It would be a mistake to deliver new levels each session to the gamer. Part of the reason Mario is fun is that you can practice the level, learn all of its secrets, and maximize your score and efficiency in playing it the whole way through unscathed. Subsequently demonstrating your expertise to friends and acquaintances is another layer of the fun, and then on top of that being able to discuss the intricacies of a level and reveal new techniques and details to each other is the icing on the cake.
Generating random levels, if they're fun levels, would be a great achievement. But any game that implements this would need to allow for saving of the level and sharing of the level so that the elements I list above can still be part of the overall experience.
Normally/. is all "I paid for [media file] so I own it and can do what I want with it" in opposition to the copyright holders who are like "No, you just licensed it, we own it and can take it back or prevent you from copying it if we want".
Here, are we to feel that the people who paid for the code don't own it and can't do what they want with it? Are developers acting the part of the MPAA now?
Lots of the responses are like "you own what you contractually purchased, according to said contract", which is cool 'cause that's what I think should be the case.
As far as I can tell, Apple's iBooks store is electronic only. So the claim, regarding Macmillan, that "They have somewhere to run. And credibly." is not true.
Where is Macmillan going to make up the revenue from sales of print books that they'll forfeit by not being on the Amazon store? Unless the third-party sellers are expected to make up the difference, in which case Amazon's move hasn't accomplished anything punitive at all and is an empty gesture.
If the certifying authority doesn't require renewals, or some sort of ongoing training in order to stay certified, then the hiring managers will/should start requiring it. "When did you get your certification? What have you done since then to maintain your current knowledge of the field?"
IT isn't like Ancient Literature. What you know today will likely be obsolete tomorrow, and any body that wants to certify qualifications in such a changing environment needs to take that into account. Sounds like they wanted to realize that, but people who just wanted a meaningless cert on their CV wouldn't let them do it.
"Traditional phone users who don't have all of those cutesy multimedia options can get by with a fraction of that."
I don't want to just "get by". Fuck that.
I didn't think the references to other works was a cop-out-- I liked that stuff.
But I sure did think the book was a major f-ing drag.
It seemed like the whole point of the book was that negative people inevitably ruin everything and there's nothing anybody can do about it. I had similar issues with his brother's book "Soon I Will Be Invincible"-- nobody learned anything or changed through the whole book. They share a kind of cynical, depressive mindset and it permeates the worlds they've created in their novels. Ugh.
I would have loved this book if it had any balance to it. You can't have things all one way or the other, and have a really great novel. Everything needs a ray of hope.
Now, if Grossman comes back with a sequel and the second act starts a climb back out of the abyss, then that would be really cool.
I have to buy new hardware when a)I run out of space or b)hardware dies. And just like clouds, the more data I have the more I have to pay-- the more hardware you have the more frequently you have to replace it or upgrade it.
You're never going to get away from this, you're only going to shift it around. It's a law of the universe. Clouds just make things a lot simpler to deal with, and much more stable.
Cory Doctorow will basically say whatever gets him a lot of press. He's a blogger looking for the next big hit. This kind of precludes him from taking a sophisticated, long-term view of any particular subject that he's writing about for pay. You've gotta look elsewhere, either in academia or by weighing the commercial evaluations against each other, to really learn what cloud computing is going to mean for the world.
Increasingly the App Store will become more like Amazon, with it's billions of items for sale. It will contain references from one product to another, it will contain suggestions based on the user's preferences and purchase history, but overall the App Store will cease to be the only way people market their apps.
Remember all the other ways there are to make sure people are aware of your iphone app. The larger developers, and the larger clients (like Barnes and Noble and State Farm) already know this and market their apps through their traditional channels-- television ads, posters in stores. Everyone is going to have to do this, and the little guy is going to have to get on board.
I think you'll see consortiums of iPhone app developers forming, pooling their marketing muscle, joining together to make "labels" of like-minded people or tools of the same ilk.
But eventually, just getting your app into the Top 25 and having a 99-cent sale isn't going to cut it. There will simply be too many apps for that kind of ploy to work. And thank god for that-- I'm a consumer; I don't want the App Store to have a limited number of apps in it. For one thing, who's going to pick and choose what apps are good enough? Apple? They have a hard enough time just enforcing their current rules without making subjective quality judgements. Best to let the market decide, I think, even if that means the deepest marketing pockets will get the most attention. There will always be "underground" places where little-known apps are talked about, and there will be people who seek them out. This is how the jailbreaking communities survive-- both for iPhone and stuff like the Wii or Xbox.
