There is no artifact of notation, here. 0.999... is the sum of 10^-n for n of one to infinity. The limit of that expression as n approaches infinity is 1. Since the limit exists and real numbers are defined at 1, the sum of 10^-n as n goes to infinity IS 1. Therefore, 0.999... is 1.
The 0.333... * 3 = 0.999... business is mostly just a shorthand way of making that same argument.
The interconnects are not the entire problem. Faster transmit helps, of course. But the information still has to come in from storage; it's still held in slow memory banks; it still has to propagate across the swarm. Software still has to be able to access that data in a way that makes sense and can scale to half a million nodes. Connectionless distributed computation is nontrivial, and while lower-latency intranode communication might get us the last 5% it won't get us the first 95%.
You implied a lack of objectivity on Slashdot because the phone was generally poorly received. For that claim to be true you must demonstrate that Slashdot is in error for disliking the phone and against the majority opinion. I was asking for evidence of this majority opinion (demonstrating that Slashdot was showing bias).
I've done plenty of googling. There are positive reviews, but there are far more negative reviews. And while I am not a smartphone expert, I'm also not a MS basher/lover (although I do heartily support OS) and in my experience the negative reviews give facts, while the positive reviews give theories.
The "shill" comment was, as you say, undeserved, and I apologize for that. I was reacting emotionally. I submit, however, that you are attacking views being expressed here as harshly as you claim they attack a (hypothetically different) objective viewpoint.
Is this supposed to have the barest pretense of objectivity?
Your post is full of buzzwords. The sum total of the good things about it that you actually provided is limited, excluisvely, to "I like the tiles," "the UI is responsive, especially the keyboard," "Zune is the best player," and "like-data goes into a universal hub," with no real clarification of the latter besides stating that all of your facebook data is on your contacts list, which to me sounds pretty awful. I have about a hundred friends on facebook, and about twenty people in my address book. Think about that.
You then proceed to say that the only instantly profitable console was the Wii, yet despite being the runaway winner in sales and admittedly profitable from the get-go, it doesn't really count compared to the original XBox because you don't consider the Wii to be "next-gen" and don't know anyone who actually plays theirs. There is no objective definition which places Microsoft as "market leader of next-gen consoles". They have wasted an incredible amount of money with the XBox line; "business savvy" typically points to the ability to make a dollar without having to spend fifty.
And, the final paragraph: you are the only person defending this platform, and you are doing it in a post full of inaccuracies and snow jobs. Flushing money down the toilet is not "big business." It is true that sometimes you have to spend money to make money; it is also true that sometimes you are spending more than you will ever make. The dumb move was not entering the market (again); it was entering it unprepared and with a substandard product.
Another shill outed. I need to start keeping a list of you guys.
Don't get me wrong; I am no friend of Microsoft. But it seems like the AV companies are acting a bit like spoiled children, here.
Their entire business model rests upon the insecurity of MS operating systems. I would think that -- clearly -- Microsoft has the right to try to make their operating system more secure. Security Essentials is a free download. There is no revenue stream associated with it. It is simply a linear upgrade to the system -- a patch for the OS. If it removes the vector by which other companies make money, it seems like the burden is on the other companies to stay relevant rather than trying to keep Microsoft from doing anything to make its operating system more secure.
It just seems strange to me. They don't charge for Security Essentials. It's a plug-in for the operating system. This has a core difference from, for example, the IE business, because Microsoft isn't providing a service so much as attempting to remove a problem; I don't really have sympathy for the plight of those that profited (however honestly) from the problem.
Sony has already tried the no-controller camera-driven games with the EyeToy, which bombed. There have been all kinds of toy programs using webcams, which are all forgotten. Adding a depth camera does not fundamentally change the interaction -- in fact, it barely affects it at all. In userspace, Kinect is EyeToy, is doomed. You cannot play engaging games without a controller.
Overpriced? Perhaps, but I have a hard time believing that Microsoft is pricing it significantly higher than they have to - they want it to be a success and the know it's up against a less expensive competitor.
If they cannot sell two cameras and a toy motor for less than $150 I'll eat my hat. Do you really believe, for instance, that they "can't sell" a 250GB hard drive for less than $129.99 when normal 250GB hard drives can be had for less than $50 (a third of the price, ultimately)?
