Insane voltage... the 980 is rated up to 1.375V. I'm happy with a i7-860 @ 3.6 GHz running on 1.2V.
Intel's made upgrading much more fun considering you can get a 30-40% CPU speed increase in about 10 minutes of research and bios tweaking. Next fall there will be 8-core/16-threads on the desktop. I am loving Intel these days.
While the comments here are mostly negative, I can say this is a big leap ahead for rendering technology mainly because the rendering is occuring at the hardware level, rendered on the Nvidia processors on a video card, instead of the CPU via software rendering. They are calling this iray and it's developed by mental images, not nvidia. While video cards are currently great at rendering games in real time, they require a tremendous amount of shader programming and only do this sort of rendering within the context of a game, instead of within a CAD application. They are also limited in their ability to render GI, area (soft) shadows and refraction/caustics. By passing the rendering from a CAD app to iray and onto the videocard hardware, you have access to 200 parallel processors, instead of the 2, 4, or 6 processors on the CPU. So in theory a 3dsmax/Maya scene that takes you 5 hours (300 minutes) to render on a dual core CPU will only take 3 minutes with your videocard's processors. With the use of reality server (and enough multiple nvidia cards all rendering the same frame), the 3 minutes drops down to 3 seconds. Personally I'd settle for the 3 minutes and I'd be damned happy about it.
You do not have to spend $100-$150 to get a good keyboard. One modern keyboard that is worthy of mention is the HP keyboard that comes standard on their workstations:
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
It could be part of the genetic code that increases risk taking or increases repetitive behavior in spite of the penalties associated with said behavior. Both of which can be useful to survival - mating, fighting and hunting involve both risk and repetition of dangerous behavior.
I'm wondering when it's going to dawn on the general public that a person is basically one big chemical reaction. If it were assumed that our behavior arises from our chemical nature (teenage hormones, anyone?) then maybe there would be some progress in how the justice system deals with offenders and how the educational system teaches students.
I know what you mean. There's this other really, really realistic movie called War Games that will scare the crap right out of you! It's about this dorky kid who hacks into a really big computer called the WOPR, which runs our war simulation programs for the Pentagon, only inside a mountain. Anyway, this kid hacks into it with his 300 baud modem after war dialing every phone number in Colorado for three days, and the computer let's him into it because the sysop had a really lame password; well, it wasn't that lame, at least it wasn't "God", but it was the name of his dead kid which was in every newspaper article ever written on the guy. Anyway, he gets in (the dork, not the dead kid), and plays a videogame called "Globo-thermo-nuclear-war", and tries to nuke Las Vegas and Seattle. But get this - it's not a game... IT'S REAL!!! No shit! That's what I've been trying to tell people - you think this can't happen - but it can! Anyway, he hacks into it, and starts the computer thinking that maybe we can actually win a nuclear war. So the computer is trying to launch the codes. Then the dork guy goes to the mountain. He says "You have to stop it, because it's trying to launch the codes!". Then the sysop comes in, and plays tic-tac-toe with the computer, and the computer loses, and then the computer figures out that if it can't win at tic-tac-toe, it shouldn't really even bother with trying to win a nuke war, because a nuke war is much harder, of course. So it quit, even though it did get the code.
I hope I didn't spoil it. But it's still really good because there's parts I left out, like the remote-controlled dinosaur.
Patents like this are proof that America has too many lawyers and MBAs and not enough engineers. Or maybe I'm just nostalgic for the good 'ole days when patents actually had to be material... a new and novel application of a technology or product feature that was a result of, you know, actual WORK originated by the person/company submitting the patent. This patent is basically a patent on a business type. It's kind of like patenting the concept of a bank, whereby you erect a building with a "vault" that allows "customers" to "withdraw" and "deposit" money. The American patent system is starting to exist primarily to employ lawyers... patent everything (no matter how stupid or obvious), and sue everybody.
Solid modeling is fine for what it's designed for - accurate 3D representation of an object. In a game, there are a lot more issues though - namely texturing and the deformation of the polygon mesh for animation. Since every 3D engine made for games requires a polygon mesh (usually a watertight mesh - meaning no holes anywhere), you might as well start with one. Facial animation requires a low resoultion base mesh with polygon edge loops in exactly the right place - which an automatic conversion from a Solid model or Nurbs model will never achieve. Animators also require a very low resolution base mesh for most animation work.
