He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. -- Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, Aphorism 146

"to write to version numbers" is another problem, though pretty much orthogonal to this one. Won't solve it, won't make it worse. That you want to "write to version numbers" (when you should be "writing to features") is possibly THE single worst argument against this change.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but most sensible people will compare CPUs at a similar price, and the Intel 'extreme' CPUs typically slot in at $999 and beyond. Hopefully Bulldozer isn't trying to compete in that segment.

Granted, sensible people don't buy these sorts of CPUs at all and are waiting for Ivy Bridge....

I thought you'd always been able to buy 'tray' (aka OEM) variants (without the cooler), it's just that lately the tray has cost the same or even less than the retail (aka "boxed") package, so there haven't really been a point to it.

I'm at the tail end of my five week summer vacation. Most of yesterday (10h) was spent playing Fallout:NV.

Sorry, I confused your link with this. That page do look up to date.

Unless just changed, those numbers are from 2003 and really out of date.

So basically it's in the noise? Even if it were true, why would anyone care about such a small downside?

I'm not sure the STL even existed at the time we're talking about. At the very least it wasn't widely used, so in the context of this dicussion it's a non-issue.

I don't know about that, maybe it was faster than Borland C++, but I did a lot of work (disassembly) on Borland Pascal compulation units and executables back in the day, and the code was horrible. HORRIBLE. Didn't even have the most basic peephole-optimizations (though someone wrote an external application to do that). It was fast to compile though, due to being one-pass, but that right there sacrifice optimizations.

So if TP/BP was faster than BC++, it was only because BC++ must have been even worse than I can imagine.

The amazing thing about these economic bubbles is that they continue to inflate even though virtually all participants know they're engaging in a bubble. This because they also believe that somewhere out there there's a greater fool, someone else who will, like themselves, ignore the fact that they value thing X below the actual cost of acquiring it

You mean comments like "I don't think my computer could run this. Here's hoping for a console version." and "Man, this looks pretty awesome. I hope it comes out on consoles." which I just pulled out from a thread under a video of The Witcher 2 which just came out?

I could probably mine places like Gametrailers, G4 and IGN for more of that, but I think I've proven my point.

The rest of your 'analysis' if wrong also, but that's another story.

... using the currency of my choice, from the region of my choice. Steam does NOT currently have "one price for everyone". If it had, I'd be able to buy my games using the same dollar amounts as americans, which I can't.

I assume the still won't let you mix AMD and nVidia video cards. Asshats. (think dedicated physx)