Corporations remove personal responsibility from individuals. So individuals will do unethical things they otherwise wouldn't contemplate "because it's their job". Therefore, corporations will be unethical whenever unethical behavior provides profit.
And yes, government is there to enforce ethical behavior through laws and punishment disincentives.
Corporations are the easiest facsimile we have to generating a viable free market economy. They allocate relatively scarce resources reasonably efficiently.
The alternative you seem to be working to is what we call a "command" economy where a centrally responsible body determines allocation of resources (including investment funds) for the good of the whole. The best example of this I can think of is Soviet Russia, the USSR. Unfortunately as we have seen, this does not develop into a particularly efficient mechanism.
In this particular example, however, MS has stepped once more into territory they can't hope to dominate - Wikipedia can "be edited by anyone!", so whatever they spin, there will be hordes of volunteer MS bashers to set it straight, the article will be marked as under conflict/controversy, and readers will get at least some meaningful and slightly unbiased information from it.
Openness and freedom of information is the enemy of unethical behavior.
Ohh... so they just signed them and ignore them anyway? That's even worse.
Still, it will be hilarious when the US authorities start using foreign policy (naked human POW pyramids!) in domestic circumstances (naked human copyright infringers!).
And the US didn't sign the Geneva conventions so there's no impetus (or evidence in some cases) of americans being required to conduct themselves with honour.
Newsflash to american anonymous coward: The USA and Canada are on the same landmass. If you nuke Canada, all but the immediate blast effects of the nukes will probably impact directly on mainland USA.
And, as some people have mentioned, the US electrical grid and fuel systems (oil, petroleum, I think you call it "gas" even though it's a liquid) is almost entirely dependant on Canadian supply (and for bonus points, GWB has already trashed a lot of the oil reserves thanks to his aggressive annexing of the sovereign nations of Iraq and Afghanistan)
Given that delightful "We're better than you because we have nukes and GWB" statement, I gladly invite the USA to nuke Canada all they want. Please. The world is better off without. (Although I will miss slashdot.)
I've just bought a Intel C2D and a GeForce 8800GTS for my home gaming rig. I've played around with Vista on PC's before I got this one, waiting for the GPU to be supported under Vista by nVidia, and I've mucked around with Linux as well, it works pretty sweet!
Where can I download this OS/X to install it? It's free isn't it? Free as in speech? Or just beer?
(Yes I have plenty of karma. Flame away. I'm making a point about OS/X being even more closed than Windows.)
Vanish is bugged? From my perspective it works perfectly, rogues *always* seem to get away from me when things aren't going their way.
Which is why I'm rolling and powerlevelling a rogue as soon as BC comes out. It's a shame about warriors though... still the game would be boring if every class was equally powerful.
Auctioning, for starters (the Guild Wars devs really wanted to implement an auction system, but they pretty much abandoned it when they realised the heavily distributed-instanced nature of the game design simply didn't allow for it... oops).
Also, because WoW is very open ended, you also get to defend the city from thousands of squealing 14 yo Alliance pallies as they once again assault Orgrimmar because they outnumber horde 1.6:1.0 on average, but it's ok because they stop when it's bedtime in the USA. Then there's the counterattacks, the subtleties of a semi-closed economic system, world PvP as well as instanced PvP (like guild wars, but on a larger scale and with larger maps)
I'm not saying GW is a bad game, but it's not designed to keep you playing over and over again. There's no ongoing "rent" payment, so there's no profit to them if you keep playing and playing after a certain point. WoW is designed to be just that, more of a lifestyle than a pick up and play kind of game. It's designed to hook you and keep you hooked. The reason it works is because people actually *want* that kind of job. Human nature. We're designed to work, forage, fight, and try to win.
I'm saying that GW is not a better game than WoW on the basis that the parent was implying it was - a game isn't better just because the server doesn't bounce as often. The servers don't bounce in GW's because they simply don't do as much, because the game doesn't have the same capabilities and complexities as WoW does. If you had a client-server based game of Tic-Tac-Toe, you'd probably never need to bounce the server for maintenance because it just wouldn't be doing a lot. Does that therefore make Tic-Tac-Toe a vastly superior game to GW and WoW?