Basically, it sounds like you don't think they're going far enough, but I think if they went as far as you want them to they would completely price themselves out of the market. At some point you have to compromise ship something practical.
If I put a box of trash up on eBay for only a 10% markup over what it all cost me, how many people do you think will buy it? The market doesn't care what you spent. It cares what the price is and what they get out of it. $150 is going to sail right over everyone's head. You may bookmark this post and refer back to it when the Kinect line is officially discontinued (I will give it say Summer of 2012, after Microsoft loses a lot of money, which is what their games division has been doing all along.)
First of all, the on-board processor was dropped. Kinect places its entire processing load on the 360 (putting a 10-15 % load on the CPU).
Second, the "regular camera" in it runs at 640x480 30Hz, which is bad enough, but the infrared projector runs at 320x240, which is abysmal and the reason the device cannot detect things like finger movements.
The device is not ambitious at all; it's old tech. We've been doing depthmaps from two image sources for about as long as we've had cameras. The fact that Microsoft has made several cuts in hardware and functionality and is still pricing the device at $150 is disheartening, although not surprising given their pricing on things like proprietary hard drives.
Basically, it's overpriced junk that could be not just matched but beaten on any computer or on the PS3 by two webcams, two microphones, and a 5k program (total cost: $60). I would applaud them for pushing development of userspace control, but what's far more likely to happen is this thing is going to bomb hard enough to scare investors away for the next thirty years. They are actually hurting the market.
A 14% greater install base on 360s is a pretty flimsy "king of the hill". Even better, by the most recent reasonable industry estimate (http://www.gamespot.com/news/6216691.html) the XBox360's lifetime failure rate is 13.7% higher than that of the PS3 (23.7% vs. 10%); it's not unprecedented for companies to count claims in sales numbers, though I could find nothing conclusive either way.
The PS3 has a clear edge in processing power and media capacity, in addition to home theater use (Blu-ray playback). Sony had a slow start due to the more expensive console, later deployment date, and relatively difficult development environment associated with the many-core Cell processor. All of those factors have improved over time.
Basically, the "XBox360 edge" is extremely thin, and while the XBox360 is starting to get a bit long in the tooth, the PS3 is reaching full market maturity.
My car got stolen a week ago, so I'm really getting a kick out of this. (No, it really did get stolen.)
Related note. Let's say you lived in a high-risk zone for car thievery, and that you weren't going to be able to afford anything more than like some late 90's economy model car (so, say, no car alarm or GPS), and you really HAD to make sure it didn't get stolen. What would you do? I was actually thinking Club until you people convinced me otherwise *grin* -- any alternate suggestions?
That is the slowest, clunkiest, most visually confusing, least responsive, and perhaps most overall depressing site I've been to this year. God, if I showed that to my boss arguing for html5 we'd get knocked clear back to plaintext. Maybe it's my browser, but Firefox 3.6 is a fair chunk of market share.
And as another person said, this is exactly the kind of thing that happened with Flash -- making fancy gizmos just because we can. This is why we programmers aren't let outside where the normal people play. Just because you can do something doesn't make it appropriate, and applications should ALWAYS be designed around use, rather than around implementations. That radial wheel with the highlighted column and the cheesy 3D text looks like an undergrad project (if it is, then kudos, keep studying).
Even if you wanted to make it 'fancy', simple grid-based arrangement with the same color scheme would have looked much better, and the mouseover highlighting instead of lables is crazy -- why should you have to highlight things at random to find something specific? It needs to be implementable without the interface lag -- grids instead of circles, or text instead of grids, and if html5 can't do it without the lag, then it needs to not be done at all.
Why does nobody want it? Property is not a "yes/no" proposition -- it has a specific value. If the price of the surrounding land reflected the presence of a plant (which it would in all real-world scenarios) then if it were appropriately priced I have no problem with it.
If you're talking about building it on private property or close enough to private property to devalue it then I feel like the owners should be compensated for the drop in value -- but, even absent that, yeah, I'd be willing. Disclaimer: I don't own land at the moment, so my opinion there may not be worth much.
NIMBY stuff (on both sides) tends to ignore the idea of the value of land (rather than a simple pass/fail relationship).
Your solar plant is not zero-emission, either. How did the solar plant get manufactured? The raw materials were dug up from the earth with the associated pollution of mining.
