So, you say the word "more man" as opposed to "more mun"?
I've always heard the second vowel pronounced as a schwa, which would be fitting of most anything but an i. Morman. Mormen. Mormun. Mormon. Regardless of pronunciation, I would rather see him paying a higher proportion of taxes like the rest of us plebes. We all payed our "fair share" to Federally-sponsored programs with which we disagree, but he gets to funnel the extra income to his own religious organization? Boo, I say.
Come on, were you against the SOPA/PIPA blackouts?
Doubtful, but that's the proverbial diamond in the rough. Are you familiar with the spamformresponse? I have not yet seen the equivalent for political reform discussions. I believe this is an indication that the Slashdot as a community underestimates the inherent complexity (corruption aside!) of American politics.
Yep, forgot about that. Thank you. The principle applies equally for conditions where pools are encouraged (small, fixed-sized, frequently allocated/deallocated objects).
They are also missing the point that the presence of a used market drives sales, because you aren't so skittish about blowing $60 on a game if you know you can recoup some of that later.
They know that. They are already selling DLC packs which cannot be resold, and the net value of the DLCs may very well match the value of the original disc. Statistics from DLCs can be used to infer sentiment fur non-transferrable games: if the DLCs sell (almost) as well as the original game, it's probably cost-effective for them to rape our right of first sale.
libc requests and releases pools of memory from the OS rather than making OS level requests every time it needs memory, and unless a pool is completely unused, it can't be released.
FTFY; this behavior is not specific to FF. Custom memory pools reduce the pressure on the generic/heterogeneous allocator (malloc) but they do not fundamentally change how the program gets memory from the operating system (sbrk). I don't know the syscalls on the Win32 side, but it's analogous.
My first guess about the discrepancy would be whether K=1024 or K=1000.. but generously, that puts FF's 799.88 MB private memory (K=1024) at 817.76 MB private memory (K=1000), leaving ~7% unaccounted still. Maybe FF is ignoring stack space, which AFAIK is a fixed size per-thread and may not be easy to measure (heap space can be measured trivially by instrumenting malloc).
Regarding the definition of various memory segments: "private" refers to pages in the virtual memory space that are not shared by any other processes. "vsize" refers to both private and shared pages in the virtual memory space, but shared pages should not be double-counted from multiple processes (i.e. in Internet Explorer, the bulk of the memory footprint is pages shared with the OS, thus the marginal memory impact from IE's "private" working set appears relatively small). "resident" refers to virtual memory space that is currently in physical RAM, as opposed to being paged out on a disk.
The fact that your "resident" memory is smaller than your "private" memory suggests that maybe some of Firefox's own data caches are paged out to disk. All browsers maintain a cache hierarchy both in-memory and on-disk, but it gets a bit silly if users have their in-memory caches so full that they get swapped out to disk anyhow. Opera browser has an "automatic" setting for the in-memory cache which should eliminate this, but I don't know about FF.
There are smaller and more expensive parts of the memory hierarchy: if Firefox can single-handedly clobber the L3 cache on modern home PCs, then nothing on that system will run at "peak performance". Going in the other direction, if Firefox's virtual memory footprint spikes substantially, it will interfere with the OS's existing use of memory for caching. This can lead to sporadic disk access (paging) and a finger-pointing game between FF devs and OS devs.
My point is simple: memory footprint on a general-purpose machine always matters.
I've assumed for a long time that large shifts in stock valuations that don't appear to have a trigger are just insiders reacting to documents that will become public at a later date. By that time, all the information is already reflected in the price which stays relatively static on the "official" announcement. It's just the way the system works.
If you really believe that the price impact of the official announcement has already been completed, you may as well bet on it. Anyone who is "late to the party" so-to-speak will drive the price up/down after the official announcement, but the price should quickly revert back to fair value.
Still insider. Only someone with access to an ECN terminal could do this that quickly. Us regular people never have the opportunity.
That's not really the definition of insider trading. Insider trading would be someone at GOOG who sold (or sold short) stocks before the announcement after knowing material information that would reduce the price of the stock (poor earnings).
