Re:I can tell you about the game
on
Review: Eufloria
·
· Score: 2, Informative
The game's standard campaign (contrasted with user-generated levels which I have not played around with yet, though there is a community of mission makers on the official forums) generally picks one of two criteria for winning. Depending on the mission, you must either: 1. Colonize every asteroid in the map. 2. Eradicate those species that are not your own.
You start off each level owning a particular asteroid, and you may have some seedling-generating trees and/or some seedlings with which to spread your colony, and perhaps you will have some defense trees as well. You start off with a fog of war that prevents viewing the particular objects on other asteroids as well as asteroids that are too far from territory you own. Up to an asteroid's total capacity of trees, you may spend ten seedlings and either sprout a tree to generate more seedlings or a tree that protects that one asteroid with homing missiles.
Given a single seedling, you may scout any other asteroid within range (one of the planet's attributes) of one of your owned asteroids in order to lift the fog of war, displaying all activity that occurs near the previously-undiscovered asteroid. Any number of seedlings may be commanded to take a journey through your claimed territory, and if they happen upon an empty asteroid, you can plant ten of them on it and one of either kind of tree that you may create is sufficient to claim the asteroid. If the asteroid is already inhabited, a battle will ensue. Your seedlings will now attack their trees and their seedlings! You may not use this asteroid to jump to another directly because you do not own it, but you may retreat, recalling your seedlings to an asteroid you own. If you succeed in destroying an enemy tree, your seedlings start infiltrating the root system of the planet, attacking its gradually-replenishing core energy. If enough seedlings are allowed to infiltrate to reduce the core energy to zero, you immediately gain ownership of the asteroid; the destroyed tree is now a seedling of a seedling-generator tree and all of the remaining trees change ownership to you.
The rest of the gameplay mechanics are smaller details: old seedling-generator trees will eventually produce a flower which can be used to upgrade any tree you own to make it produce super-seedlings or an exploding battleship of sorts, depending on which type of tree you upgraded. There is a cap to how many seedlings an asteroid will generate if left ignored. Attributes of the asteroid confer better speed or strength or infiltration efficiency to the seedlings generated by that asteroid. That's mostly it, though. I hope this is a good summary; the user manual is huge but I feel playing the demo and reading this summary should be enough to understand the game!
Re:I can tell you about the game
on
Review: Eufloria
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Terrible summary. You don't mention a SINGLE mechanic of the game. I thoroughly enjoyed Eufloria and its various interacting features: asteroids with attributes affecting difficulty of capture, distances that the asteroids can send your troops if you route through it, attributes the asteroids confer upon troops that each one grows, defensive trees, offensive (standard troop generating trees) producing eventual flowers that can be sent to ay asteroid you own to turn defense trees into bomb producers and offense trees into super troop producers, fog of war that is revealed through scouting.
You and the reviewer should be ashamed at how useless your contributions are.
Now, I feel I must make this disclaimer right off the bat: nicotine is not physiologically addictive for my particular body. However, I have enjoyed a little bit of cigarette smoking off and on over the years -- mostly upon realization that it goes well with drinking. Up until last year, I didn't hang out often with any smokers, but then I met a new friend who ended up filling my empty position of roommate. She, of course, would have been the smoker.
Thus it became trivial to bum a smoke, whenever. It became habitual, and eventually I was buying my own packs of tobacco, rolling papers and filters. I enjoyed it, to be certain, but I didn't really let myself smoke more than two or three cigarettes a day because I knew it has deleterious health effects. It took a while for me to notice any physical effects, and I attribute this to having been working on losing weight and so regularly exercising and taking care of myself very well. It also took a while before I noticed that I... well, kinda always smelled like smoke.
And so, around the same time we both decided we wanted to cut down on smoking or maybe quit. After cutting down some, my roommate stumbled upon enough information about e-cigarettes to intrigue her into buying a starter kit. It came in the mail shortly after the order (the good retailers of these things ship fast) and it was quite exciting to be there when she opened up the package and put it together!
The first thing we noticed trying it out is that it is not terribly similar to cigarette smoke other than the superficial. Yeah, the e-cigarette generates heat as you inhale, but the vaporization point of the "smoke juice" (propylene glycol, nicotine, flavors and preservatives) is sufficiently lower than the heat of burning tobacco that you notice the difference. It is slightly acrid feeling/tasting compared to smoky and tar-laden. Replacing the taste of tobacco you have a huge variety of flavors: espresso, menthol, chocolate, black cherry, applice cider, green tea with honey and even classic tobacco flavors if that's what you really enjoy!
