I like abstract strategy games, but I don't like heavy memorization. Chess is popular so it's easy to find opponents, but memorizing the opening book is necessary if you want to get good. It's also very easy for weaker players to lose the game from a single blunder, which is unsatisfying for everybody. Arimaa was designed to be difficult for computers because of the very high branching factor, and that same property also makes it interesting for humans.
Arimaa can be played on a Chess board, and the rules are simple. Memorization is completely useless. You're forced to use intuition, in a way more like Go than Chess. There are no draws. Comebacks from inferior material are much more common than in Chess. It feels like Chess without the boring bits. It's still too new to tell if it's a truly great abstract strategy game, but people are already playing it at a very high level with no obvious flaw in the rules. I recommend trying it: http://arimaa.com/arimaa/
I've been using a Lamy Safari fountain pen every day for years, dropped it a few times, and it still works good as new. Most fountain pens are fragile and expensive, designed more for asthetics than functionality. The Lamy Safari is reasonably priced and extremely reliable. The grip section has an unusual design that's very comfortable to hold. Even the nibs are tougher than average and if you manage to destroy one (eg. by dropping onto concrete) they are replacable. There's good reason these pens are highly recommended for beginners by fountain pen user groups. It will easily survive long enough to save money over disposable ballpoints if you buy ink in bulk and use a refillable cartridge.
There's a strong argument that the real reason for Japan's surrender was the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which happened at the same time. You'll note that the Allies did a lot of damage to Japanese cities with conventional weapons without forcing surrender. The firebombing of Tokyo caused similar damage to the bombs. The bombs however were a convenient excuse to avoid losing face, because unlike the Manchuria campaign they couldn't be blamed on Japanese military incompetance.
Hard real time support, and greater electrical robustness. There's no OS or caches changing your timings unexpectedly, and interrupt latencies are very low and consistent. It also sources/sinks a lot more current, so you can do things like driving an LED directly from an IO pin without an external transistor.
Flicker become invisible at about 100Hz, but only when your eyes are perfectly still. As soon as you move your eyes the flicker becomes visible. Saccadic masking does not supress this. I have personally tested this using an LED and a 555 timer, and I can see flicker up to about 10KHz if I move my eyes fast enough.
PWM lighting is extremely annoying to me, as well as multiplexed LED displays.
The most legible font is the font you're most familiar with. I used to take fonts very seriously, tweaking Fontconfig settings, etc. I now use default sans-serif for everything. I literally don't know what font it is, and it's just as legible as my customized setup. Despite all the jokes about Comic Sans I doubt it would take more than a week to get used to it.
Stopped breathing doesn't kill instantly. It's not practical with 100s of people, but with only one there should be time to restrain that person and inject them with naloxone.
You can do meaningful mathematics research with nothing but pencil and paper. Filtering out frivolous submissions is a worthwhile goal, but the fee should be adjusted according to the author's ability to pay.
You make a Stradivarius the same way you make any other high quality violin, as shown by skilled musicians failing to distinguish them from modern replicas in blind tests.
Maintaining contrast with the adverts was the only reason networks didn't remove all the dynamic range from the programming. Now that the contrast is illegal, there's nothing stopping channel vs. channel competition for loudness. Just as election campaigns target the swing voters, TV producers care about the channel flippers, and being louder than the competition is an easy way to grab their attention.
This law has the perverse consequence of making *everything* sound as bad as the adverts.
I also change my sitting position frequently. I removed my chair's arm rests to allow more flexibility.
I use a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000, which has a great layout but poor quality rubber dome keyswitches. Several people on the geekhack.org keyboard forums have modded these to use mechanical keyswitches, so maybe I'll do the same.
A good modern low self-discharge NiHM (eg. 2nd generation Eneloop) can survive more charge cycles than lithium ion, and has better self-discharge performance. Capacity is a bit worse than traditional NiMH, but it's still a lot better than NiCd. It would probably be possible to build a NiMH that meets your specifications for electric vehicles.
And don't forget that all OSs default to running 120Hz monitors at 60Hz. You have to change them to 120Hz manually. Windows even sometimes resets them back to 60Hz when you change some other display setting.
