Myself and a friend also figured it out together, and then wrote down the instructions on a couple of sheets of paper and shared it around my high school. It only took about a week for the two of us to work out a series of processes that would, in the end, solve the cube. Later on, when a book on solving the cube came out, it used almost all the same patterns (although I think it had a couple of optimizations that could combine two patterns into shortcuts). Once you decide that the way to solve the cube is to move ONE piece at a time into place, and work from one layer to the next until complete, the solutions to "how do I get this one piece from here to there" become easier to figure out.
On a side note, we used to grease our cubes with vegetable oil (yeah, awful), and the fastest I ever managed to complete a randomized cube was 30 seconds. Today, I no longer remember the exact patterns, and it would probably take me 30-60 minutes to stumble through.
"A Tritium plasma is safe, but it's important to keep track of all of it (and that includes losses to the vacuum vessel of the tokamak, we really don't want any going missing!)."
My Google-fu was weak on this one: could you perhaps elucidate why exactly we really don't want any going missing? Is it rare and valuable? I am trying to figure out just what Tritium plasma is...my physics background ended at first year uni, so it all sounds like "dilithium crystals" to me, and means about as much.
GIMP's choice of making "Save As" separate from "Export" was infuriating. Like MS Office ribbon bars, it was a step backwards in usability.Can anyone give me a good reason why all of the functionality of "Export" and "Save As" shouldn't be bundled into a single menu selection?
ChronoCloud, that was a weird post. While Japanese gaming culture has some marked differences when compared to, say, N.A gaming culture, it is just plain racist (and factually incorrect) to say "they're Japanese so they didn't really understand what people liked/didn't like about the early MMO's". I'm guessing your frame of reference excludes the early Japanese MMOs, for example.
As for EQOA being "better and more enjoyable" than FFXI, I totally disagree, and I guess I'm not the only one; EQOA is long gone, but FFXI is still going strong.
EA's "custom" STL implementation was mostly just a customized memory allocator. Game companies use STL container objects all over the place in their code; it is considered safe, efficient, and familiar.
No, the metal and composite heads are already made hollow. Titanium has a better strength vs. weight ratio than most other materials they could use. Its alloys also have useful "hardness" and "ductility" (elongation) properties when making heads for golf clubs.
So no, it's not used for its name, it's used for its performance.
Not really: as an example, a father of a friend of mine sold a beautiful mansion in the suburbs, and bought a crappy house in the expensive city core (near a hospital, which is why they moved; his wife was ill). He paid twice as much for the crappy house, complete with 70's era disco interior decorating.
So, yes, you can purchase a more expensive slum. Location, location, location.
Have you tried composing interactive music, that dynamically changes according to choices the player makes "on-the-fly"? If so, what technology do you prefer to use when composing for interactive soundtracks?
The first time I remember hearing highly interactive music in a game was "Shogo: Mobile Armor Division", back in 1998; they used a program that was similar to the old Amiga "Bars & Pipes" to help compose that music. All I remember is that the program was part of the DirectX suite at the time.
Care to give us the "actual" first edition's ISBN? Maybe someone could scan it and upload it...like you? Ever done a diff of the original and the new versions? What was cut?
....and then we can run the emulator on the emulated chrome running on the emulator, running on chrome?
It's fricking turtles all the way down!
This reminds me of someone showing off his Amiga by seeing how many clock apps he could run simultaneously on the desktop. At the time we were all suitably impressed with the egregious display of multitasking of having 100 overlapping clocks all ticking away the seconds simultaneously. I would still be impressed (and entertained for at least a minute) by chrome->AmigaOS->chrome->AmigaOS->chrome web browsing.
>(Same with the optimization issues we covered in that class - that it can make a real difference in runtime whether you iterate first over the rows and then over the columns of a 2-dimensional array or vice versa, depending on how your software stores arrays in memory, was a huge puzzle for minds far brighter than mine.)
