Depending on how many initial numbers are given at the start of the puzzle, multiple solutions to a specific initial set of numbers could exist.
Those puzzles are generally considered "broken" - but you can obtain a valid solution from those puzzles.
As an example of what I mean, consider the following puzzle grid - in the upper left corner, the digit is 1, in the far lower right hand corner, the number is 9 - multiple solutions exist that have a 1 in the (1,1) position and a 9 in the (9,9) position, and a complete solver should account for that. My application does not - it finds the first solution that meets that criteria.
I didn't know that it would solve all boards except for the hardest ones.
I've written one using DFS, it will solve all puzzles that have a solution. It stops when it reaches one solution. Having an application that can solve most, but not all puzzles isn't much help.
That would lead to a revolution in efficiency of everything from travel to mass transit to shipping.
Certainly a better example than a Sudoku solver... all a Sudoku puzzle is, at it's core, is a depth first search. You can speed up the algorithm with Dancing Links, but even on a moderately fast PC a DFS is fast enough to get a solution to a Sudoku puzzle in the blink of an eye.
I'd be interested in what the Chinese wikipedia article says (if anything) about the Student Massacre at Tienanmen Square...
For example, would they use the PRC Body count (23) or the Student Association's and the Chinese Red Cross body count? (2000 - 3000, as many as 10,000 injured).
NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.
Guess I'll have to head on over to astalavista.box.sk to download a copy of the WGA crack, just in case MS one day decides my copy of Vista is no longer legitimate.
Nah - just head on over to distrowatch.com and pick a Linux distro. I personally dumped Windows at home 5 years ago and I've never looked back.
You can argue whether or not the Linux Penguin is retarded, but at least you know he means no harm...
In this case, however, he's probably right.
Anti-piracy measures only annoy legitimate customers and thwart 14 year old morons - the "professional" pirates will eventually crack WGA, they have too much illicit profit incentive not to crack it and pirate it.
So I think it will happen, and MS will spend too much money, time, and effort in combating piracy instead of actually making a OS that's worth a damn. Let's face it - when all they do is pop up a message box when a process wants elevated permissions, and not require a password - too many users are conditioned to just click "OK".
Why is this a problem? Because it won't make Vista any more secure or protected, it'll just be *your* fault instead of MS's fault that you were infected with a virus. Whereas if they at least required a password, most mom & pop AOL'er might actually have a second thought about why this "N@k3d Brotney Speeris" screensaver needs additional permissions to run, and might not reflexivly click "OK".
Do you know how long it takes for a game to be developed? By mentioning that they all came out around the same time just proves my point that Mario 64 wasn't the "revolution" some people think it was, as there are / were many other examples. If we want to split hairs, how much different is Mario 64 from isometric platform games like Solstice and Snake, Rattle, and Roll?
Your gameplay distillation of OoT to try and devalue its revolution in gameplay is sad. Breaking the game down to its core gameplay pieces is missing the point. All games can be broken down to "you push buttons on the controller and then after a while you lose or you win,"
You completely missed my point - the Zelda games follow a formula, and each game in the series is pretty similar. I'm just pointing out that when Nintendo fanbois criticize other consoles for "sequelitis" that it's really a case of the pot calling the kettle black, especially when Mario and Zelda are brought in as examples...
Sitting here and going "Well I still play as Mario/Link and rescue the princess don't I? That's not a revolution, har!" makes you look like a shallow person who will ignore the obvious just to get their point across.
And ignoring other games of the genre, while propping up Ninendo as innovative, is intellectually dishonest.
Going from 2D to 3D, especially in a platform game, isn't a revolution, it's an evolution. Buy a dictionary, kid.
Depends - does hacking Doki Doki Panic and changing the main characters from a family to Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Toad count as a ripoff?
did they rip off the zelda games?
