I'm a white man and get shitty service there too. Not as bad as at CompUSA, but significantly worse than at Fry's. (And if you've ever been to Fry's, you know how damn low that bar is.)
There is one simple way to create good customer service: Treat your employees well. Look at any company known for good customer service, and you'll find reasonably happy employees. This is understandable, because people who hate their jobs are likely to take that anger out on whoever they deal with day to day. (Your customers.) They are also likely to not particularly value their jobs and thus won't go the extra mile.
It's much more likely that the guys that are being retained are golfing buddies with members of the board.
I do find your comment mightily amusing, though. Gotta retain the execs who fired all the low-level employees with institutional knowledge of how to help customers because you've got to keep the institutional knowledge of how to run the company into the ground with idiotic, self-destructive bean counter decisions.
Seems kind of like amputating an arm to cure the cancer but leaving the tumor in so as not to lose too much mass.
We saw this very clearly in the SF Bay Area a few years ago when they were repairing the Bay Bridge. They put these inch thick metal plates down in the roadbed. No end of exhortations from Caltrans could get people to drive normally over them. People would brake and cause just such a cascade, causing horribly traffic on the bridge. (Well...even more horrible than normal that is.)
If I were Google, I wouldn't enter the cellphone market directly. Instead, I'd use the spectrum to create a large-scale Wifi network as part of an effort to route around the big telecoms who keep threatening Google with non-neutrality. (The other part would be all that dark fiber they bought up.)
If they do *that*, it's pretty easy to layer VOIP on top of it to create cellphone/blackberry-like services, but that'd only be part of it. Imagine wireless connectivity anywhere for the price you now pay your ISP for a wired hookup.
Correct. I was oversimplifying. But the basic idea is correct. With an 8 core system running basic user software, I strongly suspect that nearly all threads are waiting for IO and thus most of the cores are entirely idle most of the time.
Some algorithms are inherently not amenable to parallelization. If you have eight cores instead of one, then the performance boost you can get can be anywhere from eight times faster to none at all.
So far, multiple cores have boosted performance mostly because the typical user has multiple applications running at a time. But as the number of cores increases, the beneficial effects diminish dramatically.
In addition, most applications these days are not CPU bound. Having eight cores doesn't help you much when three are waiting on socket calls, four are waiting on disk access calls and the last is waiting for the graphics card.
The Battle of Britain, in which Britain gained air superiority thus dooming any invasion attempt, occurred before the US entered the war. At best, US support prevented Britain from suing for peace, which it probably would have been forced to do without American supplies, but it would have likely retained its independence.
Without US support, France and Italy would likely have been "liberated" by the Russians.
I personally had problems because of DRM in HDMI. I wanted to use my PS3 with my fancy new HDMI monitor. No go because of copy protection. I had to pay extra money for a little device that would convert component cable output to VGA. So yeah, DRM cost me personally $70.
Extra annoying because I didn't want to "hack" anything. I just wanted to use the device I bought with the monitor I bought without having to pay for a new HD TV.
Not entirely true. WinXP had one massive advantage over Win2000: Win2000 didn't support many games. If you were a gamer in those days, you were stuck with Win98. WinXP brought the two lines together and yes, maybe the corporate types using Windows 2000, you were hesitant, for good reason. But if you had a home machine running Windows 98, XP was a godsend.
If he were to GPL it, he could assign the rights to the FSF, which has things like lawyers and such whose job it is to go sue people for violating licenses.
Thing is, there are equal numbers for the sexes. Girls like tall guys, so attractive girls will get the tall ones. Unattractive ones will get the short ones. Since there are as many women as men, everyone finds someone to mate with even if they aren't ideal. Since everyone breeds successfully, we *won't* get taller, though you might see a flatting of the bell curve of men think tall women are attractive. There is no "survival of the fittest" as everyone, tall or otherwise, survives to breed.
As long as humans a serial monogamists, this is the way it would go. For animals that are polygamous, it would happen as you say.
The rate of evolution is determined mostly by the percentage of the population that fail to breed. We are living in a time where an unprecedented percentage of the population survive to breed. Only 200 years ago, the chance of a baby making it to breeding age was only something like 1 in 3. Now the vast majority do.
It may not be entirely stopped, but it is very likely that the rate of evolution is currently so low that it is swamped by random genetic drift.
Yes, that was always the claim. Yet studies have shown that they have a much lower incidence of susceptibility to cholesterol than the general population.
