WWhat is your point exactly? That because apes have a broader genetic variance compared with humans, that therefore humans are not different. Your argument isn't just sloppy, it is silly. Three cheers for today's most ironic post.
A couple of things to think about: Chimps have wider variance because they have existed in small isolated populations for millions of years. Whereas, aside from the most recent population bottleneck (only about 100-200k years ago) people have lived in larger, less isolated population groups. The less isolated and the larger the population, the less drift you will experience. So drift has occurred; just less than with chimps over the same time. After all we are clearly not all blond haired, fair skinned, blued-eyed and six feet tall. It would be very odd indeed if we experienced drift only in our physical traits. Some might go so far as to say that only a fool could believe such a thing; or someone with a well-intentioned agenda. For example, a very cogent academic argument has been recently made for drift in the Ashkenazi population with respect to intelligence - and not being jewish, I have no agenda in pointing that out.
OK, that firing the dev bit was out of line. I know quite a few people in publisher marketing. And they are all nice people who would not go quite that far. Now the CXO's on the other hand...
Sure, but there is no money in going after Rove. Whereas there is all kinds of money in going after video games.
Also, you might be surprised that video game companies relish this sort of stuff. Nothing is going to come of it. So Rock Star's marketing deparment is probably pee-in-your-pants giddy at this point. I mean come on, a Congressional investigation. You just cannot buy that kind of advertising. And right in the middle of the summer slump too. Don't think for one second they didn't play an active role in getting the original TV feeds up onto the main sattelite news feeds for the networks. You CAN buy that kind of advertising.
Come Chrismas, someone's getting a big fattie of a bonus. Funny thing is, once this starts to cool down a little, some sad lout in the dev team will probably get fired as a sacrificial lamb. Then more press, whoo hooo.
If history is any judge, Scientology will be a perfectly acceptable religion in another hundred years or so. Don't forget that Christianity too was once a really crazy wacked out cult to the majority of people. For those of us who reject religion, Christianity and Scientology don't seem all that different.
Parent said, "I don't know much about this person in particular. I'm just saying that in general, that kind of employment history alone shoudln't[sic] discredit him".
Well, there's another angle on this type of thing. Here is a fox that has stalked hen houses. The foxes are the ones that are dealing with farmers and the chicken wire on a day-to-day basis. Who would better understand the choices that foxes make than the fox himself? And, if you care strongly about keeping your hens alive, where better to work than with the foxes? It doesn't look like our foxes are going to stop eating hens any time soon, and we can't say that no foxes care for hens in a meaningful way.
I don't know much about this fox in particular. I'm just saying that in general, that kind of background alone shouldn't discredit him from guarding the hen house.
What I should have said, and clearly intended, is that players cannot fire decision makers within game publishers. The analogy you describe seperates cause from effect too distantly to affect the actual decision making.
Ok, I happen to know a bit about this topic so I'm going to answer the question which was asked, namely, "Why does this happen?" The answer is not meant to be specific to this title, developer, publisher or distributor.
1) Publishers buy advertising spots in advance. They cannot, in general, recoup these ad buys if the game misses its launch. You might think they ought to be able to recoup or reuse the spot at a latter date, but this would have the effect of putting game magazines out of business. Publishers spend 20% of all their revenues on advertising; this is twice as much as the average profit margin for a publisher. That 2 to 1 leverage means that a single missed launch can knock out the profits of 2 titles. Note - this may not affect EA which probably makes magazines eat it, but it does affect other major publishers.
2) Big institutional investors like stable quarterly results. Not only equity investors but also, and perhaps more importantly, bond investors. 50-60% of title earnings are in the first 3 months after launch. So missing a launch can cause big swings in quarterly results. And contrary to popular opinion, that can't be hidden in the SEC filing. The cause of the swings they will lie about till the cows come home but the swings themselves are there for all to see. Let's say you are a really big publisher and have 10 titles come out per quarter (that's a very narrow field, btw.) If one title comes out a quarter late, then you go from 10, 10, 10, 10 to 10, 9, 11, 10. Did you catch that, there's another 2:1 leverage going on. A single miss has twice the expected impact. That's a 20% swing in income. Two misses in the same quarter and you've taken a 40% swing and will be having a very, very unpleasant conference call with investors. Or even worse, if you are part of a conglomerate, with your bosses boss and someone may be losing their job.