Are the stairs like, behind a door and in a non-corporately-furnished area (concrete floor, like a stairwell meant for fire safety)?
That's often a deterrent-- out of sight, out of mind, and if they're ugly then there's even less chance they'll get used.
Put the stairs next to the elevator and carpet them, like nice hotel lobbies do sometimes, and more people will use them.
If you make the things that are good for us/the planet really nice, more people will use them. Too often it's "Use this car that's too small and gets terrible performance, because it's good for the planet!" That's never going to be a successful motivator.
So those people who depend on weird MS Office features never give the documents they create to anyone else to view?
Seems like that's the real issue-- whether or not you create documents using edge features, you will occasionally be called upon to view one.
At the point where OO.o lets the user down to the extent that she can't get the information she needs (as opposed to a little big of rendering oddity), she'll abandon ship real fast out of sheer self-preservation.
You can't dictate which features in Office to use. So if *anybody* in your company is using a different office suite, there will be problems with translation eventually. Following Murphy's law, it will be when you're trying to demonstrate the validity of your business case to the CEO.
One interesting aspect of this case, which somewhat decays the truth of your post (which I agree with otherwise) is that Drew didn't have very good visibility into the effect of her actions.
I dunno whether the young girl ever posted something like "I'm going to kill myself if you don't stop harassing me", but the abstraction that the Internet inserts between our personal interactions would seem to be a somewhat mitigating circumstance.
I was bullied when I was a kid, so part of me wants to see these people fry. But I grew up and (mostly) got over it, so my reaction is more considered, and it seems that with this trial and the verdict she's getting what's coming to her. I do regret that conviction required a plea bargain with one of the other culprits. Such is the compromise that is our justice system.
Thank goodness it's the government who will decide what a "bad end" means!
That strikes me as an unthoughtful response.
It's not the government who decides, it's a JURY. That's you and me, buddy.
If you want to lament the uninformed state of the average citizen of the US, that's different. But here it seems like the jury of peers made a fairly astute decision at least as to appropriate punishment for this horrible woman.
Do you want people to buy your software or not? If so, drink the kool-aid, bub. Those marketing types are who your company hired to make the decisions around "how do we sell the most software, so we get to make more software while putting food in our mouths".
If you disagree that jumping right to v6.0 is a good way to increase sales, you should voice your opinion. This thread has provided some legitimate arguments:
* A buggy 6.0 is not a customer-retention tool * Version numbers can look dated in the context of other products in the same space
If you just disagree on principle, you should simply call out the decision so that everyone is aware and it's a conscious decision. Don't let anyone pretend like 6.0 is a legitimate version number. Companies should own their decisions. In a meeting, with very calm and pleasant demeanor, say "Ok, just so it's clear, we're going to call this version 6.0 for marketing purposes, not for any technical reason, correct?" That way, everyone will think you had some technical reason for wanting to make that clear, and you will have called out the decision so nobody is allowed to keep pretending. Pretending is bad for morale; it's much better to be pragmatic and cop to being pragmatic.
And now that I think of it, you absolutely should either jump to 6.0 internally in your build numbering, or you should begin using some other labeling system-- if you don't, you're opening the door to Confusion, and you don't want to go there. What's the point of a version number anyway? It's to differentiate this version from previous versions. As long as you have a way to tell n+1 or n-1 (where n is the version you're using now), that's all that really matters. There are limits, after all, to the versioning system--you can't tell how many versions there are between 6.0 and 7.0, because software these days likes using lots of dots (6.5.4.1) and there's no standard as to what defines a "point release". It's whenever the dev team (or marketing) think's it's time to go up a number.:-/
We tend to treat large companies like Comcast as if everything they do is the result of the considered thought of a single entity. That's just not the case. The Customer Support piece of Comcast is likely to be a distinct entity. Certainly they work with the rest of the company, but they've got their own agenda-- answer calls.
That means they have two things on their mind: 1. Are all the calls getting answered? 2. How long is each call and how can we shorten that time-- without doing such a poor job that call volume increases?
Call volumes are one area that Customer Support *probably* can affect only in limited ways. Divisions within a company are, in some ways, fiefdoms-- everybody filters up to a VP, and there is limited participation between Support, Network Engineering, and Product Management. Each of those groups will have their own area of responsibility which the other areas don't control-- they can only participate in projects and do their best to be a good team member.