WoW is a live, mostly non-instanced MMORPG Guild Wars is not an MMORPG at all (Just ask, they'll tell you). It's a competitive online RPG. It's fully instanced. You simply can't interact with any more than the people in the same instance with you.
World of Warcraft = thousands of players per-server. Guild Wars = 8 players per server in most cases. In towns, there can many more than 8, but the town instances are totally limited to non-combat trading, chat, and simple in-game emotes.
You admit yourself that GW isn't the better game. That's not because of poor game design from GW. It's inferior by design. The Guild Wars model deliberately chose to limit the capabilities of PvE and PvP to ensure that 100% instancing would be possible. They gutted the game to make their administration easier. Is that really a better implementation than WoW?
If we disregard game quality for the sake of the back end implementation, then the state of gaming would be very different indeed. I'd suggest some kind of online connect-4 game, the implementation would be so efficient you would never experience downtime! And it would be better than WoW because there's no downtime, right?
I have an IBM thinkpad T43 running Windows XPSP2, and it handles hibernation extremely well. In fact nowadays I just sleep it and go to my next site (bit of a road warrior, I work at multiple client sites). The laptop never has to sleep for more than 2 days, so the battery doesn't run out. I never have to shut it down. And it doesn't take long to boot anyway.
Let me just say that -consumers- dictate market forces, not microsoft or any other vendor.
Hi, I can see you've finished first year economics, including the good ol' free market economy! Great!
Let's move on to second year where we experience market conditions that allow companies like Apple to remain in business by selling non-competitive products at higher margins than free market conditions would allow by making them look bright and shiny encased in white plastics. Because people will buy something because it says "Apple" on it.
Microsoft works in a market which is very similar to a textbook condition known as a Monopoly (it's not exactly a monopoly but there's no such thing as a pure free market or a pure monopoly or any other pure market). What happens in a Monopoly market is the product demand is pretty inelastic (everyone needs computers), and the competition is heavily stifled or controlled (In this case through software patents and general obfuscation of the software product code). Now you might say Linux can compete but it really can't, even though the base functionality is really the same, Linux and Windows are both operating systems right? But only Windows will run Halo 3 and whatever other next gen games, and this is all about gaming. So, Microsoft is wholly in charge of determining supply, and therefore does control the market we're interested in.
Now, as you've identified yourself as a gamer, it's interesting that you've chosen a game to represent your status as a respectable cutting edge up to date in with the latest gamer that has *nothing* to do with over 99.99% of actual market-relevant gamers in the world. (Aside: Commander Keen was a great game for its time, but you need to move with the times, it's 2006). We can put aside any "they don't make them like they used to, I've seen it all before" discussions for another time. The gaming industry is not static, it moves. DX10 enables graphics functionality and rendering speeds like no other framework ever provided. It also more tightly controls hardware specifications which will flatten out disparity in performance, stability, and everything else that we currently experience in heterogenous hardware environments.
But if you're not 100% sure, google for screenshots of a game (a DX10 game) called Crysis, and tell me with a straight face that you believe that Commander Keen has the same potential to create visually realistic imagery and wholly immersive cinematic gameplay scenarios.
Say what you like about his products, but Steve Jobs isn't retarded either. He's made some bad decisions and some good ones, but he's always managed to create demand for products with a higher price and the same functionality as lower priced more competitive products. Usually by making them white. But I digress.
Apple's cornered the online music sales market, they've managed to attach themselves to the music industry and integrate themselves as such an invaluable part of their distribution mechanism that they can't do easily without them. Jobs is smart enough to know he's got leverage. He'll use it to prevent any cartel members from costing him money.
The only reason this started in the first place is Microsoft muscling their way into the same market, and quite intelligently, by bribing the content providers to favour them over Apple.
These people need to be kept away from sharp objects and heavy machinery until they grow up.
No. As a firm believer in Darwin's principles of natural selection, I can tell you that these people need to be given sharp objects and kept as close to heavy machinery as possible.
