Well, can you explain how Coca-Cola isolates the effect of any one campaign (billboards, one specific slogan, sponsorship of a racetrack, etc.) on their sales and brand recognition?
Someone else mentioned Coca-Cola, I'll add Bank of America since they were a recent case study. Bank of America operates branches that are setup for experimentation and market research. This incudes environmental ideas such as TV screens to get your attention while waiting in line to new product and service offerings. Tests in these special branches are often paired with non-test branches that serve similar neighborhoods and demographics of the same city. Coke and BofA are following the same process we learned in science class, test case + control case, collect and analyze data, repeat... determine if differences in observations are statistically significant. Develop a model to predict widespread use, implement, collect and analyze data to determine if model/expectations were accurate. If not, study some more.
I'd hoped that this was just a poor class and that marketing professionals would actually know what the hell they're doing. Sadly, it hasn't been the case. I worked my way through college and I've seen advertising and marketing done by mail-order catalog companies, dot.coms, homebuilders, etc. I could gather all those marketing people together in one room and you wouldn't find a single clue in the entire lot.
I've worked in software development for decades and I've seen quite a bit of terrible code written in commercial and FOSS environments. I was taught to do better in various undergraduate and graduate level classes, however there are poor practitioners in every field. I believe you are describing a similar observation, but these observations do not negate the proper practices that are taught and are followed by the truly professional.
I'm sure there are marketing professionals out there, somewhere, who are actual professionals. But in my experience, sales and marketing is where football jocks go when they get fat.
I think part of what you describe are the inflated job titles of salesmen. Before I had these marketing classes the only marketing people I knew were really salesman. It is not that different from programmers being given the title of engineer. I think being an engineer requires are broader knowledge and a greater capability. Perhaps I am biased by the MBA program that I am in. Some of the professors I have had are not pure academics, they also posses decades of experience at extremely recognizable firms. We were constantly made to justify statements and opinions, constantly told that CEOs can smell BS and that data and analysis are needed to persuade them. Again, not all CEOs may be as described, but we are being trained to function as professionals working for other professionals.
I'm sure that the reason companies have been pouring billions and billions of dollars into advertising for decades isn't that it works, but that nobody even though to check.
I used to share your misconception. My undergraduate was Computer Science, however now I have had some graduate level marketing classes and I was surprised to find out how quantitative professional marketing is. There is massive experimentation to determine what works and what does not.
... We love the captain of the football team; big, handsome, and dumb...
You have basically proven that you are just as ignorant and just as wiling to stereotype as those your rail against. Captains are usually intelligent. And some football (American) positions do require intelligence, the ability to quickly analyze a fluid situation (an unfolding play), develop a successful plan and refine that plan in real time as further developments occur. The fact that these skills are applied to big guys hitting your rather than a network intrusion is irrelevant.
... know-it-alls...
It is not intellectualism that people dislike, it is arrogance and condescension. Also, if a political candidate can not communicate without seeming arrogant or condescending then they have some shortcomings in leadership skills.
... namby pamby sissy faggot intellectuals...
Not all intellectuals are liberal.;-)
I apologize if the preceding joke went to far. The point is that intellectuals come with various political viewpoints, various athletic abilities, various levels of moral courage, etc. Again, you display a narrow uninformed stereotype and resemble those your criticize.
I doubt civilization would collapse either. It existed for thousands of years before plastics were invented.
Civilizations collapse when things they depend upon fail. The nature of these things do not matter, only the dependency. Also you seem to imply there has been one civilization, this is untrue. There have been many, one collapses, another sometimes arises over time. Our civilization could collapse just as manner others have.
Hacked... You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
True, it has an entirely different meaning when applied to a FOSS organization rather than a commercial closed source company.
Re:Duplicate plates seems a bad idea ...
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 1
The same plate is seen at many different locations throughout the day if it is driving in London. Your computer system would have to work out that it was impossible to get from one location to another in the time available (which is a non-trivial exercise).