So in the case of network policy or product efficacy, the Support operation can only affect the Network Engineering, Fulfillment (the people who ship equipment to customers), and Product Management operations to the extent that they can socially engineer the other team to do the right thing. If you know any Network Engineers you have an idea of how difficult that can be. The city of San Francisco recently learned this lesson, I think.
What Customer Support can affect is the tools they use to handle customer issues. This blog-watching guy is one of those.
If people in America would answer calls for the same rates as people in the Phillipines, then the balance of cost-to-quality for call centers would probably move further toward quality. But only maybe-- the more calls you handle the more pressure there is to generate efficiencies, which means less training and more scripting and less tolerance for calls that last a long time.
Of course, end users don't perceive any of this-- to us it's just "If Comcast would just make their service better I wouldn't have to call" and we have trouble understanding why they put effort into wacky new Support ideas like this when they should be spending that guy's paycheck on improving their network capacity so they stop being tempted to throttle bandwidth to control data transfer costs.
Wall Street Journal seems to have done well. Also travel sites, turbotax online, ticketmaster, fandango, amazon, ebay (despite recent trouble), craigslist (although they do live off ads), netflix, Angie's list, and many more. I know a bunch of artists that make money selling their work on their Web sites, and some small contractors rely on their site to give people more information and generate that all-important call for an estimate.
Bottom line is that businesses that make something that people want will make money. This generally means a product or service that actually impacts the user's life offline, in whatever way. This needs to be more valuable to the customer than the price they are asked to pay-- on the Web right now that payment is mostly time. Someday the payment will include money, and the Web will shrink but it certainly won't disappear.
The bubble was a lot of foolishness based around clever ideas that were either not profitably executable at the time (WebVan) or that it turns out PEOPLE DIDN'T ACTUALLY WANT.
The Web didn't negate the classic rules of business, as many people learned to their financial dismay.
Parent is dead on. I don't want to pay TOO MUCH for things, but unless I pay for something I have no basis for argument if it eats my brain. *cough*Linux Audio Apps*cough*
But if a consumer finds a product to be particularly usable, I'll warrant he's a lot more likely to buy the product, or something from that company, the second time.
I can't explain it; this story made my day. Dupe or no dupe. Very cool.
I know nothing about this area of science, but holy cow! This simple technique already seems to accomplish so much, and to be so useful. Think what it will be when they've created advanced inks and molding materials to create smoother "walls" and which let you control the "shrink" factor more precisely! Imagine specially designed printers to enable chip printing-- even if it's just a more precise tray to hold the shrinky dink media.
This is terribly exciting. It puts microfluidic experimentation within the reach of any hobbyist, college class, or high school! Great breakthroughs will come of this, I just know it.
I haven't RTFA, but if you have a homogenous crop, wouldn't it make more sense to have the robot just recognize say, wheat, and remove anything that's Not Wheat?
Even if you have a mixed crop, it still seems more practical to make the robot recognize the few plants that should be growing than the dozens that shouldn't.
The arrogance in the comments to this article is pretty astonishing. Either you don't believe the study because apparently you're an expert, or you think you're already getting enough Vitamin D and don't need to pay attention to it.
You'd think the study was telling us that battery acid cures cancer, rather than some natural substance that everybody agrees is necessary to live.
So what if milk producers funded the study-- they did some work, it seems legit, and they're advocating a substance we NEED TO LIVE ANYWAY, and which could POSSIBLY KEEP YOU FROM GETTING CANCER.
Add fish oil and yogurt to your diet, and then, my dear geeky friend, take your ass outside for just a little bit each day. Walk around the block or something. It won't hurt you unless you get hit by a bus, and it MIGHT KEEP YOU FROM GETTING CANCER.
Apple's market share is attempting to take away from that of Windows. Vista is cannibalizing the market share of XP.
Market share is like your weight. It's going to fluctuate, and there are too many variables for a month-to-month evaluation to be useful to anyone other than short-term traders. Today I'm 1.5 pounds heavier than yesterday. Tomorrow it will be down.
Seems way too simplistic to reduce the situation to two "equivalent" numbers. At least, if you expect the information to have any use other than getting us to click on the story and be exposed to banner ads.