Yeah, and the food you eat was grown on farms that use tools that were made with minerals dug up from the earth with big, smelly machines. The computer you use was assembled in a factory that uses big, smelly machines, and shipped over here in big, smelly machines.
Obviously everything is going to have a manufacturing cost, both financially and ecologically. The question is how much of one can our planet absorb without lasting effect. If you're seriously anti-solar because you can't assemble a solar panel without using a power source then I would like to hear your suggestions for further development.
I hate it as much as you do, but this view is, it turns out, naive. It's kind of like the Prisoners' Dilemma with a hundred thousand participants. There's no question that many, many more successful and happy relationships would turn out for everybody if everybody was completely, bluntly honest; but that system collapses as soon as any notable percentage of people choose to "enhance" their profile a bit.
The end result is the same as in many walks of life -- you have to play the game by the rules, or you're not playing the game at all. Women -expect- men to pad their profiles. If you work in IT or talk about enjoying reading or working with computers, they're already going to infer all the sci-fi and gaming and whatnot. If you waste profile space on that stuff they're going to assume that you don't have anything interesting going on, and move on.
Or, put another way, you don't waste time advertising stuff that's not interesting. Everyone knows that McDonald's is bad for you. They don't advertise it, though. And while geek hobbies aren't "bad" in the sense of a Big Mac's nutritional info, society has laid the law down and called them unsellable. Even geeky girls who are exclusively interested in hardcore raiders aren't going to be impressed with a profile that lists only that, precisely because it means the man isn't playing the game, so there must be a red flag. (Moreover, women who value traits suppressed by society, regardless of their domain -- geek or otherwise -- are in tremendous demand and seldom appear on these sites, as they have the same kind of "niche value" as some of the more questionable authors who still see publication when writing for large franchises.)
There is a moral line you don't have to cross, but you have to be prepared to sell yourself. If you want a girl who wants to be attractive to you, you have to want to be attractive to her. (If you don't want a girl who wants to be attractive to you, then you are looking for tolerance and not interest, and are not going to achieve a healthy relationship.) If you're not willing to put your best qualities forward, you're not putting in the effort on the girl's behalf, and in the context of massive social phenomena, society gets to decide what "best qualities" are, even if they are relevant to neither of the interested parties.
Re:Cooking for Engineers
on
Cooking For Geeks
·
· Score: 4, Informative
As someone who has recently went on a (self-inflicted) diet and exercise program, I want to chime in that this is pretty much right on the money. Pretty much the most important thing is getting your meal count up and your portion size down. Your body only has about five hundred calories of L2 cache, and topping that means your metabolism is having to go to main memory, which is something you want to avoid.
I chose this comment to reply to as it was your most recent.
The stuff you've been posting through this thread about your methods, insights, and experiences is really, really interesting to a fledgling PhD student, and you've put a lot of effort into composing clear, well-phrased replies to a number of questions. I just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to put it into writing; people like you are what keep me coming back to this site, because by God there are honestly intelligent people out there willing to talk about interesting stuff.
It's hard to find a spot to chime in amidst all this, so I thought I'd toss this out here.
How exactly can a film be "popular" and not "good"? You are presupposing an objective measure of "good", which is fine -- but I am curious as to what it is. Avatar was hugely popular and made boatloads of money, and I hear people panning it on here all the time. I'm genuinely curious to hear an explanation on how a movie can be both "tremendously successful" and "bad" simultaneously.
I'm afraid what I'm going to get is elitism, but regardless, I'm listening.
The problem with that line of thought is the leaders elect achieved that position through a competitive process, part of which included making themselves visible to begin with. Leaders are not elected from a perfectly lateral sample of the population. I have no chance of becoming President, nor my neighbor, or professor.
The candidate group is pre-screened to be a group of people who want to be elected, are capable of making themselves visible to the public, can reduce, eliminate, or discredit opposition, and can convince constituents that their election is in the best interests of all. That is a custom recipe for selecting "powerful sociopaths."
So I would submit that indeed, the popular elect represent the grossest extent of greed and power hunger in a context including the general population.
We're deep enough into this thread where this may not be read, but allow me to offer my view.
