BrightMail definitely DOES have false positives. At my summer job (last summer, this year I am covered by assistantship:) as tech support at an ISP that used BrightMail I don't remember a week going by without someone complaining that our spam filter had caught some of their legit mail. Most of these were borderline spam but a sizable chunk were perfectly normal mail that had no "spamness."
However, there are many small towns where Wal-Mart is just about the only game in town. Not all of these towns were "shut down" by Wal-Mart, some where dying just fine on their own and some never HAD anything until Wal-Mart opened in town. So, if Wal-Mart didn't everything the people, en masse, wanted, those people would have to drive to a larger town to get their stuff.
I agree that you should educate the customer and I DEFINITELY don't think you should only sell products that Wal-Mart carries. However, your example is flawed, I said that if you were not carrying a product in the same realm as the other products you carry, burgers and fries are NOT in the same realm as a product a French restaurant would carry. If I went into a nice French restaurant and ordered a nice meal and they told me they didn't have a specific wine that I thought would compliment the meal I wouldn't be happy, but would order something other than that specific wine. If however MANY people starting requesting that specific wine and they still decided not to carry it, I would eventually take my business elsewhere.
Selling beer and cigarettes to little kids would get you arrested rather quickly so I doubt you would make too much money.
And to be perfectly honest, that is why they are Wal-Mart and you run a small retail store.
Not everything Wal-Mart sells is shit, I think their housewares are crap personally, but they have a function. Other than that, they have decent stuff. An OK selection of electronics when you consider they aren't an electronics store, decent pharmaceutical selection, pretty good food selection.
If you had customers coming in every day specifically requesting a product that was in the realm of what you sell and you wouldn't sell it then you are doing your customers a disservice. Regardless of how YOU feel about the product, if your customers really want it, you should carry it.
Wal-Mart pulled Cosmo because people were complaining about it, especially since they generally stocked it right at the checkout stands where everyone had to see it. There is an important distinction here, they stocked the product until enough people complained about it. At which point they probably did a cost/benefit analysis of their Cosmo sales and realized that they weren't selling enough to justify a group of people getting pissed at them.
They still stock virtually all recent movies and a decent selection of older things (like I said in another post, I recently purchased Scarface from them, unedited). I would imagine an online store would be even less likely to screen their movies as they would in-store.
I bought Scarface at Wal-Mart just like a week ago. They definitely don't just carry edited titles. While their music selection may be limited and editted, their movies are not.
You basically pointed out the error in your own thinking. You assume that Wal-Mart's management is super religious just because of the merchandise they sell??? Wal-Mart stocks what the customers in the area want, no more and no less (assuming legality). I know quite a few people that work at Wal-Mart corporate who are quite liberal (as I considered myself) and none of them complain about the management (middle or upper) being nearly as conservative or religious as you suggest. Obviously Wal-Mart is ultimately interested in the almightly dollar, but name a single fortune 500 company who ISN'T. While Wal-Mart may epitomize this mode of thinking for you, I can actually think of several companies much more money hungry myself. Wal-Mart is just exceedingly good at what it does, they know the consumers in each of their markets better than the consumers probably know their own spending habits.
There's a reason Wal-Mart would NEVER sell that information though and it doesn't even concern privacy. Basically, Wal-Mart's success can partially be attributed to its IT business, they keep track of EVERYTHING they sell and sort it constantly. Huge internal studies are done to correlate sales with regions and individual stores. If they sold this data, regardless of price, they would loose a REAL big advantage to being "the ubiquitous retailer" all of a sudden, Target knows exactly what to stock in its new stores it is opening because there are already three Wal-Mart stores there and they would know what Wal-Mart sells. They would also know who buys crappy Wal-Mart shoes so they could start sending direct mail to them with nice little shoe coupons.
Trust me, that database will be MUCH more secure at Wal-Mart than at most government agency databases.