You are assuming an ideal implementation that has neither false positives nor false negatives. An actual implementation would trade false negatives for simplicity. It is quite simple to compare recent sightings and compute a linear distance. Use the timestamps to computer average velocity. If this velocity is too high spit out this instance for human review.
Then, when a duplication is noticed, which car are the police to stop? You have a 50% chance that it will be the legal one which is pulled over. And because you have picked a similar car to clone, how can the legal one prove it is innocent?
Stop both. Aren't licenses associated with the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN)? The VIN is trivial to inspected.
I don't need to argue the point, however. The fact that this is the most common defence technique suggests there is something going for it.
Lack of interest in the problem most likely. Which does not undermine my point at all, duplicates are quite detectable.
Duplicate plates seems a bad idea ...
on
Manhattan 1984
·
· Score: 1
The most common method at the moment is probably cloning car plates. Pick a similar car to yours which already goes into the zone, and duplicate its plates. Assuming your target car has a yearly pass, noone will ever notice.
I would expect that duplicate plates would be a poor strategy. It should not be hard for a computerized system to notice the same plate has been seen at two different location and alert the police.
Another common technique to use if you don't want to actually break the law is to register your car to a company using a PO Box number. Once registered, drop the PO Box. In the UK all fines go to the registered address, which will then be no longer functional.
Why on earth would the government (or the collections agency that was contracted) not look at the ownership history of the P.O. Box? Also, wouldn't you lose the paperwork to re-register the vehicle as well.
... For a little bit now we've been hearing the Brits are getting out of Iraq per popular demand. Then this week we hear the Brits are staying. Two days after a Bush - Brit pow-wow at Camp David... Seems a bit puppetish to me...
We have no idea what was discussed. There are other reasonable possibilities. If the "surge" is having positive results then perhaps the Brits are willing to participate in that. Perhaps the Sunni's turning on Al-Queda changed the "calculation" the Brits used to justify the pullout. Perhaps increasing interference by Iran has encouraged them to deploy troops to secure the border, that the troops are not going back into town, so its a different mission. We'll have to wait and see, but "puppetish" assumptions seem to be politically opportunistic.
Wow. I don't know which is scarier - the possibility that you missed the joke because it was over your head, or the possibility that such a load of drivel sounded reasonable enough to you for you to debate the issue.
Either way, I'm scared.
You have no need to be scared. While the complete post was a joke, it began with a statement that many actually do believe. The point contained in that statement was worthy of being discussed, the fact that it was introduced as part of a joke does not detract from the fact that many believe it. Humor and satire are often used to introduce serious topics. Did I miss some rule that only the original author and not a responder may do so?
No. While the complete post was obviously a joke, it began with a reasonable point that many do actually believe. It was worthy of a fork that discussed that one point.
the British government has been in bed with the US government for years, which means they pretty much do whatever the US tells them to
BS. It is a two way street, you are just being myopic in your historical context. We aided the British in the Falklands for example. No US interests were threatened since the British would have won with or without our help. All we did was further alienate ourselves from Central and South America. Then there were the European wars of the last century. Certainly it wouldn't really matter if the Kaiser had defeated Britain from an American perspective, we could have done business with him. The lunatic that followed him twenty years later would have been too dangerous, but we may have been able to arm Britain and Russia and avoid direct involvement. However such courses were not followed because the United States has a predisposition to help Britain when she needs it.
if there were no antibiotics around. the e coli would then be vulnerable to antibiotics again (but also would quickly re-evolve resitance upon exposure)
With a sufficient pool of antibiotics I wonder if a drug rotation could help avoid resistant bacteria? Only use certain drugs in certain years?
I wouldn't mind if it mutated to break down plastics like polyethylene. Preferably under special conditions, like exposure to UV light or salt water so plastics in storage didn't break down. The millions of water bottles cluttering our land and water alone will be with us for thousands of years.
Civilization would probably collapse, if not immediately, then probably after a relatively short time span. Other plastics in the field would break down, UV gets reflected like visible light, is sweat different enough from sea water, your proposing a mutating bacteria so further mutation expanding if food sources are possible, maybe even likely. Have your read Larry Niven's Ringworld? IIRC a plastics eating bacteria destroyed it. A fun read.