Using subdivision surface modeling (SDS) and displacement/normal mapping can result in ultra high resolution models and still deform well. The key for most game models is good texturing, and that's done with ZBrush, the industry standard organic modeling and texturing tool. Zbrush allows you to start with a low resolution polygon mesh and build it into a very high resolution model with the use of displacement painting.
Part of the reason game assets are rebuilt so often is because of the new tech created to get more detail out of limited hardware - and ZBrush is so good that every studio has added it to the pipeline and recreated assets based on the ZBrush workflow. Unreal Engine 3 is a good example of how much detail can be put into a game model with the use of ZBrush.
-However, this one is actually on-topic--Iraq is Bush's war, Iraq is hideously expensive, and NASA is one of many agencies that could put that money to better use.-
I hate to nitpick, but it's not "that" money, it's *my* money, and I have at least a hundred better uses for it than the needs of the Pentagon or NASA.
I wish this country would realize that if the government were forced to use money efficiently (by forcing the government to limit spending to a set percentage of the previous year's GDP, and limit the amount of taxes taken from citizens and corporations to 10% of income/wealth per year via a constitutional amendment), then the space station and/or the War in Iraq, as well as [insert big money waster here like the Osprey weapons system], wouldn't even exist today - and yet we would still have good national security and a good space program (payloads in orbit and scientific data collection) due to intelligent people working at NASA and in our defense sector who can get the job done in the most efficient way possible. Efficiency occurs when there is a motive for it - but our budgetary system of "spend it or lose it" in every government agency, combined with district-based re-election spending (i.e. "the bridge to nowhere"), is always going to create total wastes of money.
Just because NASA is "doing good" doesn't mean they automatically deserve a bigger cut of my paycheck. Especially considering how much of our money they are going to throw away on a mission to permanently inhabit the Moon. We haven't even figured out how to permanently inhabit Detroit. The arguments for going back to the Moon are extremely weak... but we will probably go anyway because it allows the government to take a trillion dollars from the citizens and then convince us that it's perfectly reasonable to do so.
I think the Founding Fathers would weep if they could see how much money is taken from us and used by the government for its own selfish ends.
I, for one, welcome our nerve-vibrating microwave Hummer-mounted overlords who won't cause permanent, visible injury as long as we aren't wearing glasses or contacts.
Or 3. They were raised by church-going parents who loved them, instilled in them a moral code and taught them how to behave. They had lots of friends growing up who also went to church and believed the same things about life and the universe, and they had a fairly happy life as a child, and they see no reason to throw away the belief system they were raised with, and are happy practicing, considering that even if their belief system isn't the most factually accurate, it doesn't hurt anyone, it does improve their own life, and it helps the people around them.
It's very hard for people to completely change the beliefs they were raised with, especially if they are happy with life. Why fault anyone for that? Most Christians I know are fairly happy with life and with their place in it. That's not a bad thing. I've never met an optimistic atheist who is really happy with life. Since we are talking about political candidates, I'll mention two people who stand out as being closet atheists: John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. Neither strikes me as being particularly happy or optimistic. We know that Hillary wants total control of the U.S. healthcare system. Atheist totalitarianism is not without precedent in world history.
Also, a Presidential candidate who is an atheist is not going to admit it. Would you rather have a Christian president who is wrong about evolution or an atheist president who is going to lie about being an atheist for political purposes, because the general public doesn't really want an atheist president? Even if a candidate admitted to being an atheist, they will have some sort of quasi-religious moral system that amounts to intellectual laziness on their part. Many "hardcore" atheists conclude that life is absurd or meaningless and that moral behavior is 100% relative to the culture or times we live in. The difficult philosophical issues of atheism will never be up for debate even if a candidate was pressed to tell people about their atheism.
I suppose you could survive a lot of strange things for a "short time". I'm sure there are plenty of bugs crawling around the launch pad at KSC that survive the shuttle's main engine ignition for a "short time". Granted, it's a *very* short time. But at that one glorious split second between life and death those little fuckers see the face of God himself.
