The real problem is that you never know what you may end up doing. The potential of a speciality bit of silicon is by it's very nature limited. It may completely fail at some new task that you didn't think of when you were building it.
It's great for some really well defined problem but as soon as that definition is no longer invalid, the speciality silicon is useless.
"General Purpose" means that you can address any problem including the ones where your specialty silicon fail.
A general purpose processor is intended to do anything.
General purpose processors are based on the idea that they aren't superstars at any one particular task. So they are pushed to perform as well as the tech will allow. This allows them to beat even the speciality silicon.
Also, not all speciality coprocessors are created equal.
A weak (but cheap) special purpose coprocessor will still underperform a general purpose CPU that's not hamstrung with certain pecular engineering considerations.
A general purpose processor is intended to do anything including that special purpose silicon you haven't even managed to build yet.
I like trucks. I am also not short. I also like a machine that is responsive. Not being a total death trap also helps. All of these feed into my automotive buying rationale that has nothing to do with what self proclaimed champions of the environment think.
In my case, the SUV is actually the cheapskates option.
I've worked for large financial institutions and Unix is something that would be considered "small" in that environment. I've also seen departments shoehorn Microsoft products into a big problem and fail just to have to turn around and use something else.
> People are quick to yell "games" as if the entire desktop hasn't been 3D-accelerated for a decade.
Except you don't need a good gaming card in order to deal with that crap. The cheapest trailing edge AMD/nvidia stuff that's likely to be not supported in the next driver release is more than fast enough for "desktop 3D acceleration".
The troll is only given power by those that respond. Don't like the trolls? Then don't feed them. It really is that simple. What we really have here is professional trolls going on a rampage and the inevitable and foreseeable backlash occuring.
This includes the original SJWs, as well as the initial media outlets that "rushed to their defense", and all the rest that have just exploited the circus afterwards.
A lot of "gamer gate" is just paying customers pissed off that the industry mouthpieces decided to insult them all.
> On Usenet, there was a strong culture of using one's real name
When exactly? I was on Usenet 25 years ago and there was plenty of vile nonsense going on.
If anything slowed down Usenet, it wasn't pretentious "real name" policies that were mocked by a significant portion of the online community. It was likely due to the asychronous nature of the medium. Posting a threat on Usenet is much like MAILING it. It's not an instant gratification medium.
Twitter is much more of a real time thing and thus probably more prone to rampaging mob psychology.
If this really is a law enforcement matter, I don't see the point of the bounties and the "legal defense fund". The same tools available to the doxxing crowd should be available to the police or anyone sympathetic with the victim. Investigating this should not be a big deal even for the cops.
The bounties seem to be more about grand standing than anything else.
> Making a credible threat against someone's life ought not to be treated like a prank.
Wake me when that actually happens.
So far, I only see hysterical idiots willing to go on a rampage to create a new class of criminal based on dubious conflations of the ethereal to the real. Trash talk from basement dwelling trolls is getting far too much attention when really it just needs to go straight into the bit bucket.
The only reason it's not is because the targets are shameless attention whores.
Increasing the size of the criminal population should be done with more consideration than any of the "pro crackdown" contingent seem to be interested in.
You think you are smart but you're really an idiot. The slippery slope is a valid argument because that's THAT THE WAY THAT US LAW WORKS. The whole thing is a slippery slope that goes back 1000 years. "The law" isn't just the statutes. It's also every court case that's ever been applied to them.
And prosecutors just love to stretch the law.
There was an article about that right here on Slashdot TODAY. So it's not even like you can claim ignorance because this isn't some legal blog.
Not everything online is directly equivalent to it's physical counterpart.
You are trying to ignore this very real distinction.
I dunno. The authorities in Utah seemed pretty unimpressed by the threats that were directed at their University when one of these SJWs decided to make a speech there. The SJW in question ran like a coward with her tail between her legs with the local authorities chose not to take the threats against her seriously.
I think "convince a cop" is a nice legal standard.
It at least passes a basic "sniff test" and doesn't require depending on the word of a hysterical narcissist who may be unhinged enough to be diagnosed by mental health professionals.