He is not involved in movie violence at all. His "belief" does not extend to movies, as he is taking zero action to limit access to movies.
Access to movies is already limited, people perceive no need for action.
Whereas for games he's going far past voluntary policies to a law barring sales to minors.
That is not hypocrisy, that is overzealousness. There are many valid criticisms of this overzealousness, you offer some of them, but your emotions seems to have made you get hung up on an inappropriate person attack. "Hypocrite" is an erroneous label, there is a consistent belief that access to film and games should be limited. You may write volumes criticizing the overzealousness of government enforcement but that does not change the consistency of the underlying belief. Calm yourself and consider this. If there were a compromise and the implementation was left to the retailer the outcome would be the same. A child attempting to buy a Mature rated Terminator game would be turned away, just as he would be at a theater. Same underlying beliefs, same outcomes, no hypocrisy.
What would happen to a retailer who refuses to comply and whether the specific legislation is constitutional or not are tangents. They do not affect the underlying belief nor the outcome for the child. They merely show an overzealousness with respect to implementation, a secondary issue.
"Restricting sales to minors based upon these ratings is no different than restricting a minor's entrance into a theater based upon moving ratings."
So you mean it should be a voluntary restriction enforced solely by the game retailers, with zero force of law?
I agree completely. And in which case there's no point in the Governator even being involved.
That's where the hypocrisy is. Call me when Arnold starts campaigning to make it illegal to let minors into R rated movies, then he'll be consistent. Until then, he's a hypocrite.
No, you are moving the goal post. In the post I responded to the original poster was saying that it was hypocrisy to "make a career off fantasy violence" and support this bill. As I pointed out there is no hypocrisy, he wants access to both violent movies and violent video games limited. Who gets to enforce things, theaters/retailers or law enforcement, does not change this underlying belief. You are merely bringing up an implementation detail, an important one but still only a detail. Which ever way this detail goes does not change the underlying belief so there is no hypocrisy here.
"Having made a career off fantasy violence,... I vas just doing it for the money." Now he's a "public servant." Makes a big difference in attitudes.
Wikipedia shows the Terminator games as being rated Teen or Mature. Restricting sales to minors based upon these ratings is no different than restricting a minor's entrance into a theater based upon moving ratings. The is no hypocracy here unless you find Arnold arguing that little kids should be able to watch the Terminator movie without a parent's approval.
Ever notice the smart rats jump first from the burning ship?
Uh, no, once Bush won reelection the ship "Bush II" was home free. Perhaps you heard about an upcoming election season? Rove is a political consultant specializing in getting Republicans elected and advancing conservative initiatives. It is simply time from Karl to get involved in the elections and he can't do that from the White House anymore.
We would still give lousy scores to lousy games, because to us the most important element of our work is the trust of our readership.
That is clever side stepping, such extreme cases are unrealistic. What is realistic is that when something is a wobbler, there be a temptation to give the developer/advertiser the benefit of the doubt, a review score of 9.0 instead of 8.9 for example. Such "inflations" are not detectable by the readership, they are within the normal error of human reviews, so your credibility and livelihood is not endangered as you suggest. However a marginally higher review will translate into increased sales and a better relationship with the developer/advertiser. The reward is far greater than the risk. I'd say that ethics, not economics, is the only real impediment to a scenario like the one I just described.
Personally, I think that a $500 price tag will result in this gaining widespread use, assuming it's as useful as the article states.
I've been diving for a couple of decades and this includes rare specialties where covering a lot of distance is useful. For normal recreational diving traveling around fast generally indicates a newbie. The point of diving is to enjoy the scenery and as divers become more experienced they generally slow down and become "lazy" and try to leverage currents and surges as much as possible.
A dolphin kick is something that divers occasionally do with normal fins to vary muscle usage and avoid fatigue and cramps. So many of us are somewhat familiar with the general style. The problem with this style is that it is quite limited with respect to maneuverability. Divers often use their legs/fins asymmetrically or at odd angles. This far more useful than going fast.