The acrid nature of the vapor from an e-cig is truly only something I noticed at first; like an acquired taste, eventually I learned the nuanced characteristics of the e-cig vapor and I found it much more pleasant than even hookah smoke. It didn't leave any odors or was even detectable from more than a couple feet away indoors! The nicotine is there at whatever strength you specify and so there is that satisfying buzz. After long we were both exclusively e-cig smokers due to how truly delightful it is compared to tobacco. We'll both enjoy the occasional actual smoke, her moreso than I, but it's not even approaching habitual.
I don't see the point of this "vaccine" because I don't think that nicotine is in and of itself all that harmful. It's enjoyable to smoke for many people, and similarly is it enjoyable to vaporize some smoke juice in your miniature fog machine! I suggest to anyone looking to quit smoking to try this alternative. The particular kit I enjoy is the Joye 510 (purchased from e-SmokeyTreats who have great prices [especially with the purchase code "save10"] and fast shipping), and the other fine mini e-cig my friends enjoy is the DSE 901. (The primary differences you'll find are in style of mechanism, whether activated by inhaling or by a button.)
If Linus hadn't started Linux, BSD would be in its current place. Linus did nothing spectacular or revolutionary. He was in the right place at the right time with his then-toy operating system, when AT&T was giving BSD legal trouble.
Are there more web-browser-based operating systems yet other than Palm webOS and Google Chrome OS? I am not going to look through the architecture right now but I expect it to be quite similar; certain applications will be built upon browser plug-ins, but fundamentally still be "web apps", and there will be numerous non-web-app services running natively on the Unix part of the platform, along with special extension objects in the JavaScript engine to allow access to these services via a message bus.
Turn signals in some areas are counterproductive. They tell the enemy (other drivers) what you intend to do, and that's bad because they'll do whatever they can to prevent you from doing it. Especially in Lexington and Louisville, but probably true in other areas of the country as well.:)
Especially true in Montgomery County, Maryland, as well.
This is my home county for the past eight years, and I think the default traffic patterns are actually probably going to be a significant improvement. I am not a traffic engineer but I am amazed at the number of lights in the county that have clearly wrong behavior where most of the time there is a green light going in the direction there is no one at all traveling at that time of day.
Gotta disagree with you there. They're not the right shape to allow you to create a vacuum between cupped fingers, and if you manage to contort your hand painfully in a way that allows you to actually get some positive pressure, the bowl is going to be too close to any bangs you might have for you to actually light it safely.
You need to learn how to read, because the reality described in the article is nothing like what you are saying. Additionally, no, "that kind of thing" that you are incorrectly describing was not "fixed" in the Linux kernel "like, at least 5-10 years ago." The Linux of 5-10 years ago had some of the worst use of global locking around. This isn't even about global locks, though; it is about replacing one particular lock implementation's use of a global mutex while modifying lock data structures to embedding the mutexes within the lock data structures.
Anytime a thread wants to access an item that might be claimed by another thread, it must use a lock to make sure that only one thread at a time can modify the item. Prior to Windows 7, when a thread needed to get or access a lock, its request had to go through a global locking mechanism. This mechanism -- the kernel dispatcher lock -- would handle the requests. Because it was unique and global, it handled potentially thousands of requests from all processors on which Windows ran. As a result, this dispatcher lock was becoming a major bottleneck. In fact, it was a principal gating factor that kept Windows Server from running on more than 64 processors.
New locking mechanism Windows 7 includes a wholly new mechanism that gets rid of the global locking concept and pushes the management of lock access down to the locked resources. This permits Windows 7 to scale up to 256 processors without performance penalty. On systems with only a few processors, however, the old kernel dispatcher lock was not overburdened, so this new mechanism provides no noticeable improvement in threading performance on desktops and small servers.
Ugh, I hate hearing uninformed comments like yours. I suppose it will actually be necessary to shout this...
THERE IS NO SPECIAL PROTOCOL FOR ITUNES TO USE IPODS. THEY ARE HFS+ OR FAT32 USB MASS STORAGE DEVICES THAT THE OPERATING SYSTEM MOUNTS AND ITUNES PUTS FILES ONTO.
A language is a language. Successful schools teach the art of programming which results in sufficient experience to learn new languages in the future. It doesn't matter which particular languages are used as examples in the process.