3) Game development is not fully mature. Games are still being developed up until the last minute before launch and this is essentially software development. This isn't audio engineering or film post production. By the time you need to start buying ad spots a lot can still go wrong.
4) All media is similar, very similar. This is a problem because the individuals at the top of conglomerations tend to think they know more about all the individual parts than they really do. A lot of problems at subsidiary publishers can be traced back to game publishers being treated the same as other media publishers. A book with some typos, we'll fix it in the next addition.
5) Game players are pissy - they hate getting built up about a game for a year and a half and then having their candy pulled away from them just before they were about to have their first taste. Yeah you know its true, don't play ignorant. But guess what no one cares, because you aren't problems #1, #2, #3 or #4. And most of all, because you cannot fire anyone. This brings me to the last reason.
6) Game players cannot fire game publishers. Decisions get made on a CYA basis and game players aren't the first, second or third entity in that feed back loop.
What I want to know though is museumpeace one of the masses who refuses to believe that physicists really are humans or is he a physicist who refuses to believe that he is of the same species as the common masses?
Do you farm? Do you do sub-atomic research? Have travelled in space? Have you domesticated any animals, lately? If you haven't done all these things, how can I be sure that you are indeed as intellegent as humans? When you see the flaw in my logic you will recognize the flaw in your own.
I couldn't have said it better myself. I agree with you completely. The world would be a much better place if we would just ban religious instruction until people are over the age of 18. It should be considered a powerful drug and regulated as such.
I just love the rhetoric here in the States regarding Judeo-Christian values as being the reason for the superiority of the west. People need a serious histroy lesson, its as if the Middle Ages never happened. Everyone who has studied the matter knows that the Western world was set back 1500 years due to the rise of Christianity.
On that note I don't think it is religion in general which is the problem. Just the Abrahamic religions. Well, until recently the Jews were pretty innocent so maybe we should count them out of that list. The trouble is really religions that promise an afterlife and a hell for non-believers. Those are the ones that ought to be outlawed. And yes all of your deranged fundamentalist out there, I'm comletely serious. As an aethiest, I think you should have no right to teach religion to your own children. Matter of fact, I think its a form of child abuse. No different than feeding your kids opium each night before bed.
Have another look. I assure you the data is free for downloading. You only have to pay for CD hard copies.
Maybe I should have mentioned at the outset that I had used all of that data, from that source, for free, for a project I worked on several years ago. So I know what I'm talking about.
That's the raw data files, buddy. Can't really ask for much more than that can ya. BTW, if you check out the NASA worldwind project you will find that there is an incredible amount of freely availble GIS data being served up on wms servers all over the world.
Had you read the paper you would come to a differet conclusion. Given that the Ashkanazi baseline IQ is 10+ points above the general population baselie, and that IQ is not perfectly heritable (.7 for arguments sake) we can say the following with respect to trying to improve the IQ of ones children. If you, like me, are not Ashkanazi, then an Ashkanzi partner of 20 points IQ less than a gentile partner are of equivalent expectation with regards to the IQ of your proginy. If you are Ashkanizi then a gentile partner had better have 20 more IQ points than a Ashkanzi partner for equivalent IQ expectations in your children. If that doesn't make sense then read the paper and it will.
I'm usually not one to comment on people's grammar
And I'm not usually one to feed a troll. However, a search will show that I have, in fact, never before used that expression on slashdot, present case excepted. Perhaps you have confused me for one of the billy goats gruff.
You seem to intelligent to be repeating such an obvious canard. In the future please double check EVERYTHING you hear a certain oxycontin addict tell you.
I should amend this a bit. I see now that they also changed voltages as they dropped clock speed. My statement about linearity and performance is only true with constant voltage. With a declining voltage we actually expect even more improvement in the power usage. Power IS directly linear with voltage under equivalent clock speed. Using their temperature measurements, the power and the clock speeds. I get a.969 R^2 fit for all data points and.985 fit if I drop the 4 highest points. These give 25.1 and 25.8 C respectively for the ambient air. Which yield 78% and 86% power improvements. The clock speed gives a 66% theoretical improvement, while the voltage drop gives a 43% improvement; which works out to 81% when combined. Thus the theoretical is in good agreement with the experimental data.