In any case, in groups, what happens to older members of the tribe who contribute to the overall tribal wellbeing, but can no longer themselves breed, can have an effect on selection through kin-selection. In other words, members of a small band are all related, and thus often share alleles. So if one band has the allele that causes people to die at 40 and the other does not, the second band is more likely to prosper and pass the shared allele even though the individuals never breed past 40.
Next time, point out to him that since people with Down's Syndrome can't breed for purely biological reasons, he's clearly too ignorant to be allowed to breed himself.
"fit" has never meant bigger biceps. There's a reason the average man has smaller biceps than the average gorilla.
The summary seems to have little relationship to the article. The article doesn't say a damn thing about choice, nor does it at all imply that humans intentionally directed their own evolution (as the summary implies.)
Prior to this, evolutionary scientists assumed that the power of culture was so strong that it swamped evolutionary effects by essentially keeping people alive where they otherwise couldn't have. What this says is that no, that is not true, and that the human race evolved to adapt to new environments just like every other species. Essentially what this means is that our brains let us survive in new environments (for example, the arctic, which without knowledge of clothing and shelter would kill a human quick) and then those that did so evolved to adapt to the environment (for example, the way the Inuit tend to deal better with high fat diets like you'd expect living on seals.) This wasn't by any sort of choice. This was because the ancient Inuit who had cholesterol problems all died off.
This is, of course, all something that happened in the past. We aren't entering any new environments, but even if we were, the death rate has become so amazingly low, that any sort of evolution is hard to imagine. Evolutionary works fastest when lots of people are dying.
The name for selection that depends on choice is "sexual selection" and it is found in many, many species and was recognized from the beginning. The extent this happened in humans is unknown. This article says nothing about that.
I'd consider it, but my linux box is too underpowered to be a game box. I'm disinclined to upgrade just to play games since it is perfect for everything else.
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I'm a white man and get shitty service there too. Not as bad as at CompUSA, but significantly worse than at Fry's. (And if you've ever been to Fry's, you know how damn low that bar is.)
There is one simple way to create good customer service: Treat your employees well. Look at any company known for good customer service, and you'll find reasonably happy employees. This is understandable, because people who hate their jobs are likely to take that anger out on whoever they deal with day to day. (Your customers.) They are also likely to not particularly value their jobs and thus won't go the extra mile.
It's much more likely that the guys that are being retained are golfing buddies with members of the board.
I do find your comment mightily amusing, though. Gotta retain the execs who fired all the low-level employees with institutional knowledge of how to help customers because you've got to keep the institutional knowledge of how to run the company into the ground with idiotic, self-destructive bean counter decisions.
Seems kind of like amputating an arm to cure the cancer but leaving the tumor in so as not to lose too much mass.
We saw this very clearly in the SF Bay Area a few years ago when they were repairing the Bay Bridge. They put these inch thick metal plates down in the roadbed. No end of exhortations from Caltrans could get people to drive normally over them. People would brake and cause just such a cascade, causing horribly traffic on the bridge. (Well...even more horrible than normal that is.)
If I were Google, I wouldn't enter the cellphone market directly. Instead, I'd use the spectrum to create a large-scale Wifi network as part of an effort to route around the big telecoms who keep threatening Google with non-neutrality. (The other part would be all that dark fiber they bought up.)
If they do *that*, it's pretty easy to layer VOIP on top of it to create cellphone/blackberry-like services, but that'd only be part of it. Imagine wireless connectivity anywhere for the price you now pay your ISP for a wired hookup.
It's a fucking *long* time until Sunday then.
Maybe you're right. I don't buy Microsoft products so I'll never play it. I assumed it was good given the sales. No accounting for taste, I suppose.
I suspect it has more to do with the huge number of good FPSes that were just released, from Halo 3 to Orange Box.
The sequel will feature 3 hours of the Sackville-Bagginses complaining about Bilbo.
Yeah, you're correct. I should have said "process".
Correct. I was oversimplifying. But the basic idea is correct. With an 8 core system running basic user software, I strongly suspect that nearly all threads are waiting for IO and thus most of the cores are entirely idle most of the time.
Some algorithms are inherently not amenable to parallelization. If you have eight cores instead of one, then the performance boost you can get can be anywhere from eight times faster to none at all.
So far, multiple cores have boosted performance mostly because the typical user has multiple applications running at a time. But as the number of cores increases, the beneficial effects diminish dramatically.
