Guvante

Scott Adams said "Scott Adams isn't such a bad guy" as an anonymous poster. It is called sock puppeting because it is you pretending to be a nobody. Most frequently it involves multiple accounts in order to appear more important, but it doesn't appear that it happened that way in this case.

The reason this is looked down upon is when you are an interested party you can talk about a topic like someone who has done a lot of research, making your opinion more valuable, however by staying anonymous you avoid revealing that you have a bias.

It isn't a black and white thing, and most of the hate wasn't actually the socket puppet thing but the conversations around it.

Link for the lazy

It depends on what you mean by computation power.

They will always be able to add more computation power, the question is whether they can do that while keeping the price the same.

Basically currently you can wait 18 months and get an improvement in performance for "free". He is theorizing this free boost will go away. You can wait 18 months and have another option in the $/performance matrix, but not one that is 100% better in every case.

Certainly the net effect would be the same but I think saying "cash flow" here is disingenuous.

There is fundamental differences between getting a check every week for $250 and getting a bigger refund than normal.

Certainly adjusting withholding for NIT would be moot but if you don't have income it very much isn't.

And adding and removing people from payments takes away a lot from the "ease to administer" benefit.

An isocurve is a graph with a bunch of lines on it. Typically these lines represent equivalencies. For instance a common isocurve graph is one representing a magnetic field. A magnetic field is continuous, but you can plot a line where it has a strength of X for various X to see how quickly the strength changes with distance and other properties.

In this case the equivalences are overall efficiency (instructions per unit time). So a line showing 1 billions instructions per second (hitting 1 GHz/1 IPC, 0.5 GHz/2 IPC, 2 GHC/0.5 IPC), another at 2 billion instructions per second (hitting 1 GHZ/2 IPC. 0.5 GHz/4 IPC, 2 GHZ/1 IPC).

Assuming that moving right or up is equivalent work, you could then judge whether you should focus on IPC or clock.

His overall synopsis is that by moving at a 45 degree (equal effort between both) you get the most benefit per unit research.