Slashdot Mirror
It would be a mistake to deliver new levels each session to the gamer. Part of the reason Mario is fun is that you can practice the level, learn all of its secrets, and maximize your score and efficiency in playing it the whole way through unscathed. Subsequently demonstrating your expertise to friends and acquaintances is another layer of the fun, and then on top of that being able to discuss the intricacies of a level and reveal new techniques and details to each other is the icing on the cake.
Generating random levels, if they're fun levels, would be a great achievement. But any game that implements this would need to allow for saving of the level and sharing of the level so that the elements I list above can still be part of the overall experience.
Here, are we to feel that the people who paid for the code don't own it and can't do what they want with it? Are developers acting the part of the MPAA now?
Lots of the responses are like "you own what you contractually purchased, according to said contract", which is cool 'cause that's what I think should be the case.
But the tone of the original post is Weird.
Where is Macmillan going to make up the revenue from sales of print books that they'll forfeit by not being on the Amazon store? Unless the third-party sellers are expected to make up the difference, in which case Amazon's move hasn't accomplished anything punitive at all and is an empty gesture.
If the certifying authority doesn't require renewals, or some sort of ongoing training in order to stay certified, then the hiring managers will/should start requiring it. "When did you get your certification? What have you done since then to maintain your current knowledge of the field?" IT isn't like Ancient Literature. What you know today will likely be obsolete tomorrow, and any body that wants to certify qualifications in such a changing environment needs to take that into account. Sounds like they wanted to realize that, but people who just wanted a meaningless cert on their CV wouldn't let them do it.
"Traditional phone users who don't have all of those cutesy multimedia options can get by with a fraction of that." I don't want to just "get by". Fuck that.
Why would they hire some guy so inept he got caught TWICE?
I didn't think the references to other works was a cop-out-- I liked that stuff. But I sure did think the book was a major f-ing drag. It seemed like the whole point of the book was that negative people inevitably ruin everything and there's nothing anybody can do about it. I had similar issues with his brother's book "Soon I Will Be Invincible"-- nobody learned anything or changed through the whole book. They share a kind of cynical, depressive mindset and it permeates the worlds they've created in their novels. Ugh. I would have loved this book if it had any balance to it. You can't have things all one way or the other, and have a really great novel. Everything needs a ray of hope. Now, if Grossman comes back with a sequel and the second act starts a climb back out of the abyss, then that would be really cool.
I have to buy new hardware when a)I run out of space or b)hardware dies. And just like clouds, the more data I have the more I have to pay-- the more hardware you have the more frequently you have to replace it or upgrade it. You're never going to get away from this, you're only going to shift it around. It's a law of the universe. Clouds just make things a lot simpler to deal with, and much more stable . Cory Doctorow will basically say whatever gets him a lot of press. He's a blogger looking for the next big hit. This kind of precludes him from taking a sophisticated, long-term view of any particular subject that he's writing about for pay. You've gotta look elsewhere, either in academia or by weighing the commercial evaluations against each other, to really learn what cloud computing is going to mean for the world.
Increasingly the App Store will become more like Amazon, with it's billions of items for sale. It will contain references from one product to another, it will contain suggestions based on the user's preferences and purchase history, but overall the App Store will cease to be the only way people market their apps.
Remember all the other ways there are to make sure people are aware of your iphone app. The larger developers, and the larger clients (like Barnes and Noble and State Farm) already know this and market their apps through their traditional channels-- television ads, posters in stores. Everyone is going to have to do this, and the little guy is going to have to get on board.
I think you'll see consortiums of iPhone app developers forming, pooling their marketing muscle, joining together to make "labels" of like-minded people or tools of the same ilk.
But eventually, just getting your app into the Top 25 and having a 99-cent sale isn't going to cut it. There will simply be too many apps for that kind of ploy to work. And thank god for that-- I'm a consumer; I don't want the App Store to have a limited number of apps in it. For one thing, who's going to pick and choose what apps are good enough? Apple? They have a hard enough time just enforcing their current rules without making subjective quality judgements. Best to let the market decide, I think, even if that means the deepest marketing pockets will get the most attention. There will always be "underground" places where little-known apps are talked about, and there will be people who seek them out. This is how the jailbreaking communities survive-- both for iPhone and stuff like the Wii or Xbox.
Are the stairs like, behind a door and in a non-corporately-furnished area (concrete floor, like a stairwell meant for fire safety)?