If your definition of "insider" here refers to "professional trader": Yes, tautology lolcats will tell you that the professional trader is professional. No, that's not a useful definition of "insider" because (1) it deviates from an accepted industry term and thus muddies discussion about the topic, and (2) it no more relevant than complaining about picking a fight with a kickboxer and losing. If you want to "win" in an earnings announcement as an amateur trader, you need to buy or short GOOG well in advance of the announcement based on your own research and expectations.
If it is able to out-compete indigenous species, then there is by definition nothing wrong with it.
If so, then your definition of "right" and "wrong" is limited to evolutionary pressure. It ignores the possible reasons why people may have concerns, such as an interest in local habitat conservation. It neatly ignores the context of the conversation:
People are quite rightly concerned because if there is something wrong with GM food and it gets into nature it's not going to disappear easily.
Nobody else is worried about the GM food getting out and... dying. They're worried about GM food getting out and causing "invasive species"-like problems, which can be hard to predict and impossible to revert.
People are quite rightly concerned because if there is something wrong with GM food and it gets into nature it's not going to disappear easily.
If there was something wrong with GM food it would be selected against in nature, and thus not spread.
That is incorrect. GM plants in the wild would only be adversely selected if the "wrong" characteristic impacted their ability to procreate, and then typically after many generations. In the meantime, the plants may out-compete indigenous species or introduce toxins up the food chain. For a non-GM example, read up on Eucalyptus trees as an iunvasive species.
Don't get me wrong here: I do not claim that GM plants exhibit any of these characteristics. I am merely pointing out that the "natural selection" argument about ecological safety/stability is utter horse shit.
You have no clear entitlement to another copy of CDs. This is important to mention, because some people believe they do... If you lose your physical property, you have no right to another instance of that property.
The difference is that with some software, producers are making the claim that the sale is a non-transferable license to use the software in an attempt to eliminate the secondary market. They want to eat their cake and have it too, by forcing people to pay for both use (licensing), and also for ownership (physical media). However, there's often no concession offered for such a restriction. That is why people feel entitled to re-download copies of software to which they own CD keys, but have since lost the media. If it's morally gray, it's because the whole situation is tit-for-tat.
In this example, someone else pointed out that Blizzard actually appears to do the right thing: they honor your purchase of the license by letting you re-download with a known CD key.
Panasonic bundles 3D with their top-of-the-line plasma displays (VT series). To get a Panasonic TV without 3D requires compromising on the rest of the display. This is a common thread on the various A/V forums, and it doesn't have anything to do with Best Buy.
However, I don't begrudge them this approach. Limiting their manufacturing options should reduce costs. If it's cheaper to force 3D on all VT-series TVs than to offer 3D and no-3D models, then so be it! The extra feature doesn't hurt, aside from padding statistics.
Door guards irritate patrons, especially those whose hands are full of food and drinks (i.e. "profitable customers"). Too much inconvenience will spoil the "carefree moviegoing experience" for many people and they will go elsewhere. Door guards should be used sparingly.
... and only if there are vacant seats after the movie starts
There are always vacant seats in a theater. "Sold out" may happen at 5%, or 20 seats left, or whatever. This is because trying to fill every single seat requires pushing people around in order to accommodate groups/couples, bringing us back to the "inconvenience" problem. It's better to leave a few seats unsold and let the latecomers take the next showing.
But ten people in the room versus one doesn't really take THAT MUCH more time to clean, but it does increase concessions revenue by about $90.
How big of a price discrepancy are you expecting? I see tickets in the $8-$13 range where I live (depending on theater, and 3D is always a few bucks extra). I wouldn't expect the price differential to be any more than $2-$4. Given that, I don't see those ten people—who were only willing to see the movie for a few bucks less—ordering $9 worth of concessions apiece.
At Longhorn I avoid the cheap wines. At real restaurants I avoid the expensive ones. How does that figure into movie pricing?
Here's the closest that I could get to an analogy:
At "Shitty Sound System and Screen" discount theater, you should avoid watching crap like "Juwanna Man" and "Pluto Nash". At "Digital 3D 10.2 THX" premium theater, you should avoid watching anything directed by David Fincher or J.J. Abrams.
..but it's horribly wrong. Of course you should be watching the better films in the better theater. You are right: movie ticket pricing is nothing like wine pricing.
Since most of the money is made in the first couple of weeks, there's not much time to gather statistics, analyze them, and do all the necessary number-crunching.