I'm a citizen of the US and I think our system of government is completely corrupt, I listen to other people's complaints about our government (I am a graduate student at a very culturally diverse university, so I know a LOT of people who are in the states only for an education) and generally agree.
What amazes me most is that people from other countries see the media representation of this country and assume EVERYONE feels that way. While it may be the majority attitude in some places, it isn't the only attitude or even a very dominate one. Most of the people in this country that don't listen to criticism about our government are the same who's life ambition is to be on the Jerry Springer show. In other words, pretty much the bottom 5%, but also sometimes the most vocal 5%.
The antialiasing bug is that lightsources shine through walls, which kinda sounds like what you are describing, but it looked REALLY bad to me... so probably not something that would be described as sometimes...
I've never played IL2, but what problems are you having in Splinter Cell? The only one I'm having is the antialiasing bug, but that is a problem with the GAME not the drivers as it manifests itself on every graphics card available.
In what way is Ati cheating, really? If you think about it, virtually every modern processor does some minor instruction rescheduling right? Basically, Ati is doing this in the driver and not on-chip, that's the only difference. I'm sure in the next few generations of GPUs we'll see the introduction of hardware features like this. Once the pixel/vertex shaders get ironed out pretty well and a lot of people use them. Right now very few games really make use of them and they spend most of their time emulating hardcoded T&L which is again a part of the driver.
Nvidia is cheating and acting like a child, er, large corporation...but that isn't at all what Ati is doing.
You forget that both of those paths are workarounds for a problem with the operating system. If you want to complain about the problem, complain about Microsoft.
I have a 9700 and don't have ANY driver problems, what sort of issues are you having?
Purity isn't the problem, the voids in the lattice aren't neccessarily the result of contamination. Instead, they are voids, truly nothing, little pockets of vaccuum...however you want to visualize it:)
Basically, as the crystal structure of the silicon is forming, a bit of crystal forms around a part that, well, isn't crystal. Imagine freezing water in a vaccuum, the water will not form a perfect ice crystal...it will be very nearly perfect, but not perfect. There will be both miniscule amounts of chemical contamination (which is somewhat easier to deal with) and misformations in the chemical lattice. Water freezes at a relatively low temperature so these wouldn't even be as significant as in a silicon crystal were the temps involved are much higher.
I loved my TnT as well, but there were a LOT of problems with games, especially at the start. If you bought one after they had been out for a while you didn't experience their first few sets of drivers. I bought one the day they came out and the only drivers I ever had that were WORSE were those from S3 for the Virge. After a while they got better, but I bought a Rendition card before they really got good.
If I'm not mistaken, all of Ati's demos will run on any hardware out there that supports their features. They released quite a few when the 9700 came out. Not as impressive as Dawn, but they weren't meant to be overall showstopper demos. They are more like the werewolf demo etc that Nvidia has on their site (which incidently also work on other cards, sometimes...).
Are you serious??? 3DFX's drivers were the best in the business up until the very end. When they were really pushing Glide (the 3D board add-in days), they ONLY had to worry about the 3D side of things.
Carmack mentioned something about it a year or so ago in his.plan, I can't find a searchable finger engine at the moment, but I can assure you its there. Who cares if their drivers really weren't all that great, neither was any one elses and EVERY major company made sure its games ran fine on 3DFX hardware. This is fairly equivalent to the recent Ati/Nvidia driver debate. Every company had been developing with Nvidia boards and only testing on Ati hardware so it seemed that Nvidia drivers were worlds ahead, now a more balanced approach is taken and Nvidia driver bugs are popping up left and right (Nvidia trying to cut corners to eek out every last bit of performance isn't helping, but that is for another thread).
Nvidia drivers were horrible until the GeForce boards. Ask anyone who actually owned a TnT 1/2.
