custom hardware in the SGI boxes either.
Alpha was a slightly different story, DEC and later Compaq did most of the porting effort, MS were forced to allow this having lost a lawsuit to DEC, Compaq decided to drop support for NT and MS prompt followed suit. Compaq had decided to drop the architecture completely.
MS could potentially have continued supporting PPC, but it would have been significant work writing drivers for new hardware as it came out (MS don't write drivers for x86, the hardware makers typically provide them drivers for free).
Out of curiosity, i would like to play with NT3 or 4 on MIPS or PPC based hardware, if anyone is aware of what hardware exactly it's capable of running on...
The Cell is PPC based, can be faster than a Core i7 in some respects and is available cheaply in quantity.
If you are willing to order sufficient quantity, IBM can crank out fast and cheap PPC chips quite easily... They did it for both Sony and MS with their respective games consoles.
Emulation on the other hand will always incur a performance hit, sometimes quite a substantial one... Tho it helps if the CPU is designed to handle it. When the Alpha was still fairly new, you could run x86 emulation on it and actually outperform the real x86 hardware that was available at the time, but unfortunately Alpha was never made in sufficient quantities to push the prices down.
Even more so, Linux is usable with a full suite of applications on PPC, IA64, MIPS, ARM, Alpha and others right now... Windows would have to start from scratch on an alternate architecture building a user and application base. With no apps users wouldn't switch, and with no users very few commercial developers would consider porting their apps.
Remember, Windows used to run on MIPS, PPC and Alpha, and still runs in a limited fashion on IA64... These architectures died or are dying because they had little or no closed source apps ported to them.
Compare that with linux where most apps can simply be recompiled, and the source code for 99% of apps is available so that people with a vested interest (ie the company making and promoting the hardware) can port the apps if noone else will. Look how many of the IA64 contributions in the linux kernel come from HP/Intel, and how many of the PPC contributions come from IBM.
It's mutually assured destruction, x86-64 has become ubiquitous enough now alongside x86 that neither side would be stupid enough. In fact, you would end up with VIA being the only manufacturer who has agreements with both parties and thus legally allowed to manufacture x86 compatible processors