I don't believe immersion is why Doom was written as a First Person Shooter.
One reason may have been that they didn't want to pay the cost of rendering your character too (an inherent advantage of FPSes)...
Finally, don't even think you can pull off any real 3D aiming in the Z axis. The best you can do with a third person view is really bad 2D aiming. No more head shots.
Actually RE4 & 5 pull this off quite well -- your weapon has a "laser sight", that projects a beam where it's aiming, and gets a little brighter where it hits the enemy. This really works great, and is quite intuitive and fast. [For sniper rifles, it switches to a first-person scope view though...]
From the tone of their pitch, I'm sure if they have the mean for violence, they would.
Er, your being "sure" isn't enough. If they advocate people (not "heaven") commiting violence against the CC, where?
It is the right thing to do to point out what the CCP does wrongly (and there are tons of examples).
However, if you skip elaborating things
They do spend a huge amount of time pointing all the horrid things the CCP does -- in fact, almost all public speech by Falun Gong I've seen consists of reports of that. [In other words, "elaborating things"]
and instead just put up posters and handing out fliers that say "MAY THE HEAVEN DESTROY CCP!!"
That's the equivalent of saying "god damn the CCP" -- it's hyperbole and maybe a bit childish, but it isn't the same thing as advocating violence.
* A hate group is an organized group or movement that advocates physical or verbal aggression toward or refusal to interact with persons on the...
Oh please; a silly and excessively hand-wringing definition of "hate group" isn't interesting to anybody except lawyers and politicians.
Real people are far more practical, and yes the nature of the opponent counts quite a lot in how most people think about the situation -- "verbal aggression" against a very nasty and literally murderous opponent is not something most people would begrudge.
[Surely there are good reasons for that definition -- in particular, definitions like that are general, and intended to be applied in cases where the opponent is weak, and things like "verbal aggression" can actually be harmful. Not the against CCP.]
It is possible to spread the message about the malice of the CCP without the sensationalism, exaggeration and phony researches.
No doubt. I agree that Falun Gong's approach is often pretty silly, and kind of childish. They'd probably be a lot more effective if they tried to approach things more maturely.
But so far I've seen no evidence that they actually promote violence. "verbal aggression" against the CCP is not violence, and saying "may heaven destroy" is not promoting it (unless I suppose you think god will actually do it, but I suspect nobody here does...).
Until they do that, I still hold my view they look more like a hate group than a religion to me.
I can't determine how you see things, but your view appears decidedly skewed, and I don't think you've demonstrated what you're claiming.
Everyday they set up a booth and spread hate message about the Chinese Communist Party. Let's put aside our judgement towards CCC itself,....
They don't seem to be preaching violent revolution against the chinese communist party, merely saying that it sucks, and people should not support them. So our opinion of the CCC matters quite a bit in how we judge what they say (and lets face it, for the most part, the CCC does suck)...
they way Falun Gong people act just seem to totally contradict "Compassion" and "Tolerance" and it seems more and more like they're preaching "an eye
I would not let my children go anywhere near this "religion".
for an eye".
the CCC quite happily kills and imprisons all those who resist or complain about its rule, and even those it suspects of resisting, or those who merely defend the rights of others to do so. Falun Gong has certainly been on the receiving end of such persecution. If Falun Gong were guilty of "eye for an eye" thinking, they'd be advocating similar actions against the CCC; but as far as I've seen, they're not, not even close. Though they certainly go to great lengths to demonize the CCC (to the extent they can be kinda annoying), every action I've seen Falun Gong advocate has been non-violent, and non-oppressive (mostly calling for individual chinese to disown the communist party).
So really I don't know what you're talking about....
I see a few tags that cast doubt on the prediction. Why? I'll bet there were skeptics of Moore's Law when that became widely disseminated.
It may have something to do with the fact that Jen-Hsun Huang is a notorious blowhard, whose foot spends far more time in his mouth than on the ground.
Combine that with the extremity of the claim (570-fold over 6 years is a huge rate of improvement), and the tags don't seem so surprising.
How lame! I opened up my new PS3 Slim, and found no cables. How the HELL can you play games designed to be played in HD, on an HD TV, if you don't have HD, or HDMI Cables?!?!
Er, all of these systems can be played on non-HD TVs as well, and indeed, maybe it's a good bet that many people that have waited this long to buy the system are exactly the sort of people would are least likely to have an HD TV (they're not enthusiastics / early adopters).