Probably - Atari 2600 had a top down "quest" game called Adventure, and Intellivision had the A D & D cart...
besides what is so good about these series is that they continue to be revolutionary - doing new things in new ways and pretty much always being excellent.
What did Super Mario World really add over Super Mario 3? A cape? For that matter, what was the big revolution between Mario 1 and Mario 2 (aka Lost Levels)? Super Mario 2 USA doesn't really count, because like I said, that game was Doki Doki Panic with a face lift.
As far as Mario 64... yeah, it was 3D, but there were other 3D adventure games like that: Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, etc.
Look at Zelda:OoT that was a fantastic revolution for zelda games
What's your criteria for declaring Ocarina of Time a revolution? Because it was 3D? The gameplay was still: Guide Link around the world, find items that open up new areas of the world to explore, lather, rinse, repeat.
The issue of memory copy performance is a tricky one, especially since CPU cycles are not the be-all to end-all of performance. Does the exception generated really cost that much more than he believes, or is it often eclipsed by the cost of the extra memory read/writes and CPU waits that are normally generated by a copy? Is it really feasible to expect program developers to do manual memory management in a day in age when programs easily weigh in at hundreds of megs?
What programs weigh in at hundreds of megs? Don't count data files or map files for games. The entire bin directory of a PostgreSQL install is only 20 megs, and that's a lot of stuff there.
And as far as doing memory management... YES. I have yet to see a compiler do a better job at managing memory than what I can do when I write my code - and the reason is quite simple: I'm the domain expert, not the compiler. Compilers generally do a good job, but it's those specific cases that bite you over and over again.
Linus is also right about child threads writing to memory. If that never happened, we wouldn't have a concept of a lock or a semaphore. The bottom line is that is happens a lot.
He may be right, but I'd like to hear more discussion between the *BSD guys and Torvalds before we put this matter to rest. And preferrably without the insults this time.:-/
I agree, the ad hominem was completely unecessary.
Sure you can argue the christian crusades when all of humanit was stupid, butwhat about recently?
The Crusades weren't really about religion, it was about beating back an Arab invasion. Religion and "liberating the Holy Land from the Heathens" was just how the European royalty whipped up support for the wars.
There's also some Prince of Wallachia that did a pretty good job at repelling the invaders... what was his name?
Oh yeah. Vlad The Impaler. The inspiration for Dracula.
And all of your above comments are the fault of the user, not the OS.
The other guy who complained about vi and cron missed the point entirely.
Backup up your files is the user's job. Both OS's can provide methods to do this automatically, but that does not take the onus of backups off the user.
Plus, no one is disputing my second point: If Windows gets borked, it's hard(er) to recover your files. If the home account in Unix gets borked, you still have a chance to recover it.
The OS already can be set up to do this. The premise of the article is flawed; and based on a premise that I reject. Chances are, if you're smart enough to run Linux, then you're probably smart enough to backup your important files.
Plus, given the author's scenario - let's flip it around: A Windows virus can bork your data and your OS. At least with UNIX, backups notwithstanding, the OS is still there and you'd have a much better chance at recovering your data than you would with Windows.
To date, the President has not specified the 'extraordinary events' which supposedly prompted his decision
Nuclear North Korea, blame for which can be entirely laid at the feet of Bill Clinton and Madeliene Albright, for giving the N. Koreans the technology to do so, and for believing the N. Koreans when they said they wuoldn't use the technology to develop a nuclear weapon.
Funny...the treaty was in existence from 1972 to 2002, ans I don't recall a single nuclear incident on U.S soil during that time.
The treaty had nothing to do with that: The threat of mutually assured destruction did. The reason, despite Reagan leaving the negotiating table at Reykjavik (which the NY Times said was going to start WW3...) for there being no nuclear exchange is because both sides knew if one started it they'd both be destroyed.
Ask the Cherokee how well their treaties worked out for them....
You might want to keep up on current events.
Cute. The Missle Defense program is still under development, and the potential is still there. Just because it's not working very well yet is no reason to drop the program.