Finally, anything that makes your silhouette look even more like a seal to a shark is a bad idea.;-)
The point of the article is that all early adopters of the whole Vista/DirectX 10 hype have been royally fucked in the ass by MS.
Perhaps you missed: "Gamers shouldn't fret too much - 10.1 adds virtually nothing that they will care about and, more to the point, adds almost nothing that developers are likely to care about." And who other than gamers care about DirectX? Not any sizeable population, and I say that as someome who worked in PC-based molecular visualization.
Get rid of the bloody GMA950 and put something in there with decent OpenGL support.
Just bumping the processor to Core 2 Duo doesn't cut it. That's not the bottleneck. That's not what you need to speed up.
Why? Not every machine needs to be equipped for higher end gaming. There are probably more people out there that need an inexpensive general purpose machine and the Mini serves that role quite nicely.
I'm no genius on the subject, but isn't there the case that divers have significant "explosion" resistant forces due to the water they're surrounded by?
Your body is mostly water, which doesn't really expand or contract due to pressure. Pressure is an issue with respect to the gasses in your lungs and blood. If external pressure is decreased (1) the air in your lungs will expand, doing so too rapidly can damage the fragile aveoli in your lungs where gas exchange with the blood occurs. (2) the air in your blood may come out of solution and form bubbles, much like opening a carbonated soft drink. Sorry, no explosion, just lungs filling with blood and/or arteries/veins being blocked by bubbles. Very bad for the diver, but terribly undramatic for TV and movies.
So, basically, you're saying that the math you use in your marketing classes is less advanced than second year calculus.
My second year calculus included differential equations, I'd say it is a little less than that but more than the most of that 2nd year. Certainly far more than the statistic class required for science and engineering majors.
Your views on math usage in the real world are warped by the career path you chose. As are mine; my industry is abnormally math-heavy.
Yes and no. I've worked in molecular modeling but we had actual mathematicians working with us to build the engine that simultaneously applied various forces on atoms and optimized the geometry of the molecule. I think that is far more math than the vast majority of CS majors ever deal with in industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, can you explain how Coca-Cola isolates the effect of any one campaign (billboards, one specific slogan, sponsorship of a racetrack, etc.) on their sales and brand recognition?
... determine if differences in observations are statistically significant. Develop a model to predict widespread use, implement, collect and analyze data to determine if model/expectations were accurate. If not, study some more.
Someone else mentioned Coca-Cola, I'll add Bank of America since they were a recent case study. Bank of America operates branches that are setup for experimentation and market research. This incudes environmental ideas such as TV screens to get your attention while waiting in line to new product and service offerings. Tests in these special branches are often paired with non-test branches that serve similar neighborhoods and demographics of the same city. Coke and BofA are following the same process we learned in science class, test case + control case, collect and analyze data, repeat
I'd hoped that this was just a poor class and that marketing professionals would actually know what the hell they're doing. Sadly, it hasn't been the case. I worked my way through college and I've seen advertising and marketing done by mail-order catalog companies, dot.coms, homebuilders, etc. I could gather all those marketing people together in one room and you wouldn't find a single clue in the entire lot.
I've worked in software development for decades and I've seen quite a bit of terrible code written in commercial and FOSS environments. I was taught to do better in various undergraduate and graduate level classes, however there are poor practitioners in every field. I believe you are describing a similar observation, but these observations do not negate the proper practices that are taught and are followed by the truly professional.
I'm sure there are marketing professionals out there, somewhere, who are actual professionals. But in my experience, sales and marketing is where football jocks go when they get fat.
I think part of what you describe are the inflated job titles of salesmen. Before I had these marketing classes the only marketing people I knew were really salesman. It is not that different from programmers being given the title of engineer. I think being an engineer requires are broader knowledge and a greater capability. Perhaps I am biased by the MBA program that I am in. Some of the professors I have had are not pure academics, they also posses decades of experience at extremely recognizable firms. We were constantly made to justify statements and opinions, constantly told that CEOs can smell BS and that data and analysis are needed to persuade them. Again, not all CEOs may be as described, but we are being trained to function as professionals working for other professionals.