Sure. That's a fine use of our collective resources, destroying the lives of kids saying stupid things online.
Of course you aren't going to "lose sleep" over the imposition of a police state. You erroneously think it won't be used against you. That's the fallacy of every one of history's most notorious regimes.
Gotcha... You would rather live in a Soviet or Iranian style police state where even the smallest bit of mindless nonsense is treated like a threat against the state.
The path you are advocating is fully of unintended consequences that you won't be immune from despite your obvious arrogance.
This is just another classic case of the law being used as worded rather than "intended". Much like computer code, the law allows for what is actually written down. Your code needs to equal your intent.
This is why the pessimistic types need to be listened to when they tell you all of the bad ways in which your law can go wrong.
The real problem here is that no politician has the guts to admit they screwed up and that the need to patch the bug.
Although I have little sympathy for the boat crew as they crossed a line that should include hellfire and damnation.
In general government mis-labels things. Consider it a variation on Madison Avenue marketing where they have the strangest tendency to claim that a product's weakest feature is actually it's strongest.
The double think is strong with both of them.
The way government operates these days something labeled "the net neutrality" act would likely be a big pile of corporate welfare for the telecom industry (much like Obamacare is).
The point of net neutrality is not to ensure that your stupid reruns perform adequately well but that they perform equally well regardless of whether they are coming from your last mile monopoly or some other competing service.
If my Netflix performance has gone into the crapper then Time Warners competing service better be suffering the same problem.
> Do you realize that before pension you spend more of your active life [barring sleep] with your colleagues than with your family and friends? How many people understand this simple fact?
It's not 1950. Those people will likely be a different set of people 3 years from now. You don't need to be "pals" with these people. You just need to get the job done. They are quite disposable.
These are people that you TEMPORARILY work with. Playing with them is not required.
It's a little more subtle than that. It's not just X vs Y. It's a distribution of all manner of things. Thus you can have men that thrive in female dominated occupations and women that are just as puzzled by these SJWs as men are.
If you're not fixated on "innovation" like some Silicon Valley startup, someone being a square peg can actually be useful. Not everything in tech is about being able to do stupid tricks in C on demand.
This is one of those things where you can choose how to react. You can either be a victim or not. It's not middle school. You don't have to mindlessly strive to "fit in". Consider it an aspect of work life balance. If you find your job taking over your life to that degree I would tend to attribute this to the prevailing attitudes regarding work in whatever location you happen to have landed in.
Once again, this is probably problems with Silicon Valley being applied to the industry at large.
The problem with your laundry list of complaints is that most of they apply to the Republicans too. Plus there's an entire wingnut branch of the party that's probably openly hostile to you.
A California geek in the GOP is like a black man at a KKK rally.
Why should non-profits get a free ride? If a University wants to retain their underwater basket weaving department then they should either find donors or students willing to pay cash.
Non-profits have escalated their tuition at brutal rates and have been doing so for decades. So I really don't have much sympathy for them either.
The first European colleges arose because people were interested in making money. This mythology that education is done for it's own sake is something that came about centuries later as entrenched beaurocracies formed.
There is also confusion regarding the whole "copyright is illegal" thing. Copyright violations can be a crime or they can be a tort. In the general vernacular, "being against the law" only applies to things that are criminal.
Things that give other people standing to sue you are not "illegal" in the vernacular use of that term.
Not sure how actual lawyers would split that particular hair.
Furthermore, the line between crime and non-crime is fluid. That is that it changes over time. It's also notable that the existence of that line by itself is enough to distinguish imaginary property from real property.
There is nothing to protect themselves from here. They are just being jerks for no good reason.
Also, this is not "private property" we're talking about here but a "public accommodation". Getting to do business with the public means that there are any number of compromises you have to make with your "property rights".
Slashdot Mirror
The real problem is that you never know what you may end up doing. The potential of a speciality bit of silicon is by it's very nature limited. It may completely fail at some new task that you didn't think of when you were building it.
