Just to cement it, UWaterloo's B team was second in the regional, but since only one team per school is allowed at the finals, they didn't get to attend.
And that, ladies and trolls, is how you put the 'p' in "pwned".
So in return you have students who are fed up with school work and labs, just try to get it done and end up hating engineering once they've graduated. I know this is the case because...
As a graduating engineering student at UW, I'd say that you're quite wrong. (Except, perhaps, for ECE.) It's far more my experience that CSers are the ones who end up with a ridiculous amount project work... Have you taken real-time, graphics, or compilers yet?
The teaching and difficulty in engineering programs at Waterloo is on par with other major universities; the professor is the main determinant of how interesting any given course is, and the professors are widely varied. Waterloo is quite selective in letting students in, so once you're here they view you as an investment -- it's very rare that anyone is completely kicked out of their program for academic failures. Contrast this with UofT, which has a reputation in several of its engineering programs for letting in far too many students and then assigning a ton of work and failing out half of them.
Uh, Waterloo's campus store sells that shirt. Of course, Waterloo isn't listed among the "...go to..." schools; Western is the lead-off I believe....
Although many Waterloo students might, in reality, actually suggest "Friends don't let friends go to Waterloo"; it's coop program is top-notch but the school (and the city) can be quite antisocial.
In fact, the article specific recommends against buying copies from places like China, where there is a strong likelihood that it's a pirated copy:
... if you're shopping online for used game paks from today's modern consoles and portables, be wary of the seller's location. 99% of the time any game being sold from China, Hong Kong, or some place you've never heard of is not a legitmate game pak. It is probably a pirated copy, and aside from the fact that you're most likely paying for something that is either stolen or poorly copied junk you shouldn't be supporting these pirates. Only buy from sellers that are local to you.
I tend to not respect people who whine about "getting respect" or how they give it out, as if it were some commodity to be traded. In fact, I'd say that blathering on like that is actually the fastest way to get me to dismiss you as an utterly useless and uninteresting person.
I agree. While the article has a good spirit and theoretically good advice in mind, I'm really not sure which audience would ultimately find it useful as it does seem to ask a lot of parents who I would guess generally regard videogames -- online or not -- as a child's independent means for entertainment.
For instance:
6. Report game glitches. Work with your child to identify exploitable glitches in the game or new methods of cheating. Report these to the game site administrator.
While the idea of a parent being actively engaged in playing the game with his/her child is simply beautiful, it seems laughable that any parent who needed to read this article would have the skills or spare time needed to play with the child and do what the tip suggests. Generally speaking, there's going to be three types of exploits in a game:
(1) Relatively obvious bugs that the company is already working/planning to fix (2) Bugs that have been reported but the company just doesn't care about (3) Hard-to-identify, obscure problems that have not been widely exploited.
There's nothing a parent could usefully for (1) or (2), and as I suggested, (3) is almost certainly out of the parents' league.
In other news, great researchers are not always the best teachers, great athletes are not always the best coaches, and great lovers are certainly not always the best parents.
Oh, wait, that's not news. That's not even remotely insightful to anyone over the age of twelve.
The RIAA/MPAA wranglings are about them making money. They sue people because they're greedy and afraid, but fileswapping affects them in no negative way beyond lost (imaginary) sales. The same argument can be applied to game piracy, but not to game companies aggressively fighting against cheaters and the sale of in-game resources.
Cheating reduces the value of the game service, and leads people who were or would have actively played the game stop doing so because its feels noticeably broken by the inequities caused by the cheaters. It's in their long-term interest to minimize cheating using whatever means possible (although, ideally, technical means), particularly when the game is a pay-per-month sort of thing.
Regarding the real-world sales of in-game items, by not aggressively fighting against this, they could be said to tacitly allow it, encouraging the view that things in-game have real-world value. This opens the company to an insane world of liability (or even regulation) and is something they want to avoid at all costs. World of Warcraft, as far as I know, has a number of game-design aspects in place to help avoid this; their crafting and looting systems are tailored to more personal use (rather than a wide open market system) such that a player can be quite successful and satisfied using only items he has looted or crafted himself or purchased cheaply from an NPC merchant. The "soul-bound" thing avoids item reuse. Whereas SWG prided itself on its open, player-driven market economy, WOW aims to mostly avoid this to improve casual, personal play.