I'm sure that the reason companies have been pouring billions and billions of dollars into advertising for decades isn't that it works, but that nobody even though to check.
I used to share your misconception. My undergraduate was Computer Science, however now I have had some graduate level marketing classes and I was surprised to find out how quantitative professional marketing is. There is massive experimentation to determine what works and what does not.
... We love the captain of the football team; big, handsome, and dumb ...
... know-it-alls ...
... namby pamby sissy faggot intellectuals ...
;-)
You have basically proven that you are just as ignorant and just as wiling to stereotype as those your rail against. Captains are usually intelligent. And some football (American) positions do require intelligence, the ability to quickly analyze a fluid situation (an unfolding play), develop a successful plan and refine that plan in real time as further developments occur. The fact that these skills are applied to big guys hitting your rather than a network intrusion is irrelevant.
It is not intellectualism that people dislike, it is arrogance and condescension. Also, if a political candidate can not communicate without seeming arrogant or condescending then they have some shortcomings in leadership skills.
Not all intellectuals are liberal.
I apologize if the preceding joke went to far. The point is that intellectuals come with various political viewpoints, various athletic abilities, various levels of moral courage, etc. Again, you display a narrow uninformed stereotype and resemble those your criticize.
I doubt civilization would collapse either. It existed for thousands of years before plastics were invented.
Civilizations collapse when things they depend upon fail. The nature of these things do not matter, only the dependency. Also you seem to imply there has been one civilization, this is untrue. There have been many, one collapses, another sometimes arises over time. Our civilization could collapse just as manner others have.
Hacked... You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
True, it has an entirely different meaning when applied to a FOSS organization rather than a commercial closed source company.
The same plate is seen at many different locations throughout the day if it is driving in London. Your computer system would have to work out that it was impossible to get from one location to another in the time available (which is a non-trivial exercise).
You are assuming an ideal implementation that has neither false positives nor false negatives. An actual implementation would trade false negatives for simplicity. It is quite simple to compare recent sightings and compute a linear distance. Use the timestamps to computer average velocity. If this velocity is too high spit out this instance for human review.
Then, when a duplication is noticed, which car are the police to stop? You have a 50% chance that it will be the legal one which is pulled over. And because you have picked a similar car to clone, how can the legal one prove it is innocent?
Stop both. Aren't licenses associated with the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN)? The VIN is trivial to inspected.
I don't need to argue the point, however. The fact that this is the most common defence technique suggests there is something going for it.
Lack of interest in the problem most likely. Which does not undermine my point at all, duplicates are quite detectable.
The most common method at the moment is probably cloning car plates. Pick a similar car to yours which already goes into the zone, and duplicate its plates. Assuming your target car has a yearly pass, noone will ever notice.
I would expect that duplicate plates would be a poor strategy. It should not be hard for a computerized system to notice the same plate has been seen at two different location and alert the police.
Another common technique to use if you don't want to actually break the law is to register your car to a company using a PO Box number. Once registered, drop the PO Box. In the UK all fines go to the registered address, which will then be no longer functional.
Why on earth would the government (or the collections agency that was contracted) not look at the ownership history of the P.O. Box? Also, wouldn't you lose the paperwork to re-register the vehicle as well.
... For a little bit now we've been hearing the Brits are getting out of Iraq per popular demand. Then this week we hear the Brits are staying. Two days after a Bush - Brit pow-wow at Camp David... Seems a bit puppetish to me ...
We have no idea what was discussed. There are other reasonable possibilities. If the "surge" is having positive results then perhaps the Brits are willing to participate in that. Perhaps the Sunni's turning on Al-Queda changed the "calculation" the Brits used to justify the pullout. Perhaps increasing interference by Iran has encouraged them to deploy troops to secure the border, that the troops are not going back into town, so its a different mission. We'll have to wait and see, but "puppetish" assumptions seem to be politically opportunistic.
Wow. I don't know which is scarier - the possibility that you missed the joke because it was over your head, or the possibility that such a load of drivel sounded reasonable enough to you for you to debate the issue. Either way, I'm scared.
