I will let people crap all over a post that's basically regurgitating Intel Developer Forum drivel, and I'm certainly not going to say that WinRT has a future.

But I will NOT let you trash talk Alpha.

The Alpha was simply a much better processor than anything from Intel at the time. It was pretty much the fastest out there, though you might argue with some high end POWER or MIPS 10K or something.

Maybe you were running Windows and x86 programs on the Alpha? Those weren't blazing. But native Alpha programs were fast fast fast. And the architecture is clean and beautiful. Just beautiful.

So you can say that ARM has not much advantage over x86 today. That's probably true. You can say that ARM sucks, has too much complexity, and the system architecture is an abomination. That's probably true also. But you leave the Alpha out of your talk unless you know what the hell you're talking about.

Explosive test comes up positive in an airport and you wonder why they react strongly? You truly are a fuckwit.

They have false positives. My Ortlieb roller bags tested positive after a month-long bicycling trip. Could have been the construction of the bag, could have been the Tanzanian dirt throughly embedded in everything by then, who knows. It didn't come directly into contact with anything combustible, much less explosive. Apparently soap/lotions can cause false positives. And of course, ammonium nitrate (the explosive used in the Oklahoma City bombings) is more commonly called "fertilizer". So, no, they shouldn't be reacting so strongly. They should know that it's likely a false positive.

Seems like a stupid rule to me.

If an engine goes out, or there is some other problem, you need extra fuel to accomplish the mission (increased gravity drag). So you have some extra fuel and extra delta v, and that's a good thing.

But if those events are rare -- and, eventually, they should be -- then you often have extra fuel. If you can use that fuel to return the craft intact to reuse and make more money, then I think that's a damn good idea. If you must burn the extra fuel, then you will lose the stage. It will cost the company more, but "less profit" is maybe an OK choice.

The goal is to optimize cost while maintaining very high reliability. For very high reliability, you need to understand worst case behavior. For optimizing cost, you need to make the common case cost efficient. Having extra delta v for anomalies and using that delta v to lower launch cost (via reuse) when no problems arise seems like smart engineering to me.

Seriously, though, Clearance + EE is quite valuable. If you're worried about seeming "rusty" on the engineering side, get a MSEE from some university... a lot of very good universities have distance programs where you might be able to get started early.

A compute rate that varies with temperature would seem to be a bug, rather than a feature. I don't want a GPU that does that. I need repeatable Gazebo simulations.

I think they're talking about the opposite (a temperature that depends on load), which your CPU has probably been doing for a long, long time.

But you've lost this one, anyway; modern Intel processors have Turbo Boost, meaning the performance does indeed depend on temperature. I was scared, too, from a worst-case provisioning perspective in an environment where I can't predict what will be running on other cores. But I've had a couple years to come to terms with it, and in practice, it doesn't actually seem any worse than other factors like last-level cache contention.

Amen.

Absolutely. Actually, I believe that science works through God in that it is God who established and maintains the physical laws that we see. After all, where did they come from, and what keeps them running? So my faith in science is rooted in my faith in God and His faithfulness to keep the natural world around me running just like He did yesterday and the day before, etc. Science is therefore the study of God's faithfulness. He is so reliable that we can create formulas based upon it.

It already had that feel in spades. Adding the voiceover just beats you over the head with it. Which I guess is appropriate, because the voiceover itself just beats you over the head with everything else.

I think it's the part where they suggested that you jerk off a robot. Or... maybe they're just into that.

Internet-pedantry, where either 1) pedantry is misapplied because the word in question does not have a single, precise definition to be pedantic over, and both the the original and the "pedant's" "pedantic" correction are correct or 2) pedantry is possible because the word does have a precise technical definition, but the "pedant" has no idea what that is and is wrong while the original usage was correct.