"The basis of the bug is that an internal "space" of identification numbers for objects created in the game (e.g., a dropped arrow, a new creature, etc.) becomes exhausted"
Hah, I used to collect arrows by dodging them. Probably another reason I hit the bug so early in the pre-expansion game. =P
Hah, this sounds like the exact same glitch, and explains what was going wrong.
I stopped playing Oblivion only a couple months after release because of this. I had (for the time) a relatively fast computer and I loved to collect and gather tons of herbs and junk. I started having this problem at around 200 hours into the game.
I always suspected that the amount of stuff I was collecting probably had some co-relation to the "slow animations" bug.
It was a very elusive sort of problem because nothing seemed to exactly co-relate to when it would start, but it would always start very abruptly at roughly (but not exactly) the same amount of played-game time, despite trying various pervious savegames. In fact, I'm the person who wrote the first version of the list of questions "put together that may help find a commonality/solution" in those threads =)
I had long grown irritated that Bethesda completely ignored the threads about this problem. I later saw that people discoveredhow to hack the save files to get around this problem, but I wasn't satisfied with that as a solution since I had no idea what else it might affect, so I never bothered to finish the game.
I'm just glad that this bug is finally getting a spotlight. I'm not sure what it says about me though, that it took an EXPANSION for the average user to collect as many "world-deltas" as it took me in a few weeks of obsessive herb picking and junk collecting =)
For one thing, the legislation that has been suggested would make it necessary to round down on 1, 2, 6, and 7 cents, and round up on 3, 4, 8, and 9 cents. With such a rule in place, there's no practical way a business could reliably profit off rounding unless they only sold a fixed number of items per transaction.
Even if you design your prices so that after tax an item always ends in prices with numbers that round up, they become moot when someone buys two or three of your item.
For example, an item that comes to $0.98 after tax will round up one cent to $1.00. But two of that item will come to $1.96, rounding down to $1.95.
How about for an item that's $0.99? 0.99 +1 1.98 +2 2.97 -2 3.96 -1 4.95 0 5.94 +1 6.93 +2 7.92 -2 8.91 -1 9.90 0
Notice a pattern here? It always balances out.
It would be quite difficult to rig it to always come out ahead since customers will almost always buy various quantities of an item, and probably various items as well.
I guess if you own a store where most of your customers buy only 1 or 2 items, you could make an extra 1 or 2 cents per transaction by ending all your prices on a $x.x9. But anyone who gets that upset over 2 cents for a whole transaction should probably shop elsewhere or stock up and buy 3 of whatever they're purchasing.
EVE Online is a good game for hardcore MMORPGers, but I wish you could enter the atmosphere of planets and land on them, seamlessly, as in Frontier. I also like how Frontier had an seemingly-endless universe, presumably generated by a procedural algorithm.
I still have an EVE account, but haven't signed in lately.
I am now worried to death that my tv will have issues with the PS3. Even though Sony demo'ed the PS3 with the tv that I have, it still means nothing to me until real people post up real info. If you have your PS3 hooked up via HDMI please post your results here. I am looking for a Sony xbr2 (46 inch version if that matters at all) that has tried this. Thanks for any info guys and gals.
Sony xbr2 60 inches-Displays image fine when it is available but losses image randomly. Blackouts happen and then the image reappears. xbr2 46 inch-No issues at all, syncs right up. xbr1 50 inch-only displays at 720p (this could be because this set doesnt support 1080p, more research neeed) xrd 60 and 50 inches-Randomly loses signal like the 60" Sony xbr2
Samsung BD-P1000-steady flickering image other display "sparkly" noise images with 1080p resolution but seems fine with 720p. 4696D-reports no signal found via hdmi sometimes and other times it works great. HL-S5087W-no issues with hmdi
Panasonic TH42PX500-Randomly loses signal like the 60" Sony xbr2
Westinghouse LVM-47w1-Randomly loses signal like the 60" Sony xbr2 42w2-flashing screen and signal loss but works fine via hmdi-dvi 37w3-flashing screen and no signal, turn off the tv and turn it back on and it seems to work.
JVC JVC HD-61FN97-seems to work fine with everything except 480p via hdmi
I never noticed all of the noise in composite signals until I got a nice TV display. The noise isn't interference, it's due to the frequency-division multiplexing that composite video uses to send three signals down one wire. It's most visible where there are brightly saturated primary colors. In my comparisons I seemed to notice it most with bright red.
The main problem with banks in SL is that there's no legitimate way for them to make money. They can't give out loans because there is no collateral. You could take out a loan, cash it out to US$, stop playing SL on that account, and create a new one.
