Yeah - I remember Pitofsky - he's the one that Clinton used to initiate (vaguely successfully) regulation of video games and song lyrics... A - it's expired; B - it's more aimed at 'patent arguments' between companies with common markets, than anything else; C - it only compelled action concerning the complainants; and D - if the FTC had the power (which it doesn't), the inclination (which it may acquire during this ditzy administration), and the right (which it will never have, but the constitution has been progressively more ignored ever since, oh, Roosevelt...) to force technical documentation 'out into the open', I would be (regardless of my underlying principles) hugely in favor of it, just for convenience' sake! I continually make the case to manufacturers, whenever I have the opportunity, that one of the best sales techniques available is to have clearly published links to clearly written documentation; and the other is word-of-mouth, which you get by having people satisfied with both the product, and its support!
I have a few policies regarding system construction that a large number of people would do well to learn (if you read this forum regularly, you know how many answers boil down to RTFM, but expressed a little more delicately, often with clips posted alongside a reference to 'page xx of your manual'...); the first is to read all the available documentation, 'pre-purchase', on the parts under consideration; the second is related - if the manufacturer can't be bothered to put a manual for their POC on their website, then I can't be bothered to send them my money for the POC, either! I have recently been working on an Excel 'conversion file' for i7 RAM, that takes in the latencies at whatever rated frequency, and standardizes them to (the only speed officially supported by Intel) 1066 - so one can compare physical latencies, rather than high frequencies, which i7s pretty much don't really seem to care about... In the process, I've discovered that two of the 'known names' in memory only publish CAS latency, and don't even bother with tRCD, tRP, and tRAS, much less voltage - so, after running into a couple of examples, I promptly removed them both from the table - who would want such stuff?
I'm amused to be called a 'fanboy (and somewhat complimented to be called an anythingboy at my age - way back when, on my fortieth, my ex posted a sign over the entrance to the party hall that read "put the horses in the wagon - it's all downhill from here"...), but it isn't just Intel who gets my kudos, its anybody who has the insight to provide excellent documentation for things that, well, need excellent documentation! I use a fairly capacious, intricate boot manager (BootItNG from TeraByte - http://www.terabyteunlimited.com/support-bootit-next-generation.htm) whose feature set is huge, and every single aspect of it, along with just about every problem you can create with it, is meticulously documented... A lot of open source stuff, as well, (a good example is the OpenMediaLibrary: http://www.openmedialibrary.org/ ) goes above and beyond; on the other hand, I've written AMD/ATI three times in the last six months (or three releases of Catalyst - however you choose to 'mark time') to ask when the Avivo codec, which is otherwise a wonderful piece, is going to learn to close a file handle when it's done processing - and no one there can even be bothered to answer support email; apparently, if your question doesn't fit in a 'pre-answered' category, you're on your own! The only thing that keeps me from going to their competitor is that I've dealt with nVidia, and they're even worse!
even though I won't be able to tell anyone...
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