http://xkcd.com/1138/

This is a clear case of not caring. On one hand the 'pilot' was a blatant attempt at working around their contract, and while I don't think it was as terrible as some think (as basic cable goes), was clearly an afterthought. On the other hand, it's hard to care at all about his wife's position. She was the one who delayed the ebook release for reasons that only cavemen can relate to, and she continues to generally pop up in annoying and unhelpful ways. Generally its' greedy people fighting over the monies, don't give a crap who wins or loses, the rest of us already have lost.

It certainly seems to leave both parties less uneasy about the potential long term impacts of taking pills.

No, they test the system with the rated TDP and ship it, and IF they do any lifetime testing at all (which is very dubious, depending on the vendor) they do what another poster up the chain described and intentionally cook the device and make sure the mean time to failure fits in a window their quality guys establish for the rated TDP, not the overclocked point. If it were able to work beyond the rated TDP for the warranty period, that means there's some material they could have removed, but didn't. If you're buying a commodity chinese-shitshop laptop as most of their customers are, you're buying from people who are trying to remove every last cent from the design. If they can cut some pennies they will absolutely do it.

And while I agree with OP that thermal damage does take a while to uncover as it pertains to silicon lifetime estimates, they are not taking into account the damage being done to the VRs, which are having to supply power beyond their design point and particularly ripple voltage. In my experience VRs are the weakest link by far and you may see failures there MUCH earlier than you would in silicon, in fact I've seen some blow in just 3 days with just slight overclocking or inadequate heat removal. Sensible MFGs derate capacitors and inductors far more than they would other components and evaluate them electrically much more carefully, but I've seen nothing sensible about consumer PC manufacture in quite some time.

While I have no doubt nVidia would like you to pay top dollar for the performance equivalent of overclocked GPUs, that may not be their top reason. The scariest of which is that they may not really know how much power their chip uses in all real life situations. Most vendors of complicated chips do not, and simply run the same apps and benchmarks we run and watch the results. Then someone comes along with a power virus and latops start failing and lawsuits happen. If there is a buffer in their TDP estimate, they want it consumed for that scenario.

Seems absolutely impossible to read 100% fiction given that most of the reading material around us every day is non-fiction, or at least "corporate non-fiction". I'm assuming we're discussing what we read for entertainment, not for work, or for our daily lives.

You fell victim to one of the classic blunders, "Never go against a troll when frist ps0t is on the line".

I would argue that EE's, and more specifically CompEs are the only ones whose job might depend on manually implementing a linked list. We do it all the time, linked list traversals are key to many network card hardware implementations... Programmers and IT will use high level languages that basically do all that for them, they really just need to understand the tradeoffs between linked lists, growable arrays, hashes, etc.

But anyone should be able to understand what a linked list is, and roughly how to manipulate it. On an interview I wouldn't expect gorgeous implementations, but they should be able to work out the logic in 30 minutes. That falls in to "general knowledge".

This is a problem I see in the entire STEM field. You work on technology X for a while, you learn it inside and out, and you expect everyone else who is "qualified" knows what you know. You want to hire someone with no ramp, who is going to drop in on day 1 and start doing great stuff, just as soon as he sets a password to his laptop.

In practice the fields are so huge, that it's fairly unlikely anyone has the domain knowledge you've acquired in your niche, unless you hire direct from a competitor (in which case you better pay well, or be offering something huge). A more reasonable approach is to weed people out based on their general skillset (i.e. what they should have learned in school), based on resume lies, and general attitude and disposition: excessive use of the passive voice, reluctance to commit to anything, points in their discussion where they failed to pursue issues to the next level, excessive number of employers, etc. Then expect it's 6 months before they start producing something that doesn't require you to hit them for. If you're afraid they will leave in 6 months, you're not paying enough or else you hired an incompetent and he's doing you a favor.

I think I see what you may have done there.

I would take this only so far, for the record. If I felt that his behavior was actively causing him unhappiness, harm, or putting him in danger, I would try anything, even things I don't believe in that didn't seem like they would cause greater harm.

However at 3yo, none of that was true. He was happy, we were happy, only very dubious medical diagnostics which evaluate "normalness" suggested otherwise. Those diagnostics were being wielded in such a way that i felt I needed to take action, or else face unspecified legal consequences. I'm not going to debate the latter, but sensible people would try to avoid such situations where possible. Fighting the man isn't the best thing for your child, until it is.

I agree completely that as parents we have to decide if the deviation from normal-ness is a bug or a feature, not based on our own context but based on the child. If he's unhappy, maybe it's worth it. But 4 years later, in my case, my son is pretty happy and confident. The advantage of being in STEM fields is that I meet a large number of very abnormal, very high functioning people every day and don't see a problem with that. I suspect many of them struggle in social situations where their fitness for that group is based strictly on adherence to normative behavior, but I also know that they avoid such situations. This seems like a reasonable trade, we should not all have to enjoy the same things. It is frequently the other people who seem to think something needs fixing.

I'm sure this is meant to be humorous, but it's a real thing. My son was diagnosed as "being on the spectrum" at the age of 3 (!?) because he was a huge nerd. Let me define that for you: he could read and understand complex technical manuals and apply the concepts, he could do double digit addition and subtraction in his head, he set all our DVRs for his shows, balancing hard disk space... I'm not some crazy parent who sits there trying to drill crap into a 3yo head, it's useless, he just was like that. What he would not do, however, is talk in any "normal" way. He would answer your question with a simple word, but never initiate. He would not talk about things he liked, or stuff he wanted to do, etc. He took toys apart and put them back together, but he didn't really have any fantasy activity with them. All these are warning signs on your yearly checkup list at the pediatrician.

So eventually we were "compelled" to take him to a specialist, and she diagnosed him. We were very reluctant, we knew there wasn't anything wrong with him, but we were getting that "or else we'll call CPS on you" vibe. So they diagnosed him as ASD: PDD-NOS, doctor speak for "fuck if we know". They prescribed a bunch of therapy which we declined, and miracle of miracles, like a light switch was turned on he started talking. And when he started talking, he started talking in long sentences, with big words and complicated ideas. He was "cured" and somehow manages normal life as well as any kid, but he still doesn't behave the same.

Autism has become the dumping grounds for any social behavior that lies outside the first standard deviation of the bell curve. It's especially obnoxious since it's being diagnosed lately with sociology, rather than actual science. No one did a brain scan or anything like that, it was all based on proto-pavlov dog experiments. The downside here is that, having grown up around autistic people, there really is such a thing and those people are not being well served by all this distraction. Money is being misspent on "easy' cases, rather than helping people who are really suffering.

Computer Science and Computer Programming are two different things. The academics are always on a quest for purity, people who work for a living want to get things done as cleanly and quickly as possible. Frequently the two minds align, but you won't convince the academic your goto is pure anymore than he can convince you to rewrite the code to remove it (which you could do).

Almost all modern CPUs have comefrom. It's always used in regular operation on "ret" or workalike instructions, to return to where you come from!

$0

I find that with many/most games, if it sucks at launch, it will always be playing catch up. Ex. Sim City. The main criticism has finally been remediated, badly, sort of. But it was really just symptomatic of a mind bogglingly stupid conception of the game, which is a horrible dumb-down of what was once a truly excellent game.

I acknowledge that there are a few games with fatal flaws that were not by design, and somehow made it through testing and got panned on release, but it seems like that's the exception.