Example: me. I don't own an xbox or a PS3, and I have a relatively crappy old SD TV. But now that the PS3's price has dropped to something non-insane, I'm thinking of picking up a slim to play stuff like RE5. Since I don't have an HD TV, I'm quite happy not to pay for cables I won't use...
Well, they deserve to be killed (or at least humbled) by their competition, if the competition is better -- but from what I've seen, flickr is still far superior to its would-be competitors. They really nailed the essential formula and built a solid site around it, and have done a good job polishing it over time. Most competing sites I've looked at seem to be much more flaky / disorganized / random, typically offering a few advantages here and there -- but they usually mess up the basics!
The yahoo takeover doesn't seem to have changed much about flickr, really, at least on the surface (a lot of the whining by flickr old-timers about yahoo logins etc seems to be pretty silly).
In fact, a lot of the problems I've seen at flickr seem to actually be because they're still acting too much like a small site -- the admins sometimes act rather arbitrarily / prematurely, and then get very snippy and control-freaky when challenged. One gets the image of five guys/girls sitting around a big table in a single-room office indulging in a few too many energy drinks...
It doesn't do much to convince me that the movie will be legitimate science-fiction, rather than fluffy science-fantasy, when the aliens are bright anime-blue with giant cartoon doe-eyes.
Eh? Is there a rule somewhere that legitimate aliens must be brown with tiny slit-like eyes?
The "The names x86-64 or x64 are sometimes used as vendor-neutral terms to collectively refer to the two nearly identical implementations." line has been included in the article since at least October 1st, 2006.
What you quote as the "since 2006" phrasing is "sometimes used", which is certainly true (I've certainly heard people use the term "x64"), but the phrasing you originally used was "often used", which is a quite different. Personally I've only ever heard "x64" from microsofties, but it does seem fairly widespread there, at least in MS development.
If looking for a term which is generally understable, however, "x64" doesn't really work, as it seems to be in widespread use only in certain communities. "x86-64" is a bit better since it has an obvious connection with the term "x86", which is much more widespread than either of the others; so it stands a better chance of being understood even by someone who hasn't seen it before.
Count me cynical, but expect to be regaled with Microsoft-scripted adverti- er "news stories" between now and the official release.
There seems to have been a bunch of them recently on slashdot, though this is certainly of the most blatant -- not only is it free of actual interesting content, and obviously aimed at hyping a particular product, but it's written in an awkward yet breathless style that only ever comes out of marketting.
This one is particularly silly because tablet pcs are an area that MS has been breathlessly predicting as the next big thing since at least the '90s. It's sort of amazing that they're still at it, but it seems very unlikely that windows 7 is somehow the magic ingredient that they've been missing all that time...
While that's probably true in this case, note that the term "public transport" does not imply public ownership or support, and in practice there are many private providers of such that do not receive any support from the government.
(less facetiously, the UK still uses miles for distances and miles per hour for speed, and fair number of people still use feet & inches for human height)
And stones for body-weight. And pints for milk and beer. And....
I may get modded troll for this, but open source != quality code. In theory, it is more likely that that is the case, but I have seen some open source code that made me die a little on the inside.
Indeed -- but exactly the same is true of proprietary code. Of course, it's sometimes harder to tell, as you can't generally see the code, and most companies know very well that a little surface polish goes a long way, even if the core is rotten.
Microsoft's developers are generally smart people who know their job.
There are many smart MS devs, but there are also many mediocre MS devs, and even downright poor ones. While the constant pressure to release can provide some incentive, it also provides a constant temptation to cut corners (which of course usually comes back to bite them in the long run, but nobody has any time to worry about the long run). Together with the well known deleterious effects of large teams, and the requirement to stay compatible with insane numbers of really, really crappy third-party apps, the result is that MS is responsible for an awful lot of pretty dodgy code (usually it kinda sorta works if you squint and keep up on your sacrifices, but don't breath too hard...).
They try their best to keep all that in check but nonetheless, there's only so much they can do; MS is not exactly what you'd call "agile" these days...
Forgive my cynicism but in my experience, humans are not altruistic at all. Like monkeys, we do what we do because it benefits us.
I agree that humans act because of some perceived benefit, but I think many people interpret words like "benefit" too narrowly. Benefit doesn't always mean material benefit.