Edison, for example, had several failures before he got the light buld working. Dyson went through 5000 prototypes before he got the Dyson Vaccuum right.
Not much of a surprise, though, given that this same President pulled out of the Kyoto Accords on Climate Change,
That Bill Clinton had no authority to sign, and that the US Senate voted against 99-0
withdrew the US from the treaty creating an International Criminal Court,
which opponents see as a threat to US Sovereignty
opposed a Protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention that would allow for inspections and verification, and failed to fulfill US obligations related to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Again, I can't help but see a trend.
You got a source for the non-proliferation treaty? Or are you upset that the military developed nuclear tipped bunker busters?
Someone really should have told Bush this before he scrapped a perfectly good 30-year old treaty
No. The treaty was with the Soviet Union, the USSR.
That entity no longer exists. The treaty was useless since the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
Treaties can also be broken at any time. That treaty would not have stopped nukes from raining down on American cities. The missle defense shield *might*.
Some people might think that gold is in too short a supply, but I think it just forces more strategic choices instead of "buy the most super awesome equipment for everyone ever at each town" way of thinking.
Actually I think the short supply of gold is to get the player using / thinking about using the Alchemy Pot.
As far as Gold - if you want a lot of it fast, go to Neos and stomp on Gold Golems. You'll get around 700 gold for each one you defeat.
DQ8 is a fantastic game, by the way. No complaints at all, except for one:
It's digital crack. Seriously. I had trouble putting the controller down while playing this game.
Star Locke doesn't have a snowball chance in hell of winning the Texas Governor position. It's going to be between the incumbent, Rick Perry, and another Republican challenger, Carole Keeton Strayhorn.
Star Locke, Kinky Friedman, and a few others, are just dry-roasted nuts that aren't worth paying much attention too.
Intel has a preceived advantage in speed they can't fully exploit.
The only scenario where Intel wins is if the operation fits entirely in the CPU cache. Otherwise, Intel processors spend an awful lot of time waiting for data.
AMD, on the other hand, is far more efficient in data access and transport, and that's why, despite running at a lower clock rate, AMD wipes the floor with Intel in benchmarks these days.
Given the benchmarks that show AMD consistently outperforming Intel, how does Intel have a "perceived advantage in speed"?
Even the Athlon XP CPU's were faster than the P4 counterparts. Compare an Athlon XP 1900+ (runs at 1.667 GHz) to a similarly clocked P4, and the Athlon wipes the floor with the Intel CPU.
AMD's architecture and chip design are, quite simply, better than anything Intel is offering.
Syntactically, C# and Java are extremely similar, so it doesn't matter too much which one you take - you'll be able to pick up the other one fairly quickly. My advice: Learn the OO concepts, as the underlying language is less important. For example: Learn why derivation is a good thing, learn inheritance, object re-use, etc.
The language (whether C# or Java) is just how you express what it is you're trying to accomplish.
Now - With all that said: I'd take Java, for one simple reason: It's been around longer and there are more free resources out there to help you with it.
But remember - as much as 90% of what you learn in Java will apply to C# and vice versa, as long as you focus on the base language (and not API's like SWT, Swing, or WinForms).
On the bright side, it'll be easier for the HAM radio broadcasters to migrate to podcasting or internet radio streams, possibly doubling or tripling their audience.
Imagine, Jim Bob's Bowl-O-Rama Supreme Show might now be able to be heard by 6, or perhaps even 9 people.
I usually spent a little time circling Elfland, and did some major leveling up in the Earth Cave, in the infamous "Hall of Giants".
Of course, after I played through the game a few times, I'd end up getting the canoe and fighting through the ice cave / castle of trials, then going back to the Volcano to stomp Kary with the upgraded characters (Knight, Ninja, etc.) after seeing Bahamut.
Sadly, the FF games started getting more linear after that, though I'm still a big fan of the series / genre.
