"it’s patriarchy that says men are stupid and monolithic and unchanging and incapable. It’s patriarchy that says men have animalistic instincts and just can’t stop themselves from harassing and assaulting. It’s patriarchy that says men can only be attracted by certain qualities, can only have particular kinds of responses, can only experience the world in narrow ways. Feminism holds that men are capable of more - are more than that. Feminism says that men are better than that"
What I said is that where I live its not like this. Girls wouldn't make a fuss about this, and would probably make more sexual jokes then guys actually. So yes maybe in comparison you guys need to lighten up as a society or something.
I don't have the reference to hand, but it's worth noting that when women use only 20% of conversation time, they are perceived by a group to be dominating the discussion.
The same thing is in effect here, basically. A bot with a very limited purpose is being seen as causing significantly greater disruption.
Whilst on a small scale they are very random, there are some good studies (sadly I don't have the references with me) that show that over large areas, they actually become quite predictable - so this is less of an issue than people think if you have enough coverage
The management-heavy buying process still applies, however - as support and service contracts become extremely important for large organisations, and are essential to their operations.
It's great to see that I'm not the only one who likes to use this approach! :)
That is probably the best example of this tactic I've seen, very well written.
[Also, I couldn't let this comment thread go without this nick getting an outing ;)]
System was built in 2003 - 8 years ago.
Assume moore's law of doubles every 2 years - expectation of 16x more powerful
Actual increase in performance - 22x in 1/4th the size
Given that it's then a quarter of the size of system X, that's an amazing increase in peak performance.
There's only one problem - that speed increase appears to owe a lot to the use of GPGPU. As I understand it, whilst research into GPGPU for HPC* is a hot area at the moment, the scale of the actual benefits it offers is still a matter of debate (especially when considering costs and power consumption).
From my perspective, the biggest limitation in using GPUs for more general purpose computations is the communication latency. I published a paper that came to that conclusion: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/papers/debs2010.pdf
In short, parallelism is not enough to get benefit from using GPUs. You need parallelism and data reuse.
Whilst your average person at home may not be able to fork out $1.4M, this is in the afordable range of many medium to large businesses, and opens up access to private compute clusters*
The highest cost for supercomputers isn't the raw hardware - it's the power consumption. This also includes the cooling needs of a large cluster. Over the lifespan of a cluster, these will add up to a significant multiple of their base cost.
* of course, this may not be the ideal way to provide access to these services
I am of the opinion that businesses are defined by how they handle the exit of customers more than by how they handle take-on of customers. A customer being difficult to manage or not profitable still deserves a professional exit.
These sorts of customers are not, however, automatically "stupid customers". They are "difficult" or "non-profitable". In my experience, a user simply being "stupid" doesn't in itself mean that you shouldn't work with them - in fact, often with a little bit of work, they might even become a reasonable repeat customer.
Like a lot of people who have had customer facing roles, I have enjoyed reading notalwaysright (and the older http://customerssuck.livejournal.com/). But I have found over time the postings to have become more deliberate funny-making or actually problematic from an equality point of view.
These sorts of customers are not, however, automatically "stupid customers". They are "difficult" or "non-profitable".
Yes. notalwaysright.com is funny, and I'm sure some are good customers. However it's a good 'ammo' against the idea that "The Customer is always right" (a corrollary is that businesses should care about losing any customers).
(The source, http://zeroatthebone.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/on-claiming-to..., isn't entirely relevent, although it's conculsion is)