Didn't realize the same guy had programmed both. I had E.T., and while it wasn't my favorite game, I played it now and then. Yeah, it had some odd collision detection and frustrating controls, but so did quite a few Atari games. The manual was also mandatory reading, but with that you could play and beat the game.
I didn't own Raiders, but tried to play it when visiting friends or relatives. I never got to see the manual, and without the manual found that game equally unplayable. I would die on the second screen every time, no matter where I went or what I did. I couldn't ever figure out what anything was. To this day Raiders sticks in my mind as one of the more frustrating Atari games I tried.
The last time I listened to a GPS, it saw a large bend in the interstate in Colorado Springs and had me exit the highway, drive twenty blocks through downtown traffic, and get back on the highway. There was no highway accident or slowdown, it was just trying to shave off half a mile or so.
Admittedly, this was maybe 8 years ago. They've probably come a long way since then. The same unit later that day had me take a left at a light and then perform a U-turn, rather than simply turning right.
Huh. I wonder if one of the old Atari books from my childhood would be there. I spent many curious hours reading one that my godmother gave me, full of games and other programs for the Atari. Only reading, you see, because the Atari I owned was the 2600 game console, no programming possible. I still enjoyed reading the book and imagining playing the games, though.
just play the damn game for an hour/day and you'll get all the gold you need.
Blech. I don't have an hour a day in perpetuity to keep up. Honestly, after a couple of weeks of playing, it gets boring. So I take a few months off, and I'm behind. I grind for a week or two, pick up a few things, get bored, take a few months more off, and I'm further behind. I've never touched a bot, but some way of keeping up with the never-ending stream of stuff would be nice.
Alternately, Blizzard could recognize that ever-increasing gulf and find other ways for players to catch up. Dramatically drop the crafting price of cards more than a year old. Let you get 2-for-1 on really ancient packs. Give away the common and uncommon cards from really old sets. I know, they want my money, so it probably won't happen. I'm not going to give them my money, so they lose me as a player.
Yep. Once I got out of the car, I sat down and wrote out the proof, which was indeed pretty simple algebra. Then I played around with some visual representations of the squares and other multiples using graph paper, which was briefly entertaining but not as educational. The main thing I kept from it was the mnemonic trick for occasional shortcuts. Sometimes it's easier to remember perfect squares or do a little subtraction in your head than to multiply large numbers.
I would imagine it varies a lot from person to person. I really liked patterns, for one. Any time a sequence or series came up, I really enjoyed it. And the shapes, in geometry, but absolutely not the proofs. One of my favorite moments came in 5th grade, learning about different bases, and converting from one to another. I told myself then, "This is so much fun, I wish I could do it as a job." Curiously enough, a decade later I landed a job doing web design and did get to occasionally translate between decimal and hexidecimal for HTML colors. You could call it a dream come true, though I think some of the joy of converting bases had faded by then.
I didn't have it quite that bad, but vaguely similar. My 6th grade math teacher realized I didn't need to be there and assigned me self-paced algebra instead. I was lazy, but eventually worked through quite a bit of the book. Then 7th grade came, and I was back in pre-algebra, before 8th grade had algebra again. I dealt with the boredom by reading novels through all of 7th and half of 8th grade (before it got ahead of where I had been) math. The teacher for 7-8 had mixed feelings, sometimes just letting me space out, other times pestering me to pay attention. She at least liked me, and supported me in the after-school math program, where I was an enthusiastic participant.
Random mathematical inquiry that you might enjoy: I once spent a road trip mucking around with a system of turning multiplication problems into subtraction problems, using the average and difference of two numbers and their squares. Perhaps better explained by example: I noticed that a pattern held where if you started with a number and squared it (for instance, 8 x 8 = 64) but then shifted the numbers up and down by 1 (9 x 7) the product was 1 less than the perfect square. If shifted by 2 (10 x 6) the product was 4 less, if shifted by 3 the product was 9 less (11 x 5 = 55), and so on, and this pattern held no matter what number you started with. Maybe a pointless trick, but a neat pattern, and I figured maybe someday I could win a bar bet by knowing that 254 x 258 is exactly 4 less than the square of 256 x 256, or that 195 x 205 is 25 less than 40,000.