For instance, I do lots of things because I get "warm fuzzies" -- say I feed a cute kitty (which I'll never see again) my sandwich, or even an ugly fleabitten and scarred kitty, because I feel sorry for it. Or I donate money to the Sierra club because I like cute animals, or I like forests (even if I don't go hiking in them, I get some kind of internal satisfaction knowing they're there). Or I give money to a homeless guy because I worry that maybe I or a friend will someday be in that position.
Feeling good about yourself, or trying to stave off worries and insecurities, or the feeling of "belonging" if one follows the dictates of some group, are all valuable benefits. Even when one actually suffers in some material way from being "altruistic", these sorts of rewards can be strong motivators. Moreover, many of these motivators aren't "zero sum".
I do think that often that stated motivations are different from real motivations -- e.g., someone might say they belong to some environmental group because they love nature; probably it's at least partly true, but a stronger reason might be that they like being part of a social group, or like the feeling of power they get from being in charge of something, or....
I'm as paranoid about privacy concerns as the next [rational] person, but I don't see what the big deal is here.
I think mainly that Murdoch is a douche, and people enjoy laughing at his consternation...
Sure, it's not entirely surprising that he wants that information -- but he doesn't have it, and watching him flail about frothing because of that is fun!
Readers like these Sony ones and the Kindle are all about the e-ink displays, full stop. They are awesome...
I think "awesome" is overstating it quite a bit.
Even for their intended use, books, I've found E-Ink displays quite underwhelming. They are a good step forward, but they conspicuously fail to live up to the hype that's preceded them. The main thought I get when actually seeing one of these products in real life (after hearing ad-nauseum how great it is) is "this is it?!"
Sure they have great battery life, a very important property for relatively static uses like books, but they also have annoyingly low contrast, low resolution, in many cases a slightly unpleasant display color, and distracting reflections from the glass. They've been hyped up to be almost as good as paper, but really they're not even close.
Or, to put it another way: "Under withering attack from intel and microsoft, netbooks have cease to be an elegant and focused attempt to short-circuit the bloat parade and rethink how we use computers, and become just another overpriced and anemic laptop running microsoft's mess of an operating system."
The GP mentioned bicycles, I used to ride one untill I took a nasty spill on the way to work. I imagine a segway would be quite a bit safer than a bicycle. I'm looking forward to when they're affordable.
Why on earth would a segway be safer than a bicycle? On a segway, you seem more exposed, and less securely braced, and they seem more clumsy than a bike, so offhand, a segway looks more dangerous.
The only safety advantage I can see it that segways are so insanely slow -- and of course, if you really think that's an advantage, you can just ride your bike slowly...
This is not unusual for companies that position themselves as high end brands. If you can pull it off, pretend you are going to buy a Cartier watch in a Cartier store and they'll outfit you with a Cohiba to smoke and some high end scotch to drink while you make up your mind. Free shoe shine. Ridiculous stuff.
It all kinda makes sense. Everybody, including the people who buy that stuff, knows that you're paying for a lot more than just the number of diamonds on your watch or the quality of construction. You're paying for an image (from other people's point of view), and for a "self image" (how the company makes you feel about yourself). Some people wanna feel like royalty and are willing to pay for others to make them feel that way. Fair enough. The markup is enough to cover it, and the greater the markup, the longer they can maintain the illusion.
The thing about Apple though, is that (1) computers are a lot more complex and in the end have many more practical issues, and (2) they're not really high end like Cartier or whoever, they're more like a solid middle. The markup really isn't enough to maintain the illusion too far.
[I loooove just walking through the high-end watch floor in places like Mitsukoshi head store (Japanese department store). There are like 10 salespeople for ever customer, and they are utterly perfect -- they will not bother you unless you want to be bothered (and then they're at your side in a flash, and helpful without being pushy), and yet still manage to make you feel like a king (walking down the aisle with a row of impeccably dressed salespeople bowing -- perfectly -- as you pass....)]
Slashdot Mirror
I don't believe immersion is why Doom was written as a First Person Shooter.
One reason may have been that they didn't want to pay the cost of rendering your character too (an inherent advantage of FPSes)...
Finally, don't even think you can pull off any real 3D aiming in the Z axis. The best you can do with a third person view is really bad 2D aiming. No more head shots.