3DFX's ultimate downfall was making several stupid business decisions. They went from a high margin and low revenue model of chipset only manufacturer to a low margin and high revenue model of board manufacturer. They did this by acquiring the worst board manufacturer in the market (STB) which was already bleeding cash massively. They also didn't have enough of a bankroll to both sustain that transition and continue to develop new products. Ultimately their product lineup stagnated even more than it HAD been (they only really ever developed one 3D chipset, everything after that was a minor modification or speedbump) and they lost there rabid fanbase and never gained a wider market acceptance. The company became worthless and Nvidia bought them for several reasons, to remove a potential competitor, to collect a bunch of IP rights, and also to get a few good engineers.
Well, to tell you the truth...I LIKE application specific optimization as long as it is general purpose enough to be applied across the board to that application. However, in this case, the corners are cut in a benchmark and are targetted SPECIFICALLY at the scene as rendered in the benchmark. If ATI had done the same thing in Quake, the pre-recorded timedemos would be faster, but not actual gameplay...that wasn't the case, the game itself was rendered faster. The only poor choice they made was how they recognized that Quake was what was being ran, optimizing a specific rendering path would have been more general purpose and have seemed a lot less like cheating.
This on the other hand, if true, could be construed as NOTHING BUT cheating. Especially when coming from a company that said they didn't support 3Dmark 2003 because it was possible for companies to optimize their drivers specifically FOR such benchmarks...well, they proved their point.
I'm not sure where you live, but you might want to take a look at this site before you condemn the midwest.
http://www.disastercenter.com/tornado/rank.htm The second ranked state is Massachusetts.
Oh, and my county is one of the fastest growing in the country as well, and its not just retired people, and I live smack dab in the middle of the midwest.
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No, he is suggesting that piling 5 people into your huge gas wagon would be more efficient than only 1 in each of 5 such gas wagons though...
BrightMail definitely DOES have false positives. At my summer job (last summer, this year I am covered by assistantship :) as tech support at an ISP that used BrightMail I don't remember a week going by without someone complaining that our spam filter had caught some of their legit mail. Most of these were borderline spam but a sizable chunk were perfectly normal mail that had no "spamness."
It only has to do with "unions" when they are in northern New Jersey or New York and are standing around in suits.
=)
Yea, I want to go to a big, crazy rock concert where everyone there is basically REQUIRED to carry metal cutlery...
However, there are many small towns where Wal-Mart is just about the only game in town. Not all of these towns were "shut down" by Wal-Mart, some where dying just fine on their own and some never HAD anything until Wal-Mart opened in town. So, if Wal-Mart didn't everything the people, en masse, wanted, those people would have to drive to a larger town to get their stuff.
The box says Mac OS 9 in every instance...I didn't see a single reference to "OS 9" without "Mac" immediately preceeding it...
I agree that you should educate the customer and I DEFINITELY don't think you should only sell products that Wal-Mart carries. However, your example is flawed, I said that if you were not carrying a product in the same realm as the other products you carry, burgers and fries are NOT in the same realm as a product a French restaurant would carry. If I went into a nice French restaurant and ordered a nice meal and they told me they didn't have a specific wine that I thought would compliment the meal I wouldn't be happy, but would order something other than that specific wine. If however MANY people starting requesting that specific wine and they still decided not to carry it, I would eventually take my business elsewhere.
Selling beer and cigarettes to little kids would get you arrested rather quickly so I doubt you would make too much money.
And to be perfectly honest, that is why they are Wal-Mart and you run a small retail store.
Not everything Wal-Mart sells is shit, I think their housewares are crap personally, but they have a function. Other than that, they have decent stuff. An OK selection of electronics when you consider they aren't an electronics store, decent pharmaceutical selection, pretty good food selection.
If you had customers coming in every day specifically requesting a product that was in the realm of what you sell and you wouldn't sell it then you are doing your customers a disservice. Regardless of how YOU feel about the product, if your customers really want it, you should carry it.
