Both of you suck at car analogies.

Let's say Nissan makes an engine. V6, 3.8L. They advertize it as being 250HP, promote it mainly by putting it in racecars and winning races, and a whole lot of other technical specs get handed out to reviewers to gush over, but nobody really reads them except nerds.

They then make a variant engine. Same V6, but they cut the stroke down so it's only 3.0L. They advertize it as being 200HP, promote it with some more racecars that don't win the overall race but are best in their class, and again they hand out a small book worth of technical specs, this one with a minor error in the air flow rates on page 394. Somebody forgot to edit the numbers from the 3.8L engine, so even though the actual airflow is more than enough for the smaller engine, the numbers originally given look bigger. Nobody from marketing was told about the airflow change, because it was a weird side-effect of something they got rid of related to turbocharger compatibility, and nobody thought to ask the engineers to double-check all of their numbers since only like 200 people would see it worldwide anyways.

Once actual customers get their hands on the new engine, most of them are pretty happy. The 3.8L is better, but it costs like twice as much as the 3.0L, so whatever. One customer is driving on this godawful, decrepit highway that hasn't been repaved since the Eisenhower administration built it, and obviously has some issues. Rather than blame the shitty conditions, he takes a look at the engine, and finds that if you take an air compressor and blow air through the intakes, not as much gets to the engine as in the 3.8L. He then bitches about it online, and other people find the same thing. Motorheads being just as collectively retarded as any group, they build a standardized test set that completely ignores realistic driving conditions and pretty much only identifies this particular oddity in this particular engine, and take to the streets waving torches and pitchforks when they find the air flow value on page 394 isn't the airflow they're getting.

Someone at Nissan hears the noise outside, checks with their internal books and finds the typo. They start explaining as quickly and loudly as they can, but the mob's angry and nobody's going to stop it with logic at this point.

Meanwhile, the smart motorheads are sitting back, waiting for Nissan to drop the price on the "tainted" engine so they can pick one up for cheap themselves, since it's actually a perfectly fine engine, already a pretty good one for the price, and way more fuel-efficient than Audi's equivalent.

Pretty much this. The whole push to have 'everyone' code is because it's trendy and is a definable skill, unlike 'learning how to think' or reason. And it segues quickly into 'jobs' which makes everybody happy. Further, there is this odd belief among many people (including a whole raft of Slashdot posters) that software can do anything and the world should be viewed through the lens of a Von Neumann machine.

Coding is a subset of human activity, not a superset. Even modeling, as championed by TFA is only a small part of human learning.

But schools are in a tough place. They are supposed to teach everyone, from the next Albert Einstein to the kid that will be sweeping the floor. They're supposed to push the latter child farther and faster than they could possibly go while not slowing down the new Einstein. All the while acting as in loco parentis, cop, judge and diaper changer.

For only $29.95 per child.

When I was a kid, and mum and dad weren't at home, my brother and I would eat raw egg yolk mixed with sugar. In one way or another we're all alive due to luck, I prefer not to push mine too much.

... and if you actually have completely random memory access, and if you're using a 970 instead of an actual compute card from the Quadro or Tesla line...

I won't make any assumptions about you, but I've *never* looked at the marketing for the product I work on. I don't check to make sure their numbers are accurate, because my job is to build the damn thing, not proofread. If someone from marketing *asks* me to check something, I will, but I don't go around reading reviews to make sure all the numbers are right.

Further, it's a compromise in a part that's already compromised. In any video card, there are several parts that need to be roughly proportionate in power - memory bandwidth, ROP units, shader units, at the most basic level. Adding extras of any one part won't speed things up, it'll just bottleneck on the other parts. The 980 was a balanced design, perhaps a bit shader-heavy. The 970 took the 980 chip, binned out about 20% of the shaders, binned out about 13% of the ROPs and slowed down one of the memory controllers by segmenting it off. The part that you're complaining is "compromised" is still *over*-engineered for the job at hand. They could have completely removed that memory controller and still been bottlenecked on shaders, not bandwidth.