In addition, most applications these days are not CPU bound. Having eight cores doesn't help you much when three are waiting on socket calls, four are waiting on disk access calls and the last is waiting for the graphics card.
The Battle of Britain, in which Britain gained air superiority thus dooming any invasion attempt, occurred before the US entered the war. At best, US support prevented Britain from suing for peace, which it probably would have been forced to do without American supplies, but it would have likely retained its independence.
Without US support, France and Italy would likely have been "liberated" by the Russians.
I personally had problems because of DRM in HDMI. I wanted to use my PS3 with my fancy new HDMI monitor. No go because of copy protection. I had to pay extra money for a little device that would convert component cable output to VGA. So yeah, DRM cost me personally $70.
Extra annoying because I didn't want to "hack" anything. I just wanted to use the device I bought with the monitor I bought without having to pay for a new HD TV.
Not entirely true. WinXP had one massive advantage over Win2000: Win2000 didn't support many games. If you were a gamer in those days, you were stuck with Win98. WinXP brought the two lines together and yes, maybe the corporate types using Windows 2000, you were hesitant, for good reason. But if you had a home machine running Windows 98, XP was a godsend.
Why not just put the proof on a separate wiki page and link to it? That prevents clutter...
If he were to GPL it, he could assign the rights to the FSF, which has things like lawyers and such whose job it is to go sue people for violating licenses.
That depends on whether it is a discrete or continuous variable.
Thing is, there are equal numbers for the sexes. Girls like tall guys, so attractive girls will get the tall ones. Unattractive ones will get the short ones. Since there are as many women as men, everyone finds someone to mate with even if they aren't ideal. Since everyone breeds successfully, we *won't* get taller, though you might see a flatting of the bell curve of men think tall women are attractive. There is no "survival of the fittest" as everyone, tall or otherwise, survives to breed.
As long as humans a serial monogamists, this is the way it would go. For animals that are polygamous, it would happen as you say.
The rate of evolution is determined mostly by the percentage of the population that fail to breed. We are living in a time where an unprecedented percentage of the population survive to breed. Only 200 years ago, the chance of a baby making it to breeding age was only something like 1 in 3. Now the vast majority do.
It may not be entirely stopped, but it is very likely that the rate of evolution is currently so low that it is swamped by random genetic drift.
Evolution by natural section has no goal. If you think it does than you do not understand the theory.
Yes, that was always the claim. Yet studies have shown that they have a much lower incidence of susceptibility to cholesterol than the general population.
In any case, in groups, what happens to older members of the tribe who contribute to the overall tribal wellbeing, but can no longer themselves breed, can have an effect on selection through kin-selection. In other words, members of a small band are all related, and thus often share alleles. So if one band has the allele that causes people to die at 40 and the other does not, the second band is more likely to prosper and pass the shared allele even though the individuals never breed past 40.
Next time, point out to him that since people with Down's Syndrome can't breed for purely biological reasons, he's clearly too ignorant to be allowed to breed himself.
"fit" has never meant bigger biceps. There's a reason the average man has smaller biceps than the average gorilla.
The summary seems to have little relationship to the article. The article doesn't say a damn thing about choice, nor does it at all imply that humans intentionally directed their own evolution (as the summary implies.)
Prior to this, evolutionary scientists assumed that the power of culture was so strong that it swamped evolutionary effects by essentially keeping people alive where they otherwise couldn't have. What this says is that no, that is not true, and that the human race evolved to adapt to new environments just like every other species. Essentially what this means is that our brains let us survive in new environments (for example, the arctic, which without knowledge of clothing and shelter would kill a human quick) and then those that did so evolved to adapt to the environment (for example, the way the Inuit tend to deal better with high fat diets like you'd expect living on seals.) This wasn't by any sort of choice. This was because the ancient Inuit who had cholesterol problems all died off.
This is, of course, all something that happened in the past. We aren't entering any new environments, but even if we were, the death rate has become so amazingly low, that any sort of evolution is hard to imagine. Evolutionary works fastest when lots of people are dying.
The name for selection that depends on choice is "sexual selection" and it is found in many, many species and was recognized from the beginning. The extent this happened in humans is unknown. This article says nothing about that.
I thought the whole point of an apology was to say your sorry for something you never should have done in the first place.
Personally, I never apologize for things I should have done in the first place.
I'd consider it, but my linux box is too underpowered to be a game box. I'm disinclined to upgrade just to play games since it is perfect for everything else.