I'm not being flippant or showing off, but for a while when they first came about in the UK papers I was partial to the odd Sudoku and in order to speed up the process of grid filling, I printed out some prepared grids with all the little numbers (the ones you're supposed to pencil in) in every single box.
Then after filling in the published starting numbers it became a simple task to simply black out those small numbers that were no longer possible i.e all the ones of the same number in the same square, row or column). Then almost invariably I'd be left with a number of squares that could be filled and the process repeated. Then, as with normal play I'd find a row column or square with pairs or triples of numbers enabling other numbers to be black out. This would solve most Sudoku, and it didn't even require any thinking.
And that's what ultimately weaned me off the things. I was essentially imitating a computer process, blacking out and filling in numbers as the rules laid down allowed. In other words utterly pointless and boring.
There are puzzles this won't solve, but then there's no actual skill to be employed in solving those ones either. Sudoku guides would bill this as "ariadne's thread", but ultimately it comes down to guesswork. When you're stuck then you have to pick a square and take a guess. If you're right, and it works, you solve the puzzle, otherwise your guess was wrong, you go back to where you were and choose the other number. To give it another name: brute force. No skill, no intelligence, just number crunching. Sudoku puzzles aren't puzzles at all, they're just an exercise in box filling.
Because Google's business model relies on advertising, and it's morally reprehensible to advertise to kids anyway. If they did do it it would have to be as a tax writeoff.
This problem just goes away if you park the correct way around (reverse into the space).
As you pull up to reverse the car you have just checked that the space is empty and clear of obstacles and you can reverse straight in with no delay. Then when it comes to leave you have full visibility around the front of your car.
Reversing out of a space necessarily leaves you totally ignorant of what's around you. By the time you've got in, belted up, adjusted the radio and put the car into gear, any observations you may have made about obstacles before you got in the car are completely redundant. You then have to rely on edging out and hoping that everyone else is going to allow you to complete your manoeuvre.
Of course it doesn't help that (admittedly entirely based on evidence from TV) US car parking lots tend to angle the parking spaces in a way that encourages people to park the wrong way around, presumably because when people first pass their tests they find it easier to drive straight into a space head first, with no thought or consideration for how they're going to emerge later.
I forgot about the similarly awful interface of a DAB radio I've used whereby you can hit the button to scan to the next station and it will play out that station, but if you forget to hit the [Yes I really do want to listen to this station] button it will wait a few seconds and then take you back to the former station you had on.
It beggars belief how designers have completely thrown the established rules out the window for DAB.
I completely agree. AM/FM radio technology became so commoditised that manufacturers were able to stick radios into any random product they desired (pictures the bathroom buddy from Gremlins). I fail to understand why DABs are so expensive.
We have one DAB radio and it required considerable thought before committing to a purchase. Earlier this year we finally decided to replace the 25 year old alarm clock radio with a new DAB one. We took it back a week later, the reasons being too numerous to mention, oddly though not reception issues. But for the price we paid the interface had so many shortcomings we just couldn't live with it.
Why are DABs so overly complicated? On my car stereo you scan to the next channel with one button. If you want to save it as a preset you just hold the preset button down. Most radios have worked like this for years. To retune a DAB you have to hit the scan button until the display shows the name of the channel you want, but then it doesn't change until you hit another button to select it.
So the sequence of button presses if you DON'T know what station you want to listen to is [>>] [SEL] -wait- [>>] [SEL] -wait- [>>] [SEL] -wait- And if you DO know what you want to listen to you have to look at the piss poor dot matrix display.
I can't see anybody pulling this off again. This was a one-off never to be repeated feat. There are lots of good ideas floating around now about what single we should all buy in opposition to the next X-factorbot, the best of which, I think, is to buy this year's X-factor single. But that's the point, there are so many possibilities that no one of them is going to be triumphant and capture the public's (lack of) imagination in the same way. There'll be competing facebook groups campaigning for different songs and it'll be self-defeating.
For the record, I didn't bother with either song. The UK charts have never reflected my preferences.
