Submission + - SPAM: Meet The Kinky King Latex of Beijing
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The answer is simple
Will Linux run out of the box on this hardware: probably yes
Will Linux run well and completely and fully utilise all the features of this hardware : probably no
An example is graphics cards, almost all are supported out of the box (more than Windows 7 supports), very few are supported with full 3D acceleration (The ones that do support 3D acceleration do so only with an extra binary driver)
If I were to keep my cat tied down I wouldn't see the point in keeping one. It's a stark contradiction to their nature. Sure they can get killed just like any animal or human. That's life.
BTW, if you have your cat or dog chiped you can be contacted when a pound picks them up. No problem there.
Generally people think there should be some sort of parity of pricing across countries for online distribution systems but this is wrong in the real world for a few reasons. Fundamentally you could break it down to intentional and mechanical.
On the intentional side, this is pretty obvious. Companies exploit the strength of local economies by pricing goods per market. They also have to deal with weak markets. Usually you get some guff about "additional operating costs" but while that's partially true it's mostly intentional price setting. We all know that Good X is cheaper in country Y than your home country Z story. I'm surprised people think companies wouldn't do it to an online distribution system too and expect parity. The nice thing for us as consumers is we can spot it. Look at the effective USD cost in Swiss Francs in that table there - ouch.
Secondly, mechanical. Managing currency exposure is fairly complicated for most businesses and many of them do a not very good job at it. Certainly Steam is woeful at it. FX markets move very very very fast and the nature of the forward contracts you have to purchase to hedge foreign currency exposures also complicates things *a lot* for non expert businesses. If I have most of my earnings in dollars and I'm selling products in Euro, I don't simply convert Euros back to dollars each business day and not mind what is happening to the EUR / USD exchange rate. If the exchange rate keeps on collapsing against me, I would be getting less and less dollars every day. You don't want your non-dollar goods giving you 20% less than you expected at the beginning of the year because of a 20% decline in the exchange rate.
What I should do is hedge my expected earnings in EUR with, say, a three month FX forward contract so that for every dollar I "lose" when the EUR / USD exchange rate falls against my dollar interests, I make a dollar in profit when the FX forward contract expires three months from now. So even if the exchange rate goes against me by 10%, while the USD40 I thought I would make a month from now on the euro sale of a single copy of my game actually becomes USD36 due to adverse currency movements, then I would get back the 4 dollars from the profit on the foreign exchange rate forward. Airlines do the equivalent hedging fuel exposures.
Banks do this all the time and decent currency management would solve a lot of these problems. Games businesses just don't get it right mechanically with decent hedging and frequently it's plain old intentional price differentials too.
Wishing without work is like fishing without bait. -- Frank Tyger