Wal-Mart pulled Cosmo because people were complaining about it, especially since they generally stocked it right at the checkout stands where everyone had to see it. There is an important distinction here, they stocked the product until enough people complained about it. At which point they probably did a cost/benefit analysis of their Cosmo sales and realized that they weren't selling enough to justify a group of people getting pissed at them.
They still stock virtually all recent movies and a decent selection of older things (like I said in another post, I recently purchased Scarface from them, unedited). I would imagine an online store would be even less likely to screen their movies as they would in-store.
I bought Scarface at Wal-Mart just like a week ago. They definitely don't just carry edited titles. While their music selection may be limited and editted, their movies are not.
You basically pointed out the error in your own thinking. You assume that Wal-Mart's management is super religious just because of the merchandise they sell??? Wal-Mart stocks what the customers in the area want, no more and no less (assuming legality). I know quite a few people that work at Wal-Mart corporate who are quite liberal (as I considered myself) and none of them complain about the management (middle or upper) being nearly as conservative or religious as you suggest. Obviously Wal-Mart is ultimately interested in the almightly dollar, but name a single fortune 500 company who ISN'T. While Wal-Mart may epitomize this mode of thinking for you, I can actually think of several companies much more money hungry myself. Wal-Mart is just exceedingly good at what it does, they know the consumers in each of their markets better than the consumers probably know their own spending habits.
There's a reason Wal-Mart would NEVER sell that information though and it doesn't even concern privacy. Basically, Wal-Mart's success can partially be attributed to its IT business, they keep track of EVERYTHING they sell and sort it constantly. Huge internal studies are done to correlate sales with regions and individual stores. If they sold this data, regardless of price, they would loose a REAL big advantage to being "the ubiquitous retailer" all of a sudden, Target knows exactly what to stock in its new stores it is opening because there are already three Wal-Mart stores there and they would know what Wal-Mart sells. They would also know who buys crappy Wal-Mart shoes so they could start sending direct mail to them with nice little shoe coupons.
Trust me, that database will be MUCH more secure at Wal-Mart than at most government agency databases.
I'll check out that particular area and see if I have the same problem...maybe I did and just didn't notice it or something...
Right now I'm fully immersed in Rise of Nations, so don't remember all the problems I had in SC.
I'm a citizen of the US and I think our system of government is completely corrupt, I listen to other people's complaints about our government (I am a graduate student at a very culturally diverse university, so I know a LOT of people who are in the states only for an education) and generally agree.
What amazes me most is that people from other countries see the media representation of this country and assume EVERYONE feels that way. While it may be the majority attitude in some places, it isn't the only attitude or even a very dominate one. Most of the people in this country that don't listen to criticism about our government are the same who's life ambition is to be on the Jerry Springer show. In other words, pretty much the bottom 5%, but also sometimes the most vocal 5%.
The antialiasing bug is that lightsources shine through walls, which kinda sounds like what you are describing, but it looked REALLY bad to me...
so probably not something that would be described as sometimes...
I've never played IL2, but what problems are you having in Splinter Cell? The only one I'm having is the antialiasing bug, but that is a problem with the GAME not the drivers as it manifests itself on every graphics card available.
In what way is Ati cheating, really? If you think about it, virtually every modern processor does some minor instruction rescheduling right? Basically, Ati is doing this in the driver and not on-chip, that's the only difference. I'm sure in the next few generations of GPUs we'll see the introduction of hardware features like this. Once the pixel/vertex shaders get ironed out pretty well and a lot of people use them. Right now very few games really make use of them and they spend most of their time emulating hardcoded T&L which is again a part of the driver.
Nvidia is cheating and acting like a child, er, large corporation...but that isn't at all what Ati is doing.
You forget that both of those paths are workarounds for a problem with the operating system. If you want to complain about the problem, complain about Microsoft.
I have a 9700 and don't have ANY driver problems, what sort of issues are you having?