Finally, you missed the most crucial part. You are assuming malice, and ignoring any possibility of incompetence, despite it being a very pointless issue to lie about, and very easy to mess up on. In fact, you seem to be ignoring all evidence that it *was* incompetence, and blindly assert that it was malice for no other reason than that you want it to be malice.

One of the largest internal migrations in US history was in the early 70's when 20 something hippies started leaving cities in droves and building mud brick utopias. Only a handful of the communes survived more then 2ys. The common cause of downfall was human nature - a bully would arise in the commune and take ownership of the land by pushing people out one by one.

I grew up during the cold war, the term "plan C" sound vaguely familiar. The military is expected to "plan for every scenario", it's unsurprising they came up with silly plans for a nuclear - most primary school kids knew that fallout made "duck and cover" a sick joke. It's an attempt to make people feel like they can "do something" other than dying.

No, see, infantry are actually trained on how to use military weapons and equipment. Cops just get handed a grenade launcher and told to go tear-gas some protesters. So we'd actually be better off with martial law.

* I'm exaggerating, but only slightly.

... except they WEREN'T the "same CPU". They were the same GPU die (GM204), but three of the sixteen cores were disabled. This was perfectly explained at launch. If you bought a 970 thinking you could overclock it to 980 clocks and get the exact same performance, I'm sorry, but you just weren't paying any attention.

This wasn't "marketing material", it was "technical marketing material", the stuff given to review sites, not the general public. And it was a relatively obscure portion that was incorrect, not something that most consumers would even understand, let alone care about. The technical marketing staff (a distinct group from the consumer marketing department) made the assumption that every enabled ROP/MC functional unit has two 8px/clock ROPs, two L2 cache units of 256KB, two links into the memory crossbar, and two 32-bit memory controllers.

This assumption was true for previous architectures (Tesla, Fermi, Kepler). It was true for earlier releases in this architecture (the 750 Ti and 980 were full-die releases, no disabled units; the 750 only disabled full units). This is the first architecture where disabling parts of the ROP/MC functional unit, while keeping other parts active, was possible. The marketing department was informed that there were still 8 ROP/MC units, and that there was still a 256-bit memory buss. They were not informed that one ROP/MC unit was partially disabled, with only one ROP and one L2 cache unit, and only one port into the memory crossbar, but still two MCs.

The point AT made is this: this information would have been figured out eventually. If Nvidia had been up-front with it, it would have been a minor footnote on the universally-positive launch reviews, not dedicated articles just for this issue. It only hurts them to have it not be known information from the get-go.

As much as it's hip to hate on big corporations for being evil, they are not evil for no purpose. They do evil only when it is more profitable. In this case, the supposed lie was less profitable than the truth. Therefore it was incompetence, either "they honestly didn't know this was how it worked when they sent the info to reviewers", or "they thought they could get away with something that absolutely would have gotten out, and would not help them sell cards anyway". The former incompetence seems far, far more likely than the latter.

One hundred million unorganized, inebriated, confused, uncoordinated, ill disciplined bozos who haven't slept outside of a building since cub scouts.

Yeah, I'll take the military any day.

The interesting thing with these facilities is that they all have fences and barb wire facing inwards - not to keep people out, but to keep people in.

"You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from stupidity"

Heinlein

Mr. President! We must not allow a mine-shaft gap!

Hitler tried very hard to ally with the US (against GB and France) prior to the onset of WW2. Later on he tried to play everyone against each other to gain some time.

This sort of thing happens all of the time.

There might be cases where an application queries how much memory is available, then allocates all of it to use as caching. If the driver doesn't manage that memory well (putting least-used data in the slower segment), that could cause performance to be lower than if it were forced to 3.5GB only.

That said, nobody seems to have found any applications where the memory management malfunctions like that, so it's more a theoretical quibble than actual at this point. And, knowing Nvidia, they'd just patch the driver so it would report a lower memory amount to that app only (they unfortunately tend to fill their drivers with exceptions or rewritten shaders to make big-name games run faster).