Probably redundant but it's clear that Usain Bolt is also a genetic 'freak'. No amount of training or branded shoes are going to bring any current 100 or 200m runner up to his level, well have to wait for another freak to come along to ever see such times again.
Unless...we have camps where people are selectively bred for different skills: speed; strength; stamina; intelligence... but wasn't that type of activity universally banned?
I seem to recall it seeming to take years to get from the various 0.x versions thorugh the 0.9.x versions before several 1.0a versions, and since then it's gone almost exponential.
I'm a hoarder, although I always called it completionist. I've always wanted to find all the secret rooms and collect all the things I can to get 100% in a game. But the goal has to be attainable. If it becomes a chore then what's the point?
I spent more hours than I care to disclose swimming around all 3 islands in GTA San Andreas collecting those shells, and then thought "Why the fuck am I doing this, it's incredibly dull." and I haven't been bothered enough to finish the game. If I can't complete it then I'm not interested. That's why I'm totally disinterested in setting foot inside WOW, a game that it seems from the outside can never be completed. A game that I've witnessed real people spending every spare minute practicing digital fishing in order to attain some fake skill which will enable them to do something else probably equally pointless. I've got enough chores to get on with in the physical world without setting myself a bunch of other tasks that no-one I know will ever see the results of, or even less, appreciate.
Now, can anybody tell me how to get 100% completion on Fire & Ice for the Amiga. I got 96% and I'm pretty sure I found all the secret rooms but that 4% betrays the fact that I either missed one or the game is wrong.
In the UK, the new iPod shuffle is £59! The old model could be had for between £30-£35, which put it in the easy gifting bracket. With the price now effectively doubled I think Apple are going to lose a LOT of sales over here.
And yes, I know a lot of it is to do with the fact our currency has tanked and our economy is completely screwed but it still seems like there's a little bit more to it than that.
I only hope that these kinds of percentage price hikes aren't seen across the range. I sorely tempted to buy up all the old models left and hold on to them for a few months to sell them at a profit.
I completely agree. There's nothing wrong with neutral.
I'd take it a stage further though. I really don't see the difference between having 1500 +ve feedback and 100+ve feedback. I think they should only show the last 10 or so feedback's given on a rolling basis, and then ONLY when feedback has been left. The default should be neutral. You shouldn't have to leave feedback at all. I hate it it when people whinge about me not having left feedback like 2 days after the auction finishes. It really makes me want to leave -ve feedback.
If my local supermarket canvassed me for feedback every time I got through the checkout and then chased me to my car when I didn't respind immediately, then I would stop shopping there. It seems most buyers on eBay don't understand that some of us have full time jobs and don't sepnd all the hours God sends checking the status of our auctions. And that not of of us live in the happy smiley "everyone deserves andAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA++++++++++++++++++++ you're a great eBayer" world.
I suppose that sort of opinion was contributory to me getting my account suspended despite the fact my feedback was 99.9% +ve. I hate eBay with a passion and really hope that Google step up to the plate and destroy their auction market share. I can't even get them to cancel my account which I'm sure is a breach of the Data Protection Act but that's another story.
You just gave me an idea. How about instead of making the tram brake every time it reaches the station, the station is itself a rolling road (rail) which runs at a constant speed just below that of the tram, enabling peeople to comfortably get on and off at slower than walking speed, but the tram never stops and is always travelling at a constant speed. When the tram reaces the end of the station it finds itself travelling back at full speed.
Hey I'm just an ideas man, you work out the technology and safety implications and fix them yourself.
On that subject. Our digital signal gets a lot worse in summer when it's raining because, I'm told, of all the wet leaves the aerial is pointing through at the local park.
I've been advised to get a wide band high gain antenna installed, but I'm loathed to do so if in a year or two the signal will be improved to the point where the new aerial will be overkill and I'll actually end up getting too much signal (which apparently is even worse).
Should I upgrade the aerial or put up with it. This summer was, as those in the UK know, particularly bad for TV.