Do you use a wireless mouse? Some of them update only at about 60Hz, so you'll not see the benefit in window dragging. And even with a wired mouse, the default 100Hz (Linux) or 125Hz (Windows) mouse update rate isn't fast enough to guarantee updating every frame on a 120Hz monitor, so you'll need to change mousepoll (Linux) or install a hacked hidusbf with test certificate (Windows). It's also possible your window compositing system is capped at 60fps. IIRC correctly Compiz does that unless you change some hidden setting, and maybe Aero does too. I don't use compositing.
The difference between 60Hz and 120Hz is extremely obvious if you're actually updating every frame. I refused to use a LCD until 120Hz LCDs were available, and even that's just barely adequate. A 200Hz CRT is clearly smoother.
All FPSs have some randomness to them, because of random player spawns, and because optimal play involves moving unpredictably. When players are limited by bad hardware they reach a point where significant skill differences are no longer possible and the randomness dominates. With high quality hardware (and good game design) the player skill difference dominates.
The better hardware you have the more you can benefit from high skill. High level console play has too much randomness because the players are bottlenecked by the controller/autoaim/low fps/small fov/etc. High level PC play often ends in very one-sided matches where small skill differences can be decisive. It's the difference between casual and hardcore play.
Not going to work, because of latency. Some animations eg. Mario's legs are only decorative, but others, eg. an enemy preparing to attack, are important game information and shouldn't be delayed at all. There's no way to algorithmically distinguish between them so even the important information will be delayed 1/4 to 1/2 second.
Slashdot Mirror
Navigation/route finding.
I like abstract strategy games, but I don't like heavy memorization. Chess is popular so it's easy to find opponents, but memorizing the opening book is necessary if you want to get good. It's also very easy for weaker players to lose the game from a single blunder, which is unsatisfying for everybody. Arimaa was designed to be difficult for computers because of the very high branching factor, and that same property also makes it interesting for humans.
Arimaa can be played on a Chess board, and the rules are simple. Memorization is completely useless. You're forced to use intuition, in a way more like Go than Chess. There are no draws. Comebacks from inferior material are much more common than in Chess. It feels like Chess without the boring bits. It's still too new to tell if it's a truly great abstract strategy game, but people are already playing it at a very high level with no obvious flaw in the rules. I recommend trying it:
http://arimaa.com/arimaa/
I've been using a Lamy Safari fountain pen every day for years, dropped it a few times, and it still works good as new. Most fountain pens are fragile and expensive, designed more for asthetics than functionality. The Lamy Safari is reasonably priced and extremely reliable. The grip section has an unusual design that's very comfortable to hold. Even the nibs are tougher than average and if you manage to destroy one (eg. by dropping onto concrete) they are replacable. There's good reason these pens are highly recommended for beginners by fountain pen user groups. It will easily survive long enough to save money over disposable ballpoints if you buy ink in bulk and use a refillable cartridge.
There's a strong argument that the real reason for Japan's surrender was the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which happened at the same time. You'll note that the Allies did a lot of damage to Japanese cities with conventional weapons without forcing surrender. The firebombing of Tokyo caused similar damage to the bombs. The bombs however were a convenient excuse to avoid losing face, because unlike the Manchuria campaign they couldn't be blamed on Japanese military incompetance.
Hard real time support, and greater electrical robustness. There's no OS or caches changing your timings unexpectedly, and interrupt latencies are very low and consistent. It also sources/sinks a lot more current, so you can do things like driving an LED directly from an IO pin without an external transistor.
Are you using the Arduino library? It's much faster if you access the AVR registers directly.
Slow it down for a bassline and that 192KHz will actually be useful.
Flicker become invisible at about 100Hz, but only when your eyes are perfectly still. As soon as you move your eyes the flicker becomes visible. Saccadic masking does not supress this. I have personally tested this using an LED and a 555 timer, and I can see flicker up to about 10KHz if I move my eyes fast enough. PWM lighting is extremely annoying to me, as well as multiplexed LED displays.