If you are still curious, read the short article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_prefetch, and when you come to the bit about prefetching texels, think of those texels as data coming from certain rows/columns of your array. Then think about the way a 2 dimensional array is laid out in linear memory, and whether the next few texels (array cells) is closer you are about to process are closer to the current one if they are from the same row or instead, the same column. In one case, they are going to be packed tightly together, and so will be more likely to be all prefetched into the cache; in the other case, they will be spread out over the memory addresses, and be less likely to all wind up in the cache.
As a game programmer, I attended a conference where one extremely knowledgable fellow demonstrated a crazy thing: he could insert reads into array processing loops where the read DID NOTHING with the single data element it had just read; the whole loop would run faster, though, because that 'useless' read caused a prefetch of data that would be used. It was nuts, it made no sense if you just looked at the code, but it was a significant measurable speedup.
>Of course, as we see with Walmart and its ilk, it is very harmful to consumers. Really? I prefer Penn & Teller's take on Walmart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHUqYfK5MDQ
Just pointing out what most folks are missing: hey had a warrant, which was not based on "look for 3D printed gun parts", but on other stuff related to the fact that this guy is a member of a criminal gang.
How does your comment relate to the post you are replying to? It sounds like this happened in an area where separation of cyclists and cars is not practiced.
Imagine your brother had been walking instead of cycling, and then struck by a drunk driver, and the doctors told him "good thing you wore your walking helmet, or you would have died". Now do you see what the fellow from the Netherlands was talking about?
Slashdot Mirror
Myself and a friend also figured it out together, and then wrote down the instructions on a couple of sheets of paper and shared it around my high school. It only took about a week for the two of us to work out a series of processes that would, in the end, solve the cube. Later on, when a book on solving the cube came out, it used almost all the same patterns (although I think it had a couple of optimizations that could combine two patterns into shortcuts). Once you decide that the way to solve the cube is to move ONE piece at a time into place, and work from one layer to the next until complete, the solutions to "how do I get this one piece from here to there" become easier to figure out.
On a side note, we used to grease our cubes with vegetable oil (yeah, awful), and the fastest I ever managed to complete a randomized cube was 30 seconds. Today, I no longer remember the exact patterns, and it would probably take me 30-60 minutes to stumble through.
"A Tritium plasma is safe, but it's important to keep track of all of it (and that includes losses to the vacuum vessel of the tokamak, we really don't want any going missing!)."
My Google-fu was weak on this one: could you perhaps elucidate why exactly we really don't want any going missing? Is it rare and valuable? I am trying to figure out just what Tritium plasma is...my physics background ended at first year uni, so it all sounds like "dilithium crystals" to me, and means about as much.
Thank you, you made my morning.
Thank you for the best laugh of my day so far.
GIMP's choice of making "Save As" separate from "Export" was infuriating. Like MS Office ribbon bars, it was a step backwards in usability.Can anyone give me a good reason why all of the functionality of "Export" and "Save As" shouldn't be bundled into a single menu selection?
ChronoCloud, that was a weird post. While Japanese gaming culture has some marked differences when compared to, say, N.A gaming culture, it is just plain racist (and factually incorrect) to say "they're Japanese so they didn't really understand what people liked/didn't like about the early MMO's". I'm guessing your frame of reference excludes the early Japanese MMOs, for example.
As for EQOA being "better and more enjoyable" than FFXI, I totally disagree, and I guess I'm not the only one; EQOA is long gone, but FFXI is still going strong.
My automated modding bot categorizes you as "troll", so there!
EA's "custom" STL implementation was mostly just a customized memory allocator.
Game companies use STL container objects all over the place in their code; it is considered safe, efficient, and familiar.
No, the metal and composite heads are already made hollow. Titanium has a better strength vs. weight ratio than most other materials they could use. Its alloys also have useful "hardness" and "ductility" (elongation) properties when making heads for golf clubs.
So no, it's not used for its name, it's used for its performance.
