Does a pink pony degrade over time, or does it just become less and less funny?
Pink ponies have a specific lifespan, which can be abruptly shortened by overworking them. The solution, as discovered by ancient greeks when they realized that slaves were dying from the extremely poor conditions of the mines, is to get as much productivity as you can in the resulting short lifespan.
You might need to bring along much more pink ponies as well.
Furthermore, 34% of college graduates said they accept the Biblical story of creation as fact.
There is one further question: Which one?
Genesis Chapter 1 has animals created before man. Genesis Chapter 2:19 implies that animals were created after man. As always, if you want to accept something as fact, you need to prepare to handle any contradictions that arise (or otherwise accept it as "best fit" or a theory.) The forceful application of religion as fact as resulted in problems, also known as witch-burning or equivalants thereof.
A scientist that digs the mysteries of a universe can easily believe that his deity is more intelligent than what most people think, as it takes skill to make self-assembling life forms without micro-managing the design.
As a final point, there's one religion that embraces the theory of evolution - which proves that science and religion are not incompatible.
I thought the AI was a big joke, the bots couldn't even manage to avoid sniper fire at all on the highest setting.
In UT2004, sniperfire is an instant-hit attack with the bonus of doing double damage on a head shot. In general, this means instant-kill.
There's only three ways to handle sniper fire, which isn't always suitable:
Taking an alternate path - which isn't an option in some Boming run maps.
Moving fast, either rocket jumping or translocating frequently. The first has a health cost, while the second caused a large quantity of complaints (and in turn, caused it to be nerfed in UT2K3/4).
Swarming - which hopes that sniper attacks aren't going to shread the whole team. Kind-of forced in Assault maps.
Also, you didn't mention which difficulty setting you used. For example, Insane bots aren't as powerful as Godlike bots.
I just loooved the Vanish - Doom "bug" in FF VI (after all, was it a bug? Vanish made physical hits never hit and magic always hit and Doom was supposed to be able to kill almost everyone as long as it hit. I just think it sounds fair and clever.)
It's a game mechanic abuse, not a bug. Also, some enemies are immune to the vanish trick, requiring you to take the long path of inflicting damage.
However, there is a bug with Vanish - it overrides some checks that prevent non-sensical targetting. You can get more information in the List of FFVI bugs.
Wikipedia has a set of guidelines indicating what is suitable for inclusion - the central WP:ATT considered the core policy to ensure attribution, with WP:V (Verifiability), WP:OR (Original Research) and WP:RS (Reliable Sources) being supporting policies.
As these issues becomes known, Wikipedia can simply identify a new method to apply it's existing policy - whether by creating something more specific (e.g. WP:BLP), or by recognizing a new method to apply existing policy. Consider it to be a variant of evolutionary hardware that was just announced.
The fact is, that computers today can run even the slowest of code fast enough.
No, they can't.
In the current Standings for Al Zimmerman's programming contest, you see a lot of entries that have many submissions, but aren't even close to the optimal result. Even on the smallest scale, the slowest of code would go through all 20 trillion possible cominbations - the next smallest is an order of magnitude larger, and anything larger is within don't-even-bother territory.
And yet, there's a person who has effectivly maxed-out their score, with a significant lead in the third category compared to the many other submissions. While he has at least one non-top submission, it's not something obtainable just by throwing as much computer power as possible.
If I run it as a straight php script thru the cmdline the algorithm works okay.
Any tips for optimising server side php?
It might not work, as some sudokus are extremely devilish. Instead of trying to solve it in one batch, try breaking it down into steps (e.g. have the script partly solve the system rather than having the server time the script out.)
An example is the implementation at http://www.scanraid.com/sudoku.htm - although this is slower since it takes step-by-step very literally.
I tried the example problems on the webpage. I had to use MSPaint, as the interface given does not support "pencil" marks and automatically assume that you are directly building the finished product.
