Yes, they basically pay developers to gimp their games for radeon users. Also, they broke physx for anyone who had a radeon card in the system.
Superior now. But when amd were ahead intel bribed the major pc makers not to use amd chips. During that time most of dell's income came from intel payments, for example. This is what destroyed amd since they could and can no longer afford r&d.
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/nov2009/tc2009114_975298.htm
The solution would have been for them to pay amd at least 10 billion in damages instead of 1, but that ship has sailed.
I had a similar problem with my nvidia 7600gt, where I would get lock ups every 10 minutes or whatever in most games, which was apparently caused by a hardware bug. There were also green dots and lines that would appear on the screen. Like they would start as dots and turn into lines if i scrolled down a web page for example.. So this type of shit isn't limited to ati/amd.
"but what if the ban leaks over to product photography (I'm looking at you, Burger King), video gameplay demos"
That would be great actually.
Just in case you don't know, switching to "mask as Firefox" in site prefs usually fixes these things. Something here http://operawiki.info/CustomButtons#webdev may be useful to you; dunno if the neptune plugin still works. One thing I'll miss about Opera is being able to put buttons on the start bar.
The likes of Google seem to deliberately break stuff for Opera users so it's not always the company's fault. On the other hand, they haven't bothered integrating hardware acceleration yet despite having a working version in 2008, so if you want to play Angry Birds you need to use something else, which is another reason I'm jumping ship.
It happens with clean installs, on different computers with XP and Win7. Even in the latest beta which I'm using now. The frozen page thing happens on pages with no flash that I know of, and usually ctrl+a or switching tabs a couple of times fixes it. It has happened lately on youtube though, along with other bs like the video freezing when you change volume.. I think it's rarer than it used to be.
That's the tip of the iceberg though. It's just full of bugs and issues that come and go with each version which have become increasingly annoying, mostly since version 10.
Opera has become so buggy it is barely worth using any more. It still has at least two really fucking annoying bugs which I reported in 2007 (usually can't select text in text boxes such as this one without right click/select all first, and pages randomly becoming uninteractable). I actually have a huge list of bugs, but no point in posting it anywhere. The devs don't seem to give a shit, which is a shame. I need to figure out which other browser I can customize close to Opera then make the switch.
Can the first one register anywhere?
Spotify doesn't really help artists http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/
I don't have this problem. It's probably Opera's fault though. For some months I've been wanting to try Firefox/IE9/Chromium because Opera has many unfixed bugs that go back even to version 9. For example, I can't select any text in this text box without doing a right click>select all first. I reported this to them 4 years ago.
Happiness is twin floppies.