It should be pointed out that only the voltage improvement really matters. Because the clock improvement is offset by the increase in calculation time which results in the same amount of total energy used for the same calculation. Whereas the lower voltage is a real improvement. Hence, the 66% speed drop yields a 43% improvement in energy usage. And this is the number they should have been reporting all along!
I'd guess that the ambient air temperature was in fact 23.6 C. This would give the expected 66% drop in heat production which would be consistent with the rest of the benchmarking results. Granted we wouldn't expect a perfectly linear relationship between heat production and clock speed, we would expect there to be a nearly linear relationship between heat production and performance for the same CPU. It's sad commentary that the persons writing these articles don't have a basic competency in physics or electrical engineering.
I read the entire blog. I may agree with much of what she had to say. Regardless, the entire affair is highly unprofessional and SMU was right to can her. She made serious ethical lapses, period.
Bad mouthing students is sufficient in my mind for canning her. If you are in a business and you run around publically bad mouthing your clients, don't be shocked when you get the pink slip and your colleagues shun you. That's the real world.
Repeating stories told in confidence is immoral. I imagine that psychologist blogs would be highly entertaining reads. They would also be highly unethical.
Yes, you are mistaken. But why follow the first mistake with a second mistake? Are you seriously begrudging me for taking your reply in context. You have only yourself to blame for replying to the wrong individual. Your follow up is a fine specimine of Deist logic.
No, religion isn't the root of evil (whatever that is.) But orgnanised religions do seem to make good people better and bad people worse. Its that latter quality that gives religions a bad name and reputation. If religions could find a way of reigning in their worst members (and preventing said individuals from leadership) then religion would be a net plus. But as it stands, by my calculus, it is a net minus. We would be better off and a more neutral people if we abondoned such superstitions.
Slashdot Mirror
WWhat is your point exactly? That because apes have a broader genetic variance compared with humans, that therefore humans are not different. Your argument isn't just sloppy, it is silly. Three cheers for today's most ironic post.
A couple of things to think about: Chimps have wider variance because they have existed in small isolated populations for millions of years. Whereas, aside from the most recent population bottleneck (only about 100-200k years ago) people have lived in larger, less isolated population groups. The less isolated and the larger the population, the less drift you will experience. So drift has occurred; just less than with chimps over the same time. After all we are clearly not all blond haired, fair skinned, blued-eyed and six feet tall. It would be very odd indeed if we experienced drift only in our physical traits. Some might go so far as to say that only a fool could believe such a thing; or someone with a well-intentioned agenda. For example, a very cogent academic argument has been recently made for drift in the Ashkenazi population with respect to intelligence - and not being jewish, I have no agenda in pointing that out.
OK, that firing the dev bit was out of line. I know quite a few people in publisher marketing. And they are all nice people who would not go quite that far. Now the CXO's on the other hand...
Sure, but there is no money in going after Rove. Whereas there is all kinds of money in going after video games.
Also, you might be surprised that video game companies relish this sort of stuff. Nothing is going to come of it. So Rock Star's marketing deparment is probably pee-in-your-pants giddy at this point. I mean come on, a Congressional investigation. You just cannot buy that kind of advertising. And right in the middle of the summer slump too. Don't think for one second they didn't play an active role in getting the original TV feeds up onto the main sattelite news feeds for the networks. You CAN buy that kind of advertising.
Come Chrismas, someone's getting a big fattie of a bonus. Funny thing is, once this starts to cool down a little, some sad lout in the dev team will probably get fired as a sacrificial lamb. Then more press, whoo hooo.
If history is any judge, Scientology will be a perfectly acceptable religion in another hundred years or so. Don't forget that Christianity too was once a really crazy wacked out cult to the majority of people. For those of us who reject religion, Christianity and Scientology don't seem all that different.
Why, Right Honorable Senator Barton, I had no idea you frequented Slashdot. Its good to have you with us.
Parent said, "I don't know much about this person in particular. I'm just saying that in general, that kind of employment history alone shoudln't[sic] discredit him".
Well, there's another angle on this type of thing. Here is a fox that has stalked hen houses. The foxes are the ones that are dealing with farmers and the chicken wire on a day-to-day basis. Who would better understand the choices that foxes make than the fox himself? And, if you care strongly about keeping your hens alive, where better to work than with the foxes? It doesn't look like our foxes are going to stop eating hens any time soon, and we can't say that no foxes care for hens in a meaningful way.