One might suggest having them hold land as collateral, but if the bank takes control of the land, then they would have to pay Linden Lab the tier fees on the land, which will almost certainly be more expensive than what they get back in interest on the loan.
However, an important open problem in math is, "Do there exist infinitely many twin primes?" Experts think it's likely enough that the answer is yes
This reminds me of something i've thought about occasionally but is difficult to explain: is there any research into a theory or at least a rule of thumb which states that limits on a pattern tend to be related to the complexity of the pattern?
Another way of putting it: If the definition of a pattern describes a series of numbers without any foreseeable limit, then it seems reasonable to assume that the series continues so long as it is well beyond the "influence" of any constants and scale of iteration (addition, multiplication, factorials, exponentiation, etc.) in the pattern's definition.
For example, if you define a pattern using the number 4, and no part of the pattern has a scale larger than, say, exponential, and if the pattern continues to behave consistently well beyond the "influence" of a magnitude of "4 exponential", then it's probably safe to say that it will continue forever.
I'm guessing there's probably already something to describe this concept, and probably in a lot clearer and simpler terms?
I don't know if it's just me, but it seems like they've been pushing ECW a lot lately.
Although I found it ridiculous that Sci-Fi added wrestling to it's line-up, I really didn't mind as long as I didn't have to see it (and it seemed to be scheduled for times when I wasn't watching anyway). Now it seems like most commercial breaks start with one of those loud obnoxious ads for ECW, and it encourages me all the more to get up and get a drink or hit the fast forward button on the DVR rather than let a few commercials slip through before I realize that I can skip past them.
I wonder if their other advertisers are aware that the ECW ads are so obnoxious that they may be driving people away from seeing the ads that follow.
A lot of people don't seem to realize that the 3D world that gets rendered onto their screen for most games is an elaborate facade of graphics hacks and extremely clever utilization of resources. To make a fast and visually beautiful 3D game requires a lot of talent and hard work from both the developers and artists.
Unfortunately, Sturgeon's Law still applies in SL, just as how it will apply anywhere you give people the ability to make and share content.
SL is a common area for amateurs to take a stab at 3D modeling and programming, but a very large majority of SL residents do not have the kind of skills that you've grown accustomed to in professional 3D games. SL does lower the bar of complexity so that amateurs who don't know OpenGL or DirectX can play around with 3D. Lowering the bar to make things simpler almost always results in a more limited set of abilities, but despite the limitations, some great talent does exist in SL from people who are able to maximize the use of the tools and abilities they have available to them.
The problem you're seeing is that most SL residents don't know how to efficiently utilize prims to minimize triangles or to bake textures to create fake lighting. But some residents do, and when they expend the extra effort, it looks great. But even then, what is the incentive to go into obsessive detail with texturing and lighting when most people will not willingly pay money just to view your build?
Does SL look like Crysis? No. But SL is over 90% amateurs, and even those with talent have no incentive to make their builds look like a polished professional 3D game.
The real criticisms of SL should be with its scalability problems and the ridiculously high cost to lease space. Once more than 20k users are online, it becomes too unstable to work in. Leasing a dedicated server in SL costs $295 per month with a $1675 setup fee, compared to $100 per month for dedicated web hosting with a small or no setup fee in most agreements.
CRTs may arguably have generally better colors than the current crop of widely available displays, but upcoming standards and technologies will challenge it:
xvYCC is a new color gamut range standard which expands upon the current NTSC color space by 1.8 times.
In addition to xvYCC, HDMI 1.3 will also support a new "Deep Color" standard which expands the current 8-bit component resolution to 10, 12, and/or 16 bits of resolution per RGB component.
Display technolgies such as laser projection, CMYRGB DLP, and LCD screens with RGB LED backlights should be able to handle the new color range and resolutions.
One neat thing about the globe view is that the stars in the background are not random, but are the positions/colors/relative magnitudes of actual stars in the sky:
On the plus side, you might see 30-minute shows becomes 30 minutes long again (but don't count on it).
I always think this when I watch Mythbusters. If you cut out the advertisments, the pre-ad "coming up next", and the post-ad "let's review what we did in the last segment" content, I would roughly estimate that it would probably only be a 20-30 minute show.
Mythbusters is a good show though. It's the only reason I ever watch the original Discovery channel anymore.
That's not as bad as waiting until the last possible moment to merge, though.
I presume that they do this on purpose, especially when traffic is slowed or stopped. They get to end of the merge zone so they can get in line as far ahead as possible. I can somewhat excuse this behavior for the people who are legitimately entering the highway, but then there are the ones who were already on the highway and switch out of the main lanes of traffic into the onramp merge lane and abuse it to cut ahead as far as possible. Some chump always lets them back in too. >:(
Because the prevailing attitude in America today is distilled to "If you're not with us, you're against us."
