Because otherwise the other companies will produce better products than you and you'll go out of business. Pardon my ignorance, but why not just copy those 'better products' when they hit market, short circuiting the colossal R&D expenditure that the other companies put forth, and undercutting their break-even point while still turning a tidy profit? Sure, you lose a few weeks of sales, but that's trivial compared to the cost of developing a product, which is usually amortized over expected months or years of sales.
I thought of that just as I clicked the submit button... but even if I'd been quicker, you don't expect me to pass up a chance to be pedantic, do you?:) RAID0 is evil anyway.
Depends on whether they're old enough to appreciate porn.
I keed, I keed!;) But most likely no, if your hard drive is anything like mine, it'll be a bunch of random media that I found useful or amusing, plus a bunch of install and system files, plus a metric shiteload of stuff that I just haven't gotten around to deleting (my windows app download folder is now completely redundant, for instance). So your point stands - it's kind of like asking whether they'd have any use for the fluff down the back of the sofa. Of course sometimes the TV remote is down there too, so you can't guarantee they won't.:P
In fact, that (and a very tinny loudspeaker compared to my old K700i) are my only gripes with my new W880i. The 700 didn't have the explicit 'turn flashlight on' mode that the 750 did but it still had the light, I just turned it on via the camera page.
Then again the LCD itself is bright enough to see reasonably well by in a dark room if your eyes are adjusted.
Not to mention that alcohol is very energy-rich in and of itself. The combination of copious alcohol, and the vigorous activity it promotes, may well result in better survival rates.
...uncontrolled, high speed wires in my opinion are far less green than modern coal plants. Dead birds do not emit carbon dioxide. Live birds do. Therefore kite farms are even greener than you thought!;)
But if it's geosynchronous it'd be hard for them to hit any of the usual targets. Isn't this where someone chimes in with "of course the government won't care because they will use it on dissidents within their own country"?
I was just playing off the 'punishment fits the crime' philosophy, although far from 'stupid, unproductive and without actual benifit to society', a properly implemented mechanical-turk-esque system would actually make quite an effective spam filter.
Your suggestion of serving time in advance and then being allowed to commit the crime unhindered is ridiculous. You're basically saying that it's OK for an innocent person to be killed simply because some unhinged individual has chosen to spend time doing public service.
Wouldn't such a scheme be totally defeated by drives with more than one platter? Not necessarily. I always assumed multi-platter drives stored data in parallel across the disks for faster speeds (so for a 4-platter drive, platter 1 = bits 1+2, platter 2 = bits 3+4, etc. at any given position, meaning that you can read a byte from just 2 head positions). This layout would make the middle of a partition physically in the middle of the drive on a single-partition drive.
I would imagine the sheer volume of "best pr1ce c1ali5" would overwhelm them and probably burn any such details out of their minds in short order - remember they have to read each email very rapidly, can't pause the stream, and would have no facility to record such things. It's a good point though - some filtering may be possible, or you could just assume that the spammer would be humanely disposed of at the end of their sentence.
Sure! How would we do that? Simple. Convicted spammers are compelled to work for 12 hours a day in a Mechanical Turk configuration, as sentient spam filters. Their results are cross-referenced, and for every false positive or false negative they get a taser zap to the 'nads just to keep them honest. They have to spam check 1 email for every spam email they send.
At a rate of 1 email per second they could get through around 40k emails per day. You'd definitely think twice about spamming if your example 330 million emails equated to 20 years hard slog.
The reason is that the instant the wheel goes from rolling to sliding the braking at the brakes becomes irrelevant - locked, only just slower than rolling contact, or spinning in reverse, no traction is no traction. When this occurs, you have the stopping distance (almost) equal to dead weight sliding on rubber skids. Yes and no. In your classical dynamics model, yes, you're right. But the fact that tyres are made of rubber and not titanium means that the rubber is actually deformed around and across the contact patch. I can't remember the link (some performance driving pro-tips page) but the gist of it was that, due to this, you want the wheel spinning maybe 5% slower than it would be if it were rolling with no braking at your current speed, for maximum braking. It's not much, but it's enough that you can hear the beginnings of tyre squeal. There is no 'instant' that the wheel goes from rolling to sliding, it's a gradual transition with maximum braking somewhere in the middle of that transition.
You'll notice that on wet roads (and even more so on ice), it's much easier to have the wheels lock without warning. This is because the coefficient of friction is so much smaller compared to the stiffness of the tyre rubber, meaning the system acts more like the classical dynamics system you describe.
I think the 'force-once' crowd are probably thinking of games that use 'action' for 'skip cutscene' (maybe 'a' is both 'fire' and 'select', and in cutscene mode 'select' skips). Nothing more annoying than finally finishing a segment of gameplay, and then accidentally skipping the cutscene. Well, nothing apart from having to watch a cutscene a million times because you can't skip it...
On a PC, you can have, say, ESC skip the cutscene, and unless it's regularly used in the game, you can skip if you want without risking missing something by skipping accidentally.
Actually, if you don't set your D3D device's cooperative level to 'exclusive' then your D3D app has no problems coexisting with other windows. Of course, then it can't change the display mode or colour depth, but does anyone not run 32 bit colour and native LCD resolution these days?