It doesn't work so well if the numbers aren't an even number of steps apart, though, so most of the time was spent inventing placeholder techniques to compensate. For example, with 9 x 6 do I drop down it to an 8x6 problem and then make a note to add back in an 8, or do I bump it up to a 9x7 problem and then make a note to subtract the 9?
Where I live in Colorado, we've gotten snowfall in May, too. I'm pretty far south, practically in line with the Virginia-North Carolina border. Being a mile and a half in the sky makes the difference, of course.
That's a shame. Unless it's totally off topic or incoherent, something like a book review should almost always be accepted. It's free content, it's educational, and it's an opportunity for discussion of something that's usually not strictly a repeat of common headlines.
I generally agree. I'd rather have more stories available, and then just ignore the ones I don't care about, than limit the selection. I even like the occasional borderline offtopic controversy, just because the discussions are generally interesting. It may be mostly unproductive, but even political flamefests are at least better argued here than most other places I visit on the web, and occasionally I learn a little something.
I have never seen mod points expire in more or less than 72 hours. Admittedly, I haven't been around as long as you have, but it's been 3 days only for the five years or so I've been getting them.
My brother and I like to trade spoonerisms. Spelling is often intentionally a little creative. I think I spend more time retyping the thing I put in there and it "fixed" for me than it saves in fixing things I mistype.
No, but I had to read "Last Shmoocon famous reverse engineer" about eight times to parse it. That's a very unlikely set of five words to begin a sentence.
In college, my speech teacher said "tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them".
Your speech teacher was a hypocrite then. He should have said, "I'm going to tell you to tell them what you're going to tell them, and then I'm going to tell you to tell them, and then I'm going to tell you to tell them what you told them. Okay, with that out of the way, tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them. In summary, I have told you to tell them what you're going to tell them, I have told you to tell them, and then I have told you to tell them what you told them."
Spoken by someone who has apparently never watched paint dry. Drips form quickly, basically almost immediately or soon after. You won't get one an hour later, let alone after 5. Wrinkles--and any other action--would happen in the first half hour, tops. After that, it might be a subtle change in sheen, or a little bit of blown debris that sticks, but that's it.
Confession: I once started a project called "Watching Paint Dry, and Other Adventures," which literally included a journal of my experience doing the titular deed, watching toasters toast, watching water boil, waiting in an airport, being stuck in traffic, etc. It was pretty funny, really, but it never made it past rough draft. But anyway that's immaterial to the discussion. I've painted a few houses and bits of furniture, and that's enough to know how it works.
The book, "You Can Count on Monsters" might be interesting. At 10, this might be nearing the edge of being too simple, but it's a book about prime numbers, factors, multiplication, sets, etc., presented with the numbers as monsters, with multiple visual depictions of how to imagine the numbers. For instance, the 6-monster is a combination of the 2-monster and the 3-monster, visually demonstrating that 6 is a combination of 3 and 2, whereas every prime number monster is visually distinct.
I catch moments, especially on my kids' movies, where something visually odd happens. I'll turn to my wife and ask, "Oh, right, this was released for 3D, wasn't it?" When done poorly, it definitely detracts from the movie, just by pulling you out of it. I think she's got one or two grown-up action or horror movies that also jumped on the bandwagon in the past decade, and it's particularly egregious in those cases.
I used to have 5tgb6yhn as a password. I didn't even have to type it, I could just swipe my finger across the keyboard twice, down the two rows, and hit it pretty reliably. It seemed convenient, but only when nobody was looking, because anyone with any sense who saw me log in that way would be able to guess it almost immediately.
Slashdot Mirror
Check some of the other posts in this thread. Someone else did a bug fix in the game. You can download it, or play online.
Didn't realize the same guy had programmed both. I had E.T., and while it wasn't my favorite game, I played it now and then. Yeah, it had some odd collision detection and frustrating controls, but so did quite a few Atari games. The manual was also mandatory reading, but with that you could play and beat the game.