---
Hmmmm. Looks like I'm off to a good start for this years Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest.
I'd been on Fark for a long time, and I think it jumped after the second election of Bush (around early 2005). Before that, comments were basically a bunch of people trying to say the funniest thing possible or derail the thread with an inappropriate pic. Boobies ruled (the NextDoorNikki thread was legendary). There was a balance of left wing and right wing views, and the flamewars were hate filled diatribes with no real point except to flame the previous poster or prove the existence of God, usually by the same person, which is pretty damn funny sometimes. By the second Bush term, 90% of the comments are from deadly serious (i.e. boring) left wing people trying to prove how much Bush sucks (not that we don't already know), the average thread isn't fun at all, moderation is nuts, and the main page has so many articles on it that it ended up looking like an early version of TotalFark. Plus, the ever important Boobies disappearing had a major impact on the fun factor. Just try having fun without Boobies.
...except UT 2004 looks a lot better. Most video games coming out today have higher production values than that CW trailer. Ignoring the look (which is way below Lucasarts standards, imo - a KOTOR trailer is more exciting)... wasn't the clone war story already told with Episode 3 (the movie)? I think the average person can fill in the blanks between the beginning of the Emperor's reign and the start of Episode 4. I really don't need or want to know what Darth Vader eats for breakfast or each and every little detail that leads up to Ep. 4.
You don't get paid every time because people can't make an infinite number of copies of the house and profit off the sale of the copies. If copyrights didn't exist then anyone with a printing press would make as many copies of a book as they could and then sell them for profit. A royalty is a payment for each copy sold, which makes perfect sense. It allows both the printer and the author to make money off of the many copies being sold.
I'm surprised that radio doesn't pay royalties. If I wrote a song and people were playing it on the radio I would expect to be paid for providing music for the station. If they played the song ten times a day, I would expect to be paid more than if they played it once a day.
One good thing about radio stations paying royalties is that the artists might have a better chance of making money. While record companies can lie to the artist about the number of copies sold and how much they should make from each copy, it would be much harder, if not impossible, for a radio station to lie about the number of plays. In addition, if royalties from radio became a good source of income, artists might actually start competing to be on the radio again, which means better music and less reliance on image.
This happened to me... XM is definitely messing with people's accounts. I canceled my service about a year ago, but a few months after canceling they started charging my card again. I can't think of a worse way to treat a customer. If someone charges your card out of the blue just because they have your account info, they are committing credit card fraud.
With its current assets, the Gates foundation will be donating at least $1.5 billion per year for the forseeable future. The doesn't mesh with the greed so often ascribed to Gates.
I don't hear too many arguments against charitable donation, so let me make one. What would be the result of Gates sticking to business and pouring the 1.5 billion into Windows or his business, instead of charity? It would likely improve Windows to the point where upgrading is actually useful. Imagine the amount of money spent on Windows and new versions of Office (Office 2007 will not work on Windows 2000) by individuals and businesses. This is money that's put into Microsoft products with no real productivity gain. This comes at a much larger price than 1.5 billion (Microsoft's revenue this year is projected to be $50 billon). What if, instead of having to upgrade Windows and software that *already works just fine*, we could spend our money on other things... like charities or other productive activities?
As an investor I always wonder why business leaders prefer spending money on charity instead of putting it back into their business. Don't they think that the business itself is helping a lot of people?
Slashdot Mirror
Insane voltage... the 980 is rated up to 1.375V. I'm happy with a i7-860 @ 3.6 GHz running on 1.2V.
Intel's made upgrading much more fun considering you can get a 30-40% CPU speed increase in about 10 minutes of research and bios tweaking. Next fall there will be 8-core/16-threads on the desktop. I am loving Intel these days.
If it's not art, why does it take a small army of the world's most talented artists to create an award winning game?
SW:KOTOR, Halflife2, Fallout3, GRID, etc etc etc.... so many games out there, so much great art.