Actually RE4 & 5 pull this off quite well -- your weapon has a "laser sight", that projects a beam where it's aiming, and gets a little brighter where it hits the enemy. This really works great, and is quite intuitive and fast. [For sniper rifles, it switches to a first-person scope view though...]
From the tone of their pitch, I'm sure if they have the mean for violence, they would.
Er, your being "sure" isn't enough. If they advocate people (not "heaven") commiting violence against the CC, where?
It is the right thing to do to point out what the CCP does wrongly (and there are tons of examples). However, if you skip elaborating things
They do spend a huge amount of time pointing all the horrid things the CCP does -- in fact, almost all public speech by Falun Gong I've seen consists of reports of that. [In other words, "elaborating things"]
and instead just put up posters and handing out fliers that say "MAY THE HEAVEN DESTROY CCP!!"
That's the equivalent of saying "god damn the CCP" -- it's hyperbole and maybe a bit childish, but it isn't the same thing as advocating violence.
* A hate group is an organized group or movement that advocates physical or verbal aggression toward or refusal to interact with persons on the ...
Oh please; a silly and excessively hand-wringing definition of "hate group" isn't interesting to anybody except lawyers and politicians.
Real people are far more practical, and yes the nature of the opponent counts quite a lot in how most people think about the situation -- "verbal aggression" against a very nasty and literally murderous opponent is not something most people would begrudge.
[Surely there are good reasons for that definition -- in particular, definitions like that are general, and intended to be applied in cases where the opponent is weak, and things like "verbal aggression" can actually be harmful. Not the against CCP.]
It is possible to spread the message about the malice of the CCP without the sensationalism, exaggeration and phony researches.
No doubt. I agree that Falun Gong's approach is often pretty silly, and kind of childish. They'd probably be a lot more effective if they tried to approach things more maturely.
But so far I've seen no evidence that they actually promote violence. "verbal aggression" against the CCP is not violence, and saying "may heaven destroy" is not promoting it (unless I suppose you think god will actually do it, but I suspect nobody here does...).
Until they do that, I still hold my view they look more like a hate group than a religion to me.
I can't determine how you see things, but your view appears decidedly skewed, and I don't think you've demonstrated what you're claiming.
Everyday they set up a booth and spread hate message about the Chinese Communist Party. Let's put aside our judgement towards CCC itself,....
They don't seem to be preaching violent revolution against the chinese communist party, merely saying that it sucks, and people should not support them. So our opinion of the CCC matters quite a bit in how we judge what they say (and lets face it, for the most part, the CCC does suck)...
they way Falun Gong people act just seem to totally contradict "Compassion" and "Tolerance" and it seems more and more like they're preaching "an eye
I would not let my children go anywhere near this "religion".
for an eye".
the CCC quite happily kills and imprisons all those who resist or complain about its rule, and even those it suspects of resisting, or those who merely defend the rights of others to do so. Falun Gong has certainly been on the receiving end of such persecution. If Falun Gong were guilty of "eye for an eye" thinking, they'd be advocating similar actions against the CCC; but as far as I've seen, they're not, not even close. Though they certainly go to great lengths to demonize the CCC (to the extent they can be kinda annoying), every action I've seen Falun Gong advocate has been non-violent, and non-oppressive (mostly calling for individual chinese to disown the communist party).
So really I don't know what you're talking about....
I see a few tags that cast doubt on the prediction. Why? I'll bet there were skeptics of Moore's Law when that became widely disseminated.
It may have something to do with the fact that Jen-Hsun Huang is a notorious blowhard, whose foot spends far more time in his mouth than on the ground.
Combine that with the extremity of the claim (570-fold over 6 years is a huge rate of improvement), and the tags don't seem so surprising.
How lame! I opened up my new PS3 Slim, and found no cables. How the HELL can you play games designed to be played in HD, on an HD TV, if you don't have HD, or HDMI Cables?!?!
Er, all of these systems can be played on non-HD TVs as well, and indeed, maybe it's a good bet that many people that have waited this long to buy the system are exactly the sort of people would are least likely to have an HD TV (they're not enthusiastics / early adopters).
Example: me. I don't own an xbox or a PS3, and I have a relatively crappy old SD TV. But now that the PS3's price has dropped to something non-insane, I'm thinking of picking up a slim to play stuff like RE5. Since I don't have an HD TV, I'm quite happy not to pay for cables I won't use...