Last I heard you need a TV licence for ANY equipment capable of viewing the BBCs output, and that includes a computer. No really. Did you hide your computer when the inspector cam around?
My gf has sworn off of Motorola phones for this same reason. She's had two now and both were exactly the same as you describe. Every 5 minutes they'd go off on one like the electronic equivalent of jumping up and down frantically waving your arms and shouting at the top of your voice "I'm running out of energy!! I'm running out of energy!!" My Sony Ericsson tells you once, tells you again an hour later and then dies. It seems there should also be some attention paid to the time of day. No point beeping away and flashing in the middle of the night for most people (user defined settings if you want to change it I suppose). Perhaps it should even only bother to tell you next time you try to interact with the device. It iPhone probably has something like that.
That's not the only way. They could simply avoid the issue by flying the other way around. The could even halve the distance if they flew along the date line, looped around the nearest pole and flew back up the other side.
I don't see why this was modded as funny, I completely agree.
LCDs and Plasmas are both being heavily marketed like we simply HAVE to have one or the other, a bit like Republicans/Democrats or Labour/Conservative. Personally I see problems with both technologies and I WILL stick with my 20+ year old Decca CRT until it actually fails. Just two months ago I recycled my old 14" portable which had served me well for around 20 years, but I haven't bothered replacing it since I can live without TV in the bedroom. I only hope that when the main TV does finally pack in I'll still be able to get a CRT to replace it.
BTW it appears on just about everything: "Tesco: Every little helps". It's not always the most appropriate little motto. I once saw a poster in a store window. Large type:
THIS STORE WILL BE
CLOSED FOR 3 WEEKS
STARTING 10/10/1998
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not being flippant or showing off, but for a while when they first came about in the UK papers I was partial to the odd Sudoku and in order to speed up the process of grid filling, I printed out some prepared grids with all the little numbers (the ones you're supposed to pencil in) in every single box.
Then after filling in the published starting numbers it became a simple task to simply black out those small numbers that were no longer possible i.e all the ones of the same number in the same square, row or column). Then almost invariably I'd be left with a number of squares that could be filled and the process repeated. Then, as with normal play I'd find a row column or square with pairs or triples of numbers enabling other numbers to be black out. This would solve most Sudoku, and it didn't even require any thinking.
And that's what ultimately weaned me off the things. I was essentially imitating a computer process, blacking out and filling in numbers as the rules laid down allowed. In other words utterly pointless and boring.
There are puzzles this won't solve, but then there's no actual skill to be employed in solving those ones either. Sudoku guides would bill this as "ariadne's thread", but ultimately it comes down to guesswork. When you're stuck then you have to pick a square and take a guess. If you're right, and it works, you solve the puzzle, otherwise your guess was wrong, you go back to where you were and choose the other number. To give it another name: brute force. No skill, no intelligence, just number crunching. Sudoku puzzles aren't puzzles at all, they're just an exercise in box filling.
Because Google's business model relies on advertising, and it's morally reprehensible to advertise to kids anyway. If they did do it it would have to be as a tax writeoff.
This problem just goes away if you park the correct way around (reverse into the space).
As you pull up to reverse the car you have just checked that the space is empty and clear of obstacles and you can reverse straight in with no delay. Then when it comes to leave you have full visibility around the front of your car.
Reversing out of a space necessarily leaves you totally ignorant of what's around you. By the time you've got in, belted up, adjusted the radio and put the car into gear, any observations you may have made about obstacles before you got in the car are completely redundant. You then have to rely on edging out and hoping that everyone else is going to allow you to complete your manoeuvre.
Of course it doesn't help that (admittedly entirely based on evidence from TV) US car parking lots tend to angle the parking spaces in a way that encourages people to park the wrong way around, presumably because when people first pass their tests they find it easier to drive straight into a space head first, with no thought or consideration for how they're going to emerge later.