I didn't own Raiders, but tried to play it when visiting friends or relatives. I never got to see the manual, and without the manual found that game equally unplayable. I would die on the second screen every time, no matter where I went or what I did. I couldn't ever figure out what anything was. To this day Raiders sticks in my mind as one of the more frustrating Atari games I tried.
Dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago.
Long duck dawn?*
Darn it, now I've got to go watch a John Hughes movie.
*Yeah, I know that's not *quite* how he put it.
The last time I listened to a GPS, it saw a large bend in the interstate in Colorado Springs and had me exit the highway, drive twenty blocks through downtown traffic, and get back on the highway. There was no highway accident or slowdown, it was just trying to shave off half a mile or so.
Admittedly, this was maybe 8 years ago. They've probably come a long way since then. The same unit later that day had me take a left at a light and then perform a U-turn, rather than simply turning right.
Huh. I wonder if one of the old Atari books from my childhood would be there. I spent many curious hours reading one that my godmother gave me, full of games and other programs for the Atari. Only reading, you see, because the Atari I owned was the 2600 game console, no programming possible. I still enjoyed reading the book and imagining playing the games, though.
just play the damn game for an hour/day and you'll get all the gold you need.
Blech. I don't have an hour a day in perpetuity to keep up. Honestly, after a couple of weeks of playing, it gets boring. So I take a few months off, and I'm behind. I grind for a week or two, pick up a few things, get bored, take a few months more off, and I'm further behind. I've never touched a bot, but some way of keeping up with the never-ending stream of stuff would be nice.
Alternately, Blizzard could recognize that ever-increasing gulf and find other ways for players to catch up. Dramatically drop the crafting price of cards more than a year old. Let you get 2-for-1 on really ancient packs. Give away the common and uncommon cards from really old sets. I know, they want my money, so it probably won't happen. I'm not going to give them my money, so they lose me as a player.
Yep. Once I got out of the car, I sat down and wrote out the proof, which was indeed pretty simple algebra. Then I played around with some visual representations of the squares and other multiples using graph paper, which was briefly entertaining but not as educational. The main thing I kept from it was the mnemonic trick for occasional shortcuts. Sometimes it's easier to remember perfect squares or do a little subtraction in your head than to multiply large numbers.
I would imagine it varies a lot from person to person. I really liked patterns, for one. Any time a sequence or series came up, I really enjoyed it. And the shapes, in geometry, but absolutely not the proofs. One of my favorite moments came in 5th grade, learning about different bases, and converting from one to another. I told myself then, "This is so much fun, I wish I could do it as a job." Curiously enough, a decade later I landed a job doing web design and did get to occasionally translate between decimal and hexidecimal for HTML colors. You could call it a dream come true, though I think some of the joy of converting bases had faded by then.
I didn't have it quite that bad, but vaguely similar. My 6th grade math teacher realized I didn't need to be there and assigned me self-paced algebra instead. I was lazy, but eventually worked through quite a bit of the book. Then 7th grade came, and I was back in pre-algebra, before 8th grade had algebra again. I dealt with the boredom by reading novels through all of 7th and half of 8th grade (before it got ahead of where I had been) math. The teacher for 7-8 had mixed feelings, sometimes just letting me space out, other times pestering me to pay attention. She at least liked me, and supported me in the after-school math program, where I was an enthusiastic participant.
Random mathematical inquiry that you might enjoy: I once spent a road trip mucking around with a system of turning multiplication problems into subtraction problems, using the average and difference of two numbers and their squares. Perhaps better explained by example: I noticed that a pattern held where if you started with a number and squared it (for instance, 8 x 8 = 64) but then shifted the numbers up and down by 1 (9 x 7) the product was 1 less than the perfect square. If shifted by 2 (10 x 6) the product was 4 less, if shifted by 3 the product was 9 less (11 x 5 = 55), and so on, and this pattern held no matter what number you started with. Maybe a pointless trick, but a neat pattern, and I figured maybe someday I could win a bar bet by knowing that 254 x 258 is exactly 4 less than the square of 256 x 256, or that 195 x 205 is 25 less than 40,000.