I don't know much about this fox in particular. I'm just saying that in general, that kind of background alone shouldn't discredit him from guarding the hen house.
What I should have said, and clearly intended, is that players cannot fire decision makers within game publishers. The analogy you describe seperates cause from effect too distantly to affect the actual decision making.
Ok, I happen to know a bit about this topic so I'm going to answer the question which was asked, namely, "Why does this happen?" The answer is not meant to be specific to this title, developer, publisher or distributor.
1) Publishers buy advertising spots in advance. They cannot, in general, recoup these ad buys if the game misses its launch. You might think they ought to be able to recoup or reuse the spot at a latter date, but this would have the effect of putting game magazines out of business. Publishers spend 20% of all their revenues on advertising; this is twice as much as the average profit margin for a publisher. That 2 to 1 leverage means that a single missed launch can knock out the profits of 2 titles. Note - this may not affect EA which probably makes magazines eat it, but it does affect other major publishers.
2) Big institutional investors like stable quarterly results. Not only equity investors but also, and perhaps more importantly, bond investors. 50-60% of title earnings are in the first 3 months after launch. So missing a launch can cause big swings in quarterly results. And contrary to popular opinion, that can't be hidden in the SEC filing. The cause of the swings they will lie about till the cows come home but the swings themselves are there for all to see. Let's say you are a really big publisher and have 10 titles come out per quarter (that's a very narrow field, btw.) If one title comes out a quarter late, then you go from 10, 10, 10, 10 to 10, 9, 11, 10. Did you catch that, there's another 2:1 leverage going on. A single miss has twice the expected impact. That's a 20% swing in income. Two misses in the same quarter and you've taken a 40% swing and will be having a very, very unpleasant conference call with investors. Or even worse, if you are part of a conglomerate, with your bosses boss and someone may be losing their job.
3) Game development is not fully mature. Games are still being developed up until the last minute before launch and this is essentially software development. This isn't audio engineering or film post production. By the time you need to start buying ad spots a lot can still go wrong.
4) All media is similar, very similar. This is a problem because the individuals at the top of conglomerations tend to think they know more about all the individual parts than they really do. A lot of problems at subsidiary publishers can be traced back to game publishers being treated the same as other media publishers. A book with some typos, we'll fix it in the next addition.
5) Game players are pissy - they hate getting built up about a game for a year and a half and then having their candy pulled away from them just before they were about to have their first taste. Yeah you know its true, don't play ignorant. But guess what no one cares, because you aren't problems #1, #2, #3 or #4. And most of all, because you cannot fire anyone. This brings me to the last reason.
6) Game players cannot fire game publishers. Decisions get made on a CYA basis and game players aren't the first, second or third entity in that feed back loop.
What I want to know though is museumpeace one of the masses who refuses to believe that physicists really are humans or is he a physicist who refuses to believe that he is of the same species as the common masses?
Do you farm? Do you do sub-atomic research? Have travelled in space? Have you domesticated any animals, lately? If you haven't done all these things, how can I be sure that you are indeed as intellegent as humans? When you see the flaw in my logic you will recognize the flaw in your own.
I couldn't have said it better myself. I agree with you completely. The world would be a much better place if we would just ban religious instruction until people are over the age of 18. It should be considered a powerful drug and regulated as such.
I just love the rhetoric here in the States regarding Judeo-Christian values as being the reason for the superiority of the west. People need a serious histroy lesson, its as if the Middle Ages never happened. Everyone who has studied the matter knows that the Western world was set back 1500 years due to the rise of Christianity.
On that note I don't think it is religion in general which is the problem. Just the Abrahamic religions. Well, until recently the Jews were pretty innocent so maybe we should count them out of that list. The trouble is really religions that promise an afterlife and a hell for non-believers. Those are the ones that ought to be outlawed. And yes all of your deranged fundamentalist out there, I'm comletely serious. As an aethiest, I think you should have no right to teach religion to your own children. Matter of fact, I think its a form of child abuse. No different than feeding your kids opium each night before bed.
See my reply, here.
Have another look. I assure you the data is free for downloading. You only have to pay for CD hard copies.
Maybe I should have mentioned at the outset that I had used all of that data, from that source, for free, for a project I worked on several years ago. So I know what I'm talking about.