While the comments here are mostly negative, I can say this is a big leap ahead for rendering technology mainly because the rendering is occuring at the hardware level, rendered on the Nvidia processors on a video card, instead of the CPU via software rendering. They are calling this iray and it's developed by mental images, not nvidia. While video cards are currently great at rendering games in real time, they require a tremendous amount of shader programming and only do this sort of rendering within the context of a game, instead of within a CAD application. They are also limited in their ability to render GI, area (soft) shadows and refraction/caustics. By passing the rendering from a CAD app to iray and onto the videocard hardware, you have access to 200 parallel processors, instead of the 2, 4, or 6 processors on the CPU. So in theory a 3dsmax/Maya scene that takes you 5 hours (300 minutes) to render on a dual core CPU will only take 3 minutes with your videocard's processors. With the use of reality server (and enough multiple nvidia cards all rendering the same frame), the 3 minutes drops down to 3 seconds. Personally I'd settle for the 3 minutes and I'd be damned happy about it.
You obviously don't get flashbanged then FF'd at spawn very often. Hell doth hath more fury.
Which means we are only Windows 7.1, 7.2, 7.3, 7.4, 7.5 and 8 years away from a really sweet OS.
You can also buy a Model M "clone" for a lot less money. Mine cost $15 from Keytronic a few years ago.
http://www.keytronicems.com/home/keyboards/keyboards/keyboards.html
You do not have to spend $100-$150 to get a good keyboard. One modern keyboard that is worthy of mention is the HP keyboard that comes standard on their workstations:
http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06c/A10-51210-69998-329254-69998-3311101-3311102-3311104.html
The keypress has a nice feel to it, more so than any $100+ logitech I've tried.
There is no "the memory leak" or "the memory issue", just as there is no "the crash problem" or "the security problem"
Once upon a time there was this OS named Windows Millennium Edition, also known as "the" in your examples above.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
It could be part of the genetic code that increases risk taking or increases repetitive behavior in spite of the penalties associated with said behavior. Both of which can be useful to survival - mating, fighting and hunting involve both risk and repetition of dangerous behavior.
I'm wondering when it's going to dawn on the general public that a person is basically one big chemical reaction. If it were assumed that our behavior arises from our chemical nature (teenage hormones, anyone?) then maybe there would be some progress in how the justice system deals with offenders and how the educational system teaches students.
I know what you mean. There's this other really, really realistic movie called War Games that will scare the crap right out of you! It's about this dorky kid who hacks into a really big computer called the WOPR, which runs our war simulation programs for the Pentagon, only inside a mountain. Anyway, this kid hacks into it with his 300 baud modem after war dialing every phone number in Colorado for three days, and the computer let's him into it because the sysop had a really lame password; well, it wasn't that lame, at least it wasn't "God", but it was the name of his dead kid which was in every newspaper article ever written on the guy. Anyway, he gets in (the dork, not the dead kid), and plays a videogame called "Globo-thermo-nuclear-war", and tries to nuke Las Vegas and Seattle. But get this - it's not a game... IT'S REAL!!! No shit! That's what I've been trying to tell people - you think this can't happen - but it can! Anyway, he hacks into it, and starts the computer thinking that maybe we can actually win a nuclear war. So the computer is trying to launch the codes. Then the dork guy goes to the mountain. He says "You have to stop it, because it's trying to launch the codes!". Then the sysop comes in, and plays tic-tac-toe with the computer, and the computer loses, and then the computer figures out that if it can't win at tic-tac-toe, it shouldn't really even bother with trying to win a nuke war, because a nuke war is much harder, of course. So it quit, even though it did get the code.
I hope I didn't spoil it. But it's still really good because there's parts I left out, like the remote-controlled dinosaur.
Patents like this are proof that America has too many lawyers and MBAs and not enough engineers. Or maybe I'm just nostalgic for the good 'ole days when patents actually had to be material... a new and novel application of a technology or product feature that was a result of, you know, actual WORK originated by the person/company submitting the patent. This patent is basically a patent on a business type. It's kind of like patenting the concept of a bank, whereby you erect a building with a "vault" that allows "customers" to "withdraw" and "deposit" money. The American patent system is starting to exist primarily to employ lawyers... patent everything (no matter how stupid or obvious), and sue everybody.