The "tax" won't be retroactive. You'd need a new iPod with tax to get the benefits. The tax is only paid to UMG. You could only get away with copying their catalog, not the RIAA's.
No, Microsoft pays a fee to Universal for each Zune sold (I think the sum of all fees paid amounts to roughly $0.45US now... ha!) for the privilege of selling Universals music catalog through Microsoft's online music market (Urge or something?). It was a necessary move by Microsoft to attempt to make the Zune the favoured weapon of the RIAA instead of the iPod, because music made and sold for Zune will therefore represent a richer revenue stream than iTunes. Typical MS business practice, and quite cunning. Microsoft recognises that content is king, and works to secure it quickly, and where possible deny it to the competition.
Because of the nature of that agreement, however, if you infringe copyright and get caught, you won't be safe from the RIAA's extortion attempts.
No no, the Canadian recordable media levy is *not* related to copyright infringement at all.
The levy is a fee paid to the recording industry to subsidise the industry for the loss of revenue taken from duplicate media sales to compensate the industry for *fair-use* backups of media for personal use. Really a coup for the music industry because they're getting paid every time you exercise your rights, and they still get to take you to court if they can fake enough evidence about your downloading.
But this new one is fantastic, because if Apple accedes to the music industry's wish (and I personally hope they will as quickly as possible), it hopefully (IANAL) creates an circumstance where you have already paid damages to the music industry, and hopefully double jeopardy means they can now not take you to court and say "well you took our music but we weren't compensated" because they will have been (for any music published by Universal at least). Thus making their entire catalog free for download by anyone, anywhere, who owns an iPod.
This is different from the Zune, which pays money to the publisher simply as a gratuity for the favour of their songs being available on the Zune music purchasing outlet. The establishment in this case is not being compensated for copyright infringement.
And, no matter how fast your integrated memory controller is, you're splitting that memory between CPU and GPU (remember, if you didn't want to share the memory, why would you put the GPU on the same socket as the CPU, why not have it in a seperate socket, or, haha, as a PCIe card?). Sure, you get the benefit of having the CPU shove data directly to the GPU without using the heavily saturated (not) PCIe bus.
It would be highly inefficient to shove DDR3 memory at a CPU - benchmarks consistently demonstrate that additional memory throughput beyond DDR2800 makes little to no difference in performance of a contemporary CPU. Going from DDR2-667 to DDR2-800 is barely noticeable. Why throw even more money at the CPU so you can have a GPU that performs close to the speed of a self-sufficient graphics card?
No no, it is evident this solution is meant for the low end markets. While performance parts make the prestige of a company, it's the volume sales that are the bread and butter. This is why AMD consistently paper launches their high end video cards, there's no sense in producing them at high volume, you just need to make enough for the benchmarking sites to record you as the maker of the fastest GPU, then you get the prestige, then you sell the midrange parts in volume.
And that lovely less-than-average performing integrated GPU is taking up space that could be used with a CPU, so you're sacrificing your SMP for the sake of that.
Unless you get two sockets, so two GPUs and two CPUs. Some bizarre new AMD crossfire monster. But the memory throughput would still be weaker than using PCIe cards. 4x4 would be better performance.
Slightly off topic - has anyone noticed that the Vista EULA only allows two CPUs? What does this mean for Intel and AMD quad cores? Everyone has to buy a Windows Server 2003 license?
Remember the characteristics of performance GPUs at the moment - AMD's Fusion technologies are not aimed at performance gaming at all, they're squarely aimed at the imbedded/budget/mobile segments of the market.
Just look at the memory speed of your average CPU (667MHz DDR2) and your average GPU (1GHz DDR3 is good).
Now, hooking your GPU up to the main system memory takes away a huge chunk of your performance. Saves you a lot of money though. If you're not sure, go look at how overclocking video memory affects performance, just about any of your THG/Anandtech/Extremetech sites will tell you.
This is just another method of doing your onboard graphics solution. It will perform much better than current integrated graphics solutions. But there's no way it can outperform a quad-SLI rig, even on paper.