The most legible font is the font you're most familiar with. I used to take fonts very seriously, tweaking Fontconfig settings, etc. I now use default sans-serif for everything. I literally don't know what font it is, and it's just as legible as my customized setup. Despite all the jokes about Comic Sans I doubt it would take more than a week to get used to it.
Stopped breathing doesn't kill instantly. It's not practical with 100s of people, but with only one there should be time to restrain that person and inject them with naloxone.
You can do meaningful mathematics research with nothing but pencil and paper. Filtering out frivolous submissions is a worthwhile goal, but the fee should be adjusted according to the author's ability to pay.
Try using no toothpaste at all:
http://www.ijdr.in/article.asp?issn=0970-9290;year=2010;volume=21;issue=2;spage=213;epage=217;aulast=Jayakumar
I stopped using toothpaste about a year ago, to no perceptible effect. Brushing+flossing alone is sufficient to keep your teeth healthy.
Lots of tests have been done, here's a good one:
http://www.pnas.org/content/109/3/760
See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stradivarius#Comparisons_in_sound_quality
You make a Stradivarius the same way you make any other high quality violin, as shown by skilled musicians failing to distinguish them from modern replicas in blind tests.
Running under DOS typically does not give you 100% control over the CPU:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode
Maintaining contrast with the adverts was the only reason networks didn't remove all the dynamic range from the programming. Now that the contrast is illegal, there's nothing stopping channel vs. channel competition for loudness. Just as election campaigns target the swing voters, TV producers care about the channel flippers, and being louder than the competition is an easy way to grab their attention.
This law has the perverse consequence of making *everything* sound as bad as the adverts.
Running an operating system is both an advantage and a disadvantage. Hard realtime is much easier on an Arduino.
I also change my sitting position frequently. I removed my chair's arm rests to allow more flexibility.
I use a Microsoft Natural Ergonomic 4000, which has a great layout but poor quality rubber dome keyswitches. Several people on the geekhack.org keyboard forums have modded these to use mechanical keyswitches, so maybe I'll do the same.
A good modern low self-discharge NiHM (eg. 2nd generation Eneloop) can survive more charge cycles than lithium ion, and has better self-discharge performance. Capacity is a bit worse than traditional NiMH, but it's still a lot better than NiCd. It would probably be possible to build a NiMH that meets your specifications for electric vehicles.
And don't forget that all OSs default to running 120Hz monitors at 60Hz. You have to change them to 120Hz manually. Windows even sometimes resets them back to 60Hz when you change some other display setting.
Do you use a wireless mouse? Some of them update only at about 60Hz, so you'll not see the benefit in window dragging. And even with a wired mouse, the default 100Hz (Linux) or 125Hz (Windows) mouse update rate isn't fast enough to guarantee updating every frame on a 120Hz monitor, so you'll need to change mousepoll (Linux) or install a hacked hidusbf with test certificate (Windows). It's also possible your window compositing system is capped at 60fps. IIRC correctly Compiz does that unless you change some hidden setting, and maybe Aero does too. I don't use compositing.
The difference between 60Hz and 120Hz is extremely obvious if you're actually updating every frame. I refused to use a LCD until 120Hz LCDs were available, and even that's just barely adequate. A 200Hz CRT is clearly smoother.
All FPSs have some randomness to them, because of random player spawns, and because optimal play involves moving unpredictably. When players are limited by bad hardware they reach a point where significant skill differences are no longer possible and the randomness dominates. With high quality hardware (and good game design) the player skill difference dominates.
The better hardware you have the more you can benefit from high skill. High level console play has too much randomness because the players are bottlenecked by the controller/autoaim/low fps/small fov/etc. High level PC play often ends in very one-sided matches where small skill differences can be decisive. It's the difference between casual and hardcore play.
It does matter, because cells are most vulnerable to radiation while in the process of dividing.
Not going to work, because of latency. Some animations eg. Mario's legs are only decorative, but others, eg. an enemy preparing to attack, are important game information and shouldn't be delayed at all. There's no way to algorithmically distinguish between them so even the important information will be delayed 1/4 to 1/2 second.