Marriage has been for years a way to ensure an equal distribution of males to females. Attraction develops from ancient rites of selection which favored those that were stronger, faster, and more likely to survive. However, as a requirement for society to develop, we suddenly need "experts" in various fields not directly connected to survival -- i.e. the person good at farming may not be "attractive", the person who knows how to predict the weather may not be "attractive", and so forth. We'll call these "beta mates", and under a non-rigorous system they would simply never mate, and therefore have much less reason to participate in society -- depriving it of their expertise.
There is another factor, as well. Historically, it has been shown that in unstructured environments, a greater number of females mated than males. The deduction to be made is that females will flock to a male they consider attractive, accepting the presence of other mates in exchange for the higher attraction and potentially stronger offspring. That we don't see this as often nowadays is precisely because of the point I'm about to make:
Structured monogamous marriage is a method of distributing males and females equally, and provides all mates ("alpha" and "beta") with a reward for participating in society -- the "alphas" benefit from the additional expertise brought by the "betas", and the "betas" have a very high chance of successful mating. This was for quite some time enforced through arranged marriage, and I would even make the argument that arranged marriage is what made civilization possible.
Polygamy would lead, ultimately, to alpha flocking again, and greatly reduce the encouragement for beta experts to contribute meaningfully to society. I would further argue that we have begun to see the effects of this in the USA with the considerable reduction in the sanctity of marriage and a (I would postulate) corresponding drop in technological leadership worldwide.
If you are claiming that you cannot tell a difference between the 24fps (even with the blur) and the 60fps you are lying to attempt to support an incorrect point.
I will grant that 24fps with motion blur is acceptably close to 60fps, but submit that this only proves the worth of a powerful card, as what started this was someone getting 30fps -without- blur, and applying a blur like that requires horsepower (which could have gone to just increasing the frame rate to begin with). Real-time rendering is not cinematography in which you have all the time and data you want to smooth each frame.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, and 1 exists. QED.
There is no artifact of notation, here. 0.999... is the sum of 10^-n for n of one to infinity. The limit of that expression as n approaches infinity is 1. Since the limit exists and real numbers are defined at 1, the sum of 10^-n as n goes to infinity IS 1. Therefore, 0.999... is 1.
The 0.333... * 3 = 0.999... business is mostly just a shorthand way of making that same argument.
Well, no. In ALL cases where f(x) exists, the limit of n as n approaches x is ALWAYS f(x). It is the same thing.
Kindly explain to me how 0.333... * 3 = 1, if 0.999... != 1.
The interconnects are not the entire problem. Faster transmit helps, of course. But the information still has to come in from storage; it's still held in slow memory banks; it still has to propagate across the swarm. Software still has to be able to access that data in a way that makes sense and can scale to half a million nodes. Connectionless distributed computation is nontrivial, and while lower-latency intranode communication might get us the last 5% it won't get us the first 95%.
You implied a lack of objectivity on Slashdot because the phone was generally poorly received. For that claim to be true you must demonstrate that Slashdot is in error for disliking the phone and against the majority opinion. I was asking for evidence of this majority opinion (demonstrating that Slashdot was showing bias).
I've done plenty of googling. There are positive reviews, but there are far more negative reviews. And while I am not a smartphone expert, I'm also not a MS basher/lover (although I do heartily support OS) and in my experience the negative reviews give facts, while the positive reviews give theories.
The "shill" comment was, as you say, undeserved, and I apologize for that. I was reacting emotionally. I submit, however, that you are attacking views being expressed here as harshly as you claim they attack a (hypothetically different) objective viewpoint.
Can you point to somewhere else where it is, in fact, being vigorously defended?
Is this supposed to have the barest pretense of objectivity?
Your post is full of buzzwords. The sum total of the good things about it that you actually provided is limited, excluisvely, to "I like the tiles," "the UI is responsive, especially the keyboard," "Zune is the best player," and "like-data goes into a universal hub," with no real clarification of the latter besides stating that all of your facebook data is on your contacts list, which to me sounds pretty awful. I have about a hundred friends on facebook, and about twenty people in my address book. Think about that.
You then proceed to say that the only instantly profitable console was the Wii, yet despite being the runaway winner in sales and admittedly profitable from the get-go, it doesn't really count compared to the original XBox because you don't consider the Wii to be "next-gen" and don't know anyone who actually plays theirs. There is no objective definition which places Microsoft as "market leader of next-gen consoles". They have wasted an incredible amount of money with the XBox line; "business savvy" typically points to the ability to make a dollar without having to spend fifty.