Additionally, you didn't fight ogres outside elfland; you go to the top of the peninsula just northeast of Pravoka
Exit Elfland, walk around in circles. If you're on an NES, the Ogres will often be accompanied by "Creeps", if it's Final Fantasy Origins for PSX the Creeps are named something else.
But there's definitely Ogres surrounding Elfland, and they'll appear all the way to Astos's castle.
But you are right about one thing, they do appear north of Pravoka.
Slashdot Mirror
Depending on how many initial numbers are given at the start of the puzzle, multiple solutions to a specific initial set of numbers could exist.
Those puzzles are generally considered "broken" - but you can obtain a valid solution from those puzzles.
As an example of what I mean, consider the following puzzle grid - in the upper left corner, the digit is 1, in the far lower right hand corner, the number is 9 - multiple solutions exist that have a 1 in the (1,1) position and a 9 in the (9,9) position, and a complete solver should account for that. My application does not - it finds the first solution that meets that criteria.
I didn't know that it would solve all boards except for the hardest ones.
I've written one using DFS, it will solve all puzzles that have a solution. It stops when it reaches one solution. Having an application that can solve most, but not all puzzles isn't much help.
Took all the fun out of the game.
I never thought it was fun to begin with.
That would lead to a revolution in efficiency of everything from travel to mass transit to shipping.
Certainly a better example than a Sudoku solver... all a Sudoku puzzle is, at it's core, is a depth first search. You can speed up the algorithm with Dancing Links, but even on a moderately fast PC a DFS is fast enough to get a solution to a Sudoku puzzle in the blink of an eye.
I'd be interested in what the Chinese wikipedia article says (if anything) about the Student Massacre at Tienanmen Square...
For example, would they use the PRC Body count (23) or the Student Association's and the Chinese Red Cross body count? (2000 - 3000, as many as 10,000 injured).
NOBODY expects the Spanish Inquisition! Our chief weapon is surprise...surprise and fear...fear and surprise.... Our two weapons are fear and surprise...and ruthless efficiency.... Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.
Guess I'll have to head on over to astalavista.box.sk to download a copy of the WGA crack, just in case MS one day decides my copy of Vista is no longer legitimate.
Nah - just head on over to distrowatch.com and pick a Linux distro. I personally dumped Windows at home 5 years ago and I've never looked back.
You can argue whether or not the Linux Penguin is retarded, but at least you know he means no harm...
In this case, however, he's probably right.
Anti-piracy measures only annoy legitimate customers and thwart 14 year old morons - the "professional" pirates will eventually crack WGA, they have too much illicit profit incentive not to crack it and pirate it.
So I think it will happen, and MS will spend too much money, time, and effort in combating piracy instead of actually making a OS that's worth a damn. Let's face it - when all they do is pop up a message box when a process wants elevated permissions, and not require a password - too many users are conditioned to just click "OK".
Why is this a problem? Because it won't make Vista any more secure or protected, it'll just be *your* fault instead of MS's fault that you were infected with a virus. Whereas if they at least required a password, most mom & pop AOL'er might actually have a second thought about why this "N@k3d Brotney Speeris" screensaver needs additional permissions to run, and might not reflexivly click "OK".
Your gameplay distillation of OoT to try and devalue its revolution in gameplay is sad. Breaking the game down to its core gameplay pieces is missing the point. All games can be broken down to "you push buttons on the controller and then after a while you lose or you win,"
You completely missed my point - the Zelda games follow a formula, and each game in the series is pretty similar. I'm just pointing out that when Nintendo fanbois criticize other consoles for "sequelitis" that it's really a case of the pot calling the kettle black, especially when Mario and Zelda are brought in as examples...
Sitting here and going "Well I still play as Mario/Link and rescue the princess don't I? That's not a revolution, har!" makes you look like a shallow person who will ignore the obvious just to get their point across.