That's often a deterrent-- out of sight, out of mind, and if they're ugly then there's even less chance they'll get used.
Put the stairs next to the elevator and carpet them, like nice hotel lobbies do sometimes, and more people will use them.
If you make the things that are good for us/the planet really nice, more people will use them. Too often it's "Use this car that's too small and gets terrible performance, because it's good for the planet!" That's never going to be a successful motivator.
So those people who depend on weird MS Office features never give the documents they create to anyone else to view?
Seems like that's the real issue-- whether or not you create documents using edge features, you will occasionally be called upon to view one.
At the point where OO.o lets the user down to the extent that she can't get the information she needs (as opposed to a little big of rendering oddity), she'll abandon ship real fast out of sheer self-preservation.
You can't dictate which features in Office to use. So if *anybody* in your company is using a different office suite, there will be problems with translation eventually. Following Murphy's law, it will be when you're trying to demonstrate the validity of your business case to the CEO.
One interesting aspect of this case, which somewhat decays the truth of your post (which I agree with otherwise) is that Drew didn't have very good visibility into the effect of her actions.
I dunno whether the young girl ever posted something like "I'm going to kill myself if you don't stop harassing me", but the abstraction that the Internet inserts between our personal interactions would seem to be a somewhat mitigating circumstance.
I was bullied when I was a kid, so part of me wants to see these people fry. But I grew up and (mostly) got over it, so my reaction is more considered, and it seems that with this trial and the verdict she's getting what's coming to her. I do regret that conviction required a plea bargain with one of the other culprits. Such is the compromise that is our justice system.
Thank goodness it's the government who will decide what a "bad end" means!
That strikes me as an unthoughtful response.
It's not the government who decides, it's a JURY. That's you and me, buddy.
If you want to lament the uninformed state of the average citizen of the US, that's different. But here it seems like the jury of peers made a fairly astute decision at least as to appropriate punishment for this horrible woman.
Do you want people to buy your software or not? If so, drink the kool-aid, bub. Those marketing types are who your company hired to make the decisions around "how do we sell the most software, so we get to make more software while putting food in our mouths".
If you disagree that jumping right to v6.0 is a good way to increase sales, you should voice your opinion. This thread has provided some legitimate arguments:
* A buggy 6.0 is not a customer-retention tool
* Version numbers can look dated in the context of other products in the same space
If you just disagree on principle, you should simply call out the decision so that everyone is aware and it's a conscious decision. Don't let anyone pretend like 6.0 is a legitimate version number. Companies should own their decisions. In a meeting, with very calm and pleasant demeanor, say "Ok, just so it's clear, we're going to call this version 6.0 for marketing purposes, not for any technical reason, correct?" That way, everyone will think you had some technical reason for wanting to make that clear, and you will have called out the decision so nobody is allowed to keep pretending. Pretending is bad for morale; it's much better to be pragmatic and cop to being pragmatic.
And now that I think of it, you absolutely should either jump to 6.0 internally in your build numbering, or you should begin using some other labeling system-- if you don't, you're opening the door to Confusion, and you don't want to go there. What's the point of a version number anyway? It's to differentiate this version from previous versions. As long as you have a way to tell n+1 or n-1 (where n is the version you're using now), that's all that really matters. There are limits, after all, to the versioning system--you can't tell how many versions there are between 6.0 and 7.0, because software these days likes using lots of dots (6.5.4.1) and there's no standard as to what defines a "point release". It's whenever the dev team (or marketing) think's it's time to go up a number. :-/
If, however, the tree is harvested for human use, ... some of it may be stored for decades to centuries (construction, paper).
Yeah, in a landfill. :-/
We tend to treat large companies like Comcast as if everything they do is the result of the considered thought of a single entity. That's just not the case. The Customer Support piece of Comcast is likely to be a distinct entity. Certainly they work with the rest of the company, but they've got their own agenda-- answer calls.
That means they have two things on their mind:
1. Are all the calls getting answered?
2. How long is each call and how can we shorten that time-- without doing such a poor job that call volume increases?
Call volumes are one area that Customer Support *probably* can affect only in limited ways. Divisions within a company are, in some ways, fiefdoms-- everybody filters up to a VP, and there is limited participation between Support, Network Engineering, and Product Management. Each of those groups will have their own area of responsibility which the other areas don't control-- they can only participate in projects and do their best to be a good team member.