Shame... this article could have slipped through on April the 1st. I can't find any real survey data offhand from the article link - the only thing available was posted a couple of times in this thread - and it doesn't have any statistical importance that supports the conclusion. In fact, there's a significant chunk missing - 23% unaccounted for, which is rather large for a catch-all "other" choice.
Also, I find Heavy Metal to be a bit of a stretch for music being generally favoured by gifted children. I can understand Rock music, but Heavy Metal is merely a variant that puts extreme focus on volume rather than anything else.
In any case, it seems as if there's a lack of exposure to differet music styles - as if it were reflecting mainstream culture rather than isolating music preferenes of gifted children.
Does anybody know the term for a "pseudo-lawyer" that's comparable to "quack" being used to describe a fake doctor?
And while I'm asking, if you're going to give him more media attention than he deserves, why not provide a link to one of his previous failures in the main article text? Sure, I could pull it up on a search, but there's at least some readers who aren't aware of previous blunders.
In my school system, it is mandated by the government to have 110 hours of instruction per course per year. This makes the fix quite obvious - provide 110 hours of instructional material per course per year. As expected, following what's written down is the one of the best methods.
Some people once played with a "toy" where you have to put shapes into holes - learning that only the square shape fits in the square hole, the circle into the circle and the triangle into the triangle. Time spent attempting to put a shape in the wrong hole isn't that much different than giving incorrect training to students (e.g. addition drills when the student mastered long division.)
On the main topic of games, I have "played" them at school. I would label these softwares as substandard due to their rigidity, railroading, or other factors, and it would take a significant update in software technology level to change my opinion. For example, one math software package had easily guessable answers for a multiple choice - a correct answer, and two wrong answers generated by changing exactly one aspect of the correct one (but differed between the two.)
I seem pessamistic when it comes to these efforts in encouraging education, as if it were beating the ground five feet away from the bush. However, instruction is the only way to get education to work, and it isn't done by a fire and forget method.
The product showed a number of issues as soon as it was unpacked and put to work, that you would not expect from something 'enterprise grade', like not being able to keep a VPN up and running for more than a few minutes, or doing bad IP routing on our LAN.
Defective within 30 days. Request a return at the 29-day mark.
I've finally decided that the product was far from being ready to market or even usable for beta testers, and have requested some kind of compensation for all the job I had to do.
Don't bother requesting compensation, unless you have a documented attempt to return the product within the 30 day period.
What's your opinion about such a behavior in a company? Is it fair?
It might not be fair (depending on which viewpoint you have), but it is not possible to get a defective product to work.
From the summary, it sounds as if Take Two will have to provide some sort of evidence that he does affect their sales (or in some other way impacts their bottom line) to prevail
The bottom line is impacted by having to spend money defending against groundless lawsuits. Money spent on defence could instead be applied to advertising (i.e. hiring a person to make a game look bad in a controlled manner - for the opposite effect of making the game popular..)
A Reuters story points out something that's probably not much of a shock to readers here: almost a third of console owners are 'adults'.
Another person probably beat me to this, but adults are the technical owners of the console since they bought it with their money. Unless a non-adult saved up enough allowance to buy one, it's usually the parent that buys the product.
Most likely, the survey meant that a third of console users are adults - which isn't suprising anyway since there's bound to be a game an adult likes on a console (even if most of them are cookie-cutter.) Even so, it's only a segment of the gaming demographics - there are some people that want to play puzzle games which are normally found on a PC (such as Freecell, Minesweeper, etc.)
It's exactly that way of thinking that produces so much bloat these days, you say there's no point in making echo smaller and more simple (of course, you DO realise it's just an example, right?), and people take that to a higher level, 'why should I optimise, rethink my code, when we have 2 GB's of RAM, dualcore cpu's, 300 GB HDD's' and so on.
This is countered by taking the opposite approach - for example, Number crunching. Even with all that processing power, you cannot obtain an optimal result by doing a brute force approach, as it will take up too much time.