Running at 'normal' cooperative level doesn't seem to have a noticeable performance hit these days and allows you to quickly tab back and forth. WoW's 'Full screen windowed' mode does this, and it's a godsend if you're tabbing out for IM conversations, thottbot,/. etc.
Working my ass off to beat the boss, and then watching a cutscene that assumes I lost. GRRR! Second only to 'working my ass off to beat a level, then having the game crash because it assumes I can't win.';) Case in point: The Terran campaign in Starcraft, where Kerrigan gets taken by the Zerg. Clear the Protoss base, load Kerrigan into a drop ship, lift your buildings off and nick off to some remote corner of the map. Your time runs out, and zerglings swarm until the game goes blooie.:P
Besides, wouldn't quicksaving in, say, Tetris make the game way too easy because you can always undo a bad piece placement? I dunno, if I pause a Tetris game at any appreciable speed, let alone if I quicksaved and restored (were such a thing possible), it kills my rhythm and I most likely rapidly die. Once you get up to a goodly speed in time-attack style puzzle games, maintaining flow is the most important part of the game. Or so I find.
There's almost always something you could have done, or some way to have prepared. Admittedly I haven't played Nethack, but that sounds like a horrible design. Play once, get to level 1 and realise that unless you buy 'Ball of String' your pet kitten will rip your face off. Play again, get to level 2 and discover that you should have picked up a Funny Twig that you need to press a button hidden in a knothole. Play again, get to level 15 and find out that because you forgot to pick up a pocket handkerchief at level 4, you're screwed and you have to start over.
I've always thought it a hallmark of bad game design if it's possible to screw up your game such that you can't possibly win, in such a way that you don't find out about it until much later. The usual example of this is failing to pick up some seemingly useless item that is required to solve a later puzzle, at which point you can't go back and get the item. "There's always something you could have done" doesn't make it fair if that thing was not reasonably forseeable, and it's definitely not fun if the game requires copious trial and error, each time repeating much of the game, to work out. With the short games of 10 years ago, it's fair enough to require repetition, but to find out 30 hours into an RPG that you forgot your coat, and your coat contains the keys for the blast-o-rocket you parked on Mars in the pre-story, and that you'll have to restart? No.
The ko rule only applies to the player's most recent move. Players cannot form loops of length 2, but longer loops are possible.
"Ko rule": A stone cannot be played on a particular point, if doing so would recreate the board position that existed after the same player's previous turn.
Where the confusion lies is that sports are not deterministic, IE, there are not 64 squares on a football field like there are on a chessboard. I believe you meant discrete, not deterministic. But otherwise, agreed - anything can be modelled mathematically, that's what mathematics is for. It's just a lot harder to come up with algorithms for continuous things like that, because computers are inherently discrete, and only simulate analogue values awkwardly through discretization.
Agreed. It's like arm wrestling. If you have a machine with a box full of hydraulics and whatnot, that plugs into a power socket, of course it's going to beat a human in an arm wrestle (heheh maybe it'll even break their arm...:P ) If, on the other hand, you have a machine made of meat, weighing less than 200lb, that can beat a human at arm wrestling while being powered by Big Macs, and is capable of navigating to the bar to buy a round of drinks when it's its turn, then it becomes impressive.
Re:fun/games/make a buck at it
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 1
I've really got to go to some better casinos. The one near where I live has more expensive drinks than any club I know of, the food is meh, and the babes with big bewbs are so obviously either (a) hanging around the richest guy they can find, who is in turn throwing away money hand over fist to keep them amused, or (b) if older, spending their rich hubby's money while he works himself to death for them.
I'd settle for cheap drinks. I don't need the food and the third, I can look at for free.:P
Re:Exhaustive?
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Go for it. The article isn't about beating "UbuntuDupe's hypothetical game", it's about beating Go. There are lots of things that humans are better than computers at. None of that has any relevance to the article. Correct me if I'm wrong, UbuntuDupe, but - I don't think he was saying "let's solve a different game". He was just pointing out that the whole point Go is so hot in AI programming is that its state space is big enough that it *can't* be brute forced, and so whatever-it-is that you need to play it well with a human-sized intellect might just be 'intelligence'. Simply waiting until your hardware is swanky enough to brute force it is missing the point. Of course it may be that brute force state-space searches ARE the best approach to AI. Then again, it may not, and it's worth trying to find other approaches.
Chess playing became a much less interesting proposition when hardware became chunky enough that you could cache the first few moves from archives of known openings, brute-force search the next 12-15 moves, and store all endgames for the last 8 or so moves in a lookup table.
Re:What about this idea?
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 3, Funny
No, he was going to say "what about a bewb", because bewbs are the best thing evar. But then he thought better of it.
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I thought of that just as I clicked the submit button... but even if I'd been quicker, you don't expect me to pass up a chance to be pedantic, do you? :) RAID0 is evil anyway.
...as well as implementing a redundant RAID. Is that like an ATM Machine? Or a PIN Number?Depends on whether they're old enough to appreciate porn.