It's great for some really well defined problem but as soon as that definition is no longer invalid, the speciality silicon is useless.
"General Purpose" means that you can address any problem including the ones where your specialty silicon fail.
A general purpose processor is intended to do anything.
General purpose processors are based on the idea that they aren't superstars at any one particular task. So they are pushed to perform as well as the tech will allow. This allows them to beat even the speciality silicon.
Also, not all speciality coprocessors are created equal.
A weak (but cheap) special purpose coprocessor will still underperform a general purpose CPU that's not hamstrung with certain pecular engineering considerations.
A general purpose processor is intended to do anything including that special purpose silicon you haven't even managed to build yet.
I like trucks. I am also not short. I also like a machine that is responsive. Not being a total death trap also helps. All of these feed into my automotive buying rationale that has nothing to do with what self proclaimed champions of the environment think.
In my case, the SUV is actually the cheapskates option.
I've worked for large financial institutions and Unix is something that would be considered "small" in that environment. I've also seen departments shoehorn Microsoft products into a big problem and fail just to have to turn around and use something else.
> People are quick to yell "games" as if the entire desktop hasn't been 3D-accelerated for a decade.
Except you don't need a good gaming card in order to deal with that crap. The cheapest trailing edge AMD/nvidia stuff that's likely to be not supported in the next driver release is more than fast enough for "desktop 3D acceleration".
The troll is only given power by those that respond. Don't like the trolls? Then don't feed them. It really is that simple. What we really have here is professional trolls going on a rampage and the inevitable and foreseeable backlash occuring.
This includes the original SJWs, as well as the initial media outlets that "rushed to their defense", and all the rest that have just exploited the circus afterwards.
A lot of "gamer gate" is just paying customers pissed off that the industry mouthpieces decided to insult them all.
> On Usenet, there was a strong culture of using one's real name
When exactly? I was on Usenet 25 years ago and there was plenty of vile nonsense going on.
If anything slowed down Usenet, it wasn't pretentious "real name" policies that were mocked by a significant portion of the online community. It was likely due to the asychronous nature of the medium. Posting a threat on Usenet is much like MAILING it. It's not an instant gratification medium.
Twitter is much more of a real time thing and thus probably more prone to rampaging mob psychology.
If this really is a law enforcement matter, I don't see the point of the bounties and the "legal defense fund". The same tools available to the doxxing crowd should be available to the police or anyone sympathetic with the victim. Investigating this should not be a big deal even for the cops.
The bounties seem to be more about grand standing than anything else.
> Making a credible threat against someone's life ought not to be treated like a prank.
Wake me when that actually happens.
So far, I only see hysterical idiots willing to go on a rampage to create a new class of criminal based on dubious conflations of the ethereal to the real. Trash talk from basement dwelling trolls is getting far too much attention when really it just needs to go straight into the bit bucket.
The only reason it's not is because the targets are shameless attention whores.
Increasing the size of the criminal population should be done with more consideration than any of the "pro crackdown" contingent seem to be interested in.
You think you are smart but you're really an idiot. The slippery slope is a valid argument because that's THAT THE WAY THAT US LAW WORKS. The whole thing is a slippery slope that goes back 1000 years. "The law" isn't just the statutes. It's also every court case that's ever been applied to them.
And prosecutors just love to stretch the law.
There was an article about that right here on Slashdot TODAY. So it's not even like you can claim ignorance because this isn't some legal blog.
Not everything online is directly equivalent to it's physical counterpart.
You are trying to ignore this very real distinction.
I dunno. The authorities in Utah seemed pretty unimpressed by the threats that were directed at their University when one of these SJWs decided to make a speech there. The SJW in question ran like a coward with her tail between her legs with the local authorities chose not to take the threats against her seriously.
I think "convince a cop" is a nice legal standard.
It at least passes a basic "sniff test" and doesn't require depending on the word of a hysterical narcissist who may be unhinged enough to be diagnosed by mental health professionals.
Sure. That's a fine use of our collective resources, destroying the lives of kids saying stupid things online.