Solid modeling is fine for what it's designed for - accurate 3D representation of an object. In a game, there are a lot more issues though - namely texturing and the deformation of the polygon mesh for animation. Since every 3D engine made for games requires a polygon mesh (usually a watertight mesh - meaning no holes anywhere), you might as well start with one. Facial animation requires a low resoultion base mesh with polygon edge loops in exactly the right place - which an automatic conversion from a Solid model or Nurbs model will never achieve. Animators also require a very low resolution base mesh for most animation work.
Using subdivision surface modeling (SDS) and displacement/normal mapping can result in ultra high resolution models and still deform well. The key for most game models is good texturing, and that's done with ZBrush, the industry standard organic modeling and texturing tool. Zbrush allows you to start with a low resolution polygon mesh and build it into a very high resolution model with the use of displacement painting.
Part of the reason game assets are rebuilt so often is because of the new tech created to get more detail out of limited hardware - and ZBrush is so good that every studio has added it to the pipeline and recreated assets based on the ZBrush workflow. Unreal Engine 3 is a good example of how much detail can be put into a game model with the use of ZBrush.
Links (cause I'm too lazy to make them part of the above text):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subdivision_surface
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbrush
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unreal_engine
-However, this one is actually on-topic--Iraq is Bush's war, Iraq is hideously expensive, and NASA is one of many agencies that could put that money to better use.-
I hate to nitpick, but it's not "that" money, it's *my* money, and I have at least a hundred better uses for it than the needs of the Pentagon or NASA.
I wish this country would realize that if the government were forced to use money efficiently (by forcing the government to limit spending to a set percentage of the previous year's GDP, and limit the amount of taxes taken from citizens and corporations to 10% of income/wealth per year via a constitutional amendment), then the space station and/or the War in Iraq, as well as [insert big money waster here like the Osprey weapons system], wouldn't even exist today - and yet we would still have good national security and a good space program (payloads in orbit and scientific data collection) due to intelligent people working at NASA and in our defense sector who can get the job done in the most efficient way possible. Efficiency occurs when there is a motive for it - but our budgetary system of "spend it or lose it" in every government agency, combined with district-based re-election spending (i.e. "the bridge to nowhere"), is always going to create total wastes of money.
Just because NASA is "doing good" doesn't mean they automatically deserve a bigger cut of my paycheck. Especially considering how much of our money they are going to throw away on a mission to permanently inhabit the Moon. We haven't even figured out how to permanently inhabit Detroit. The arguments for going back to the Moon are extremely weak... but we will probably go anyway because it allows the government to take a trillion dollars from the citizens and then convince us that it's perfectly reasonable to do so.
I think the Founding Fathers would weep if they could see how much money is taken from us and used by the government for its own selfish ends.
if she explodes, it's a bomb. If not, well, sorry for the inconvenience, ma'am.
I, for one, welcome our nerve-vibrating microwave Hummer-mounted overlords who won't cause permanent, visible injury as long as we aren't wearing glasses or contacts.
http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?locale=en-US &name=chinaworkculture&vgnextoid=8196c24cf3dad010V gnVCM100000dd04090aRCRD
The politicians are about 15 years too late.
"If yer gonna build a quantum computer, yer gonna need some quantum memory to store qubits."
--
Yer also gonna need some real good smart folks whose readin' and writin' skills don't come from schoolin' they got down 'n South yonder.
Excuse me for a while, I need to go read a few books to make up for the five minutes I spent at that redneck blog.
Or 3. They were raised by church-going parents who loved them, instilled in them a moral code and taught them how to behave. They had lots of friends growing up who also went to church and believed the same things about life and the universe, and they had a fairly happy life as a child, and they see no reason to throw away the belief system they were raised with, and are happy practicing, considering that even if their belief system isn't the most factually accurate, it doesn't hurt anyone, it does improve their own life, and it helps the people around them.
It's very hard for people to completely change the beliefs they were raised with, especially if they are happy with life. Why fault anyone for that? Most Christians I know are fairly happy with life and with their place in it. That's not a bad thing. I've never met an optimistic atheist who is really happy with life. Since we are talking about political candidates, I'll mention two people who stand out as being closet atheists: John Kerry and Hillary Clinton. Neither strikes me as being particularly happy or optimistic. We know that Hillary wants total control of the U.S. healthcare system. Atheist totalitarianism is not without precedent in world history.
