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Comment Re:What do you expect? (Score 1) 131

So what your saying is if you make a nice, safe, charger (for instance) but people buy the knock-off that looks exactly the same but causes fires, the solution is to lower your prices because yours is 'over-engineered'?

That's not what parent said at all. A charger that works vs a charger that causes fires does not "act the same" or "ha[ve] the same quality".

Comment Re:Why wait until March? (Score 4, Informative) 26

That was my question as well. TFA gives the reason for the delay:

"Pargman is now urging companies to take advantage of this time window until March 25 to investigate internal networks for the presence of the Emotet malware and see if other gangs used it to deploy other threats.

After Emotet uninstalls itself on March 25, such investigations will be harder to carry out."

Submission + - Quadsort: A stable sorting algorithm faster than quicksort and Timsort (github.com)

Submitted by scandum
scandum writes: Long has the conviction been held that quicksort is faster than merge sort. Timsort (derived from merge sort and insertion sort) was introduced in 2002 and while slower than quicksort for random data, Timsort performs better on ordered data.

Quadsort (derived from merge sort) was introduced in 2020 and is faster than quicksort for random data, and slightly faster than Timsort on ordered data.

Also of notice is the significant performance difference on small arrays, quadsort is on average two times faster than Timsort on data sets between 10 and 1000 elements. Quadsort achieves this performance through several optimizations spread out over 1500 lines of code that get the maximum performance out of merge sort.

Submission + - SPAM: P&G Cuts More Than $100 Million in 'Largely Ineffective' Digital Ads

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: Procter & Gamble said that its move to cut more than $100 million in digital marketing spend in the June quarter had little impact on its business, proving that those digital ads were largely ineffective.

Almost all of the consumer product giant’s advertising cuts in the period came from digital, finance chief Jon Moeller said on its earnings call Thursday. The company targeted ads that could wind up on sites with fake traffic from software known as “bots,” or those with objectionable content.

“What it reflected was a choice to cut spending from a digital standpoint where it was ineffective, where either we were serving bots as opposed to human beings or where the placement of ads was not facilitating the equity of our brands,” he said.
Link to Original Source

Submission + - Computer game designed to treat depression as effective as traditional treatment (news24.com)

Submitted by sirlark
sirlark writes: Researchers at the University of Auckland tested an interactive 3D fantasy game called Sparx on a 94 youngsters diagnosed with depression whose average age was 15 and a half. Sparx invites a user to take on a series of seven challenges over four to seven weeks in which an avatar has to learn to deal with anger and hurt feelings and swap negative thoughts for helpful ones. Used for three months, Sparx was at least as effective as face-to-face conventional counselling, according to several depression rating scales. In addition, 44% of the Sparx group who carried out at least four of the seven challenges recovered completely. In the conventional treatment group, only 26% recovered fully.

One has to wonder if it Sparx specifically, or gaming in general that provides the most benefit. Given that most of the symptoms of depression relate to a feeling of being unable to influence one's environment (powerlessness, helplessness, ennui, etc) and games are specifically designed to make one feel powerful but challenged (if they hit the sweet spot).

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That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers. - Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle in "Oath of Fealty"

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