And, the final paragraph: you are the only person defending this platform, and you are doing it in a post full of inaccuracies and snow jobs. Flushing money down the toilet is not "big business." It is true that sometimes you have to spend money to make money; it is also true that sometimes you are spending more than you will ever make. The dumb move was not entering the market (again); it was entering it unprepared and with a substandard product.
Another shill outed. I need to start keeping a list of you guys.
Don't get me wrong; I am no friend of Microsoft. But it seems like the AV companies are acting a bit like spoiled children, here.
Their entire business model rests upon the insecurity of MS operating systems. I would think that -- clearly -- Microsoft has the right to try to make their operating system more secure. Security Essentials is a free download. There is no revenue stream associated with it. It is simply a linear upgrade to the system -- a patch for the OS. If it removes the vector by which other companies make money, it seems like the burden is on the other companies to stay relevant rather than trying to keep Microsoft from doing anything to make its operating system more secure.
It just seems strange to me. They don't charge for Security Essentials. It's a plug-in for the operating system. This has a core difference from, for example, the IE business, because Microsoft isn't providing a service so much as attempting to remove a problem; I don't really have sympathy for the plight of those that profited (however honestly) from the problem.
What bombs are those? I'm honestly curious, I've never heard of anything like that before.
Here, here, here, and here.
Actually, Kinect only allows skeletal recognition for its own Avatars -- that functionality is not available to games developers. Both consoles are doing an equal amount of skeletal recognition in the SDK exposed to developers -- none.
Because, quite simply, everyone else knows it's not worth it. In fact, Sony was offered the Kinect technology and chose not to use it, specifically because they knew its marketability is limited.
Sony has already tried the no-controller camera-driven games with the EyeToy, which bombed. There have been all kinds of toy programs using webcams, which are all forgotten. Adding a depth camera does not fundamentally change the interaction -- in fact, it barely affects it at all. In userspace, Kinect is EyeToy, is doomed. You cannot play engaging games without a controller.
If they cannot sell two cameras and a toy motor for less than $150 I'll eat my hat. Do you really believe, for instance, that they "can't sell" a 250GB hard drive for less than $129.99 when normal 250GB hard drives can be had for less than $50 (a third of the price, ultimately)?
If I put a box of trash up on eBay for only a 10% markup over what it all cost me, how many people do you think will buy it? The market doesn't care what you spent. It cares what the price is and what they get out of it. $150 is going to sail right over everyone's head. You may bookmark this post and refer back to it when the Kinect line is officially discontinued (I will give it say Summer of 2012, after Microsoft loses a lot of money, which is what their games division has been doing all along.)
Sorry. Much falseness here.
First of all, the on-board processor was dropped. Kinect places its entire processing load on the 360 (putting a 10-15 % load on the CPU).
Second, the "regular camera" in it runs at 640x480 30Hz, which is bad enough, but the infrared projector runs at 320x240, which is abysmal and the reason the device cannot detect things like finger movements.
The device is not ambitious at all; it's old tech. We've been doing depthmaps from two image sources for about as long as we've had cameras. The fact that Microsoft has made several cuts in hardware and functionality and is still pricing the device at $150 is disheartening, although not surprising given their pricing on things like proprietary hard drives.
Basically, it's overpriced junk that could be not just matched but beaten on any computer or on the PS3 by two webcams, two microphones, and a 5k program (total cost: $60). I would applaud them for pushing development of userspace control, but what's far more likely to happen is this thing is going to bomb hard enough to scare investors away for the next thirty years. They are actually hurting the market.
Curtosey vgchartz.com, worldwide hardware totals:
XBox360: 43.2M
PS3: 37.6M
A 14% greater install base on 360s is a pretty flimsy "king of the hill". Even better, by the most recent reasonable industry estimate (http://www.gamespot.com/news/6216691.html) the XBox360's lifetime failure rate is 13.7% higher than that of the PS3 (23.7% vs. 10%); it's not unprecedented for companies to count claims in sales numbers, though I could find nothing conclusive either way.