And honestly, clustering filesystems and databases are solving that problem too.
Except that clustering filesystems almost always have to compromise on one of the ACID properties. For example, Amazon's Dynamo and CouchDB are highly available, redundant, and fast, but allow conflicts, assuming the application will correct for them. Ok, but that fails for a banking application -- if I were to withdraw my entire balance from two different nodes simultaneously, I'd have a massive overdraft, but I'd also have the money.
You could imagine trying to shard it instead, but what happens when you transfer money between two shards? You still need a transaction, only now it needs to be synchronized between two nodes. What do you do? Do you lock both nodes at once? Now you've got a possibility of deadlocks.
Really? I thought you could choose a definitive order in which to lock any two nodes -- perhaps based on strict ordering of a globally unique identifier -- and always lock them in that order, avoiding the possibility of deadlock altogether. Guess you learn something new every day.
I assume the point you want to make is that Ruby is far more expressive than most other languages. I agree and would rather use it for most things if not for established projects wanting to stick with languages they're already using (C++, Java, C).
The only real difference with closures in Java and in Ruby is that Ruby gives you a writable version of the parent stack frame, where modifications to variables can occur, whereas Java gives you a read-only version, where you declare stack variables of interest as final so that all living versions of the stack frame remain consistent. It is really a minor inconvenience overall, especially compared to static typing.
I'm reminded of the PC vs console gaming argument about how mice are better because you can snap directly to a target instead of holding the control stick and having to wait as you pan around. Well touch vs mouse it's the same argument. With the mouse you have to start pushing your mouse across the mousepad, wait for it to reach its destination, and then fire. With touch you just tap the spot
Um, think about this for a second.
You are saying it's MORE difficult to move your mouse a couple of inch's (as most people have acceleration happening, so you don't have to move it 20 inch's to go across a 20 inch monitor) versus moving your arm/hand to the desired spot (which has to much worse for you physically). You either have the touchscreen horizontal, to reduce stress on your arm, but this increases the stress on your neck muscles by having your head always tilted down, or the screen is vertical, to reduce the stress on your neck, but you have to lift your arm and it's also more difficult to accurately touch the correct spot over time. And any position in between these two positions just varies how much strain each thing gets.
Why are you so certain that the "seated position" must remain constant in order to operate a computer? There are many more ways to position a computer display and a human body than those you described.
Slashdot Mirror
The game's standard campaign (contrasted with user-generated levels which I have not played around with yet, though there is a community of mission makers on the official forums) generally picks one of two criteria for winning. Depending on the mission, you must either:
1. Colonize every asteroid in the map.
2. Eradicate those species that are not your own.
You start off each level owning a particular asteroid, and you may have some seedling-generating trees and/or some seedlings with which to spread your colony, and perhaps you will have some defense trees as well. You start off with a fog of war that prevents viewing the particular objects on other asteroids as well as asteroids that are too far from territory you own. Up to an asteroid's total capacity of trees, you may spend ten seedlings and either sprout a tree to generate more seedlings or a tree that protects that one asteroid with homing missiles.
Given a single seedling, you may scout any other asteroid within range (one of the planet's attributes) of one of your owned asteroids in order to lift the fog of war, displaying all activity that occurs near the previously-undiscovered asteroid. Any number of seedlings may be commanded to take a journey through your claimed territory, and if they happen upon an empty asteroid, you can plant ten of them on it and one of either kind of tree that you may create is sufficient to claim the asteroid. If the asteroid is already inhabited, a battle will ensue. Your seedlings will now attack their trees and their seedlings! You may not use this asteroid to jump to another directly because you do not own it, but you may retreat, recalling your seedlings to an asteroid you own. If you succeed in destroying an enemy tree, your seedlings start infiltrating the root system of the planet, attacking its gradually-replenishing core energy. If enough seedlings are allowed to infiltrate to reduce the core energy to zero, you immediately gain ownership of the asteroid; the destroyed tree is now a seedling of a seedling-generator tree and all of the remaining trees change ownership to you.
The rest of the gameplay mechanics are smaller details: old seedling-generator trees will eventually produce a flower which can be used to upgrade any tree you own to make it produce super-seedlings or an exploding battleship of sorts, depending on which type of tree you upgraded. There is a cap to how many seedlings an asteroid will generate if left ignored. Attributes of the asteroid confer better speed or strength or infiltration efficiency to the seedlings generated by that asteroid. That's mostly it, though. I hope this is a good summary; the user manual is huge but I feel playing the demo and reading this summary should be enough to understand the game!