You are egregiously wrong and should be modded down accordingly.
Here is free USGS topographic data from the USGS:
http://edcdaac.usgs.gov/gtopo30/gtopo30.asp
That's the raw data files, buddy. Can't really ask for much more than that can ya. BTW, if you check out the NASA worldwind project you will find that there is an incredible amount of freely availble GIS data being served up on wms servers all over the world.
Had you read the paper you would come to a differet conclusion. Given that the Ashkanazi baseline IQ is 10+ points above the general population baselie, and that IQ is not perfectly heritable (.7 for arguments sake) we can say the following with respect to trying to improve the IQ of ones children. If you, like me, are not Ashkanazi, then an Ashkanzi partner of 20 points IQ less than a gentile partner are of equivalent expectation with regards to the IQ of your proginy. If you are Ashkanizi then a gentile partner had better have 20 more IQ points than a Ashkanzi partner for equivalent IQ expectations in your children. If that doesn't make sense then read the paper and it will.
Actually the paper makes a strong case that they are not inbred. Indeed that is one of the central thesis of the paper. RTFP!
I'm usually not one to comment on people's grammar
And I'm not usually one to feed a troll. However, a search will show that I have, in fact, never before used that expression on slashdot, present case excepted. Perhaps you have confused me for one of the billy goats gruff.
With no due respect. On the issues of volcanos and CFC's - you are completely full of it and talking out of your ass.
i splay_article=vn504ozoneed
For an informed history of this piece of misinformation, see:
http://www.sustainer.org/dhm_archive/search.php?d
You seem to intelligent to be repeating such an obvious canard. In the future please double check EVERYTHING you hear a certain oxycontin addict tell you.
I should amend this a bit. I see now that they also changed voltages as they dropped clock speed. My statement about linearity and performance is only true with constant voltage. With a declining voltage we actually expect even more improvement in the power usage. Power IS directly linear with voltage under equivalent clock speed. Using their temperature measurements, the power and the clock speeds. I get a .969 R^2 fit for all data points and .985 fit if I drop the 4 highest points. These give 25.1 and 25.8 C respectively for the ambient air. Which yield 78% and 86% power improvements. The clock speed gives a 66% theoretical improvement, while the voltage drop gives a 43% improvement; which works out to 81% when combined. Thus the theoretical is in good agreement with the experimental data.
It should be pointed out that only the voltage improvement really matters. Because the clock improvement is offset by the increase in calculation time which results in the same amount of total energy used for the same calculation. Whereas the lower voltage is a real improvement. Hence, the 66% speed drop yields a 43% improvement in energy usage. And this is the number they should have been reporting all along!
I'd guess that the ambient air temperature was in fact 23.6 C. This would give the expected 66% drop in heat production which would be consistent with the rest of the benchmarking results. Granted we wouldn't expect a perfectly linear relationship between heat production and clock speed, we would expect there to be a nearly linear relationship between heat production and performance for the same CPU. It's sad commentary that the persons writing these articles don't have a basic competency in physics or electrical engineering.
I read the entire blog. I may agree with much of what she had to say. Regardless, the entire affair is highly unprofessional and SMU was right to can her. She made serious ethical lapses, period.
Bad mouthing students is sufficient in my mind for canning her. If you are in a business and you run around publically bad mouthing your clients, don't be shocked when you get the pink slip and your colleagues shun you. That's the real world.
Repeating stories told in confidence is immoral. I imagine that psychologist blogs would be highly entertaining reads. They would also be highly unethical.
Are you really trying to refute "correlation implies correlation"? Perhaps you should reconsider your position on that.
You're a fool and a troll and I'd hazard that this guy would pass the opportunity to work with someone of your intellect.
Yes, you are mistaken. But why follow the first mistake with a second mistake? Are you seriously begrudging me for taking your reply in context. You have only yourself to blame for replying to the wrong individual. Your follow up is a fine specimine of Deist logic.
No, religion isn't the root of evil (whatever that is.) But orgnanised religions do seem to make good people better and bad people worse. Its that latter quality that gives religions a bad name and reputation. If religions could find a way of reigning in their worst members (and preventing said individuals from leadership) then religion would be a net plus. But as it stands, by my calculus, it is a net minus. We would be better off and a more neutral people if we abondoned such superstitions.