One of the previous contests required me to number crunch to determine whether or not a number was prime. Unless your Bignum library is as fast as possible, you will lose a significant amount of time on slow operations. Likewise, if your algorithm is O(n log n) rather than O(n), you will lose a lot of time.
Hell, WordPerfect 5.0 ran faster on my old 12 MHz 286 than OpenOffice.org 2.x runs on my 2 GHz Sempron - and had pretty much all the functionality I need in a word processor even now.
Most likely, WordPerfect 5.0 used a fixed-pitch font for display, which by default is 80x25. OpenOffice.org 2.x uses a GUI, which can be configured to display more text than what's normally possible under an 80x25 terminal window.
If you want something fast, pick Wordpad, Textedit or the Linux equivalant - which is more than enough for a basic wordprocessor. If you need something more fancy, you can load up OpenOffice.org or your favourite word processor.
Give me an RPG with no leveling up, a storyline that is actually effected by my character, and a goal more creative than "kill the big evil thing"
An RPG with no levelling up is equivalant to Commander Keen - a fixed charater throughout the game. Not a problem by itself, but such games are stereotyped to be "mindless action" with no plot.
A storyline affected by your character does appear from time to time - but there's ultimatly one main storyline which has slight variations. More often than not, "Alternate plots" are either discarded when a sequel gets released, or somehow forcefully merged into the storyline - which tends to have a worse effect than intended.
The standard "defeat evil big thing", however, cannot be easily avoided. More often than not, these stories generally require an antagonist (which usually is a variation on the theme.) While some games managed to avoid this concept (e.g. Rouge and Earth 2150: Escape from the Blue Planet are scavenger hunts), it's still a major obstacle to overcome.
As much as we'd like to shake off those cliches, they are here to stay. Almost nothing can be done to prevent them as there's always an underlying concept that requires them to begin with.
A review, when done properly, is always useful. While most reviews you find in an average magazine are generally either advertising, or inflated, the best reviews are from those who do an in-depth analysis of multiple games (i.e. at least play it to completion, and making notes at the same time.)
Also, an ideal review minimizes the amount of emotion within the review. If you don't like the game, just say you don't like it - otherwise you've just made two pages of filler.
If you have to, try building up a list of known flaws within games (whether it's with graphics, gameplay, the AI, etc.) and see how well a game you are reviewing stacks up against this listing. While this is entirely mechanical reviewing method, it doesn't make it any less effective than what's going around on the market.
What is the handling for students that already know the material, and how does this differ from the correct procedure?
I'm in schools every day. Are you?
Unless the GP dropped out or was in an accellerated program, you can be sure that he was in a school every school day for 13 years. The same applies to me.
Generalizations like "Teachers don't" label you an idiot anyway.
No, such generalizations label him a bigot. All you need to do is join the group of people who hate bigots.
How about we wipe their tushies and tell them they won't have to work hard to make something of themselves?
Homework is not "working hard" - it's working long. While it works for some people, it does not carry over to other aspects of life (i.e. you cannot grind social skills), nor does it carry into the workforce (i.e. McDonalds does not require you to work at home, and neither do most other semi-skilled jobs. While you do work overtime, you are generally called into work for that - none of which is at home.)
For me, Math homework for grades 1-9 provided no benefit as I already knew the material. You cannot improve a skill by reviewing material that you already mastered - while refreshing material does help if you haven't used it in a while, it cannot make you better than the book itself. If you object to pampering, then you should object to schools not giving enough challenge to students that already know the material.
Likewise, "Art homework" does not improve my art skills. Given that high-school courses are composed "buckshot" (perhaps it's better to use it's acronym), the art homework that I has was simply trying to create mediocre-quality art in different forms - with no or limited theory on how to create art (or artistically draw things) to begin with. Homework will not help in this regard, as it assumes that you are able to improve a skill you don't have.
And yes, I graduated high school
So did I, and that was with missing projects that consisted of a major portion of the final grade (i.e. Create a 3'x3'x3' "fun machine" with household materials, and transport it safely to the school building - which provides zero benefit to learning aside from increasing a number that's already past the 50% threshold.)