Well, they deserve to be killed (or at least humbled) by their competition, if the competition is better -- but from what I've seen, flickr is still far superior to its would-be competitors. They really nailed the essential formula and built a solid site around it, and have done a good job polishing it over time. Most competing sites I've looked at seem to be much more flaky / disorganized / random, typically offering a few advantages here and there -- but they usually mess up the basics!
The yahoo takeover doesn't seem to have changed much about flickr, really, at least on the surface (a lot of the whining by flickr old-timers about yahoo logins etc seems to be pretty silly).
In fact, a lot of the problems I've seen at flickr seem to actually be because they're still acting too much like a small site -- the admins sometimes act rather arbitrarily / prematurely, and then get very snippy and control-freaky when challenged. One gets the image of five guys/girls sitting around a big table in a single-room office indulging in a few too many energy drinks...
It doesn't do much to convince me that the movie will be legitimate science-fiction, rather than fluffy science-fantasy, when the aliens are bright anime-blue with giant cartoon doe-eyes.
Eh? Is there a rule somewhere that legitimate aliens must be brown with tiny slit-like eyes?
The "The names x86-64 or x64 are sometimes used as vendor-neutral terms to collectively refer to the two nearly identical implementations." line has been included in the article since at least October 1st, 2006.
What you quote as the "since 2006" phrasing is "sometimes used", which is certainly true (I've certainly heard people use the term "x64"), but the phrasing you originally used was "often used", which is a quite different. Personally I've only ever heard "x64" from microsofties, but it does seem fairly widespread there, at least in MS development.
If looking for a term which is generally understable, however, "x64" doesn't really work, as it seems to be in widespread use only in certain communities. "x86-64" is a bit better since it has an obvious connection with the term "x86", which is much more widespread than either of the others; so it stands a better chance of being understood even by someone who hasn't seen it before.
Count me cynical, but expect to be regaled with Microsoft-scripted adverti- er "news stories" between now and the official release.
There seems to have been a bunch of them recently on slashdot, though this is certainly of the most blatant -- not only is it free of actual interesting content, and obviously aimed at hyping a particular product, but it's written in an awkward yet breathless style that only ever comes out of marketting.
This one is particularly silly because tablet pcs are an area that MS has been breathlessly predicting as the next big thing since at least the '90s. It's sort of amazing that they're still at it, but it seems very unlikely that windows 7 is somehow the magic ingredient that they've been missing all that time...
I enjoy listening to reruns of classic "My Word" episodes ... punctuating the pauses in in banter by loudly breaking wind.
Must have sucked to be in the studio audience though...
Supported in part by public taxes.
While that's probably true in this case, note that the term "public transport" does not imply public ownership or support, and in practice there are many private providers of such that do not receive any support from the government.
(less facetiously, the UK still uses miles for distances and miles per hour for speed, and fair number of people still use feet & inches for human height)
And stones for body-weight. And pints for milk and beer. And....
mmmm beer....
I may get modded troll for this, but open source != quality code. In theory, it is more likely that that is the case, but I have seen some open source code that made me die a little on the inside.
Indeed -- but exactly the same is true of proprietary code. Of course, it's sometimes harder to tell, as you can't generally see the code, and most companies know very well that a little surface polish goes a long way, even if the core is rotten.
Microsoft's developers are generally smart people who know their job.
There are many smart MS devs, but there are also many mediocre MS devs, and even downright poor ones. While the constant pressure to release can provide some incentive, it also provides a constant temptation to cut corners (which of course usually comes back to bite them in the long run, but nobody has any time to worry about the long run). Together with the well known deleterious effects of large teams, and the requirement to stay compatible with insane numbers of really, really crappy third-party apps, the result is that MS is responsible for an awful lot of pretty dodgy code (usually it kinda sorta works if you squint and keep up on your sacrifices, but don't breath too hard...).
They try their best to keep all that in check but nonetheless, there's only so much they can do; MS is not exactly what you'd call "agile" these days...
, so freakin' load it up and see for yourself...what do you have to loose [sic]...?
Time, and "time is money, friend!"
Also, your soul.
and debian:
$ cat /proc/sys/vm/mmap_min_addr
4096
Cool!
ID scientists...looking like crackpots
That's actually a pretty good analogy.
Forgive my cynicism but in my experience, humans are not altruistic at all. Like monkeys, we do what we do because it benefits us.