You can bet your ass that statistical analysis goes into planning for the larger movie theater chains. There are always surprises, but statistical estimates are used to schedule film rentals, showing times, and staff scheduling.
Now, applying that to ticket pricing... that just sounds like a lot of complexity for very little gain. If a movie draws a smaller crowd, it already gets a smaller "house" and fewer showings. Trying to draw a larger crowd with dynamic pricing sounds like Laffer Curve shenanigans with the deck stacked against you.
Also, in many cinemas it would be fairly easy to defeat the system: buy a ticket for the cheapest movie listed, then sneak into the theater for the movie you actually want to see. Policing this might cost more than the additional profit.
Plus you get your photo on the "refuse service" wall like a local celebrity!
The kids at the box office won't care about that, and the managers will be too busy to notice. In a sufficiently busy theater there will be a rent-a-cop who also doesn't care because he is too busy watching for theft, vandalism, and aggressive teenagers.
Let me preface this by saying that your response really sounds like a case of the GIFT. Calm down, guy!
If might be eliminating 2D digital projection out in the middle of nowhere where you have only one theater for 100 miles, but in civilization, it's not happening at all.
Your assumption is incorrect. I don't live in the middle of nowhere. I have observed this in every movie theater I have attended in my area.
the majority are unaffected and don't care about your complaints.
Well, that's true. The majority doesn't seem to be clamoring for 2D digital projection; just some of my film-buff friends.
Have you tried organizing a petition to take to the manager at the movie theater stating that X number of people will simply stop going if they don't provide 2D digital as well as 3D?
No, but I have voted with my wallet and avoided new films because of it. I'm watching more "new" movies at home. I'm sure such a petition would fail, though, given how little most people care. Where do you get this idea that everything we don't like must be protested?
The industry's push for 3D is the ONLY reason you have the choice of 2D digital projection at all... In ten years or so... you'll have your ubiquitous digital 2D.
Honestly... all the 3D movies are also shown in 2D - and for less money.
In my neck of the woods, 3D movies have replaced digital projection of 2D movies (probably because the projector is the same, but the ticket prices are higher). That leaves me choosing either 3D digital or 2D film.
People on slashdot are generally pro-choice unless it's something they can sit on their high horse and whine about all us bourgeois
We're upset because the industry's push for 3D is very clearly eliminating the choice of 2D digital projection. I absolutely loved watching the new Star Trek in digital projection: the space-expanse scenes were so much more serene without the jitter of a film projector. Now I have to suffer shitty, scratched polarized glasses and jarringly unreal stereoscopy if I want to enjoy digital projection.
Knowledge has always been a company resource... They usually fall under "trade secrets".
I believe I addressed the notion of trade secrets (proprietary information) in my original post. My point is that I don't believe said knowledge constitutes a "resource" in the sense that it cannot be consumed. Thus, my expectation that the argument "did X work using company resources" would not apply in this situation. This is similar to the "theft" vs. "copyright infringement" argument, and I had hoped that someone with a definitive answer could add to the conversation.
he still used a company resource.......knowledge of their processes
Maybe you can point me to a more formal definition of "company resource" used by legal/HR types, but this does not sound right. A resource can be consumed: hardware, bandwidth, office supplies, software licenses, etc. Knowledge is not consumable, and so using company-sponsored knowledge generally only falls afoul of propriety rules. This would not be the case for a piece of software that is not exposed outside of the company, so the closest argument is that he has "proprietary company knowledge" stored on his personal computer.
Slashdot Mirror
I've always heard the second vowel pronounced as a schwa, which would be fitting of most anything but an i. Morman. Mormen. Mormun. Mormon. Regardless of pronunciation, I would rather see him paying a higher proportion of taxes like the rest of us plebes. We all payed our "fair share" to Federally-sponsored programs with which we disagree, but he gets to funnel the extra income to his own religious organization? Boo, I say.
Doubtful, but that's the proverbial diamond in the rough. Are you familiar with the spam form response? I have not yet seen the equivalent for political reform discussions. I believe this is an indication that the Slashdot as a community underestimates the inherent complexity (corruption aside!) of American politics.