"I find it funny that I've also heard people saying you need to go to school to be a programmer or work in the computer industry. Most of us geeks know that's also false."
Most of us also know that most of those programmers who didn't go to school aren't very good.
Yes, there are exceptional people out there who are very good. There are also a great many people who did go to school but are very incompetent when it comes any sort of practical application of their disciplines. When we, as a culture, celebrate an unschooled person, we do it not because they lack a formal education, but because of what they were able to achieve despite that. We celebrate them, because this is exceptional -- yes, of course, you don't need to go to school, but if you want to do it well, school can really, really help.
Learning and working on your own teaches you things you won't necessarily learn in school. Going to school teaches you things you wouldn't necessarily come across or address effectively on your own. These are not mutually exclusive ideas. The End.
But Mr Driller DS was not released at the NA DS launch.
However, apparently because of mastering/shipping issues, the deadline for Namco to submit a master copy of Mr Driller DS to manufacturing was roughly two weeks earlier for the NA version than it was for the JPN version.
Actually, he can solve it without moving the R if he also happens to use the A from PAL to make RATE. As you said, it's the parity -- and in an even/odd setup such as this, two wrongs make a right.
For this reason, an alternate way to ensure his confounding is to leave the orginal R for RATE in the corner and then mix the puzzle up such that the A of PAL is near the top and the A of RATE is near the bottom.
Do it to one of them, and it's unsolvable -- do it to two and it's solvable again; there is a even/odd parity to the edge pieces so it's only unsolvable if an odd number of edge cubelets have been flipped from their starting state.
Whether or not the cube is solvable (even when mixed up) can be determined in a fairly straight-forward manner, but most people wouldn't bother to do this. In any case, once the cube is practically solved it becomes obvious when, of the last few edge cubelets to orient, an odd number need flipping.
Similarly, there is a modulo-3 parity involved with the corner piece orientation, and the total "twist" remains the same (at 0) when normally manipulating the cube, while randomly turning corner pieces could result in an unsolvable total twist of -1 or +1. In any case, there isn't anything "more" unsolvable that can be done by twisting multiple corners that couldn't be done by simply twisting a single corner cubelet either clockwise or counterclockwise. As with the edges, it's straight-forward but normally not worthwhile to determine ahead of time if the twist parity of the cube is what it should be, and it won't truly pose a problem until all of the corners have been properly oriented save one, at which point the tampering becomes obvious.
The Rubik's Cube (Rubik's, not Rubix -- named for Professor Erno Rubik, its inventor; he originally called it the Magic Cube but its name was changed to bear his when it started to get marketed worldwide) has a third form of parity involved that depends on the transposition of the corner and edge pieces. Swapping a single pair of edge pieces or a single pair of corners (but not both, or any even-numbered combination of pairs -- these are all solvable states) will result in the pieces of the cube not being able to be positioned properly, which is again annoying but obvious when the cube is mostly solved. One can determine if this is the case for some random cube, but I can't off the top of my head think of an algorithm that's as easy for a person to use as the ones for the other two cases.
So, to review: supposing you took a Rubik's Cube apart and assembled it back together at random, you have a 1/12 change of this random permutation being one that the puzzle could be solved from -- there's a 1/2 chance that the edge-orientation parity is even (otherwise, at the end it will look like a single edge has been flipped), a 1/3 chance of getting the corner-orientation parity correct (otherwise it will appear like a single corner has been twisted either clockwise or counterclockwise), and a 1/2 chance that the positions of the pieces are such that they can be place properly (otherwise, it will appear as if a single pair of corner or edge pieces have been swapped -- these two cases are equivalent and can be moved between)
Slashdot Mirror
Truly, Calamari are the possessors of REAL ULTIMATE POWER.
Just to cement it, UWaterloo's B team was second in the regional, but since only one team per school is allowed at the finals, they didn't get to attend.
And that, ladies and trolls, is how you put the 'p' in "pwned".