And ignoring other games of the genre, while propping up Ninendo as innovative, is intellectually dishonest.
Going from 2D to 3D, especially in a platform game, isn't a revolution, it's an evolution. Buy a dictionary, kid.
Depends - does hacking Doki Doki Panic and changing the main characters from a family to Mario, Luigi, Peach, and Toad count as a ripoff?
did they rip off the zelda games?
Probably - Atari 2600 had a top down "quest" game called Adventure, and Intellivision had the A D & D cart...
besides what is so good about these series is that they continue to be revolutionary - doing new things in new ways and pretty much always being excellent.
What did Super Mario World really add over Super Mario 3? A cape? For that matter, what was the big revolution between Mario 1 and Mario 2 (aka Lost Levels)? Super Mario 2 USA doesn't really count, because like I said, that game was Doki Doki Panic with a face lift.
As far as Mario 64... yeah, it was 3D, but there were other 3D adventure games like that: Tomb Raider, Crash Bandicoot, etc.
Look at Zelda:OoT that was a fantastic revolution for zelda games
What's your criteria for declaring Ocarina of Time a revolution? Because it was 3D? The gameplay was still: Guide Link around the world, find items that open up new areas of the world to explore, lather, rinse, repeat.
The issue of memory copy performance is a tricky one, especially since CPU cycles are not the be-all to end-all of performance. Does the exception generated really cost that much more than he believes, or is it often eclipsed by the cost of the extra memory read/writes and CPU waits that are normally generated by a copy? Is it really feasible to expect program developers to do manual memory management in a day in age when programs easily weigh in at hundreds of megs?
What programs weigh in at hundreds of megs? Don't count data files or map files for games. The entire bin directory of a PostgreSQL install is only 20 megs, and that's a lot of stuff there.
And as far as doing memory management... YES. I have yet to see a compiler do a better job at managing memory than what I can do when I write my code - and the reason is quite simple: I'm the domain expert, not the compiler. Compilers generally do a good job, but it's those specific cases that bite you over and over again.
Linus is also right about child threads writing to memory. If that never happened, we wouldn't have a concept of a lock or a semaphore. The bottom line is that is happens a lot.
He may be right, but I'd like to hear more discussion between the *BSD guys and Torvalds before we put this matter to rest. And preferrably without the insults this time. :-/
I agree, the ad hominem was completely unecessary.
His mission will be to find Sarah Connor.
The Crusades weren't really about religion, it was about beating back an Arab invasion. Religion and "liberating the Holy Land from the Heathens" was just how the European royalty whipped up support for the wars.
There's also some Prince of Wallachia that did a pretty good job at repelling the invaders... what was his name?
Oh yeah. Vlad The Impaler. The inspiration for Dracula.
The other guy who complained about vi and cron missed the point entirely.
Backup up your files is the user's job. Both OS's can provide methods to do this automatically, but that does not take the onus of backups off the user.
Plus, no one is disputing my second point: If Windows gets borked, it's hard(er) to recover your files. If the home account in Unix gets borked, you still have a chance to recover it.
Google "How to use cron".
The OS already can be set up to do this. The premise of the article is flawed; and based on a premise that I reject. Chances are, if you're smart enough to run Linux, then you're probably smart enough to backup your important files.
Plus, given the author's scenario - let's flip it around: A Windows virus can bork your data and your OS. At least with UNIX, backups notwithstanding, the OS is still there and you'd have a much better chance at recovering your data than you would with Windows.
Mod article -1, Flamebait.
Nuclear North Korea, blame for which can be entirely laid at the feet of Bill Clinton and Madeliene Albright, for giving the N. Koreans the technology to do so, and for believing the N. Koreans when they said they wuoldn't use the technology to develop a nuclear weapon.
Funny...the treaty was in existence from 1972 to 2002, ans I don't recall a single nuclear incident on U.S soil during that time.