The PS3 has a clear edge in processing power and media capacity, in addition to home theater use (Blu-ray playback). Sony had a slow start due to the more expensive console, later deployment date, and relatively difficult development environment associated with the many-core Cell processor. All of those factors have improved over time.
Basically, the "XBox360 edge" is extremely thin, and while the XBox360 is starting to get a bit long in the tooth, the PS3 is reaching full market maturity.
Excellent advice, and I now have, I feel, a better grasp of the situation. Thanks :D
My car got stolen a week ago, so I'm really getting a kick out of this. (No, it really did get stolen.)
Related note. Let's say you lived in a high-risk zone for car thievery, and that you weren't going to be able to afford anything more than like some late 90's economy model car (so, say, no car alarm or GPS), and you really HAD to make sure it didn't get stolen. What would you do? I was actually thinking Club until you people convinced me otherwise *grin* -- any alternate suggestions?
That is the slowest, clunkiest, most visually confusing, least responsive, and perhaps most overall depressing site I've been to this year. God, if I showed that to my boss arguing for html5 we'd get knocked clear back to plaintext. Maybe it's my browser, but Firefox 3.6 is a fair chunk of market share.
And as another person said, this is exactly the kind of thing that happened with Flash -- making fancy gizmos just because we can. This is why we programmers aren't let outside where the normal people play. Just because you can do something doesn't make it appropriate, and applications should ALWAYS be designed around use, rather than around implementations. That radial wheel with the highlighted column and the cheesy 3D text looks like an undergrad project (if it is, then kudos, keep studying).
Even if you wanted to make it 'fancy', simple grid-based arrangement with the same color scheme would have looked much better, and the mouseover highlighting instead of lables is crazy -- why should you have to highlight things at random to find something specific? It needs to be implementable without the interface lag -- grids instead of circles, or text instead of grids, and if html5 can't do it without the lag, then it needs to not be done at all.
Why does nobody want it? Property is not a "yes/no" proposition -- it has a specific value. If the price of the surrounding land reflected the presence of a plant (which it would in all real-world scenarios) then if it were appropriately priced I have no problem with it.
If you're talking about building it on private property or close enough to private property to devalue it then I feel like the owners should be compensated for the drop in value -- but, even absent that, yeah, I'd be willing. Disclaimer: I don't own land at the moment, so my opinion there may not be worth much.
NIMBY stuff (on both sides) tends to ignore the idea of the value of land (rather than a simple pass/fail relationship).
Yeah, and the food you eat was grown on farms that use tools that were made with minerals dug up from the earth with big, smelly machines. The computer you use was assembled in a factory that uses big, smelly machines, and shipped over here in big, smelly machines.
Obviously everything is going to have a manufacturing cost, both financially and ecologically. The question is how much of one can our planet absorb without lasting effect. If you're seriously anti-solar because you can't assemble a solar panel without using a power source then I would like to hear your suggestions for further development.
I hate it as much as you do, but this view is, it turns out, naive. It's kind of like the Prisoners' Dilemma with a hundred thousand participants. There's no question that many, many more successful and happy relationships would turn out for everybody if everybody was completely, bluntly honest; but that system collapses as soon as any notable percentage of people choose to "enhance" their profile a bit.
The end result is the same as in many walks of life -- you have to play the game by the rules, or you're not playing the game at all. Women -expect- men to pad their profiles. If you work in IT or talk about enjoying reading or working with computers, they're already going to infer all the sci-fi and gaming and whatnot. If you waste profile space on that stuff they're going to assume that you don't have anything interesting going on, and move on.
Or, put another way, you don't waste time advertising stuff that's not interesting. Everyone knows that McDonald's is bad for you. They don't advertise it, though. And while geek hobbies aren't "bad" in the sense of a Big Mac's nutritional info, society has laid the law down and called them unsellable. Even geeky girls who are exclusively interested in hardcore raiders aren't going to be impressed with a profile that lists only that, precisely because it means the man isn't playing the game, so there must be a red flag. (Moreover, women who value traits suppressed by society, regardless of their domain -- geek or otherwise -- are in tremendous demand and seldom appear on these sites, as they have the same kind of "niche value" as some of the more questionable authors who still see publication when writing for large franchises.)
