Sheesh..so maybe 'forced' was an overlly strong word to use.
But consider: EA may not have the clout they once had, but they are still one of the largest game publishers in the world and you still want them making games for your fledgling console, I think. And if 'the other console' may be giving them what they want, you are likely to consider the same.

But this is maybe more likely: MS and Sony saw 'online pass' and decided they want that money instead of EA. It's their network after all. The console guys give the publishers a small cut, which the publishers are happy with since it's enforced platform-wide and managed by network, which costs the publishers nothing. It's just free money. Everyone wins! Except for the gamer, of course, but they're probably filthy thieves anyway.

Still seem hard to believe?

On the surface this may look like EA is giving up it's quest to kill used games. I find that rather unlikely.

What this likely *really* means, is that 'online pass' will soon be redundant. With ps4 and the next xbox soon to be out, this moves all but confirms that there will be something similar at the system level on both consoles, likely with publisher-friendly terms so they can share in on the ransom windfall.

EA is shutting down theirs early to try and save face and let Sony and MS look like the jerks next gen, when in reality, it was probably their idea and lobbying that forced Sony and MS's hands.

So..yippie?

"...but we both can't have our margins in this fight against ARM. We've had a good run and all, but it turns out we like our margins better than you. Again, sorry. Good luck with that Windows RT thing, ya shmucks."

WebOS had an actual standard Linux user space. Everything was back level, but it was there.
Android does not. The user space is all locked down custom java land.

On WebOS you could actually load up standard ARM Linux repos and install whatever you wanted. Awesome idea, IMO. I'm still bummed it never caught on.

Intel is kind of a no compromise company. They want the power..and the margins. Look at the rest of their businesses:
  They own a huge chunk of the margins on PCs and servers, and basically dictate to OEMs what their products will be.
  They kicked Nvidia out of the chipset/motherboard market because, y'know, can't have that.
  They wouldn't budge on prices for chips in the original Xbox, which doomed it to failure and havn't sniffed the console market since.
  They're in and out of mobile, mostly because they can't line up any partners.

And now they're going to play nice with the content/distribution cartels? The path to their door it littered with the corpses of start-ups and wunderkinds that only needed the Ace of Content for the staight flush.

Don't blame me if I don't hold my breath there.

Did you RTFA?

All of what you said may be true, and AMD smokescreening is of course part of it, but DAMN, these guys are screwed.

I'm not sure how much innovation is being strangled, but one thing that's certain is the damage to Mickey's popularity.

When was the last time that a Mickey Mouse cartoon was released? Do kids today even know who he is?
Can you imagine if all the old Mickey cartoons where on PBS constantly? It would probably endear kids to him all over again and send a new wave of kids to Disney parks. How is there a downside? It seems crazy to me to pass up the value that those old 'toons have - to both the culture and to Disney in the form of free brand publicity.

Instead they rot in the 'vault' and Disney parks are full of old 'IP' that fewer and fewer people recognize.
Genius!

Intel like to throw claims like this out there to try and win mind-share.
It means nothing, but sounds impressive in a vague, buzz-wordy way. It's just marketing.

I'm not surprised their vague future predictions are aimed at mobile now. They desperately need mind-share in that segment.

"Look! We're relavent in mobile! We'll have FORTY-EIGHT cores! All with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads!"

Yeah, this issue has been around long before 12.04. Glad its getting some attention. My workaround was to switch to a different distro. :)

Dew point. Colder than that and you have to deal with condensation.

Oil works well, but current solutions work with total immersion and that's a freakin mess. And seeing the heatsink capacity of water is higher to begin with, warm water cooling is a much more practical solution.

Spoken like a true software guy (no offense, I'm one too). Where we differ, though, is that I don't believe the ideal is a sea of unreliable bottom barrel x86 with janitors swapping out a box when the little blinky light turns red. No fun!

Also:
What all this pie in the sky open source hardware stuff seems to ignore is the most expensive piece in the whole enchilada: the CPU. And that certainly won't be 'open sourced' any time soon. "So what", you say. For that one piece, we'll just rely on Intel because that's what everyone uses anyway.
Well then, Intel would have more power than ever and would, no doubt, more easily be able to command more of the profits per box and use that to stomp out any competition, and then yeah! CPU monopoly!
But Intel wouldn't ever abuse that power, they're engineers, right?

I'm all for compatibility, but sometimes "fragmentation" is often the result of a *healthy* market. More unique designs to solve a problem is a good thing.

Snapshots are arguably outside of the scope of the hypervisor, but I can certainly see the value in your example.

Still, I would use LVM snapshots, or even better, netboot an OS image onto a ramdisk, and reboot it when you want to 'reset' it.
VMWare also includes I/O drivers in the hypervisor, which is another over-step of scope, IMO.

Some of the pain points of VMWare:

number of vCPUs, vMemory per VM
vSphere 5 now lets you have up to 32 vCPUs and 1024GB in a VM, which is good. vSphere4, which most people still, have is limited to only 8/256 per VM.

overhead:
VMWare takes a good 15-30%. Again the hypervisor in vShere 5 is a bit better performer.

stability:
I/O drivers are included in the hypervisor, which is a bit scary.

Pricing
The VMWare pricing model is overly confusing. Costs for added more vRAM to the pool? yuk.. vsphere5 makes this even worse.

I kinda see KVM as taking off here in the future. A lot of development is focusing that way..

Bar none, PowerVM still has VMWare beat in most areas that matter, but vSphere 5 is a step in the right direction.

If we're just talking x86, though, I keep hearing that KVM will be the top virtualization solution going forward.