Purity isn't the problem, the voids in the lattice aren't neccessarily the result of contamination. Instead, they are voids, truly nothing, little pockets of vaccuum...however you want to visualize it :)
Basically, as the crystal structure of the silicon is forming, a bit of crystal forms around a part that, well, isn't crystal. Imagine freezing water in a vaccuum, the water will not form a perfect ice crystal...it will be very nearly perfect, but not perfect. There will be both miniscule amounts of chemical contamination (which is somewhat easier to deal with) and misformations in the chemical lattice. Water freezes at a relatively low temperature so these wouldn't even be as significant as in a silicon crystal were the temps involved are much higher.
I loved my TnT as well, but there were a LOT of problems with games, especially at the start. If you bought one after they had been out for a while you didn't experience their first few sets of drivers. I bought one the day they came out and the only drivers I ever had that were WORSE were those from S3 for the Virge. After a while they got better, but I bought a Rendition card before they really got good.
If I'm not mistaken, all of Ati's demos will run on any hardware out there that supports their features. They released quite a few when the 9700 came out. Not as impressive as Dawn, but they weren't meant to be overall showstopper demos. They are more like the werewolf demo etc that Nvidia has on their site (which incidently also work on other cards, sometimes...).
Are you serious??? 3DFX's drivers were the best in the business up until the very end. When they were really pushing Glide (the 3D board add-in days), they ONLY had to worry about the 3D side of things.
.plan, I can't find a searchable finger engine at the moment, but I can assure you its there. Who cares if their drivers really weren't all that great, neither was any one elses and EVERY major company made sure its games ran fine on 3DFX hardware. This is fairly equivalent to the recent Ati/Nvidia driver debate. Every company had been developing with Nvidia boards and only testing on Ati hardware so it seemed that Nvidia drivers were worlds ahead, now a more balanced approach is taken and Nvidia driver bugs are popping up left and right (Nvidia trying to cut corners to eek out every last bit of performance isn't helping, but that is for another thread).
Carmack mentioned something about it a year or so ago in his
Nvidia drivers were horrible until the GeForce boards. Ask anyone who actually owned a TnT 1/2.
3DFX's ultimate downfall was making several stupid business decisions. They went from a high margin and low revenue model of chipset only manufacturer to a low margin and high revenue model of board manufacturer. They did this by acquiring the worst board manufacturer in the market (STB) which was already bleeding cash massively. They also didn't have enough of a bankroll to both sustain that transition and continue to develop new products. Ultimately their product lineup stagnated even more than it HAD been (they only really ever developed one 3D chipset, everything after that was a minor modification or speedbump) and they lost there rabid fanbase and never gained a wider market acceptance. The company became worthless and Nvidia bought them for several reasons, to remove a potential competitor, to collect a bunch of IP rights, and also to get a few good engineers.
Well, to tell you the truth...I LIKE application specific optimization as long as it is general purpose enough to be applied across the board to that application. However, in this case, the corners are cut in a benchmark and are targetted SPECIFICALLY at the scene as rendered in the benchmark. If ATI had done the same thing in Quake, the pre-recorded timedemos would be faster, but not actual gameplay...that wasn't the case, the game itself was rendered faster. The only poor choice they made was how they recognized that Quake was what was being ran, optimizing a specific rendering path would have been more general purpose and have seemed a lot less like cheating.
This on the other hand, if true, could be construed as NOTHING BUT cheating. Especially when coming from a company that said they didn't support 3Dmark 2003 because it was possible for companies to optimize their drivers specifically FOR such benchmarks...well, they proved their point.
And your point? There are way too damned many people as it is anyway...
It would suck for several years, but the long term gains would be worth it...
I'm not sure where you live, but you might want to take a look at this site before you condemn the midwest.
http://www.disastercenter.com/tornado/rank.htm
The second ranked state is Massachusetts.
Oh, and my county is one of the fastest growing in the country as well, and its not just retired people, and I live smack dab in the middle of the midwest.