Yep, forgot about that. Thank you. The principle applies equally for conditions where pools are encouraged (small, fixed-sized, frequently allocated/deallocated objects).
They know that. They are already selling DLC packs which cannot be resold, and the net value of the DLCs may very well match the value of the original disc. Statistics from DLCs can be used to infer sentiment fur non-transferrable games: if the DLCs sell (almost) as well as the original game, it's probably cost-effective for them to rape our right of first sale.
FTFY; this behavior is not specific to FF. Custom memory pools reduce the pressure on the generic/heterogeneous allocator (malloc) but they do not fundamentally change how the program gets memory from the operating system (sbrk). I don't know the syscalls on the Win32 side, but it's analogous.
My first guess about the discrepancy would be whether K=1024 or K=1000.. but generously, that puts FF's 799.88 MB private memory (K=1024) at 817.76 MB private memory (K=1000), leaving ~7% unaccounted still. Maybe FF is ignoring stack space, which AFAIK is a fixed size per-thread and may not be easy to measure (heap space can be measured trivially by instrumenting malloc).
Regarding the definition of various memory segments: "private" refers to pages in the virtual memory space that are not shared by any other processes. "vsize" refers to both private and shared pages in the virtual memory space, but shared pages should not be double-counted from multiple processes (i.e. in Internet Explorer, the bulk of the memory footprint is pages shared with the OS, thus the marginal memory impact from IE's "private" working set appears relatively small). "resident" refers to virtual memory space that is currently in physical RAM, as opposed to being paged out on a disk.
The fact that your "resident" memory is smaller than your "private" memory suggests that maybe some of Firefox's own data caches are paged out to disk. All browsers maintain a cache hierarchy both in-memory and on-disk, but it gets a bit silly if users have their in-memory caches so full that they get swapped out to disk anyhow. Opera browser has an "automatic" setting for the in-memory cache which should eliminate this, but I don't know about FF.
There are smaller and more expensive parts of the memory hierarchy: if Firefox can single-handedly clobber the L3 cache on modern home PCs, then nothing on that system will run at "peak performance". Going in the other direction, if Firefox's virtual memory footprint spikes substantially, it will interfere with the OS's existing use of memory for caching. This can lead to sporadic disk access (paging) and a finger-pointing game between FF devs and OS devs.
My point is simple: memory footprint on a general-purpose machine always matters.
If you really believe that the price impact of the official announcement has already been completed, you may as well bet on it. Anyone who is "late to the party" so-to-speak will drive the price up/down after the official announcement, but the price should quickly revert back to fair value.
That's not really the definition of insider trading. Insider trading would be someone at GOOG who sold (or sold short) stocks before the announcement after knowing material information that would reduce the price of the stock (poor earnings).
If your definition of "insider" here refers to "professional trader": Yes, tautology lolcats will tell you that the professional trader is professional. No, that's not a useful definition of "insider" because (1) it deviates from an accepted industry term and thus muddies discussion about the topic, and (2) it no more relevant than complaining about picking a fight with a kickboxer and losing. If you want to "win" in an earnings announcement as an amateur trader, you need to buy or short GOOG well in advance of the announcement based on your own research and expectations.
If so, then your definition of "right" and "wrong" is limited to evolutionary pressure. It ignores the possible reasons why people may have concerns, such as an interest in local habitat conservation. It neatly ignores the context of the conversation:
Nobody else is worried about the GM food getting out and... dying. They're worried about GM food getting out and causing "invasive species"-like problems, which can be hard to predict and impossible to revert.
That is incorrect. GM plants in the wild would only be adversely selected if the "wrong" characteristic impacted their ability to procreate, and then typically after many generations. In the meantime, the plants may out-compete indigenous species or introduce toxins up the food chain. For a non-GM example, read up on Eucalyptus trees as an iunvasive species.
Don't get me wrong here: I do not claim that GM plants exhibit any of these characteristics. I am merely pointing out that the "natural selection" argument about ecological safety/stability is utter horse shit.
Is that British English (i.e. "flashlight"), or are you Just That Crazy?
The difference is that with some software, producers are making the claim that the sale is a non-transferable license to use the software in an attempt to eliminate the secondary market. They want to eat their cake and have it too, by forcing people to pay for both use (licensing), and also for ownership (physical media). However, there's often no concession offered for such a restriction. That is why people feel entitled to re-download copies of software to which they own CD keys, but have since lost the media. If it's morally gray, it's because the whole situation is tit-for-tat.