You have no need to be scared. While the complete post was a joke, it began with a statement that many actually do believe. The point contained in that statement was worthy of being discussed, the fact that it was introduced as part of a joke does not detract from the fact that many believe it. Humor and satire are often used to introduce serious topics. Did I miss some rule that only the original author and not a responder may do so?
Whoooooooosh...
No. While the complete post was obviously a joke, it began with a reasonable point that many do actually believe. It was worthy of a fork that discussed that one point.
the British government has been in bed with the US government for years, which means they pretty much do whatever the US tells them to
BS. It is a two way street, you are just being myopic in your historical context. We aided the British in the Falklands for example. No US interests were threatened since the British would have won with or without our help. All we did was further alienate ourselves from Central and South America. Then there were the European wars of the last century. Certainly it wouldn't really matter if the Kaiser had defeated Britain from an American perspective, we could have done business with him. The lunatic that followed him twenty years later would have been too dangerous, but we may have been able to arm Britain and Russia and avoid direct involvement. However such courses were not followed because the United States has a predisposition to help Britain when she needs it.
if there were no antibiotics around. the e coli would then be vulnerable to antibiotics again (but also would quickly re-evolve resitance upon exposure)
With a sufficient pool of antibiotics I wonder if a drug rotation could help avoid resistant bacteria? Only use certain drugs in certain years?
I wouldn't mind if it mutated to break down plastics like polyethylene. Preferably under special conditions, like exposure to UV light or salt water so plastics in storage didn't break down. The millions of water bottles cluttering our land and water alone will be with us for thousands of years.
Civilization would probably collapse, if not immediately, then probably after a relatively short time span. Other plastics in the field would break down, UV gets reflected like visible light, is sweat different enough from sea water, your proposing a mutating bacteria so further mutation expanding if food sources are possible, maybe even likely. Have your read Larry Niven's Ringworld? IIRC a plastics eating bacteria destroyed it. A fun read.
He is not involved in movie violence at all. His "belief" does not extend to movies, as he is taking zero action to limit access to movies.
Access to movies is already limited, people perceive no need for action.
Whereas for games he's going far past voluntary policies to a law barring sales to minors.
That is not hypocrisy, that is overzealousness. There are many valid criticisms of this overzealousness, you offer some of them, but your emotions seems to have made you get hung up on an inappropriate person attack. "Hypocrite" is an erroneous label, there is a consistent belief that access to film and games should be limited. You may write volumes criticizing the overzealousness of government enforcement but that does not change the consistency of the underlying belief. Calm yourself and consider this. If there were a compromise and the implementation was left to the retailer the outcome would be the same. A child attempting to buy a Mature rated Terminator game would be turned away, just as he would be at a theater. Same underlying beliefs, same outcomes, no hypocrisy.
What would happen to a retailer who refuses to comply and whether the specific legislation is constitutional or not are tangents. They do not affect the underlying belief nor the outcome for the child. They merely show an overzealousness with respect to implementation, a secondary issue.
"Restricting sales to minors based upon these ratings is no different than restricting a minor's entrance into a theater based upon moving ratings."
So you mean it should be a voluntary restriction enforced solely by the game retailers, with zero force of law? I agree completely. And in which case there's no point in the Governator even being involved. That's where the hypocrisy is. Call me when Arnold starts campaigning to make it illegal to let minors into R rated movies, then he'll be consistent. Until then, he's a hypocrite.
No, you are moving the goal post. In the post I responded to the original poster was saying that it was hypocrisy to "make a career off fantasy violence" and support this bill. As I pointed out there is no hypocrisy, he wants access to both violent movies and violent video games limited. Who gets to enforce things, theaters/retailers or law enforcement, does not change this underlying belief. You are merely bringing up an implementation detail, an important one but still only a detail. Which ever way this detail goes does not change the underlying belief so there is no hypocrisy here.
"Having made a career off fantasy violence,... I vas just doing it for the money." Now he's a "public servant." Makes a big difference in attitudes.