Please, this is a much better business model. Now, mobile phones are much more appealing to the most lucrative market. By loading phones with dozens of complicated games and applications, they are objects of desire for rich nerds who love twiddling with little gadgets but would never want to own a regular telephone because they don't have any friends to call.
Thanks... I was just poking fun at the judge. It was a very uninformed statement to make in a court, just because a product is free as in beer doesn't mean it's free as in speech.
Under the same logic, however, the RIAA really has no avenue to enforce the copyrights they hold as the music is played for free (effectively) over radio broadcast. As RIAA has given away the music, they clearly deserve no right to enforce copyright, by the logic of the judge.
This is an awesome precedent that will completely invalidate all copyright, in fact. As soon as one evaluation copy of any software is released anywhere, that codebase immediately enters the public domain, because copyright cannot be enforced on it. The only preventative measure is to use the DMCA, by placing a mechanism to make the code unreadable, and therefore the only way to see it would be to violate the DMCA to break in and have a look at the code. (Although, the work may not be covered by copyright because according to superjudge's precedent, it was given away free, even if it was in a compiled format).
1) Develop awesome code (this can be hard so I recommend you buy some other companies awesome code). 2) Patent awesome code 3) Cross-license awesome code with IBM and allow IBM to include the code in Linux 4) Sue IBM and the Linux Pirates for infringing your copyright and patents.
Now what may happen here is that IBM might tell you that it's not really your code in Linux, this is obviously akin to the Chewbacca Defense. You must immediately then subpoena IBM for every line of code they ever wrote. IBM will likely attempt the same from you as a stalling tactic, well you can show them who's boss. Don't front up with any of your code! Eventually IBM will capitulate and you will become incredibly wealthy.
Slashdot Mirror
Corporations remove personal responsibility from individuals. So individuals will do unethical things they otherwise wouldn't contemplate "because it's their job". Therefore, corporations will be unethical whenever unethical behavior provides profit.
And yes, government is there to enforce ethical behavior through laws and punishment disincentives.
Corporations are the easiest facsimile we have to generating a viable free market economy. They allocate relatively scarce resources reasonably efficiently.
The alternative you seem to be working to is what we call a "command" economy where a centrally responsible body determines allocation of resources (including investment funds) for the good of the whole. The best example of this I can think of is Soviet Russia, the USSR. Unfortunately as we have seen, this does not develop into a particularly efficient mechanism.
In this particular example, however, MS has stepped once more into territory they can't hope to dominate - Wikipedia can "be edited by anyone!", so whatever they spin, there will be hordes of volunteer MS bashers to set it straight, the article will be marked as under conflict/controversy, and readers will get at least some meaningful and slightly unbiased information from it.
Openness and freedom of information is the enemy of unethical behavior.
Ohh... so they just signed them and ignore them anyway?
That's even worse.
Still, it will be hilarious when the US authorities start using foreign policy (naked human POW pyramids!) in domestic circumstances (naked human copyright infringers!).
And the US didn't sign the Geneva conventions so there's no impetus (or evidence in some cases) of americans being required to conduct themselves with honour.
Newsflash to american anonymous coward: The USA and Canada are on the same landmass. If you nuke Canada, all but the immediate blast effects of the nukes will probably impact directly on mainland USA.
And, as some people have mentioned, the US electrical grid and fuel systems (oil, petroleum, I think you call it "gas" even though it's a liquid) is almost entirely dependant on Canadian supply (and for bonus points, GWB has already trashed a lot of the oil reserves thanks to his aggressive annexing of the sovereign nations of Iraq and Afghanistan)
Given that delightful "We're better than you because we have nukes and GWB" statement, I gladly invite the USA to nuke Canada all they want. Please. The world is better off without. (Although I will miss slashdot.)
I've just bought a Intel C2D and a GeForce 8800GTS for my home gaming rig. I've played around with Vista on PC's before I got this one, waiting for the GPU to be supported under Vista by nVidia, and I've mucked around with Linux as well, it works pretty sweet!
Where can I download this OS/X to install it? It's free isn't it? Free as in speech? Or just beer?