Not really: as an example, a father of a friend of mine sold a beautiful mansion in the suburbs, and bought a crappy house in the expensive city core (near a hospital, which is why they moved; his wife was ill). He paid twice as much for the crappy house, complete with 70's era disco interior decorating.
So, yes, you can purchase a more expensive slum. Location, location, location.
Exactly!
Have you tried composing interactive music, that dynamically changes according to choices the player makes "on-the-fly"? If so, what technology do you prefer to use when composing for interactive soundtracks?
The first time I remember hearing highly interactive music in a game was "Shogo: Mobile Armor Division", back in 1998; they used a program that was similar to the old Amiga "Bars & Pipes" to help compose that music. All I remember is that the program was part of the DirectX suite at the time.
Just tossing out a thank you to a wonderful author. I am pleased to hear that you are still alive and kicking! I wish you and yours happy holidays.
Care to give us the "actual" first edition's ISBN? Maybe someone could scan it and upload it...like you?
Ever done a diff of the original and the new versions? What was cut?
....and then we can run the emulator on the emulated chrome running on the emulator, running on chrome?
It's fricking turtles all the way down!
This reminds me of someone showing off his Amiga by seeing how many clock apps he could run simultaneously on the desktop. At the time we were all suitably impressed with the egregious display of multitasking of having 100 overlapping clocks all ticking away the seconds simultaneously. I would still be impressed (and entertained for at least a minute) by chrome->AmigaOS->chrome->AmigaOS->chrome web browsing.
>(Same with the optimization issues we covered in that class - that it can make a real difference in runtime whether you iterate first over the rows and then over the columns of a 2-dimensional array or vice versa, depending on how your software stores arrays in memory, was a huge puzzle for minds far brighter than mine.)
If you are still curious, read the short article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instruction_prefetch, and when you come to the bit about prefetching texels, think of those texels as data coming from certain rows/columns of your array. Then think about the way a 2 dimensional array is laid out in linear memory, and whether the next few texels (array cells) is closer you are about to process are closer to the current one if they are from the same row or instead, the same column. In one case, they are going to be packed tightly together, and so will be more likely to be all prefetched into the cache; in the other case, they will be spread out over the memory addresses, and be less likely to all wind up in the cache.
As a game programmer, I attended a conference where one extremely knowledgable fellow demonstrated a crazy thing: he could insert reads into array processing loops where the read DID NOTHING with the single data element it had just read; the whole loop would run faster, though, because that 'useless' read caused a prefetch of data that would be used. It was nuts, it made no sense if you just looked at the code, but it was a significant measurable speedup.
Sheltered, gated community...or just giant fucking country, like Canada. Your choice.
First of all, it is important to get along with your coworkers.
Beyond that, though, maybe your boss needs to watch this TED talk:
http://www.ted.com/talks/susan_cain_the_power_of_introverts.html
Cue military experiments involving "gun arms" in 3,2,1...
Matrox was a little behind on their general 3D acceleration, but they were ahead of everyone else with multi-monitor support on consumer-level cards.
So you are OK with people driving 2 ton vehicles at speed whilst wearing Google goggles? Because, I'm not.
>Of course, as we see with Walmart and its ilk, it is very harmful to consumers.
Really? I prefer Penn & Teller's take on Walmart: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHUqYfK5MDQ
Just pointing out what most folks are missing: hey had a warrant, which was not based on "look for 3D printed gun parts", but on other stuff related to the fact that this guy is a member of a criminal gang.
How does your comment relate to the post you are replying to? It sounds like this happened in an area where separation of cyclists and cars is not practiced.
Imagine your brother had been walking instead of cycling, and then struck by a drunk driver, and the doctors told him "good thing you wore your walking helmet, or you would have died". Now do you see what the fellow from the Netherlands was talking about?
>Not totally true. Stroke/path/fill rasterization work is not supported by current 3D rendering APIs (and thus not accelerated by 3d hardware).
Incorrect. It's there, developers just aren't using it for some reason.
https://developer.nvidia.com/nv-path-rendering