That would make it the next flop. Lots of applications are still 32bit, and there is no reason to enforce a quick change here. 4 GByte are not enough for everyone, but for many users they are. Take x86 support away, and the complaints will be enormous.

It will take at least another 10 years until a Windows without x86 support is accepted.

For the most common purposes, like text documents and spreadsheets there is already ODF.
It is even an ISO standard. Unless there are unexpected problems with things like Asian fonts, that should be a no-brainer.

A German company named Alphakat is developing a similat technology.
On their website they claim to have some pilot plants already in production:
http://www.alphakat.de/temp/company.php

In other ways too. A few years ago they started using translation software for the non-english pages of MSDN. The quality is as expected.

Fortunately, my English is pretty good so I don't need translations. Unfortunately, even if I choose English, there are annoying popups with translated text that cover up links. And if I switch off Javascript, parts of the site won't work anymore.

Older Word versions (Word 6, Word 2000) were error prone enough that the number of software crashes exceeded my number of stupid mistakes.

Now Office 2010 has changed that for me, so *today* you are right (and Libre Office is also pretty stable). But historically, GP had good reasons for his attitude.

Depends on how much that percent of the CPU die holds the rest back in terms of complexity and maybe performance limitations (not really my area of expertise). You may be right that it does not really matter.

On the other hand, "prior to 1992" means DOS and maybe Windows 3.x software. I'm aware that there are still a few DOS-based maintenance tools for the PC around, but otherwise I don't know anyone who still works with DOS software.

I used to work for a company that was really backwards that way, until a few years ago they produced a medical device with DOS-based software as "implicit real time system" (no other thread that can steal the CPU). But even they have given up on DOS, as the technical limitations became too bothersome. The successor of that device, now on the market, uses Windows 7 with a real time extension to the OS.

Dropping 16 bit backwards compatibility is probably OK by now, and I don't think there is such a thing as 8 bit programs on x86 at all. But 32 bit software is still widely used and backwards compatibility to it is an important feature of AMD64. AMD would be crazy to drop that in an AMD64 compatible CPU.

At the same time however, they are developing ARM-based server processors which are not x86 compatible at all. So there seems to be a market for that. There certainly is in the tablet world. I just don't see it for the desktop yet.

Well I guess Intel have the volume too, so that is another thing going for them. AMD with its lower volume may be (more strongly) forced to go with a foundry.

At the same time, progress in fabrication processes seems to slow down a bit, and cost advantages are no longer so obvious with a new generation. Maybe the gap between Intel and AMD in manufacturing will shrink due to that.

Possible but not attractive if the time frames between upgrades was a bit longer.

Bought an Athlon X2 with DDR2 RAM in 2007.

Wanted an upgrade in 2011 and found that the price per GByte of DDR2 RAM was much higher than for DDR3 RAM. CPU and GPU needed changing anyway. 4GByte of DDR3 RAM were not more expensive than buying another 2GByte of DDR2 RAM would have cost. Some Athlons and Phenoms for socket AM2+ were still available but the socket AM3 CPUs looked considerably better.

So I settled on a Phenom II X4 on a relatively inexpensive new socket AM3 Board. Bottom line, I paid some extra for the new board but got better memory bandwidth and a more power efficient CPU out of it. The old board remained operational, as I did not rip out CPU, GPU or RAM.

I also still had a nice case from 2004 hanging around so I shelled out a bit additional money for a PSU and a new hard disk, and put the new system into the old case. Overall, I paid maybe 150 euros more than with maximum reuse of the old stuff. But that way I kept the 2007 PC usable, which is still useful from time to time :-)

If it's done well, then yes, voice acting can enhance a game. But if writing and storytelling are weak, you might as well go back to displaying the text only and save a few bucks. Same for bad voice actors.

That much is true, especially if you already have a fan base. The downside comes when you try to sell the next game after delivering something that barely deserves to be called a game, let alone a good one.

I-Novae studios are doing something similar, AFAIK with a bit more budget and limited to terrain generation:
https://www.inovaestudios.com/Technology
This may be a better example of what a large game studio might go for. Overall a bit more conventional than Limit Theory, and needing more manpower, but still a big win in not having to model the terrain by hand.

It seems a lot of the budgets goes into more shiny graphics, not necessarily into more sophisticated game play. Perhaps it is time to try something new, such as procedural generation of more game assets.

A good example would be Limit Theory, a space game currently in development where only the user interface is designed the traditional way. Ship models and asteroids are created by procedural generation. Here is the latest development update: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2albJYS-wI

Still looks a bit blocky, but considering the game had a $50.000 dollar goal on Kickstarter and the developer feels more than comfortable with the $187,865 that were pledged, the value for money is going to be impressive.

A slightly larger team with a budget of perhaps a few million should be able to do amazing things with that approach. Assuming the team members are as talented as Josh Parnell ;-)

Nope, Metallica's album "Death Magnetic" was still butchered in 2008 due to excessive compression.

Never had one of those "sandwiched" ones, must be pretty rare. All CDs I own are of the label laquer - data layer - plastic variety.

BTW and slightly off topic, DVDs have the data layer between two equally thick layers of plastic. So they should be fairly resistant to physical damage. Not that I intend to try ;-)