Absolute polarization is widespread these days in America: If you are at all critical of A, you are automatically labeled as a B-supporter, so they will automatically respond by attacking B.
This reminds me of a problem I've been occasionally thinking about for a few years now.
What *minimal* texture would you need to have in order to generate any arbitrary bitonal image using offsets, rotations, flipping, and scaling?
For example, a 2x2 grid has the following combinations: 00 00 10 01 00 10 11 01 00 10 01 10 11 11 01 11 00 10 00 00 01 10 00 01 11 01 10 11 10 01 11 11
All of these can be represented in a texture by properly offsetting, rotating, and/or scaling a 2x2 segment of the following: 1010 1100
In the image shown on the link of the parent poster, it shows all possible 3x3 glyphs, which is partway to solving the problem, but the hard part is combining these glyphs together into a single texture in a way that minimizes texture size -- using texture offset, rotation, flipping, and scaling techniques.
For example, the first two columns of 3x3 glyphs from the parent link: 000 100 000 000 000 000 100 010 000 000 000 000
could be combined into a single 4x3 texture: 0000 0100 0000
Assuming we start by scaling our texture so only the left 3x3 portion of it is shown (cropping off the 4th column out of view): - The first glyph (empty) can be easily achieved by scaling any 0-pixel up until all 1-pixels are no longer in view. - The second glyph (corner pixel) can be achieved by offsetting down and right one unit (the top row will wrap to the bottom). - The third glyph can be achieved by offsetting right one unit. - The fourth glyph is already shown by default with our starting scale and position.
This is just for a small subset of 3x3 glyphs. The real problem is figuring out a way to generate the minimal texture which will handle *any* 3x3 glyph. And once that is done, going up to solving any 4x4 glyph, 5x5, 6x6, etc. My only approach so far is to manually design the best minimal texture I can and keep reducing it further as I discover new ways to optimize it. Unfortunately this will not scale as the combinations get more mind-bogglingly complex. I figure there must be a much more elegant way to solve this problem for any n x n size glyphs, but it sounds like a problem better suited to someone who has majored in math. For me, it just remains an ongoing curiosity that I reflect upon occasionally. =)
Slashdot Mirror
You can do that too. If I recall correctly, I think there is a 50% chance that getting hit by an arrow puts it directly into your inventory =)
"The basis of the bug is that an internal "space" of identification numbers for objects created in the game (e.g., a dropped arrow, a new creature, etc.) becomes exhausted"
Hah, I used to collect arrows by dodging them. Probably another reason I hit the bug so early in the pre-expansion game. =P
Hah, this sounds like the exact same glitch, and explains what was going wrong.
I stopped playing Oblivion only a couple months after release because of this. I had (for the time) a relatively fast computer and I loved to collect and gather tons of herbs and junk. I started having this problem at around 200 hours into the game.
I always suspected that the amount of stuff I was collecting probably had some co-relation to the "slow animations" bug.
It was a very elusive sort of problem because nothing seemed to exactly co-relate to when it would start, but it would always start very abruptly at roughly (but not exactly) the same amount of played-game time, despite trying various pervious savegames. In fact, I'm the person who wrote the first version of the list of questions "put together that may help find a commonality/solution" in those threads =)
I had long grown irritated that Bethesda completely ignored the threads about this problem. I later saw that people discoveredhow to hack the save files to get around this problem, but I wasn't satisfied with that as a solution since I had no idea what else it might affect, so I never bothered to finish the game.
I'm just glad that this bug is finally getting a spotlight. I'm not sure what it says about me though, that it took an EXPANSION for the average user to collect as many "world-deltas" as it took me in a few weeks of obsessive herb picking and junk collecting =)
This kind of reminds me of the businesses that "sell" lunar property, or the right to name a star.
One thing to keep in mind though: more mass = more crumple.
c hool-buss.html
Example: http://necromanc.blogspot.com/2006/12/hummer-vs-s
The only way such meta-laws (including the no-riders type of laws) can work is through a constitutional amendment.
For example, an item that comes to $0.98 after tax will round up one cent to $1.00. But two of that item will come to $1.96, rounding down to $1.95.
Oops, this should read:
For example, an item that comes to $0.98 after tax will round up two cents to $1.00. But two of that item will come to $1.96, rounding down to $1.95.