;) But most likely no, if your hard drive is anything like mine, it'll be a bunch of random media that I found useful or amusing, plus a bunch of install and system files, plus a metric shiteload of stuff that I just haven't gotten around to deleting (my windows app download folder is now completely redundant, for instance). So your point stands - it's kind of like asking whether they'd have any use for the fluff down the back of the sofa. Of course sometimes the TV remote is down there too, so you can't guarantee they won't. :P
I keed, I keed!
In fact, that (and a very tinny loudspeaker compared to my old K700i) are my only gripes with my new W880i. The 700 didn't have the explicit 'turn flashlight on' mode that the 750 did but it still had the light, I just turned it on via the camera page.
Then again the LCD itself is bright enough to see reasonably well by in a dark room if your eyes are adjusted.
Well, then you can tell us whether the snozzberries are warm or cold, as well as whether they taste like snozzberries.
Not to mention that alcohol is very energy-rich in and of itself. The combination of copious alcohol, and the vigorous activity it promotes, may well result in better survival rates.
:)
Someone hail me a beer scooter!
...uncontrolled, high speed wires in my opinion are far less green than modern coal plants. Dead birds do not emit carbon dioxide. Live birds do. Therefore kite farms are even greener than you thought!I was just playing off the 'punishment fits the crime' philosophy, although far from 'stupid, unproductive and without actual benifit to society', a properly implemented mechanical-turk-esque system would actually make quite an effective spam filter.
Your suggestion of serving time in advance and then being allowed to commit the crime unhindered is ridiculous. You're basically saying that it's OK for an innocent person to be killed simply because some unhinged individual has chosen to spend time doing public service.
I would imagine the sheer volume of "best pr1ce c1ali5" would overwhelm them and probably burn any such details out of their minds in short order - remember they have to read each email very rapidly, can't pause the stream, and would have no facility to record such things. It's a good point though - some filtering may be possible, or you could just assume that the spammer would be humanely disposed of at the end of their sentence.
At a rate of 1 email per second they could get through around 40k emails per day. You'd definitely think twice about spamming if your example 330 million emails equated to 20 years hard slog.
You'll notice that on wet roads (and even more so on ice), it's much easier to have the wheels lock without warning. This is because the coefficient of friction is so much smaller compared to the stiffness of the tyre rubber, meaning the system acts more like the classical dynamics system you describe.
I think the 'force-once' crowd are probably thinking of games that use 'action' for 'skip cutscene' (maybe 'a' is both 'fire' and 'select', and in cutscene mode 'select' skips). Nothing more annoying than finally finishing a segment of gameplay, and then accidentally skipping the cutscene. Well, nothing apart from having to watch a cutscene a million times because you can't skip it...
On a PC, you can have, say, ESC skip the cutscene, and unless it's regularly used in the game, you can skip if you want without risking missing something by skipping accidentally.
Actually, if you don't set your D3D device's cooperative level to 'exclusive' then your D3D app has no problems coexisting with other windows. Of course, then it can't change the display mode or colour depth, but does anyone not run 32 bit colour and native LCD resolution these days?
/. etc.
Running at 'normal' cooperative level doesn't seem to have a noticeable performance hit these days and allows you to quickly tab back and forth. WoW's 'Full screen windowed' mode does this, and it's a godsend if you're tabbing out for IM conversations, thottbot,
I've always thought it a hallmark of bad game design if it's possible to screw up your game such that you can't possibly win, in such a way that you don't find out about it until much later. The usual example of this is failing to pick up some seemingly useless item that is required to solve a later puzzle, at which point you can't go back and get the item. "There's always something you could have done" doesn't make it fair if that thing was not reasonably forseeable, and it's definitely not fun if the game requires copious trial and error, each time repeating much of the game, to work out. With the short games of 10 years ago, it's fair enough to require repetition, but to find out 30 hours into an RPG that you forgot your coat, and your coat contains the keys for the blast-o-rocket you parked on Mars in the pre-story, and that you'll have to restart? No.
Agreed. It's like arm wrestling. If you have a machine with a box full of hydraulics and whatnot, that plugs into a power socket, of course it's going to beat a human in an arm wrestle (heheh maybe it'll even break their arm... :P ) If, on the other hand, you have a machine made of meat, weighing less than 200lb, that can beat a human at arm wrestling while being powered by Big Macs, and is capable of navigating to the bar to buy a round of drinks when it's its turn, then it becomes impressive.
I've really got to go to some better casinos. The one near where I live has more expensive drinks than any club I know of, the food is meh, and the babes with big bewbs are so obviously either (a) hanging around the richest guy they can find, who is in turn throwing away money hand over fist to keep them amused, or (b) if older, spending their rich hubby's money while he works himself to death for them.
:P
I'd settle for cheap drinks. I don't need the food and the third, I can look at for free.
Chess playing became a much less interesting proposition when hardware became chunky enough that you could cache the first few moves from archives of known openings, brute-force search the next 12-15 moves, and store all endgames for the last 8 or so moves in a lookup table.
No, he was going to say "what about a bewb", because bewbs are the best thing evar. But then he thought better of it.
Heheh. Bewbiez.