Besides, most North American high schools have extremely poor calibration for course difficulty. They make the false assumption that students are uniform in their skill levels, and lump the person who knows basic algebra with those in Grade 7 math (which still claims that you can't create negative numbers in the same way that you can't divide by zero.)
If something is "made available", then distribution is only one step away. As you know, items that are "available" are easily obtained - and "evidence" of copyright violation can be done by downloading or obtaining the copies in question.
This case in question sounds like it's arguing a technicality - which is trivial for any lawyer to work around by showing that copies were made from the site (rather than simply being posted.)
Some of the dev-tools I want to run are just obscene RAM-pigs. On the desktop I'm using now (Win2003), it sucks up 1.6gb just to boot.
Based on that alone, the best fix is to find out what occupies that 1.6GB, as that amount of memory would pin similar desktops that use three times the "recommended" memory amount. Otherwise, I might as well use an "Overkill" tag.
Move that to Vista, add a VM-Ware session or two, and I'm worried I'll be pushing 4Gb.
Okay... If necessary, you could use virtual memory for your two VM-Ware sessions.
Slashdot Mirror
Pink ponies have a specific lifespan, which can be abruptly shortened by overworking them. The solution, as discovered by ancient greeks when they realized that slaves were dying from the extremely poor conditions of the mines, is to get as much productivity as you can in the resulting short lifespan.
You might need to bring along much more pink ponies as well.
Some of us work for tech support, and today is Sunday during the day time.
That would be derelition of duty.
There is one further question: Which one?
Genesis Chapter 1 has animals created before man. Genesis Chapter 2:19 implies that animals were created after man. As always, if you want to accept something as fact, you need to prepare to handle any contradictions that arise (or otherwise accept it as "best fit" or a theory.) The forceful application of religion as fact as resulted in problems, also known as witch-burning or equivalants thereof.
A scientist that digs the mysteries of a universe can easily believe that his deity is more intelligent than what most people think, as it takes skill to make self-assembling life forms without micro-managing the design.
As a final point, there's one religion that embraces the theory of evolution - which proves that science and religion are not incompatible.
In UT2004, sniperfire is an instant-hit attack with the bonus of doing double damage on a head shot. In general, this means instant-kill.
There's only three ways to handle sniper fire, which isn't always suitable:
Also, you didn't mention which difficulty setting you used. For example, Insane bots aren't as powerful as Godlike bots.
Mercury has a double sunset - with the same sun setting twice without going over the sky: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,8 36746,00.html.
This was discovered sometime in 1967.
It's a game mechanic abuse, not a bug. Also, some enemies are immune to the vanish trick, requiring you to take the long path of inflicting damage.
However, there is a bug with Vanish - it overrides some checks that prevent non-sensical targetting. You can get more information in the List of FFVI bugs.
Wikipedia has a set of guidelines indicating what is suitable for inclusion - the central WP:ATT considered the core policy to ensure attribution, with WP:V (Verifiability), WP:OR (Original Research) and WP:RS (Reliable Sources) being supporting policies.
As these issues becomes known, Wikipedia can simply identify a new method to apply it's existing policy - whether by creating something more specific (e.g. WP:BLP), or by recognizing a new method to apply existing policy. Consider it to be a variant of evolutionary hardware that was just announced.
No, they can't.
In the current Standings for Al Zimmerman's programming contest, you see a lot of entries that have many submissions, but aren't even close to the optimal result. Even on the smallest scale, the slowest of code would go through all 20 trillion possible cominbations - the next smallest is an order of magnitude larger, and anything larger is within don't-even-bother territory.
And yet, there's a person who has effectivly maxed-out their score, with a significant lead in the third category compared to the many other submissions. While he has at least one non-top submission, it's not something obtainable just by throwing as much computer power as possible.
It might not work, as some sudokus are extremely devilish. Instead of trying to solve it in one batch, try breaking it down into steps (e.g. have the script partly solve the system rather than having the server time the script out.)