I forgot about the similarly awful interface of a DAB radio I've used whereby you can hit the button to scan to the next station and it will play out that station, but if you forget to hit the [Yes I really do want to listen to this station] button it will wait a few seconds and then take you back to the former station you had on.
It beggars belief how designers have completely thrown the established rules out the window for DAB.
I completely agree. AM/FM radio technology became so commoditised that manufacturers were able to stick radios into any random product they desired (pictures the bathroom buddy from Gremlins). I fail to understand why DABs are so expensive.
We have one DAB radio and it required considerable thought before committing to a purchase. Earlier this year we finally decided to replace the 25 year old alarm clock radio with a new DAB one. We took it back a week later, the reasons being too numerous to mention, oddly though not reception issues. But for the price we paid the interface had so many shortcomings we just couldn't live with it.
Why are DABs so overly complicated? On my car stereo you scan to the next channel with one button. If you want to save it as a preset you just hold the preset button down. Most radios have worked like this for years. To retune a DAB you have to hit the scan button until the display shows the name of the channel you want, but then it doesn't change until you hit another button to select it.
So the sequence of button presses if you DON'T know what station you want to listen to is [>>] [SEL] -wait- [>>] [SEL] -wait- [>>] [SEL] -wait-
And if you DO know what you want to listen to you have to look at the piss poor dot matrix display.
...for version 1.1 thanks.
>> With many people typically having hundreds of "friends".
There, fixed that for you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFKHaFJzUb4
I can't see anybody pulling this off again. This was a one-off never to be repeated feat. There are lots of good ideas floating around now about what single we should all buy in opposition to the next X-factorbot, the best of which, I think, is to buy this year's X-factor single. But that's the point, there are so many possibilities that no one of them is going to be triumphant and capture the public's (lack of) imagination in the same way. There'll be competing facebook groups campaigning for different songs and it'll be self-defeating.
For the record, I didn't bother with either song. The UK charts have never reflected my preferences.
That reminds me, when are George, Cosmo, Elaine and Jerry getting out?
Probably redundant but it's clear that Usain Bolt is also a genetic 'freak'. No amount of training or branded shoes are going to bring any current 100 or 200m runner up to his level, well have to wait for another freak to come along to ever see such times again.
Unless...we have camps where people are selectively bred for different skills: speed; strength; stamina; intelligence... but wasn't that type of activity universally banned?
I'm getting update fatigue.
I seem to recall it seeming to take years to get from the various 0.x versions thorugh the 0.9.x versions before several 1.0a versions, and since then it's gone almost exponential.
I haven't bothered with 3.5 yet.
I'm a hoarder, although I always called it completionist. I've always wanted to find all the secret rooms and collect all the things I can to get 100% in a game. But the goal has to be attainable. If it becomes a chore then what's the point?
I spent more hours than I care to disclose swimming around all 3 islands in GTA San Andreas collecting those shells, and then thought "Why the fuck am I doing this, it's incredibly dull." and I haven't been bothered enough to finish the game. If I can't complete it then I'm not interested. That's why I'm totally disinterested in setting foot inside WOW, a game that it seems from the outside can never be completed. A game that I've witnessed real people spending every spare minute practicing digital fishing in order to attain some fake skill which will enable them to do something else probably equally pointless. I've got enough chores to get on with in the physical world without setting myself a bunch of other tasks that no-one I know will ever see the results of, or even less, appreciate.
Now, can anybody tell me how to get 100% completion on Fire & Ice for the Amiga. I got 96% and I'm pretty sure I found all the secret rooms but that 4% betrays the fact that I either missed one or the game is wrong.
Sea level rising is the problem that solves itself.
All those people who get displaced by rising water simply get first dibs on the new land appearing in the rapidly warming antarctic.
In the UK, the new iPod shuffle is £59! The old model could be had for between £30-£35, which put it in the easy gifting bracket. With the price now effectively doubled I think Apple are going to lose a LOT of sales over here.
And yes, I know a lot of it is to do with the fact our currency has tanked and our economy is completely screwed but it still seems like there's a little bit more to it than that.
