Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 11th May 2009 08:46 UTC
Microsoft isn't the only company in the technology industry with a monopoly. Its partner in crime, Intel, has often been accused of monopoly abuse as well, and is currently under scrutiny by the same European Commission who fined Microsoft. Sources have told eWeek (which generally has a good track record) that Intel will indeed be found guilty this week of abusing its monopoly position to stifle the competition.
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RE[5]: Comment by flanque
by kaiwai on Tue 12th May 2009 05:05
in reply to "RE[4]: Comment by flanque"
Member since:2005-07-06
You mean AMD laptops or integrated systems.
Which is how the majority of people purchase their computers - me included.
It most certainly doesn't prevent you from using AMD processors, at least there's no technical reason. Ideological, now, that's another matter.
Sure, there is no technical reason - but people just don't go out, purchase a CPU - they purchase a complete system. The majority purchase their computers from big name vendors who in turn use the worlds most open source unfriendly organisation (Broadcom). Why do they use Broadcom? because AMD chose Broadcom as a partner for their laptop platform (along with Atheros and Realtek). Why didn't they just settle for Atheros and Realtek instead of bringing in Broadcom?
Sad thing is that most new Macs use Broadcom too... and, in my experience, in addition to being very unfriendly to open source, their chips just aren't that good. My Macbook routinely drops Wifi connections both in OS X and Ubuntu, whereas my Atheros 928x-based wifi in my EEE 1000HE remains solid. Why AMD sticks with Broadcom when their chips are sub-par is beyond me.
I know what you mean; the quality has improved somewhat - 2 years after they released the first MacBook with a Broadcom wireless chipset in it - but it shouldn't take 2 years to get semi-reliable wireless connections. I remember the MacBook, that came with an atheros wireless chipset - it was rock solid. Heck, I had a microwave, wireless phone, and three other wireless networks in the neighbourhood - never dropped a connection once.
You must be lucky on the Atheros 9K series because on the 5k series as mentioned in a previous 'Acer Aspire One' review I complained about the ath5k driver corrupting downloads - reported the fault on bugzilla but it was never fixed. Gave up in the end and went back to my MacBook.
Member since:
2008-07-15
You mean AMD laptops or integrated systems. It most certainly doesn't prevent you from using AMD processors, at least there's no technical reason. Ideological, now, that's another matter.
Sad thing is that most new Macs use Broadcom too... and, in my experience, in addition to being very unfriendly to open source, their chips just aren't that good. My Macbook routinely drops Wifi connections both in OS X and Ubuntu, whereas my Atheros 928x-based wifi in my EEE 1000HE remains solid. Why AMD sticks with Broadcom when their chips are sub-par is beyond me.