An example is the implementation at http://www.scanraid.com/sudoku.htm - although this is slower since it takes step-by-step very literally.
I tried the example problems on the webpage. I had to use MSPaint, as the interface given does not support "pencil" marks and automatically assume that you are directly building the finished product.
Shame... this article could have slipped through on April the 1st. I can't find any real survey data offhand from the article link - the only thing available was posted a couple of times in this thread - and it doesn't have any statistical importance that supports the conclusion. In fact, there's a significant chunk missing - 23% unaccounted for, which is rather large for a catch-all "other" choice.
Also, I find Heavy Metal to be a bit of a stretch for music being generally favoured by gifted children. I can understand Rock music, but Heavy Metal is merely a variant that puts extreme focus on volume rather than anything else.
In any case, it seems as if there's a lack of exposure to differet music styles - as if it were reflecting mainstream culture rather than isolating music preferenes of gifted children.
Does anybody know the term for a "pseudo-lawyer" that's comparable to "quack" being used to describe a fake doctor?
And while I'm asking, if you're going to give him more media attention than he deserves, why not provide a link to one of his previous failures in the main article text? Sure, I could pull it up on a search, but there's at least some readers who aren't aware of previous blunders.
In my school system, it is mandated by the government to have 110 hours of instruction per course per year. This makes the fix quite obvious - provide 110 hours of instructional material per course per year. As expected, following what's written down is the one of the best methods.
Some people once played with a "toy" where you have to put shapes into holes - learning that only the square shape fits in the square hole, the circle into the circle and the triangle into the triangle. Time spent attempting to put a shape in the wrong hole isn't that much different than giving incorrect training to students (e.g. addition drills when the student mastered long division.)
On the main topic of games, I have "played" them at school. I would label these softwares as substandard due to their rigidity, railroading, or other factors, and it would take a significant update in software technology level to change my opinion. For example, one math software package had easily guessable answers for a multiple choice - a correct answer, and two wrong answers generated by changing exactly one aspect of the correct one (but differed between the two.)
I seem pessamistic when it comes to these efforts in encouraging education, as if it were beating the ground five feet away from the bush. However, instruction is the only way to get education to work, and it isn't done by a fire and forget method.
Defective within 30 days. Request a return at the 29-day mark.
Don't bother requesting compensation, unless you have a documented attempt to return the product within the 30 day period.
It might not be fair (depending on which viewpoint you have), but it is not possible to get a defective product to work.
The bottom line is impacted by having to spend money defending against groundless lawsuits. Money spent on defence could instead be applied to advertising (i.e. hiring a person to make a game look bad in a controlled manner - for the opposite effect of making the game popular..)
Another person probably beat me to this, but adults are the technical owners of the console since they bought it with their money. Unless a non-adult saved up enough allowance to buy one, it's usually the parent that buys the product.
Most likely, the survey meant that a third of console users are adults - which isn't suprising anyway since there's bound to be a game an adult likes on a console (even if most of them are cookie-cutter.) Even so, it's only a segment of the gaming demographics - there are some people that want to play puzzle games which are normally found on a PC (such as Freecell, Minesweeper, etc.)
Most of us here have desk work for 8 hours/day - not counting 1-2 hours travel time on a bus. How do we get exercise in this situation?
While I did find links to desk exercise websites, they are most frequently some simple stretches and not really much of an exercise.
This is countered by taking the opposite approach - for example, Number crunching. Even with all that processing power, you cannot obtain an optimal result by doing a brute force approach, as it will take up too much time.
One of the previous contests required me to number crunch to determine whether or not a number was prime. Unless your Bignum library is as fast as possible, you will lose a significant amount of time on slow operations. Likewise, if your algorithm is O(n log n) rather than O(n), you will lose a lot of time.
Most likely, WordPerfect 5.0 used a fixed-pitch font for display, which by default is 80x25. OpenOffice.org 2.x uses a GUI, which can be configured to display more text than what's normally possible under an 80x25 terminal window.
