But is it two weeks sprint down a dead end? For a project this size, agile is like trying to build a skyscraper first as a one story building, then two story building, then three story building and so on. Apparently you're making great progress the first sprint and you have a shack up, that's 1/100 floors done already. Except it doesn't work like that, so sometime around the 20th floor you've got people all over the first 19 trying to build in extra support columns and stronger walls and propping up the foundation. Things grind to a halt and you're not making any real progress. Then the orders come to get moving and you start going upwards again more and more rickety until eventually you find the straw that broke the mule's back and it all comes crumbling down.

Agile is nice if you're close enough you can start delivering actual features that would belong in the end product at the end. In practice it often means you build the first iteration with string and duct tape planning to replace it with something more solid on the back end in time, but I think everyone knows how that goes - the string and duct tape has a tendency to stay because that part is "done". Of course hindsight is always much easier but agile I feel lacks foresight, we do this now to meet our sprint goals and then if we need to change something to meet our next sprint goals, we'll deal with that then. In practice, there's not time to go back and rework things every time you figure out this should have been done differently.

So AMD says, but Tom's Hardware disagrees:

The cheapest laptop newegg sells that I could find was $250, so there's a good $100 range where Atoms, Celerons, Pentiums and AMD is battling it out - that's not much, really.

Which is likely the part that matters in these laptops. I mean if you're trying to use these for serious number crunching you are using the wrong tool for the job. It's not like the single threaded performance is poor, it is horrible. Anandtech compared it to a i7-3517U, which is totally unfair price-wise (it's a $350 chip) but fair power-wise (it's a 17W chip). In cinebench single-threaded the Intel chip scored 1.24, the A4-5000 0.39 - that's a 3.18x performance lead with 2W higher TDP, 2.8x if you scale it to be equal. You're getting a not-quite-as-dog-slow-as-an-Atom ultra mobile laptop, but you're not getting anything fighting above it's league either.

Yeah, but the biggest benefit it seems they got in sleep states and I don't think sleeping in the morning, sleeping in the evening, sleeping all through the night is what the song is all about...

The analogy is sound, the "parallel" part is the processor and the "non-parallel" part the rest and it'll approach the same power baseline with increased processor efficiency as it does the performance baseline with increased parallelization. But I feel it's a rather silly complication of the obvious, unlike parallelization. Yes of course if the screen is the biggest power hog, then it has the most potential for improvement. Note that it would be a fallacy to think it will always have the greatest improvement, if the screen takes 60% and the processor 40% but you can only reduce screen power by 10% to 54% and the processor by 50% to 20% of the original you gain more with the processor.

Do Verizon care if you run a piddly little server that doesn't even use 1GB/month? No. They cared because he used 77TB, himself admitting to violating the ToS was just a free confession they could hang him by. If he'd said "none of your business" they'd just have to search the ToS a little harder, you're confusing the ends with the means.

You think the ancient Greeks didn't know about snow melting to water, water vapor from boiling or dew from moist air? The four elements are their first attempt at the periodic table, they did not confuse elements and states. Though I suppose fire was way off the mark.

Except the open source community doesn't take "no" for an answer, it's like calling a hermit a bad citizen simply because he wants nothing to with the rest of society. Those technologies you talk of won't work with a blob because there's no ABI and GPL hooks, so it essentially boils down to the same: nVidia doesn't do open source. They only want to offer you the blob, period. But for a lot of people in the OSS community it seems doing nothing at all is the same as being evil. Either you're with us, or you're against us.

As a general rule there's two kinds of contracts, fixed bid and time&material. The former usually means a predefined scope at a fixed price, formal change orders and bug fixes are usually free within a given testing period. The other is basically "do whatever I say" and yes I will, but I don't own the specification and I'm not making any sign-offs on what I'll deliver - I just work hours for you. You get various forms of hybrids - I consider agile one of them - but that's the archetypes. I've coded off "specifications" that were a yellow post-it note, rushed it to production with hardly any testing or documentation and if it works for them it works for me. If you're overall not happy with my work stop the contract, but I charge you every hour even when I'm bug fixing my own work.