I agree that humans act because of some perceived benefit, but I think many people interpret words like "benefit" too narrowly. Benefit doesn't always mean material benefit.
For instance, I do lots of things because I get "warm fuzzies" -- say I feed a cute kitty (which I'll never see again) my sandwich, or even an ugly fleabitten and scarred kitty, because I feel sorry for it. Or I donate money to the Sierra club because I like cute animals, or I like forests (even if I don't go hiking in them, I get some kind of internal satisfaction knowing they're there). Or I give money to a homeless guy because I worry that maybe I or a friend will someday be in that position.
Feeling good about yourself, or trying to stave off worries and insecurities, or the feeling of "belonging" if one follows the dictates of some group, are all valuable benefits. Even when one actually suffers in some material way from being "altruistic", these sorts of rewards can be strong motivators. Moreover, many of these motivators aren't "zero sum".
I do think that often that stated motivations are different from real motivations -- e.g., someone might say they belong to some environmental group because they love nature; probably it's at least partly true, but a stronger reason might be that they like being part of a social group, or like the feeling of power they get from being in charge of something, or ....
I'm as paranoid about privacy concerns as the next [rational] person, but I don't see what the big deal is here.
I think mainly that Murdoch is a douche, and people enjoy laughing at his consternation...
Sure, it's not entirely surprising that he wants that information -- but he doesn't have it, and watching him flail about frothing because of that is fun!
Readers like these Sony ones and the Kindle are all about the e-ink displays, full stop. They are awesome...
I think "awesome" is overstating it quite a bit.
Even for their intended use, books, I've found E-Ink displays quite underwhelming. They are a good step forward, but they conspicuously fail to live up to the hype that's preceded them. The main thought I get when actually seeing one of these products in real life (after hearing ad-nauseum how great it is) is "this is it?!"
Sure they have great battery life, a very important property for relatively static uses like books, but they also have annoyingly low contrast, low resolution, in many cases a slightly unpleasant display color, and distracting reflections from the glass. They've been hyped up to be almost as good as paper, but really they're not even close.
Or, to put it another way: "Under withering attack from intel and microsoft, netbooks have cease to be an elegant and focused attempt to short-circuit the bloat parade and rethink how we use computers, and become just another overpriced and anemic laptop running microsoft's mess of an operating system."
These "netbooks" come with vista?! That's insane...
Next on Slashdot: reports of overwhelming Zune hate.
It's because of all the squirting. Brown squirting.
Sure the segway may look really dorky, but hey, at least there's no squirting!
The GP mentioned bicycles, I used to ride one untill I took a nasty spill on the way to work. I imagine a segway would be quite a bit safer than a bicycle. I'm looking forward to when they're affordable.
Why on earth would a segway be safer than a bicycle? On a segway, you seem more exposed, and less securely braced, and they seem more clumsy than a bike, so offhand, a segway looks more dangerous.
The only safety advantage I can see it that segways are so insanely slow -- and of course, if you really think that's an advantage, you can just ride your bike slowly...
This is not unusual for companies that position themselves as high end brands. If you can pull it off, pretend you are going to buy a Cartier watch in a Cartier store and they'll outfit you with a Cohiba to smoke and some high end scotch to drink while you make up your mind. Free shoe shine. Ridiculous stuff.
It all kinda makes sense. Everybody, including the people who buy that stuff, knows that you're paying for a lot more than just the number of diamonds on your watch or the quality of construction. You're paying for an image (from other people's point of view), and for a "self image" (how the company makes you feel about yourself). Some people wanna feel like royalty and are willing to pay for others to make them feel that way. Fair enough. The markup is enough to cover it, and the greater the markup, the longer they can maintain the illusion.
The thing about Apple though, is that (1) computers are a lot more complex and in the end have many more practical issues, and (2) they're not really high end like Cartier or whoever, they're more like a solid middle. The markup really isn't enough to maintain the illusion too far.
[I loooove just walking through the high-end watch floor in places like Mitsukoshi head store (Japanese department store). There are like 10 salespeople for ever customer, and they are utterly perfect -- they will not bother you unless you want to be bothered (and then they're at your side in a flash, and helpful without being pushy), and yet still manage to make you feel like a king (walking down the aisle with a row of impeccably dressed salespeople bowing -- perfectly -- as you pass....)]