For one thing, the legislation that has been suggested would make it necessary to round down on 1, 2, 6, and 7 cents, and round up on 3, 4, 8, and 9 cents. With such a rule in place, there's no practical way a business could reliably profit off rounding unless they only sold a fixed number of items per transaction.
Even if you design your prices so that after tax an item always ends in prices with numbers that round up, they become moot when someone buys two or three of your item.
For example, an item that comes to $0.98 after tax will round up one cent to $1.00. But two of that item will come to $1.96, rounding down to $1.95.
0.98 +2
1.96 -1
2.94 +1
3.92 -2
4.90 0
5.88 +2
6.86 -1
7.84 +1
8.82 -2
9.80 0
How about for an item that's $0.99?
0.99 +1
1.98 +2
2.97 -2
3.96 -1
4.95 0
5.94 +1
6.93 +2
7.92 -2
8.91 -1
9.90 0
Notice a pattern here? It always balances out.
It would be quite difficult to rig it to always come out ahead since customers will almost always buy various quantities of an item, and probably various items as well.
I guess if you own a store where most of your customers buy only 1 or 2 items, you could make an extra 1 or 2 cents per transaction by ending all your prices on a $x.x9. But anyone who gets that upset over 2 cents for a whole transaction should probably shop elsewhere or stock up and buy 3 of whatever they're purchasing.
EVE Online is a good game for hardcore MMORPGers, but I wish you could enter the atmosphere of planets and land on them, seamlessly, as in Frontier. I also like how Frontier had an seemingly-endless universe, presumably generated by a procedural algorithm.
I still have an EVE account, but haven't signed in lately.
From phantomhitman on AVS Forums thread http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=7
Oops, my second link should have been to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_video
I'm a big fan of plain ol' RCA jacks: Red and white for audio, yellow for video.
Of course you're referring to composite signals there. Simply adding two more RCA cables will get you a *much* better component signal.
Check out the wikipedia articles on composite video and component video.
I never noticed all of the noise in composite signals until I got a nice TV display. The noise isn't interference, it's due to the frequency-division multiplexing that composite video uses to send three signals down one wire. It's most visible where there are brightly saturated primary colors. In my comparisons I seemed to notice it most with bright red.
The main problem with banks in SL is that there's no legitimate way for them to make money. They can't give out loans because there is no collateral. You could take out a loan, cash it out to US$, stop playing SL on that account, and create a new one.
One might suggest having them hold land as collateral, but if the bank takes control of the land, then they would have to pay Linden Lab the tier fees on the land, which will almost certainly be more expensive than what they get back in interest on the loan.
However, an important open problem in math is, "Do there exist infinitely many twin primes?" Experts think it's likely enough that the answer is yes
This reminds me of something i've thought about occasionally but is difficult to explain: is there any research into a theory or at least a rule of thumb which states that limits on a pattern tend to be related to the complexity of the pattern?
Another way of putting it: If the definition of a pattern describes a series of numbers without any foreseeable limit, then it seems reasonable to assume that the series continues so long as it is well beyond the "influence" of any constants and scale of iteration (addition, multiplication, factorials, exponentiation, etc.) in the pattern's definition.
For example, if you define a pattern using the number 4, and no part of the pattern has a scale larger than, say, exponential, and if the pattern continues to behave consistently well beyond the "influence" of a magnitude of "4 exponential", then it's probably safe to say that it will continue forever.
I'm guessing there's probably already something to describe this concept, and probably in a lot clearer and simpler terms?
I don't know if it's just me, but it seems like they've been pushing ECW a lot lately.
Although I found it ridiculous that Sci-Fi added wrestling to it's line-up, I really didn't mind as long as I didn't have to see it (and it seemed to be scheduled for times when I wasn't watching anyway). Now it seems like most commercial breaks start with one of those loud obnoxious ads for ECW, and it encourages me all the more to get up and get a drink or hit the fast forward button on the DVR rather than let a few commercials slip through before I realize that I can skip past them.
I wonder if their other advertisers are aware that the ECW ads are so obnoxious that they may be driving people away from seeing the ads that follow.
So how long till they announce HD based widescreen iPods.
Assuming the same 3.5" screen size, it won't be until they can boost that 160ppi resolution to at least 467ppi. =)
A lot of people don't seem to realize that the 3D world that gets rendered onto their screen for most games is an elaborate facade of graphics hacks and extremely clever utilization of resources. To make a fast and visually beautiful 3D game requires a lot of talent and hard work from both the developers and artists.
Unfortunately, Sturgeon's Law still applies in SL, just as how it will apply anywhere you give people the ability to make and share content.