It sounds to me like you're asking for the best of both worlds, contractors that'll work regular hours during most of the project and do bug fixes for free at the end. That is going to be trouble, every time. Hell, when you say "programming project manager" I'm starting to think they're not even in full control of the code, far less the spec. Contractors tend to love repeat business, have you them coming back for more? No? Probably because they feel railroaded by the process. Do your contractors ever reject your specs? Can they reject your specs? Or are you just telling them these are the specs and I'm saying they're good enough, get to work? What about when things undoubtedly come up, is there a formal change process or you just improving or amending the spec?

Good enough to work by and good enough to sign off on are two entirely different things, try doing a proper fixed bid project and I think you'll find out.

I have that setup.... but it's a dark arts test every time to find the right order of turning on/tuning in the devices in right order to make it actually work. Usually I have to disconnect and reconnect the cable from the PC to my surround receiver as well. I blame HDCP, clearly they have some sort of handshake issues. The TV I had before that would only work with direct source -> TV connections, going via a receiver meant no signal. Again it appears to be a HDCP handshake issue, the pass-through added just enough latency that it didn't work. Kill it with fire.

Around here I would say refrigerators for employee use and/or vending machines are more common, basic coffee is usually free though. For example there's a coffee capsule machine on my floor, but it's bring your own capsules. Every so often I bring soda, but I could also buy it on the first floor at cafeteria prices. Snacking I do too much of already, so I'd rather enjoy that at home than snacking at work. Sure I'd in some way love free soda, but I also know I'd drink much more just because I can and it's free and it's right there. Yes self control is my own task but at the same time you know it's subsidized soda, implicitly you know you're giving up a tiny bit of your paycheck for it and want your money's worth. If I ever worked a place that gave me free potato chips too, I'd probably add 20 pounds before I quit for my own good. To me, bring/buy your own refreshments makes a lot more sense than BYOD.

Sounds like you live in a big city with underground trains, yes there the power lines will be underground and fairly well protected too. More rural parts often don't have that luxury, falling trees, landslides and rock slides can take out the power cables as well. Like you I'm not very prepared but if I lived in some of the more isolated parts - which by climate are much the same - I'd definitively have a generator handy.

Only to make sure that what was said in English was fully understood by everyone in the room or asking a stronger English speaker to express something they found difficult, never heard anything they seemed to assume was private. Seems like a very foolish move as I can speak three languages, understand five and probably pick up stray words from a dozen. Would this possibly be Canadian French and the English speakers in presence American? Because people tend to assume Americans only speak English (or possibly Spanish), it's only 99.9% accurate but I don't see two Frenchman thinking the same anywhere in Europe.

No, first line support is often dealing with people that have a PEBCAK problem, not a software or hardware problem. Or at least not one related to what you're actually providing support for in a supported configuration. I suspect that many companies don't actually want a support line, if you have a problem they'd rather you get pissed and go somewhere else than tie up one of their employees - even your outsourced call center guy. Unless it's a big thing affecting many users in which case you probably know it without everyone calling in. It's not acceptable to not offer support, but you can make it useless enough that most people won't bother. This all sounds like a much cheaper way of providing non-support while still giving the pretense that you do. Let's call it a tier zero before you even get to reach first line support, far less knowledgeable support.

I once had the displeasure of telling our client that the vendor (luckily not our company but our partner, so I could say "they" not "us") did not support the use of the "back" button in their web interface. Any support case that involved using it would be closed as not supported. For bonus points they didn't provide any functionality equivalent to it either, so of course everyone used the back button anyway where it did work. To me it's a bit like selling a four door car where the back doors are only for decoration and actually opening and closing the doors are not supported but I guess if you have enough lawyers and impenetrable contracts anything is possible.

Yes, the claim that Y is actually X is only covered by a small section on misrepresentation. Unless it's in bad faith there's no penalty at all and worse case they're only liable for costs incurred, no penalties or restitution. It's as if the copyright lobby wrote it, oh wait they did....