There is a moral line you don't have to cross, but you have to be prepared to sell yourself. If you want a girl who wants to be attractive to you, you have to want to be attractive to her. (If you don't want a girl who wants to be attractive to you, then you are looking for tolerance and not interest, and are not going to achieve a healthy relationship.) If you're not willing to put your best qualities forward, you're not putting in the effort on the girl's behalf, and in the context of massive social phenomena, society gets to decide what "best qualities" are, even if they are relevant to neither of the interested parties.
As someone who has recently went on a (self-inflicted) diet and exercise program, I want to chime in that this is pretty much right on the money. Pretty much the most important thing is getting your meal count up and your portion size down. Your body only has about five hundred calories of L2 cache, and topping that means your metabolism is having to go to main memory, which is something you want to avoid.
I chose this comment to reply to as it was your most recent.
The stuff you've been posting through this thread about your methods, insights, and experiences is really, really interesting to a fledgling PhD student, and you've put a lot of effort into composing clear, well-phrased replies to a number of questions. I just wanted to say thanks for taking the time to put it into writing; people like you are what keep me coming back to this site, because by God there are honestly intelligent people out there willing to talk about interesting stuff.
Anyway. That's all I've got.
Ok. We're getting closer.
What is "good quality", separate from what people select for in movies (making them "popular")? What is "unpopular quality"?
It's hard to find a spot to chime in amidst all this, so I thought I'd toss this out here.
How exactly can a film be "popular" and not "good"? You are presupposing an objective measure of "good", which is fine -- but I am curious as to what it is. Avatar was hugely popular and made boatloads of money, and I hear people panning it on here all the time. I'm genuinely curious to hear an explanation on how a movie can be both "tremendously successful" and "bad" simultaneously.
I'm afraid what I'm going to get is elitism, but regardless, I'm listening.
The problem with that line of thought is the leaders elect achieved that position through a competitive process, part of which included making themselves visible to begin with. Leaders are not elected from a perfectly lateral sample of the population. I have no chance of becoming President, nor my neighbor, or professor.
The candidate group is pre-screened to be a group of people who want to be elected, are capable of making themselves visible to the public, can reduce, eliminate, or discredit opposition, and can convince constituents that their election is in the best interests of all. That is a custom recipe for selecting "powerful sociopaths."
So I would submit that indeed, the popular elect represent the grossest extent of greed and power hunger in a context including the general population.
So the innocent should be prosecuted because of the guilty?
We're deep enough into this thread where this may not be read, but allow me to offer my view.
Marriage has been for years a way to ensure an equal distribution of males to females. Attraction develops from ancient rites of selection which favored those that were stronger, faster, and more likely to survive. However, as a requirement for society to develop, we suddenly need "experts" in various fields not directly connected to survival -- i.e. the person good at farming may not be "attractive", the person who knows how to predict the weather may not be "attractive", and so forth. We'll call these "beta mates", and under a non-rigorous system they would simply never mate, and therefore have much less reason to participate in society -- depriving it of their expertise.
There is another factor, as well. Historically, it has been shown that in unstructured environments, a greater number of females mated than males. The deduction to be made is that females will flock to a male they consider attractive, accepting the presence of other mates in exchange for the higher attraction and potentially stronger offspring. That we don't see this as often nowadays is precisely because of the point I'm about to make:
Structured monogamous marriage is a method of distributing males and females equally, and provides all mates ("alpha" and "beta") with a reward for participating in society -- the "alphas" benefit from the additional expertise brought by the "betas", and the "betas" have a very high chance of successful mating. This was for quite some time enforced through arranged marriage, and I would even make the argument that arranged marriage is what made civilization possible.
Polygamy would lead, ultimately, to alpha flocking again, and greatly reduce the encouragement for beta experts to contribute meaningfully to society. I would further argue that we have begun to see the effects of this in the USA with the considerable reduction in the sanctity of marriage and a (I would postulate) corresponding drop in technological leadership worldwide.
If you are claiming that you cannot tell a difference between the 24fps (even with the blur) and the 60fps you are lying to attempt to support an incorrect point.
I will grant that 24fps with motion blur is acceptably close to 60fps, but submit that this only proves the worth of a powerful card, as what started this was someone getting 30fps -without- blur, and applying a blur like that requires horsepower (which could have gone to just increasing the frame rate to begin with). Real-time rendering is not cinematography in which you have all the time and data you want to smooth each frame.