The teaching and difficulty in engineering programs at Waterloo is on par with other major universities; the professor is the main determinant of how interesting any given course is, and the professors are widely varied. Waterloo is quite selective in letting students in, so once you're here they view you as an investment -- it's very rare that anyone is completely kicked out of their program for academic failures. Contrast this with UofT, which has a reputation in several of its engineering programs for letting in far too many students and then assigning a ton of work and failing out half of them.
Uh, Waterloo's campus store sells that shirt. Of course, Waterloo isn't listed among the "...go to..." schools; Western is the lead-off I believe....
Although many Waterloo students might, in reality, actually suggest "Friends don't let friends go to Waterloo"; it's coop program is top-notch but the school (and the city) can be quite antisocial.
"It's like being a baby, only you're old enough to enjoy it!"
I tend to not respect people who whine about "getting respect" or how they give it out, as if it were some commodity to be traded. In fact, I'd say that blathering on like that is actually the fastest way to get me to dismiss you as an utterly useless and uninteresting person.
A: "My laptop's battery doesn't last long enough"
B: "Your problem is you're awake; here, take some drugs."
...which is both the falling-deaths and metal-spike-traps capital of the USA.
"Gamers spend ..." with 95% confidence, 19 times out of 20?
I agree with the parent; trusting IGN to do statistics is like believing everything you read in Score:-1 posts.
The last time you checked must have been 1998.
A lot has happened since then. Might I suggest you take a look at how your tech stocks have been doing since then?
"Rage of the Wookiees"?
I think this story has come out 23 days early.
I agree. While the article has a good spirit and theoretically good advice in mind, I'm really not sure which audience would ultimately find it useful as it does seem to ask a lot of parents who I would guess generally regard videogames -- online or not -- as a child's independent means for entertainment.
For instance:
6. Report game glitches. Work with your child to identify exploitable glitches in the game or new methods of cheating. Report these to the game site administrator.
While the idea of a parent being actively engaged in playing the game with his/her child is simply beautiful, it seems laughable that any parent who needed to read this article would have the skills or spare time needed to play with the child and do what the tip suggests. Generally speaking, there's going to be three types of exploits in a game:
(1) Relatively obvious bugs that the company is already working/planning to fix
(2) Bugs that have been reported but the company just doesn't care about
(3) Hard-to-identify, obscure problems that have not been widely exploited.
There's nothing a parent could usefully for (1) or (2), and as I suggested, (3) is almost certainly out of the parents' league.
In other news, great researchers are not always the best teachers, great athletes are not always the best coaches, and great lovers are certainly not always the best parents.
Oh, wait, that's not news. That's not even remotely insightful to anyone over the age of twelve.
The RIAA/MPAA wranglings are about them making money. They sue people because they're greedy and afraid, but fileswapping affects them in no negative way beyond lost (imaginary) sales. The same argument can be applied to game piracy, but not to game companies aggressively fighting against cheaters and the sale of in-game resources.
Cheating reduces the value of the game service, and leads people who were or would have actively played the game stop doing so because its feels noticeably broken by the inequities caused by the cheaters. It's in their long-term interest to minimize cheating using whatever means possible (although, ideally, technical means), particularly when the game is a pay-per-month sort of thing.
Regarding the real-world sales of in-game items, by not aggressively fighting against this, they could be said to tacitly allow it, encouraging the view that things in-game have real-world value. This opens the company to an insane world of liability (or even regulation) and is something they want to avoid at all costs. World of Warcraft, as far as I know, has a number of game-design aspects in place to help avoid this; their crafting and looting systems are tailored to more personal use (rather than a wide open market system) such that a player can be quite successful and satisfied using only items he has looted or crafted himself or purchased cheaply from an NPC merchant. The "soul-bound" thing avoids item reuse. Whereas SWG prided itself on its open, player-driven market economy, WOW aims to mostly avoid this to improve casual, personal play.
he's not going to win any points with anyone for his comments earlier this year
Read it a bit more carefully: The comments were made in a private letter 3.5 years ago; they were only published last month.
It's refreshing to see that even in today's topsy-turvy world there are people who have the good sense to fail downwards.