I only hope that these kinds of percentage price hikes aren't seen across the range. I sorely tempted to buy up all the old models left and hold on to them for a few months to sell them at a profit.
Yes let's get rid off all the other loosers!!!!
I completely agree. There's nothing wrong with neutral.
I'd take it a stage further though. I really don't see the difference between having 1500 +ve feedback and 100+ve feedback. I think they should only show the last 10 or so feedback's given on a rolling basis, and then ONLY when feedback has been left. The default should be neutral. You shouldn't have to leave feedback at all. I hate it it when people whinge about me not having left feedback like 2 days after the auction finishes. It really makes me want to leave -ve feedback.
If my local supermarket canvassed me for feedback every time I got through the checkout and then chased me to my car when I didn't respind immediately, then I would stop shopping there. It seems most buyers on eBay don't understand that some of us have full time jobs and don't sepnd all the hours God sends checking the status of our auctions. And that not of of us live in the happy smiley "everyone deserves andAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA++++++++++++++++++++ you're a great eBayer" world.
I suppose that sort of opinion was contributory to me getting my account suspended despite the fact my feedback was 99.9% +ve. I hate eBay with a passion and really hope that Google step up to the plate and destroy their auction market share. I can't even get them to cancel my account which I'm sure is a breach of the Data Protection Act but that's another story.
...that the only difference was that Ms Pac Man had a bow in her hair.
You just gave me an idea.
How about instead of making the tram brake every time it reaches the station, the station is itself a rolling road (rail) which runs at a constant speed just below that of the tram, enabling peeople to comfortably get on and off at slower than walking speed, but the tram never stops and is always travelling at a constant speed. When the tram reaces the end of the station it finds itself travelling back at full speed.
Hey I'm just an ideas man, you work out the technology and safety implications and fix them yourself.
On that subject. Our digital signal gets a lot worse in summer when it's raining because, I'm told, of all the wet leaves the aerial is pointing through at the local park.
I've been advised to get a wide band high gain antenna installed, but I'm loathed to do so if in a year or two the signal will be improved to the point where the new aerial will be overkill and I'll actually end up getting too much signal (which apparently is even worse).
Should I upgrade the aerial or put up with it. This summer was, as those in the UK know, particularly bad for TV.
...a famly multinational conglomerate.
Last I heard you need a TV licence for ANY equipment capable of viewing the BBCs output, and that includes a computer.
No really. Did you hide your computer when the inspector cam around?
My gf has sworn off of Motorola phones for this same reason. She's had two now and both were exactly the same as you describe. Every 5 minutes they'd go off on one like the electronic equivalent of jumping up and down frantically waving your arms and shouting at the top of your voice "I'm running out of energy!! I'm running out of energy!!"
My Sony Ericsson tells you once, tells you again an hour later and then dies.
It seems there should also be some attention paid to the time of day. No point beeping away and flashing in the middle of the night for most people (user defined settings if you want to change it I suppose). Perhaps it should even only bother to tell you next time you try to interact with the device.
It iPhone probably has something like that.
That's not the only way. They could simply avoid the issue by flying the other way around. The could even halve the distance if they flew along the date line, looped around the nearest pole and flew back up the other side.
I don't see why this was modded as funny, I completely agree.
LCDs and Plasmas are both being heavily marketed like we simply HAVE to have one or the other, a bit like Republicans/Democrats or Labour/Conservative. Personally I see problems with both technologies and I WILL stick with my 20+ year old Decca CRT until it actually fails. Just two months ago I recycled my old 14" portable which had served me well for around 20 years, but I haven't bothered replacing it since I can live without TV in the bedroom. I only hope that when the main TV does finally pack in I'll still be able to get a CRT to replace it.
BTW it appears on just about everything: "Tesco: Every little helps". It's not always the most appropriate little motto. I once saw a poster in a store window. Large type:
THIS STORE WILL BE
CLOSED FOR 3 WEEKS
STARTING 10/10/1998
Tesco
every little helps
So how does that help exactly?