So in the case of network policy or product efficacy, the Support operation can only affect the Network Engineering, Fulfillment (the people who ship equipment to customers), and Product Management operations to the extent that they can socially engineer the other team to do the right thing. If you know any Network Engineers you have an idea of how difficult that can be. The city of San Francisco recently learned this lesson, I think.
What Customer Support can affect is the tools they use to handle customer issues. This blog-watching guy is one of those.
If people in America would answer calls for the same rates as people in the Phillipines, then the balance of cost-to-quality for call centers would probably move further toward quality. But only maybe-- the more calls you handle the more pressure there is to generate efficiencies, which means less training and more scripting and less tolerance for calls that last a long time.
Of course, end users don't perceive any of this-- to us it's just "If Comcast would just make their service better I wouldn't have to call" and we have trouble understanding why they put effort into wacky new Support ideas like this when they should be spending that guy's paycheck on improving their network capacity so they stop being tempted to throttle bandwidth to control data transfer costs.
Well, no.
Wall Street Journal seems to have done well. Also travel sites, turbotax online, ticketmaster, fandango, amazon, ebay (despite recent trouble), craigslist (although they do live off ads), netflix, Angie's list, and many more. I know a bunch of artists that make money selling their work on their Web sites, and some small contractors rely on their site to give people more information and generate that all-important call for an estimate.
Bottom line is that businesses that make something that people want will make money. This generally means a product or service that actually impacts the user's life offline, in whatever way. This needs to be more valuable to the customer than the price they are asked to pay-- on the Web right now that payment is mostly time. Someday the payment will include money, and the Web will shrink but it certainly won't disappear.
The bubble was a lot of foolishness based around clever ideas that were either not profitably executable at the time (WebVan) or that it turns out PEOPLE DIDN'T ACTUALLY WANT.
The Web didn't negate the classic rules of business, as many people learned to their financial dismay.
Parent is dead on. I don't want to pay TOO MUCH for things, but unless I pay for something I have no basis for argument if it eats my brain. *cough*Linux Audio Apps*cough*
yet.
But if a consumer finds a product to be particularly usable, I'll warrant he's a lot more likely to buy the product, or something from that company, the second time.
I can't explain it; this story made my day. Dupe or no dupe. Very cool.
I know nothing about this area of science, but holy cow! This simple technique already seems to accomplish so much, and to be so useful. Think what it will be when they've created advanced inks and molding materials to create smoother "walls" and which let you control the "shrink" factor more precisely! Imagine specially designed printers to enable chip printing-- even if it's just a more precise tray to hold the shrinky dink media.
This is terribly exciting. It puts microfluidic experimentation within the reach of any hobbyist, college class, or high school! Great breakthroughs will come of this, I just know it.
I haven't RTFA, but if you have a homogenous crop, wouldn't it make more sense to have the robot just recognize say, wheat, and remove anything that's Not Wheat?
Even if you have a mixed crop, it still seems more practical to make the robot recognize the few plants that should be growing than the dozens that shouldn't.
The arrogance in the comments to this article is pretty astonishing. Either you don't believe the study because apparently you're an expert, or you think you're already getting enough Vitamin D and don't need to pay attention to it.
You'd think the study was telling us that battery acid cures cancer, rather than some natural substance that everybody agrees is necessary to live.
So what if milk producers funded the study-- they did some work, it seems legit, and they're advocating a substance we NEED TO LIVE ANYWAY, and which could POSSIBLY KEEP YOU FROM GETTING CANCER.
Protect yourself. Read the wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitamin_D
Add fish oil and yogurt to your diet, and then, my dear geeky friend, take your ass outside for just a little bit each day. Walk around the block or something. It won't hurt you unless you get hit by a bus, and it MIGHT KEEP YOU FROM GETTING CANCER.
Apple's market share is attempting to take away from that of Windows.
Vista is cannibalizing the market share of XP.
Market share is like your weight. It's going to fluctuate, and there are too many variables for a month-to-month evaluation to be useful to anyone other than short-term traders. Today I'm 1.5 pounds heavier than yesterday. Tomorrow it will be down.
Seems way too simplistic to reduce the situation to two "equivalent" numbers. At least, if you expect the information to have any use other than getting us to click on the story and be exposed to banner ads.
...is "Grid computing finds cure for malaria."
I could look through the threads of my bedroom rug for 420 years and not find the cure either.
Eyes on the prize, people.