It doesn't work so well if the numbers aren't an even number of steps apart, though, so most of the time was spent inventing placeholder techniques to compensate. For example, with 9 x 6 do I drop down it to an 8x6 problem and then make a note to add back in an 8, or do I bump it up to a 9x7 problem and then make a note to subtract the 9?
Where I live in Colorado, we've gotten snowfall in May, too. I'm pretty far south, practically in line with the Virginia-North Carolina border. Being a mile and a half in the sky makes the difference, of course.
Or distributing childcare duties. Or splitting the night watch into a natural late shift and early shift.
I know a lot of people don't like them, but I've always enjoyed a day of silliness.
That's a shame. Unless it's totally off topic or incoherent, something like a book review should almost always be accepted. It's free content, it's educational, and it's an opportunity for discussion of something that's usually not strictly a repeat of common headlines.
I generally agree. I'd rather have more stories available, and then just ignore the ones I don't care about, than limit the selection. I even like the occasional borderline offtopic controversy, just because the discussions are generally interesting. It may be mostly unproductive, but even political flamefests are at least better argued here than most other places I visit on the web, and occasionally I learn a little something.
I have never seen mod points expire in more or less than 72 hours. Admittedly, I haven't been around as long as you have, but it's been 3 days only for the five years or so I've been getting them.
+0 Inciteful (as in, highly insightful, but said in such an insulting manner it's also flamebait)
My brother and I like to trade spoonerisms. Spelling is often intentionally a little creative. I think I spend more time retyping the thing I put in there and it "fixed" for me than it saves in fixing things I mistype.
No, but I had to read "Last Shmoocon famous reverse engineer" about eight times to parse it. That's a very unlikely set of five words to begin a sentence.
In college, my speech teacher said "tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them".
Your speech teacher was a hypocrite then. He should have said, "I'm going to tell you to tell them what you're going to tell them, and then I'm going to tell you to tell them, and then I'm going to tell you to tell them what you told them. Okay, with that out of the way, tell them what you're going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them. In summary, I have told you to tell them what you're going to tell them, I have told you to tell them, and then I have told you to tell them what you told them."
Spoken by someone who has apparently never watched paint dry. Drips form quickly, basically almost immediately or soon after. You won't get one an hour later, let alone after 5. Wrinkles--and any other action--would happen in the first half hour, tops. After that, it might be a subtle change in sheen, or a little bit of blown debris that sticks, but that's it.
Confession: I once started a project called "Watching Paint Dry, and Other Adventures," which literally included a journal of my experience doing the titular deed, watching toasters toast, watching water boil, waiting in an airport, being stuck in traffic, etc. It was pretty funny, really, but it never made it past rough draft. But anyway that's immaterial to the discussion. I've painted a few houses and bits of furniture, and that's enough to know how it works.
The book, "You Can Count on Monsters" might be interesting. At 10, this might be nearing the edge of being too simple, but it's a book about prime numbers, factors, multiplication, sets, etc., presented with the numbers as monsters, with multiple visual depictions of how to imagine the numbers. For instance, the 6-monster is a combination of the 2-monster and the 3-monster, visually demonstrating that 6 is a combination of 3 and 2, whereas every prime number monster is visually distinct.
www.amazon.com/You-Can-Count-Monsters-Characters/dp/1470422093/
Disclaimer: my Mom either knows the person who did the book, or knows someone who knows the author. That's not why I recommended the book.
I catch moments, especially on my kids' movies, where something visually odd happens. I'll turn to my wife and ask, "Oh, right, this was released for 3D, wasn't it?" When done poorly, it definitely detracts from the movie, just by pulling you out of it. I think she's got one or two grown-up action or horror movies that also jumped on the bandwagon in the past decade, and it's particularly egregious in those cases.
It's always Tuesday somewhere!
Er, what?
I used to have 5tgb6yhn as a password. I didn't even have to type it, I could just swipe my finger across the keyboard twice, down the two rows, and hit it pretty reliably. It seemed convenient, but only when nobody was looking, because anyone with any sense who saw me log in that way would be able to guess it almost immediately.