SL is a common area for amateurs to take a stab at 3D modeling and programming, but a very large majority of SL residents do not have the kind of skills that you've grown accustomed to in professional 3D games. SL does lower the bar of complexity so that amateurs who don't know OpenGL or DirectX can play around with 3D. Lowering the bar to make things simpler almost always results in a more limited set of abilities, but despite the limitations, some great talent does exist in SL from people who are able to maximize the use of the tools and abilities they have available to them.
The problem you're seeing is that most SL residents don't know how to efficiently utilize prims to minimize triangles or to bake textures to create fake lighting. But some residents do, and when they expend the extra effort, it looks great. But even then, what is the incentive to go into obsessive detail with texturing and lighting when most people will not willingly pay money just to view your build?
Does SL look like Crysis? No. But SL is over 90% amateurs, and even those with talent have no incentive to make their builds look like a polished professional 3D game.
The real criticisms of SL should be with its scalability problems and the ridiculously high cost to lease space. Once more than 20k users are online, it becomes too unstable to work in. Leasing a dedicated server in SL costs $295 per month with a $1675 setup fee, compared to $100 per month for dedicated web hosting with a small or no setup fee in most agreements.
The fact that the parent is not modded up is a good example of how young slashdotters must be these days.
Damn kids! *shakes a cane* =)
One neat thing about the globe view is that the stars in the background are not random, but are the positions/colors/relative magnitudes of actual stars in the sky:
http://josef.org/wii-forecast-constellations.html
Try using 0.0.0.0 instead of 127.0.0.1. It seems to make the connection attempts fail faster, which means faster page load completion.
On the plus side, you might see 30-minute shows becomes 30 minutes long again (but don't count on it).
I always think this when I watch Mythbusters. If you cut out the advertisments, the pre-ad "coming up next", and the post-ad "let's review what we did in the last segment" content, I would roughly estimate that it would probably only be a 20-30 minute show.
Mythbusters is a good show though. It's the only reason I ever watch the original Discovery channel anymore.
That's not as bad as waiting until the last possible moment to merge, though.
I presume that they do this on purpose, especially when traffic is slowed or stopped. They get to end of the merge zone so they can get in line as far ahead as possible. I can somewhat excuse this behavior for the people who are legitimately entering the highway, but then there are the ones who were already on the highway and switch out of the main lanes of traffic into the onramp merge lane and abuse it to cut ahead as far as possible. Some chump always lets them back in too. >:(
Because the prevailing attitude in America today is distilled to "If you're not with us, you're against us."
Absolute polarization is widespread these days in America: If you are at all critical of A, you are automatically labeled as a B-supporter, so they will automatically respond by attacking B.
This reminds me of a problem I've been occasionally thinking about for a few years now.
What *minimal* texture would you need to have in order to generate any arbitrary bitonal image using offsets, rotations, flipping, and scaling?
For example, a 2x2 grid has the following combinations:
00 00 10 01 00 10 11 01 00 10 01 10 11 11 01 11
00 10 00 00 01 10 00 01 11 01 10 11 10 01 11 11
All of these can be represented in a texture by properly offsetting, rotating, and/or scaling a 2x2 segment of the following:
1010
1100
In the image shown on the link of the parent poster, it shows all possible 3x3 glyphs, which is partway to solving the problem, but the hard part is combining these glyphs together into a single texture in a way that minimizes texture size -- using texture offset, rotation, flipping, and scaling techniques.
For example, the first two columns of 3x3 glyphs from the parent link:
000 100 000 000
000 000 100 010
000 000 000 000
could be combined into a single 4x3 texture:
0000
0100
0000
Assuming we start by scaling our texture so only the left 3x3 portion of it is shown (cropping off the 4th column out of view):
- The first glyph (empty) can be easily achieved by scaling any 0-pixel up until all 1-pixels are no longer in view.
- The second glyph (corner pixel) can be achieved by offsetting down and right one unit (the top row will wrap to the bottom).
- The third glyph can be achieved by offsetting right one unit.
- The fourth glyph is already shown by default with our starting scale and position.
This is just for a small subset of 3x3 glyphs. The real problem is figuring out a way to generate the minimal texture which will handle *any* 3x3 glyph. And once that is done, going up to solving any 4x4 glyph, 5x5, 6x6, etc. My only approach so far is to manually design the best minimal texture I can and keep reducing it further as I discover new ways to optimize it. Unfortunately this will not scale as the combinations get more mind-bogglingly complex. I figure there must be a much more elegant way to solve this problem for any n x n size glyphs, but it sounds like a problem better suited to someone who has majored in math. For me, it just remains an ongoing curiosity that I reflect upon occasionally. =)