Of course they get something in return. They get everybody on the WinRT APIs so that they get 30% of all software sales for Windows. That's worth way more than a windows license.

They also get OneDrive subscriptions to increase your storage and Microsoft Office subscriptions and they get you searching Bing and they get you buying Skype minutes and they get you buying Surface Tablets and they get you buying movies and music and they get you buying Music Subscriptions and they get you subscribing to Xbox Live and they convince developers to develop for WinRT/Store since there are tons of customers now and that boosts Windows 10 on phones and that attacks the ipad and....

Microsoft profits handsomely by giving you Windows 10 for free. The sooner people get off of Win7 the sooner the App Store cash cow starts getting milked.

So Windows 10 takes Windows 8.1 and spends almost all of its development resources on keyboard and mouse... but you aren't going to upgrade from *Windows 8.1* which is worse with mouse and keyboard because you are afraid that Windows 10, Microsoft's return to the Mouse and Keyboard paradigm is too touch oriented?

I can't think of a single application which actually tries to swap memory off of PCI-E. Because you not only have to load the new memory, you also then have to *reload* the old memory. Especially with something like raytracing where you never know which memory is going to be called on the next ray. You would be pathetically and uselessly slow. So ok, fine technically "that's not how GPU memory management works" but back in the real world there are few practical applications where a single task is useful when memory swapping comes into play.

Sure, it performs exactly the same until you run out of memory and then its performance goes to 0% since it can't do anything. You're getting 12GB of RAM with the TitanX vs the 6GB on the TI. The Titan is essentially cheap Tesla for compute heavy tasks like Adobe Premiere or 3D Rendering. I wish though that Nvidia would embrace Titan's position and enable GRID virtualization. AMD has enabled at least GPU pass-through on their entire high end line. I guess Virtual GPUs are still so niche that it's not a high priority. But with the Xbox One running 2 virtual OSes on the same Box it would be great if Microsoft embraced virtualization more broadly.

ATI/AMD has had shit drivers since the 90s. This whole "Nvidia is stabbing us in the back!" doesn't carry water since they've *never* had reliable products.

And why would the accounting department or HR consult with IT before purchasing accounting or sales or HR software? My fiancee is a school registrar. She understands the software she uses very well and is an expert within the limited domain of school registration and billing software. Why would she call their school's IT contracted company to consult before picking out a hypothetical new replacement piece of software to do her job.

Fucking IT, I swear. The fact that you know how to manage a server, fix a RAID or setup a router doesn't make you an expert on ever fucking aspect of technology in the universe. I'm incredibly technologically proficient but there is no reason my fiancee would consult with me on what software to use to do her job. Ideally she would design her own software, in the real world she would find a developer and have them make software that meets her needs but most likely she'll just have to shop on the market for a commercial product already available. None of those scenarios though need any input from IT.

Let me translate that: the company was nearly broke and the employees were given the opportunity to become *investors* and potentially get their money in an installment plan assuming the company didn't go bankrupt before the installment plan was complete for presumably little to no return or take their owed severance.

I can't believe that employees who were fired might not choose to invest in their former employer who just fired them... especially when they were fired because the business was already going down.

The existing investors were also smart enough to cut their losses and liquidate. If the profit-seeking investors who presumably believed in the company weren't willing to invest then why the fuck would a laid off worker choose to invest int he company's future?

I don't view IT as an epithet I view it as a specific skillset that we don't need full time in house. IT is about being an expert at OS, Network and Database management. If we want to deploy openstack, we call our contract IT company. If our fileserver goes down, we call IT. If we are seeing a performance bottleneck in our network we call IT.

Everybody else though is focused on a completely different task, making great visual effects. To do that we write tools to assist artists, streamline workflow and automate time consuming tasks.

If I have trouble with a linux box I call a kickass IT guy who knows Linux backwards and forwards. If I need someone to streamline the workflow for managing a VFX sequence with 800 assets with evolving character rigs and ensuring that an animator can transfer their animation to a new rig I'm not going to IT I'm going to a technical artist who has deep domain knowledge on both character animation and rigging.

If that developer decides that they need a database to track animations between versions they will probably develop on a database on their local workstation. When they're happy and want to move it to production then we meet with IT, tell them "We'll have 40 users with about 10,000 requests per minute." They'll recommend hardware or say that an existing server can handle it and deploy a production ready database. They'll ensure it fits in with our existing security policies, firewalls, access rights etc and then handle maintenance and backup.