(Yes I have plenty of karma. Flame away. I'm making a point about OS/X being even more closed than Windows.)
Hmmm and after the level 10 mage has gotten the level 60 rogue out of stealth, what do you think happens to the mage?
And what is the rogue doing fighting level 10 mages anyway, is he alliance on a PvP server or something?
Vanish is bugged? From my perspective it works perfectly, rogues *always* seem to get away from me when things aren't going their way.
Which is why I'm rolling and powerlevelling a rogue as soon as BC comes out. It's a shame about warriors though... still the game would be boring if every class was equally powerful.
What can you do in a WoW city?
Auctioning, for starters (the Guild Wars devs really wanted to implement an auction system, but they pretty much abandoned it when they realised the heavily distributed-instanced nature of the game design simply didn't allow for it... oops).
Also, because WoW is very open ended, you also get to defend the city from thousands of squealing 14 yo Alliance pallies as they once again assault Orgrimmar because they outnumber horde 1.6:1.0 on average, but it's ok because they stop when it's bedtime in the USA. Then there's the counterattacks, the subtleties of a semi-closed economic system, world PvP as well as instanced PvP (like guild wars, but on a larger scale and with larger maps)
I'm not saying GW is a bad game, but it's not designed to keep you playing over and over again. There's no ongoing "rent" payment, so there's no profit to them if you keep playing and playing after a certain point. WoW is designed to be just that, more of a lifestyle than a pick up and play kind of game. It's designed to hook you and keep you hooked. The reason it works is because people actually *want* that kind of job. Human nature. We're designed to work, forage, fight, and try to win.
I'm saying that GW is not a better game than WoW on the basis that the parent was implying it was - a game isn't better just because the server doesn't bounce as often. The servers don't bounce in GW's because they simply don't do as much, because the game doesn't have the same capabilities and complexities as WoW does. If you had a client-server based game of Tic-Tac-Toe, you'd probably never need to bounce the server for maintenance because it just wouldn't be doing a lot. Does that therefore make Tic-Tac-Toe a vastly superior game to GW and WoW?
Thanks, trollman!
Now let's deFUD this one.
WoW is a live, mostly non-instanced MMORPG
Guild Wars is not an MMORPG at all (Just ask, they'll tell you). It's a competitive online RPG. It's fully instanced. You simply can't interact with any more than the people in the same instance with you.
World of Warcraft = thousands of players per-server.
Guild Wars = 8 players per server in most cases. In towns, there can many more than 8, but the town instances are totally limited to non-combat trading, chat, and simple in-game emotes.
You admit yourself that GW isn't the better game. That's not because of poor game design from GW. It's inferior by design. The Guild Wars model deliberately chose to limit the capabilities of PvE and PvP to ensure that 100% instancing would be possible. They gutted the game to make their administration easier. Is that really a better implementation than WoW?
If we disregard game quality for the sake of the back end implementation, then the state of gaming would be very different indeed. I'd suggest some kind of online connect-4 game, the implementation would be so efficient you would never experience downtime! And it would be better than WoW because there's no downtime, right?
I have an IBM thinkpad T43 running Windows XPSP2, and it handles hibernation extremely well. In fact nowadays I just sleep it and go to my next site (bit of a road warrior, I work at multiple client sites). The laptop never has to sleep for more than 2 days, so the battery doesn't run out. I never have to shut it down. And it doesn't take long to boot anyway.
Let me just say that -consumers- dictate market forces, not microsoft or any other vendor.
Hi, I can see you've finished first year economics, including the good ol' free market economy! Great!
Let's move on to second year where we experience market conditions that allow companies like Apple to remain in business by selling non-competitive products at higher margins than free market conditions would allow by making them look bright and shiny encased in white plastics. Because people will buy something because it says "Apple" on it.
Microsoft works in a market which is very similar to a textbook condition known as a Monopoly (it's not exactly a monopoly but there's no such thing as a pure free market or a pure monopoly or any other pure market). What happens in a Monopoly market is the product demand is pretty inelastic (everyone needs computers), and the competition is heavily stifled or controlled (In this case through software patents and general obfuscation of the software product code). Now you might say Linux can compete but it really can't, even though the base functionality is really the same, Linux and Windows are both operating systems right? But only Windows will run Halo 3 and whatever other next gen games, and this is all about gaming. So, Microsoft is wholly in charge of determining supply, and therefore does control the market we're interested in.
