But publishers don't lower the initial game price from the goodness of their hearts. New releases on Steam still cost (typically) 50 Euros, that has not changed compared to pre-Steam times. In short, publishers try to charge as much as the market will tolerate and pocket the extra profit.

Now there are a few people like me, who strongly dislike "services" like Steam and will buy less than before (and that preferably from DRM-free sources like GOG). But it seems that we are too few to make a difference.
Unless you count the success of crowd-funded games (Kickstarter) as an aspect of that dislike. Which it may be, but I don't have the data to prove it :-(

And don't forget product liability.

If there is a known, safety-relevant flaw in a car, and the manufacturer does NOT do a safety recall, future accidents caused by that flaw might lead to lawsuits of the nasty kind. Since negligence is now easily demonstrated, the courts might grant the victims punitive damages. Ouch.

I guess it will backfire in the form of other carmakers offering cheaper cars that are just as good for the "entry level" features. Because the extra hardware was never installed.

NT4 had only limited DirectX support, so it was not for gamers (although vastly better than 98 in stability). 2K was the first "business" Windows that had all the features of the consumer OS.

[slightly off topic]
And I used it happily until 2007 when my then-new PC would not run stable under 2K. In hindsight I suspect the drivers, in particular those from NVidia. My 8600GT officially had only "legacy" drivers for 2K, inofficially you could also run the XP drivers. With either, the machine would crash frequently. So I finally relented and installed XP.

The 45W Kaveris are interesting, as they show a nice improvement in performance/watt - the new "sweet spot" is not in the top models but in the somewhat slower A8-7600 (3.1-3.3 GHz CPU speed).

I wonder how a 4 module (8 core) FX on that basis would perform and at which TDP. For software that scales well with many cores, it might be a good buy.

A good point from the perspective of a game designer, and I support the sentiment.

But most of us are consumers most of the time. Even those of us who work on one or two community software projects will typically use a bunch of software where they are not involved in the making. Which means taking the software as it is, and if its creators went for a design that requires a beefy PC you have one or you don't use that particular software.

For some applications, in particular games, performance still matters. My current PC will run older games just fine, but some newer releases tend to demand a fairly powerful machine.

For example, I might be interested in Star Citizen but Chris Roberts has already announced that he is aiming for maximum eye candy on high end machines. It is unlikely that my current machine will handle that game, even on low settings.

If the applications you run do well on a machine from a decade ago, fine. But that is not the case for everybody.

It would also require a new and presumably more expensive socket, and motherboards would always need four DDR3 sockets for provideing the full bandwidth - no more cheap mini boards with only two sockets.

Overall, I'm not sure if it would be much cheaper than GDDR5 on the mainboard.

An 8-core Steamroller would be an improvement too, now that computer games finally start scaling well with multiple cores. I might even be willing to re-purpose a server part for my next desktop, even if it is a tad more expensive.

If AMD does not bother though, the Xeon E3-1230 v3 from Intel looks nice as well, only the mainboards that actually support ECC RAM are a bit expensive.

While I agree with the underlying idea of doing something about the tax avoidance, this rule is probably violating the rules of the EU internal market (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Market).

What the EU really needs is IMHO a tax harmonization that stops countries like Ireland from attracting corporate headquarters with extremely low tax rates.

Considering countries outside the EU, the measure described in TFA would make more sense. I'm still not 100% convinced, but it would be at least worth discussing.

Similar here,

although it is more likely to be a new programming approach to an existing project. So instead of a complete "private" computer setup it is more likely to be an unofficial change set that modifies only a few parts of the project. It may even live on the official TFS as a "shelf set" ;-)

The Core2Duo was a good chip for its time, but current Intels outperform it by a wide margin. I'm pretty sure that even current AMDs beat it, despite their Bulldozer mis-design. Likewise, the GTX460 will be beaten by modern cards.

If you are talking about Intel PCs that use only integrated graphics, your claim might be true. But gamers usually understand that they need a discrete GPU ;-)

In general (not necessarily relating to Kaveri as-is) 8 giB of fast, soldered memory as in the PS4 would make sense for a PC.

The current APUs are seriously bandwidth starved. In reviews where a Phenom II with a discrete graphics card is pitted against an APU with similar clock speed and number of graphics cores, the Phenom II usually wins (except benchmarks that don't use the GPU much). Overclocking the memory helps the APU some, which is further evidence.

With PS4 style memory that problem could be solved, admittedly at the expense of being able to add more RAM. But looking back on my last three computer purchases, I always ended up doing a complete update instead of adding RAM to the existing PC. Because the CPU and GPU were also obsolete, and with a new CPU came a new mainboard with a different type of RAM.

I'm still building my own desktops, but I would agree that upgrading it is not necessary as often anymore. For various reasons:

  1) The innovation speed (and I'm using the word "innovation" loosely) has gone down. From hardware generation N to N+1, the gains are smaller than they used to be five years ago. Less incentive to get that shiny new CPU and graphics card...

  2) The hardware requirements of most software have grown only moderately in the last years. Even mediocre hardware can play movies in full HD and most games in passable graphics quality these days. Only hardcore gamers and some professionals need $2000 machines these days.

  3) As a subset of 2), Microsoft is finally doing one thing right: the hardware requirements of their OS are no longer growing massively with each release. I'd still call Windows 7 a bit greedy for RAM, but that is cheap enough and the performance is usually (given enough RAM) as good as XP's.

All things summed up, my PCs last longer and are cheaper these days. Good for me, not so good for the industry.

Good point, but I think for US corporations demonstrating good IT security is no longer sufficient. Now that it is common knowledge that the NSA can, and sometimes will, show up with a "national security letter" and demand customer data, nothing short of a change in US law will repair the lost trust.

Because laws under which US companies can legally refuse to cooperate with US intelligence services will be needed to exclude the scenario that said intelligence services simply compel delivery of the data.

I guess the combined industry lobby will eventually be able to get those changes, but in the meantime the economic damage will be unavoidable even for US corporations that are otherwise good at security.