Although, I must admit, I wouldn't mind playing around with this
I hear they've hired Neal Stephenson to write a story based on this.
(Yes, I'm joking.)
"I find it funny that I've also heard people saying you need to go to school to be a programmer or work in the computer industry. Most of us geeks know that's also false."
Most of us also know that most of those programmers who didn't go to school aren't very good.
Yes, there are exceptional people out there who are very good. There are also a great many people who did go to school but are very incompetent when it comes any sort of practical application of their disciplines. When we, as a culture, celebrate an unschooled person, we do it not because they lack a formal education, but because of what they were able to achieve despite that. We celebrate them, because this is exceptional -- yes, of course, you don't need to go to school, but if you want to do it well, school can really, really help.
Learning and working on your own teaches you things you won't necessarily learn in school. Going to school teaches you things you wouldn't necessarily come across or address effectively on your own. These are not mutually exclusive ideas. The End.
Bah! I'm one step ahead of this curve. I don't even bother with images: I do all my art in the command line of MATLAB!
...
No, really, I'm serious.
This seems a bit unlikely given the approach Sony took with the PS1 and PS2, but there's a press release to back this up on nVidia's site.
But Mr Driller DS was not released at the NA DS launch.
However, apparently because of mastering/shipping issues, the deadline for Namco to submit a master copy of Mr Driller DS to manufacturing was roughly two weeks earlier for the NA version than it was for the JPN version.
Actually, he can solve it without moving the R if he also happens to use the A from PAL to make RATE. As you said, it's the parity -- and in an even/odd setup such as this, two wrongs make a right.
For this reason, an alternate way to ensure his confounding is to leave the orginal R for RATE in the corner and then mix the puzzle up such that the A of PAL is near the top and the A of RATE is near the bottom.
Do it to one of them, and it's unsolvable -- do it to two and it's solvable again; there is a even/odd parity to the edge pieces so it's only unsolvable if an odd number of edge cubelets have been flipped from their starting state.
Whether or not the cube is solvable (even when mixed up) can be determined in a fairly straight-forward manner, but most people wouldn't bother to do this. In any case, once the cube is practically solved it becomes obvious when, of the last few edge cubelets to orient, an odd number need flipping.
Similarly, there is a modulo-3 parity involved with the corner piece orientation, and the total "twist" remains the same (at 0) when normally manipulating the cube, while randomly turning corner pieces could result in an unsolvable total twist of -1 or +1. In any case, there isn't anything "more" unsolvable that can be done by twisting multiple corners that couldn't be done by simply twisting a single corner cubelet either clockwise or counterclockwise. As with the edges, it's straight-forward but normally not worthwhile to determine ahead of time if the twist parity of the cube is what it should be, and it won't truly pose a problem until all of the corners have been properly oriented save one, at which point the tampering becomes obvious.
The Rubik's Cube (Rubik's, not Rubix -- named for Professor Erno Rubik, its inventor; he originally called it the Magic Cube but its name was changed to bear his when it started to get marketed worldwide) has a third form of parity involved that depends on the transposition of the corner and edge pieces. Swapping a single pair of edge pieces or a single pair of corners (but not both, or any even-numbered combination of pairs -- these are all solvable states) will result in the pieces of the cube not being able to be positioned properly, which is again annoying but obvious when the cube is mostly solved. One can determine if this is the case for some random cube, but I can't off the top of my head think of an algorithm that's as easy for a person to use as the ones for the other two cases.
So, to review: supposing you took a Rubik's Cube apart and assembled it back together at random, you have a 1/12 change of this random permutation being one that the puzzle could be solved from -- there's a 1/2 chance that the edge-orientation parity is even (otherwise, at the end it will look like a single edge has been flipped), a 1/3 chance of getting the corner-orientation parity correct (otherwise it will appear like a single corner has been twisted either clockwise or counterclockwise), and a 1/2 chance that the positions of the pieces are such that they can be place properly (otherwise, it will appear as if a single pair of corner or edge pieces have been swapped -- these two cases are equivalent and can be moved between)
Sounds like he's still angry about "get echelon day".