You and the reviewer should be ashamed at how useless your contributions are.
My 20mm thick Canon Elph would disagree with you....
Thus it became trivial to bum a smoke, whenever. It became habitual, and eventually I was buying my own packs of tobacco, rolling papers and filters. I enjoyed it, to be certain, but I didn't really let myself smoke more than two or three cigarettes a day because I knew it has deleterious health effects. It took a while for me to notice any physical effects, and I attribute this to having been working on losing weight and so regularly exercising and taking care of myself very well. It also took a while before I noticed that I... well, kinda always smelled like smoke.
And so, around the same time we both decided we wanted to cut down on smoking or maybe quit. After cutting down some, my roommate stumbled upon enough information about e-cigarettes to intrigue her into buying a starter kit. It came in the mail shortly after the order (the good retailers of these things ship fast) and it was quite exciting to be there when she opened up the package and put it together!
The first thing we noticed trying it out is that it is not terribly similar to cigarette smoke other than the superficial. Yeah, the e-cigarette generates heat as you inhale, but the vaporization point of the "smoke juice" (propylene glycol, nicotine, flavors and preservatives) is sufficiently lower than the heat of burning tobacco that you notice the difference. It is slightly acrid feeling/tasting compared to smoky and tar-laden. Replacing the taste of tobacco you have a huge variety of flavors: espresso, menthol, chocolate, black cherry, applice cider, green tea with honey and even classic tobacco flavors if that's what you really enjoy!
The acrid nature of the vapor from an e-cig is truly only something I noticed at first; like an acquired taste, eventually I learned the nuanced characteristics of the e-cig vapor and I found it much more pleasant than even hookah smoke. It didn't leave any odors or was even detectable from more than a couple feet away indoors! The nicotine is there at whatever strength you specify and so there is that satisfying buzz. After long we were both exclusively e-cig smokers due to how truly delightful it is compared to tobacco. We'll both enjoy the occasional actual smoke, her moreso than I, but it's not even approaching habitual.
I don't see the point of this "vaccine" because I don't think that nicotine is in and of itself all that harmful. It's enjoyable to smoke for many people, and similarly is it enjoyable to vaporize some smoke juice in your miniature fog machine! I suggest to anyone looking to quit smoking to try this alternative. The particular kit I enjoy is the Joye 510 (purchased from e-SmokeyTreats who have great prices [especially with the purchase code "save10"] and fast shipping), and the other fine mini e-cig my friends enjoy is the DSE 901. (The primary differences you'll find are in style of mechanism, whether activated by inhaling or by a button.)
If Linus hadn't started Linux, BSD would be in its current place. Linus did nothing spectacular or revolutionary. He was in the right place at the right time with his then-toy operating system, when AT&T was giving BSD legal trouble.
Are there more web-browser-based operating systems yet other than Palm webOS and Google Chrome OS? I am not going to look through the architecture right now but I expect it to be quite similar; certain applications will be built upon browser plug-ins, but fundamentally still be "web apps", and there will be numerous non-web-app services running natively on the Unix part of the platform, along with special extension objects in the JavaScript engine to allow access to these services via a message bus.
It is truly amazing how badly old cars can handle when you put terrible wheels and tires on them, isn't it?
Turn signals in some areas are counterproductive. They tell the enemy (other drivers) what you intend to do, and that's bad because they'll do whatever they can to prevent you from doing it. Especially in Lexington and Louisville, but probably true in other areas of the country as well. :)
Especially true in Montgomery County, Maryland, as well.
This is my home county for the past eight years, and I think the default traffic patterns are actually probably going to be a significant improvement. I am not a traffic engineer but I am amazed at the number of lights in the county that have clearly wrong behavior where most of the time there is a green light going in the direction there is no one at all traveling at that time of day.
No -- the polite thing to do is for you to not try to troll slashdot.
Yeah, I mean, it's not like I was raised vegetarian throughout my childhood and survived it....
Buy one and sell the Windows 7 license to me. I wouldn't mind saving some cash.
Gotta disagree with you there. They're not the right shape to allow you to create a vacuum between cupped fingers, and if you manage to contort your hand painfully in a way that allows you to actually get some positive pressure, the bowl is going to be too close to any bangs you might have for you to actually light it safely.
Or so I've heard.