Of course you aren't going to "lose sleep" over the imposition of a police state. You erroneously think it won't be used against you. That's the fallacy of every one of history's most notorious regimes.
> Gotcha... death threats are just pranks.
Gotcha... You would rather live in a Soviet or Iranian style police state where even the smallest bit of mindless nonsense is treated like a threat against the state.
The path you are advocating is fully of unintended consequences that you won't be immune from despite your obvious arrogance.
This is just another classic case of the law being used as worded rather than "intended". Much like computer code, the law allows for what is actually written down. Your code needs to equal your intent.
This is why the pessimistic types need to be listened to when they tell you all of the bad ways in which your law can go wrong.
The real problem here is that no politician has the guts to admit they screwed up and that the need to patch the bug.
Although I have little sympathy for the boat crew as they crossed a line that should include hellfire and damnation.
In general government mis-labels things. Consider it a variation on Madison Avenue marketing where they have the strangest tendency to claim that a product's weakest feature is actually it's strongest.
The double think is strong with both of them.
The way government operates these days something labeled "the net neutrality" act would likely be a big pile of corporate welfare for the telecom industry (much like Obamacare is).
Unadulterated bullshit.
The point of net neutrality is not to ensure that your stupid reruns perform adequately well but that they perform equally well regardless of whether they are coming from your last mile monopoly or some other competing service.
If my Netflix performance has gone into the crapper then Time Warners competing service better be suffering the same problem.
> Do you realize that before pension you spend more of your active life [barring sleep] with your colleagues than with your family and friends? How many people understand this simple fact?
It's not 1950. Those people will likely be a different set of people 3 years from now. You don't need to be "pals" with these people. You just need to get the job done. They are quite disposable.
These are people that you TEMPORARILY work with. Playing with them is not required.
It's a little more subtle than that. It's not just X vs Y. It's a distribution of all manner of things. Thus you can have men that thrive in female dominated occupations and women that are just as puzzled by these SJWs as men are.
If you're not fixated on "innovation" like some Silicon Valley startup, someone being a square peg can actually be useful. Not everything in tech is about being able to do stupid tricks in C on demand.
Even "tech" isn't all "tech".
It's likely that it's his experiences that aren't narrow.
How can you be in this business and not have been exposed to expats of various kinds including those that have a cultural bias towards tea?
If you want a "fish out of water" story, then how about Asians that have chosen to change their name in order to "fit in"?
This is one of those things where you can choose how to react. You can either be a victim or not. It's not middle school. You don't have to mindlessly strive to "fit in". Consider it an aspect of work life balance. If you find your job taking over your life to that degree I would tend to attribute this to the prevailing attitudes regarding work in whatever location you happen to have landed in.
Once again, this is probably problems with Silicon Valley being applied to the industry at large.
The problem with your laundry list of complaints is that most of they apply to the Republicans too. Plus there's an entire wingnut branch of the party that's probably openly hostile to you.
A California geek in the GOP is like a black man at a KKK rally.
Why should non-profits get a free ride? If a University wants to retain their underwater basket weaving department then they should either find donors or students willing to pay cash.
Non-profits have escalated their tuition at brutal rates and have been doing so for decades. So I really don't have much sympathy for them either.
The first European colleges arose because people were interested in making money. This mythology that education is done for it's own sake is something that came about centuries later as entrenched beaurocracies formed.
There is also confusion regarding the whole "copyright is illegal" thing. Copyright violations can be a crime or they can be a tort. In the general vernacular, "being against the law" only applies to things that are criminal.
Things that give other people standing to sue you are not "illegal" in the vernacular use of that term.
Not sure how actual lawyers would split that particular hair.
Furthermore, the line between crime and non-crime is fluid. That is that it changes over time. It's also notable that the existence of that line by itself is enough to distinguish imaginary property from real property.
Real property interests don't expire.
There is nothing to protect themselves from here. They are just being jerks for no good reason.
Also, this is not "private property" we're talking about here but a "public accommodation". Getting to do business with the public means that there are any number of compromises you have to make with your "property rights".