In this example, someone else pointed out that Blizzard actually appears to do the right thing: they honor your purchase of the license by letting you re-download with a known CD key.
Panasonic bundles 3D with their top-of-the-line plasma displays (VT series). To get a Panasonic TV without 3D requires compromising on the rest of the display. This is a common thread on the various A/V forums, and it doesn't have anything to do with Best Buy.
However, I don't begrudge them this approach. Limiting their manufacturing options should reduce costs. If it's cheaper to force 3D on all VT-series TVs than to offer 3D and no-3D models, then so be it! The extra feature doesn't hurt, aside from padding statistics.
Door guards irritate patrons, especially those whose hands are full of food and drinks (i.e. "profitable customers"). Too much inconvenience will spoil the "carefree moviegoing experience" for many people and they will go elsewhere. Door guards should be used sparingly.
There are always vacant seats in a theater. "Sold out" may happen at 5%, or 20 seats left, or whatever. This is because trying to fill every single seat requires pushing people around in order to accommodate groups/couples, bringing us back to the "inconvenience" problem. It's better to leave a few seats unsold and let the latecomers take the next showing.
How big of a price discrepancy are you expecting? I see tickets in the $8-$13 range where I live (depending on theater, and 3D is always a few bucks extra). I wouldn't expect the price differential to be any more than $2-$4. Given that, I don't see those ten people—who were only willing to see the movie for a few bucks less—ordering $9 worth of concessions apiece.
Here's the closest that I could get to an analogy:
You can bet your ass that statistical analysis goes into planning for the larger movie theater chains. There are always surprises, but statistical estimates are used to schedule film rentals, showing times, and staff scheduling.
Now, applying that to ticket pricing... that just sounds like a lot of complexity for very little gain. If a movie draws a smaller crowd, it already gets a smaller "house" and fewer showings. Trying to draw a larger crowd with dynamic pricing sounds like Laffer Curve shenanigans with the deck stacked against you.
Bingo.
The kids at the box office won't care about that, and the managers will be too busy to notice. In a sufficiently busy theater there will be a rent-a-cop who also doesn't care because he is too busy watching for theft, vandalism, and aggressive teenagers.
I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. Do you provide an Outlook plugin?
Let me preface this by saying that your response really sounds like a case of the GIFT. Calm down, guy!
Your assumption is incorrect. I don't live in the middle of nowhere. I have observed this in every movie theater I have attended in my area.
Well, that's true. The majority doesn't seem to be clamoring for 2D digital projection; just some of my film-buff friends.
No, but I have voted with my wallet and avoided new films because of it. I'm watching more "new" movies at home. I'm sure such a petition would fail, though, given how little most people care. Where do you get this idea that everything we don't like must be protested?
Very informative. Thank you.
In my neck of the woods, 3D movies have replaced digital projection of 2D movies (probably because the projector is the same, but the ticket prices are higher). That leaves me choosing either 3D digital or 2D film.
We're upset because the industry's push for 3D is very clearly eliminating the choice of 2D digital projection. I absolutely loved watching the new Star Trek in digital projection: the space-expanse scenes were so much more serene without the jitter of a film projector. Now I have to suffer shitty, scratched polarized glasses and jarringly unreal stereoscopy if I want to enjoy digital projection.
I believe I addressed the notion of trade secrets (proprietary information) in my original post. My point is that I don't believe said knowledge constitutes a "resource" in the sense that it cannot be consumed. Thus, my expectation that the argument "did X work using company resources" would not apply in this situation. This is similar to the "theft" vs. "copyright infringement" argument, and I had hoped that someone with a definitive answer could add to the conversation.
Maybe you can point me to a more formal definition of "company resource" used by legal/HR types, but this does not sound right. A resource can be consumed: hardware, bandwidth, office supplies, software licenses, etc. Knowledge is not consumable, and so using company-sponsored knowledge generally only falls afoul of propriety rules. This would not be the case for a piece of software that is not exposed outside of the company, so the closest argument is that he has "proprietary company knowledge" stored on his personal computer.