The treaty had nothing to do with that: The threat of mutually assured destruction did. The reason, despite Reagan leaving the negotiating table at Reykjavik (which the NY Times said was going to start WW3...) for there being no nuclear exchange is because both sides knew if one started it they'd both be destroyed.
Ask the Cherokee how well their treaties worked out for them....
You might want to keep up on current events.
Cute. The Missle Defense program is still under development, and the potential is still there. Just because it's not working very well yet is no reason to drop the program.
Edison, for example, had several failures before he got the light buld working. Dyson went through 5000 prototypes before he got the Dyson Vaccuum right.
Not much of a surprise, though, given that this same President pulled out of the Kyoto Accords on Climate Change,
That Bill Clinton had no authority to sign, and that the US Senate voted against 99-0
withdrew the US from the treaty creating an International Criminal Court,
which opponents see as a threat to US Sovereignty
opposed a Protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention that would allow for inspections and verification, and failed to fulfill US obligations related to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. Again, I can't help but see a trend.
You got a source for the non-proliferation treaty? Or are you upset that the military developed nuclear tipped bunker busters?
I see a trend, too. A blind left leaning one.
No. The treaty was with the Soviet Union, the USSR.
That entity no longer exists. The treaty was useless since the collapse of the Soviet Empire.
Treaties can also be broken at any time. That treaty would not have stopped nukes from raining down on American cities. The missle defense shield *might*.
Actually I think the short supply of gold is to get the player using / thinking about using the Alchemy Pot.
As far as Gold - if you want a lot of it fast, go to Neos and stomp on Gold Golems. You'll get around 700 gold for each one you defeat.
DQ8 is a fantastic game, by the way. No complaints at all, except for one:
It's digital crack. Seriously. I had trouble putting the controller down while playing this game.
Star Locke, Kinky Friedman, and a few others, are just dry-roasted nuts that aren't worth paying much attention too.
The only scenario where Intel wins is if the operation fits entirely in the CPU cache. Otherwise, Intel processors spend an awful lot of time waiting for data.
AMD, on the other hand, is far more efficient in data access and transport, and that's why, despite running at a lower clock rate, AMD wipes the floor with Intel in benchmarks these days.
Given the benchmarks that show AMD consistently outperforming Intel, how does Intel have a "perceived advantage in speed"?
Even the Athlon XP CPU's were faster than the P4 counterparts. Compare an Athlon XP 1900+ (runs at 1.667 GHz) to a similarly clocked P4, and the Athlon wipes the floor with the Intel CPU.
AMD's architecture and chip design are, quite simply, better than anything Intel is offering.
The language (whether C# or Java) is just how you express what it is you're trying to accomplish.
Now - With all that said: I'd take Java, for one simple reason: It's been around longer and there are more free resources out there to help you with it.
But remember - as much as 90% of what you learn in Java will apply to C# and vice versa, as long as you focus on the base language (and not API's like SWT, Swing, or WinForms).
And still, why was this an issue for a federal court as opposed to a state court?
It's not. Why should a local school district curriculum ever be a federal issue?
If the locals in Dover PA want to teach their kids ID, then let them. If doesn't affect anyone else.
Imagine, Jim Bob's Bowl-O-Rama Supreme Show might now be able to be heard by 6, or perhaps even 9 people.
Of course, after I played through the game a few times, I'd end up getting the canoe and fighting through the ice cave / castle of trials, then going back to the Volcano to stomp Kary with the upgraded characters (Knight, Ninja, etc.) after seeing Bahamut.
Sadly, the FF games started getting more linear after that, though I'm still a big fan of the series / genre.
Exit Elfland, walk around in circles. If you're on an NES, the Ogres will often be accompanied by "Creeps", if it's Final Fantasy Origins for PSX the Creeps are named something else.
But there's definitely Ogres surrounding Elfland, and they'll appear all the way to Astos's castle.
But you are right about one thing, they do appear north of Pravoka.