Just because someone touches a computer doesn't make them "IT". Not because IT is an insult but because it would redefine the role too broadly. Would you call a technical animator who works on developing fluid simulations an IT person? No.

Similarly someone who works on the Unreal Engine's source isn't in "IT" they are a developer. They are working on very specific problems unique to computer graphics or audio or AI or Animation etc. The person though who ensures that developer has the infrastructure they need isn't someone to be looked down on, they're just in a very different role. However when that developer says that they need 10TB of shared storage at 400MB/s to 5 users then you call IT. That's specifically *not* working two jobs that's using people where they are most productive. I see the hierarchy as such:

Physicists - Develop principles.
Fabrication Experts - User principles of physics to create better chips.
Chip Designers - Design processors which can "do work".
Fundamental Software Developers - Write the software to expose the hardware to regular developers. (OS, Drivers, File Systems, Runtimes, Networking Stacks, Compilers etc, Databases, etc.)
IT - Deploys and maintains the hardware designed by Chip Designers and software by the Systems Engineers doing the low level fundamental work necessary.
Developers - Those who write functional software to solve specific problems.
Users - People who use the software.

As I see it a fab engineer should understand physics, a chip designer should understand the limitations of fabrication, a systems engineer should understand chip design, IT should understand drivers and other low level systems engineering, Developers should know how to do limited deployments of their development environment.
Users should ideally be able to write tools to solve their problems.

But to use the obligatory car analogy, I'm not going to call a civil engineer to consult on how to tune the steering on a race car. I will call them and have them design a great race track to drive the car on, but their role is one of deploying and repairing infrastructure for cars to drive on, not to design the cars except where the two overlap by necessity.

At our company we outsource all of our IT. All projects are run by the actual users. This works perfectly. 'IT' handles the things that we know they're good at: keeping the email up and running, maintaining servers, troubleshooting workstations etc. The users do what they're good at: solving industry specific problems.

I wouldn't bother contacting our IT before starting a project because the only requests I'll have for IT are possibly provisioning a new ______ server that we need for the project or having them integrate our development server into the network. Once we've got a project up and running we can then do a handoff meeting with IT on what they need to know to keep it running. "This service needs a _____ box with a _____ connection to the network. If the box dies, re-install ______ and configure _____ service like _____." They can then handle maintenance. For our company, IT is essentially a Colocation service.

Bing returns the same results so unless both knowledge graphs are operating the same I would imagine it's a much simpler explanation: both sites rely on "answer" websites for answers. If you ask any question most often the results are Yahoo.Answers, Answers.com and wikihow. My guess would be that "Answers in Genesis" overloads their weighting for "answers" URLs associated with "Questions" on this topic.

If they actually overloaded the Knowledge Graph it would appear in a special box at the top of the results. In this instance it's still just a link. If you search "Circumference of the earth" you'll get a knowledge graph result with an "official answer".

I know a lot of women in non profits. Generally "being interested in social change" is code for "shit pay".

I kept buying AMD to save a penny and my experience was iffy drivers (even on Windows) and two dead fans. Now I go NVidia and have had far fewer problems.

I bought Tesla Stock at a marvelous point in time for my portfolio's value. But I realized it's grossly overvalued. But... just because something is grossly overvalued doesn't mean it won't go up.. and it has, over and over and over. If I had sold it off where I thought Tesla was actually valued I would have missed out on enough of a bump that short of the stock going bankrupt and hitting $0 I can take a pretty huge bubble pop and still come out ahead of where "sensible" people would have bailed. But people aren't sensible. And I don't see people getting sensible any time soon.

Let's take a 100kw laser system like being demonstrated. Let's say your mirror is a 90% mirror (very good mirror) free of dirt. That's still 10kw on something maybe 2" across. If you've got a polycarbonate cover for your mirror surface it's now black. If you're using polished chrome it's already been burned off down to the metal underneath which is also probably charred. Also the lasers are often in the near-infrared range not the optical range.

I would say the goal hasn't changed but they found applications short of the goal. The author seems to suggest that this is dishonest--it's not dishonest at all. Missile defense is/was a multi-billion dollar boondoggle but the current anti-mortar systems employed in the middle east are functional and effective. Just because we can't have megawatt class lasers yet doesn't mean that the current demonstrations of useful applications for lightweight lasers are smoke and mirror deception. His premise is completely misguided "Since these aren't megawatt lasers, these are useless." Maybe in the cold war less than megawatt lasers were useless but we aren't fighting the soviet union we're fighting guys in a rubber dingy.