Now, as you've identified yourself as a gamer, it's interesting that you've chosen a game to represent your status as a respectable cutting edge up to date in with the latest gamer that has *nothing* to do with over 99.99% of actual market-relevant gamers in the world. (Aside: Commander Keen was a great game for its time, but you need to move with the times, it's 2006). We can put aside any "they don't make them like they used to, I've seen it all before" discussions for another time. The gaming industry is not static, it moves. DX10 enables graphics functionality and rendering speeds like no other framework ever provided. It also more tightly controls hardware specifications which will flatten out disparity in performance, stability, and everything else that we currently experience in heterogenous hardware environments.
But if you're not 100% sure, google for screenshots of a game (a DX10 game) called Crysis, and tell me with a straight face that you believe that Commander Keen has the same potential to create visually realistic imagery and wholly immersive cinematic gameplay scenarios.
Say what you like about his products, but Steve Jobs isn't retarded either. He's made some bad decisions and some good ones, but he's always managed to create demand for products with a higher price and the same functionality as lower priced more competitive products. Usually by making them white. But I digress.
Apple's cornered the online music sales market, they've managed to attach themselves to the music industry and integrate themselves as such an invaluable part of their distribution mechanism that they can't do easily without them. Jobs is smart enough to know he's got leverage. He'll use it to prevent any cartel members from costing him money.
The only reason this started in the first place is Microsoft muscling their way into the same market, and quite intelligently, by bribing the content providers to favour them over Apple.
These people need to be kept away from sharp objects and heavy machinery until they grow up.
No. As a firm believer in Darwin's principles of natural selection, I can tell you that these people need to be given sharp objects and kept as close to heavy machinery as possible.
Foolhardy!
This is all hypothetical anyway, but
The "tax" won't be retroactive. You'd need a new iPod with tax to get the benefits.
The tax is only paid to UMG. You could only get away with copying their catalog, not the RIAA's.
No, Microsoft pays a fee to Universal for each Zune sold (I think the sum of all fees paid amounts to roughly $0.45US now... ha!) for the privilege of selling Universals music catalog through Microsoft's online music market (Urge or something?). It was a necessary move by Microsoft to attempt to make the Zune the favoured weapon of the RIAA instead of the iPod, because music made and sold for Zune will therefore represent a richer revenue stream than iTunes. Typical MS business practice, and quite cunning. Microsoft recognises that content is king, and works to secure it quickly, and where possible deny it to the competition.
Because of the nature of that agreement, however, if you infringe copyright and get caught, you won't be safe from the RIAA's extortion attempts.
No no, the Canadian recordable media levy is *not* related to copyright infringement at all.
The levy is a fee paid to the recording industry to subsidise the industry for the loss of revenue taken from duplicate media sales to compensate the industry for *fair-use* backups of media for personal use. Really a coup for the music industry because they're getting paid every time you exercise your rights, and they still get to take you to court if they can fake enough evidence about your downloading.
But this new one is fantastic, because if Apple accedes to the music industry's wish (and I personally hope they will as quickly as possible), it hopefully (IANAL) creates an circumstance where you have already paid damages to the music industry, and hopefully double jeopardy means they can now not take you to court and say "well you took our music but we weren't compensated" because they will have been (for any music published by Universal at least). Thus making their entire catalog free for download by anyone, anywhere, who owns an iPod.
This is different from the Zune, which pays money to the publisher simply as a gratuity for the favour of their songs being available on the Zune music purchasing outlet. The establishment in this case is not being compensated for copyright infringement.
And, no matter how fast your integrated memory controller is, you're splitting that memory between CPU and GPU (remember, if you didn't want to share the memory, why would you put the GPU on the same socket as the CPU, why not have it in a seperate socket, or, haha, as a PCIe card?). Sure, you get the benefit of having the CPU shove data directly to the GPU without using the heavily saturated (not) PCIe bus.