Wikipedia shows the Terminator games as being rated Teen or Mature. Restricting sales to minors based upon these ratings is no different than restricting a minor's entrance into a theater based upon moving ratings. The is no hypocracy here unless you find Arnold arguing that little kids should be able to watch the Terminator movie without a parent's approval.
Ever notice the smart rats jump first from the burning ship?
Uh, no, once Bush won reelection the ship "Bush II" was home free. Perhaps you heard about an upcoming election season? Rove is a political consultant specializing in getting Republicans elected and advancing conservative initiatives. It is simply time from Karl to get involved in the elections and he can't do that from the White House anymore.
We would still give lousy scores to lousy games, because to us the most important element of our work is the trust of our readership.
That is clever side stepping, such extreme cases are unrealistic. What is realistic is that when something is a wobbler, there be a temptation to give the developer/advertiser the benefit of the doubt, a review score of 9.0 instead of 8.9 for example. Such "inflations" are not detectable by the readership, they are within the normal error of human reviews, so your credibility and livelihood is not endangered as you suggest. However a marginally higher review will translate into increased sales and a better relationship with the developer/advertiser. The reward is far greater than the risk. I'd say that ethics, not economics, is the only real impediment to a scenario like the one I just described.
Personally, I think that a $500 price tag will result in this gaining widespread use, assuming it's as useful as the article states.
;-)
I've been diving for a couple of decades and this includes rare specialties where covering a lot of distance is useful. For normal recreational diving traveling around fast generally indicates a newbie. The point of diving is to enjoy the scenery and as divers become more experienced they generally slow down and become "lazy" and try to leverage currents and surges as much as possible.
A dolphin kick is something that divers occasionally do with normal fins to vary muscle usage and avoid fatigue and cramps. So many of us are somewhat familiar with the general style. The problem with this style is that it is quite limited with respect to maneuverability. Divers often use their legs/fins asymmetrically or at odd angles. This far more useful than going fast.
Finally, anything that makes your silhouette look even more like a seal to a shark is a bad idea.
The point of the article is that all early adopters of the whole Vista/DirectX 10 hype have been royally fucked in the ass by MS.
Perhaps you missed: "Gamers shouldn't fret too much - 10.1 adds virtually nothing that they will care about and, more to the point, adds almost nothing that developers are likely to care about." And who other than gamers care about DirectX? Not any sizeable population, and I say that as someome who worked in PC-based molecular visualization.
Get rid of the bloody GMA950 and put something in there with decent OpenGL support. Just bumping the processor to Core 2 Duo doesn't cut it. That's not the bottleneck. That's not what you need to speed up.
Why? Not every machine needs to be equipped for higher end gaming. There are probably more people out there that need an inexpensive general purpose machine and the Mini serves that role quite nicely.
I'm no genius on the subject, but isn't there the case that divers have significant "explosion" resistant forces due to the water they're surrounded by?
Your body is mostly water, which doesn't really expand or contract due to pressure. Pressure is an issue with respect to the gasses in your lungs and blood. If external pressure is decreased (1) the air in your lungs will expand, doing so too rapidly can damage the fragile aveoli in your lungs where gas exchange with the blood occurs. (2) the air in your blood may come out of solution and form bubbles, much like opening a carbonated soft drink. Sorry, no explosion, just lungs filling with blood and/or arteries/veins being blocked by bubbles. Very bad for the diver, but terribly undramatic for TV and movies.
"I'm not saying there is anything wrong with this. Just that your are romantically naive about FOSS developers."
;-)
Hehe...please don't burst my open source bubble, it's all I've got left.
Not true, you will always have the source code.
So, basically, you're saying that the math you use in your marketing classes is less advanced than second year calculus.
My second year calculus included differential equations, I'd say it is a little less than that but more than the most of that 2nd year. Certainly far more than the statistic class required for science and engineering majors.
Your views on math usage in the real world are warped by the career path you chose. As are mine; my industry is abnormally math-heavy.
Yes and no. I've worked in molecular modeling but we had actual mathematicians working with us to build the engine that simultaneously applied various forces on atoms and optimized the geometry of the molecule. I think that is far more math than the vast majority of CS majors ever deal with in industry.