If you want something fast, pick Wordpad, Textedit or the Linux equivalant - which is more than enough for a basic wordprocessor. If you need something more fancy, you can load up OpenOffice.org or your favourite word processor.
An RPG with no levelling up is equivalant to Commander Keen - a fixed charater throughout the game. Not a problem by itself, but such games are stereotyped to be "mindless action" with no plot.
A storyline affected by your character does appear from time to time - but there's ultimatly one main storyline which has slight variations. More often than not, "Alternate plots" are either discarded when a sequel gets released, or somehow forcefully merged into the storyline - which tends to have a worse effect than intended.
The standard "defeat evil big thing", however, cannot be easily avoided. More often than not, these stories generally require an antagonist (which usually is a variation on the theme.) While some games managed to avoid this concept (e.g. Rouge and Earth 2150: Escape from the Blue Planet are scavenger hunts), it's still a major obstacle to overcome.
As much as we'd like to shake off those cliches, they are here to stay. Almost nothing can be done to prevent them as there's always an underlying concept that requires them to begin with.
A review, when done properly, is always useful. While most reviews you find in an average magazine are generally either advertising, or inflated, the best reviews are from those who do an in-depth analysis of multiple games (i.e. at least play it to completion, and making notes at the same time.)
Also, an ideal review minimizes the amount of emotion within the review. If you don't like the game, just say you don't like it - otherwise you've just made two pages of filler.
If you have to, try building up a list of known flaws within games (whether it's with graphics, gameplay, the AI, etc.) and see how well a game you are reviewing stacks up against this listing. While this is entirely mechanical reviewing method, it doesn't make it any less effective than what's going around on the market.
What is the handling for students that already know the material, and how does this differ from the correct procedure?
Unless the GP dropped out or was in an accellerated program, you can be sure that he was in a school every school day for 13 years. The same applies to me.
No, such generalizations label him a bigot. All you need to do is join the group of people who hate bigots.
Homework is not "working hard" - it's working long. While it works for some people, it does not carry over to other aspects of life (i.e. you cannot grind social skills), nor does it carry into the workforce (i.e. McDonalds does not require you to work at home, and neither do most other semi-skilled jobs. While you do work overtime, you are generally called into work for that - none of which is at home.)
For me, Math homework for grades 1-9 provided no benefit as I already knew the material. You cannot improve a skill by reviewing material that you already mastered - while refreshing material does help if you haven't used it in a while, it cannot make you better than the book itself. If you object to pampering, then you should object to schools not giving enough challenge to students that already know the material.
Likewise, "Art homework" does not improve my art skills. Given that high-school courses are composed "buckshot" (perhaps it's better to use it's acronym), the art homework that I has was simply trying to create mediocre-quality art in different forms - with no or limited theory on how to create art (or artistically draw things) to begin with. Homework will not help in this regard, as it assumes that you are able to improve a skill you don't have.
So did I, and that was with missing projects that consisted of a major portion of the final grade (i.e. Create a 3'x3'x3' "fun machine" with household materials, and transport it safely to the school building - which provides zero benefit to learning aside from increasing a number that's already past the 50% threshold.)
Besides, most North American high schools have extremely poor calibration for course difficulty. They make the false assumption that students are uniform in their skill levels, and lump the person who knows basic algebra with those in Grade 7 math (which still claims that you can't create negative numbers in the same way that you can't divide by zero.)
If something is "made available", then distribution is only one step away. As you know, items that are "available" are easily obtained - and "evidence" of copyright violation can be done by downloading or obtaining the copies in question.
This case in question sounds like it's arguing a technicality - which is trivial for any lawyer to work around by showing that copies were made from the site (rather than simply being posted.)
Based on that alone, the best fix is to find out what occupies that 1.6GB, as that amount of memory would pin similar desktops that use three times the "recommended" memory amount. Otherwise, I might as well use an "Overkill" tag.
Okay... If necessary, you could use virtual memory for your two VM-Ware sessions.