achievement!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIS6G-HvnkU

This is a post-Bilski world. This shit is invalid.

Its basically a entire operating system that runs in 16-bit mode from a ROM. It is always running, it has network stack, it is outside of your OS security model, and the OS can not tell what it is doing. All the implementations are proprietary and you cannot reverse engineer it to verify what it does.

BIOS may be a open standard, but that does not make is a good thing. If i wanted a OS i would use one, I dont want a OS that runs outside the one I installed, one that I cannot turn off nor have any control over what it does. It is reasonable to have a BIOS on ROM that does not interact with the network, that does not stay on all the time, or implements straight forward ACPI. But things that are OS-like belong in a OS, not above the pervue of the user in a flash chip, and that OS should be one that is used and works, so that a device which has a driver in the OS doesnt work simply because there is not ANOTHER driver for the BIOS.

If you want things like netboot, you can put linux or BSD on a flash chip and kexec to any other OS, but don't force another proprietary OS down my throat and call it "Open".

Yes, but if Intel did get a monopoly and tried to milk it prices would equalize and people would switch.

Also, you just pointed out how consumers are really doing quite well in the x86 market right now. Despite all the talk there is a fair bit of competition and also an incredible pace of innovation, all to the benefit of consumers.

Yes, but this is why nothing is going to happen. Its just all a game that leads to a contract renegotiation, and no-one should think otherwise.

One word: Itanic

bravo, if people are not critical in what they read than it doesnt matter what they read, they will always end up believing mistruths. Its better to have them read a work with more life, and learn how people might game the system, or otherwise they will always fall prey when the government, some scammer, some corporation, or even some well-meaning individual tries to slam mis-truths down their throat. You cant protect people from mis-speech, it is far better to expose them to all speech and learn for themselves how to make us of it.

yes, most people learn that if they type what they want into google, or the firefox search box, the magical answer will show up, but attributing it to magic, and assuming it will answer is fundamentally flawed.

Google may be have some things and not others, it may rank things wrongly due to flaws or outright manipulation, it is wranked by a computer so cannot see certain relationships, nor can it read your mind.

There is nothing wrong with google being limited, and it is. Nor is there anything wrong with using it, and all information should be available to use, including secondary information like the indexing of Google. But assuming that it can answer your question, and more importantly, assuming that it knows the answers in fundamentally flawed, and some lack parts of this distinction.

This was fairly basic however, and smart kids know this whether their elder teacher, who cant format his word processing correctly, is ordered to "teach" it or not.

by that time everyone would switch to VIA or ARM or PowerPC, it would just take to long. Perhaps Windows users would be stuck with two monopolies, but Linux, and to a less degree Mac users, have other options.

Also, the massive hit in progress would just lead everyone to not upgrade.

agreed, right now the competition is hot, and the consumers are doing quite well. Good bickering is good, and profits are also quite good, as long as it doesn't prevent any of these big guys from doing business.

While there is a possibility ntel could sink its own ship, (see above post) this thing is actually in quite good shape. Bus speeds do change, so things cant always be backwards compatible AND faster; but in general differnt stuff is very compatible. AMD is making a stride that 3 generations of CPUs will fit in previous generation motherboards, albeit with slower memory pipelines. Also, with SATA and usb it really is just plug it in computing, and with no restart. It costs more, but servers have hot swap RAM, and also many motherboards have hot swap PCI-E cards.

For the most part, this criticism of upgradeability is without merit: simply because development is moving really really fast and therefore a 3-year-old computer cant use anything but PCI cards, and USB devices (also IDE HDs work fine) of and old one doesnt mean there is a lack of interoperability, this is largely just cause everything is getting so much better, cheaper, and faster. The parts that are no longer inter-operable are so obsolete and slow that there is no point is continuing to using them in a new machine.

Then people who are not locked in, ie Linux users and to a lesser degree Mac users, will switch platforms...and Windows users would then have 2 monopolies to pay their dues to. :P

But Intel looses their x86_64 licence if AMD looses its x86 licence. And Intel cant just cancel AMDs licence, that was part of the licencing for what would be the PC platform.

Microsoft has been trying to commoditize Intel for years and this is the type of thing they do to try to defend themselves.

However, Microsoft isn't their biggest enemy anymore, and performance is a commodity, although that doesn't mean its not a profitable one.

Intel needs to stop trying to pull Microsoft-like lock-ins, things like EFI for example. Intel should focus on making their platform better, and making it suitable in more markets, rather than trying to increase switching costs from their legacy platform. Otherwise their market will disappear out from under them.

I have never used steam, but some other coments below made it seem that at least every month after offline mode it would decide it needs "re-legitimizing". This starts to seem alot like linux genuine advantage pretty quick.