It would be highly inefficient to shove DDR3 memory at a CPU - benchmarks consistently demonstrate that additional memory throughput beyond DDR2800 makes little to no difference in performance of a contemporary CPU. Going from DDR2-667 to DDR2-800 is barely noticeable. Why throw even more money at the CPU so you can have a GPU that performs close to the speed of a self-sufficient graphics card?
No no, it is evident this solution is meant for the low end markets. While performance parts make the prestige of a company, it's the volume sales that are the bread and butter. This is why AMD consistently paper launches their high end video cards, there's no sense in producing them at high volume, you just need to make enough for the benchmarking sites to record you as the maker of the fastest GPU, then you get the prestige, then you sell the midrange parts in volume.
And that lovely less-than-average performing integrated GPU is taking up space that could be used with a CPU, so you're sacrificing your SMP for the sake of that.
Unless you get two sockets, so two GPUs and two CPUs. Some bizarre new AMD crossfire monster. But the memory throughput would still be weaker than using PCIe cards. 4x4 would be better performance.
Slightly off topic - has anyone noticed that the Vista EULA only allows two CPUs? What does this mean for Intel and AMD quad cores? Everyone has to buy a Windows Server 2003 license?
Remember the characteristics of performance GPUs at the moment - AMD's Fusion technologies are not aimed at performance gaming at all, they're squarely aimed at the imbedded/budget/mobile segments of the market.
Just look at the memory speed of your average CPU (667MHz DDR2) and your average GPU (1GHz DDR3 is good).
Now, hooking your GPU up to the main system memory takes away a huge chunk of your performance. Saves you a lot of money though. If you're not sure, go look at how overclocking video memory affects performance, just about any of your THG/Anandtech/Extremetech sites will tell you.
This is just another method of doing your onboard graphics solution. It will perform much better than current integrated graphics solutions. But there's no way it can outperform a quad-SLI rig, even on paper.
Please, this is a much better business model. Now, mobile phones are much more appealing to the most lucrative market. By loading phones with dozens of complicated games and applications, they are objects of desire for rich nerds who love twiddling with little gadgets but would never want to own a regular telephone because they don't have any friends to call.
That's progress!
Thanks... I was just poking fun at the judge. It was a very uninformed statement to make in a court, just because a product is free as in beer doesn't mean it's free as in speech.
Under the same logic, however, the RIAA really has no avenue to enforce the copyrights they hold as the music is played for free (effectively) over radio broadcast. As RIAA has given away the music, they clearly deserve no right to enforce copyright, by the logic of the judge.
This is an awesome precedent that will completely invalidate all copyright, in fact. As soon as one evaluation copy of any software is released anywhere, that codebase immediately enters the public domain, because copyright cannot be enforced on it. The only preventative measure is to use the DMCA, by placing a mechanism to make the code unreadable, and therefore the only way to see it would be to violate the DMCA to break in and have a look at the code. (Although, the work may not be covered by copyright because according to superjudge's precedent, it was given away free, even if it was in a compiled format).
Now I can download all the MP3's I want. Copyright isn't an issue because they're being given away for free. On Bittorrent.
Hmm, Exchange and PDC? That is one of the Do-Not-Do-This(tm) things isn't it?
1) Develop awesome code (this can be hard so I recommend you buy some other companies awesome code).
2) Patent awesome code
3) Cross-license awesome code with IBM and allow IBM to include the code in Linux
4) Sue IBM and the Linux Pirates for infringing your copyright and patents.
Now what may happen here is that IBM might tell you that it's not really your code in Linux, this is obviously akin to the Chewbacca Defense. You must immediately then subpoena IBM for every line of code they ever wrote. IBM will likely attempt the same from you as a stalling tactic, well you can show them who's boss. Don't front up with any of your code! Eventually IBM will capitulate and you will become incredibly wealthy.
Hugs and Kisses,
D McB.
At least they decided to allow the Americans to know they don't have democracy anymore. How long until this sort of thing becomes censored?