(pics or gtfo)
You need to learn how to read, because the reality described in the article is nothing like what you are saying. Additionally, no, "that kind of thing" that you are incorrectly describing was not "fixed" in the Linux kernel "like, at least 5-10 years ago." The Linux of 5-10 years ago had some of the worst use of global locking around. This isn't even about global locks, though; it is about replacing one particular lock implementation's use of a global mutex while modifying lock data structures to embedding the mutexes within the lock data structures.
Anytime a thread wants to access an item that might be claimed by another thread, it must use a lock to make sure that only one thread at a time can modify the item. Prior to Windows 7, when a thread needed to get or access a lock, its request had to go through a global locking mechanism. This mechanism -- the kernel dispatcher lock -- would handle the requests. Because it was unique and global, it handled potentially thousands of requests from all processors on which Windows ran. As a result, this dispatcher lock was becoming a major bottleneck. In fact, it was a principal gating factor that kept Windows Server from running on more than 64 processors.
New locking mechanism
Windows 7 includes a wholly new mechanism that gets rid of the global locking concept and pushes the management of lock access down to the locked resources. This permits Windows 7 to scale up to 256 processors without performance penalty. On systems with only a few processors, however, the old kernel dispatcher lock was not overburdened, so this new mechanism provides no noticeable improvement in threading performance on desktops and small servers.
Can you even name a few contemporary orchestral composers? If not, I suggest that you have no ability to speak toward their relative "quality."
None, because iTunes does not copy over content that the device does not support.
No, it won't. It refuses to copy DRM-encrusted content to the Palm Pre.
Ugh, I hate hearing uninformed comments like yours. I suppose it will actually be necessary to shout this...
THERE IS NO SPECIAL PROTOCOL FOR ITUNES TO USE IPODS. THEY ARE HFS+ OR FAT32 USB MASS STORAGE DEVICES THAT THE OPERATING SYSTEM MOUNTS AND ITUNES PUTS FILES ONTO.
A language is a language. Successful schools teach the art of programming which results in sufficient experience to learn new languages in the future. It doesn't matter which particular languages are used as examples in the process.
And honestly, clustering filesystems and databases are solving that problem too.
Except that clustering filesystems almost always have to compromise on one of the ACID properties. For example, Amazon's Dynamo and CouchDB are highly available, redundant, and fast, but allow conflicts, assuming the application will correct for them. Ok, but that fails for a banking application -- if I were to withdraw my entire balance from two different nodes simultaneously, I'd have a massive overdraft, but I'd also have the money.
You could imagine trying to shard it instead, but what happens when you transfer money between two shards? You still need a transaction, only now it needs to be synchronized between two nodes. What do you do? Do you lock both nodes at once? Now you've got a possibility of deadlocks.
Really? I thought you could choose a definitive order in which to lock any two nodes -- perhaps based on strict ordering of a globally unique identifier -- and always lock them in that order, avoiding the possibility of deadlock altogether. Guess you learn something new every day.
I assume the point you want to make is that Ruby is far more expressive than most other languages. I agree and would rather use it for most things if not for established projects wanting to stick with languages they're already using (C++, Java, C).
The only real difference with closures in Java and in Ruby is that Ruby gives you a writable version of the parent stack frame, where modifications to variables can occur, whereas Java gives you a read-only version, where you declare stack variables of interest as final so that all living versions of the stack frame remain consistent. It is really a minor inconvenience overall, especially compared to static typing.
Seriously, show me the Java equivalent to:
Or maybe:
Try:
Runnable foo = new Runnable() { // do some stuff
public void run() {
}
}
setInterval(foo, 1000);
Happy to help you with any more Java questions!
Um, think about this for a second.
You are saying it's MORE difficult to move your mouse a couple of inch's (as most people have acceleration happening, so you don't have to move it 20 inch's to go across a 20 inch monitor) versus moving your arm/hand to the desired spot (which has to much worse for you physically). You either have the touchscreen horizontal, to reduce stress on your arm, but this increases the stress on your neck muscles by having your head always tilted down, or the screen is vertical, to reduce the stress on your neck, but you have to lift your arm and it's also more difficult to accurately touch the correct spot over time. And any position in between these two positions just varies how much strain each thing gets.
Why are you so certain that the "seated position" must remain constant in order to operate a computer? There are many more ways to position a computer display and a human body than those you described.
Better yet, we should implement the callable objects in assembly!
Actually, there is a "Delete all history for last 20 minutes" option.