Also, a Presidential candidate who is an atheist is not going to admit it. Would you rather have a Christian president who is wrong about evolution or an atheist president who is going to lie about being an atheist for political purposes, because the general public doesn't really want an atheist president? Even if a candidate admitted to being an atheist, they will have some sort of quasi-religious moral system that amounts to intellectual laziness on their part. Many "hardcore" atheists conclude that life is absurd or meaningless and that moral behavior is 100% relative to the culture or times we live in. The difficult philosophical issues of atheism will never be up for debate even if a candidate was pressed to tell people about their atheism.
running a state-sponsored build of commuNeXT OS.
I suppose you could survive a lot of strange things for a "short time". I'm sure there are plenty of bugs crawling around the launch pad at KSC that survive the shuttle's main engine ignition for a "short time". Granted, it's a *very* short time. But at that one glorious split second between life and death those little fuckers see the face of God himself.
---
Hmmmm. Looks like I'm off to a good start for this years Bulwer-Lytton fiction contest.
I'd been on Fark for a long time, and I think it jumped after the second election of Bush (around early 2005). Before that, comments were basically a bunch of people trying to say the funniest thing possible or derail the thread with an inappropriate pic. Boobies ruled (the NextDoorNikki thread was legendary). There was a balance of left wing and right wing views, and the flamewars were hate filled diatribes with no real point except to flame the previous poster or prove the existence of God, usually by the same person, which is pretty damn funny sometimes. By the second Bush term, 90% of the comments are from deadly serious (i.e. boring) left wing people trying to prove how much Bush sucks (not that we don't already know), the average thread isn't fun at all, moderation is nuts, and the main page has so many articles on it that it ended up looking like an early version of TotalFark. Plus, the ever important Boobies disappearing had a major impact on the fun factor. Just try having fun without Boobies.
...except UT 2004 looks a lot better. Most video games coming out today have higher production values than that CW trailer. Ignoring the look (which is way below Lucasarts standards, imo - a KOTOR trailer is more exciting)... wasn't the clone war story already told with Episode 3 (the movie)? I think the average person can fill in the blanks between the beginning of the Emperor's reign and the start of Episode 4. I really don't need or want to know what Darth Vader eats for breakfast or each and every little detail that leads up to Ep. 4.
You don't get paid every time because people can't make an infinite number of copies of the house and profit off the sale of the copies. If copyrights didn't exist then anyone with a printing press would make as many copies of a book as they could and then sell them for profit. A royalty is a payment for each copy sold, which makes perfect sense. It allows both the printer and the author to make money off of the many copies being sold.
I'm surprised that radio doesn't pay royalties. If I wrote a song and people were playing it on the radio I would expect to be paid for providing music for the station. If they played the song ten times a day, I would expect to be paid more than if they played it once a day.
One good thing about radio stations paying royalties is that the artists might have a better chance of making money. While record companies can lie to the artist about the number of copies sold and how much they should make from each copy, it would be much harder, if not impossible, for a radio station to lie about the number of plays. In addition, if royalties from radio became a good source of income, artists might actually start competing to be on the radio again, which means better music and less reliance on image.
This happened to me... XM is definitely messing with people's accounts. I canceled my service about a year ago, but a few months after canceling they started charging my card again. I can't think of a worse way to treat a customer. If someone charges your card out of the blue just because they have your account info, they are committing credit card fraud.
With its current assets, the Gates foundation will be donating at least $1.5 billion per year for the forseeable future. The doesn't mesh with the greed so often ascribed to Gates.
I don't hear too many arguments against charitable donation, so let me make one. What would be the result of Gates sticking to business and pouring the 1.5 billion into Windows or his business, instead of charity? It would likely improve Windows to the point where upgrading is actually useful. Imagine the amount of money spent on Windows and new versions of Office (Office 2007 will not work on Windows 2000) by individuals and businesses. This is money that's put into Microsoft products with no real productivity gain. This comes at a much larger price than 1.5 billion (Microsoft's revenue this year is projected to be $50 billon). What if, instead of having to upgrade Windows and software that *already works just fine*, we could spend our money on other things... like charities or other productive activities?
As an investor I always wonder why business leaders prefer spending money on charity instead of putting it back into their business. Don't they think that the business itself is helping a lot of people?