76° inside. 77° outside. Not really warm enough to put the AC on, not much point in using the fan.
Some people use the wrong units for temperature. And distance. And volume. And weight. And even dates (what's something like "2.3.2011" supposed to mean?)
It's confusing.
This was fixed in phpBB 3.x, Warp. But I don't know if we're ever going to install it because there is so much custom stuff in our install of phpBB 2.x.
That's one of the major problems of patching software developed by others: They become differing branches that are very difficult to merge.
Of course the next question is how hard would it be to see how it was fixed and integrate the fix into tasvideos' branch... (Although the best option would be, obviously, to isolate the changes made to phpbb at tasvideos.org, upgrade phpbb, and integrate the changes back.)
How is it possible that the run length is 42:55 but the video length is only 36:50?
Btw, is the invisible Elum glitch really necessary? IMO it detracts from entertainment rather than adding to it (not least because at some points it's confusing what's happening, as it looks as if you are wasting time for no obvious reason).
Edit: Thinking about it, the relation between 42:55 and 36:50 is almost exactly the same as the relation between 60 and 50, which would mean that this is a 50 fps game encoded at 60 fps.
However, in this list Wiki: ConsoleVerificationTests you'll see a list of games with partial sync. Games in this category clearly desync due to emulator-NES inaccuracies. Mainly because they desync consistently in the same spot. That is the group I'd prefer to see be 'syncable' over fastest. TASers could easily work around the emu inaccuracies by testing.
I still think that if it's determined that the desyncing happens because the emulator is not accurately emulating the hardware, the emulator should be fixed. Otherwise the run is, basically, relying on an emulator "bug", which is very frowned upon.
Settling for a TAS that syncs on both the emulator and the console might produce a suboptimal TAS. One which has compromises to make it work in both, rather than one which is the fastest possible on the console (and hence a properly-working emulator).
And, as I said, if the reason for the desync is something along the lines of the game reading uninitialized RAM, which may have nondeterministic values in it, but otherwise the emulator is doing a proper job at emulating the hardware, then there's no problem in accepting the TAS. As long as it represents what could be possible on the console if those RAM values happened to be set appropriately it's ok.
(Edit: Oh, and of course there's the third very real possibility: That the nesbot device itself is not being accurate enough. In that case it's the device that should be improved.
I'm actually wondering if some of the desyncs could be caused by the game reading input between frames or otherwise too often at some points, which confuses the nesbot. After all, the keypress file only has data for each frame, no more.)
I don't know how easy this would be to fix/implement, but it's a rather annoying feature of phpbb which would be nice if it was corrected:
When there are new posts in a thread, there's a small orange icon in the thread listing on the left of the thread name which you can click to go to the first unread post.
However, after you have read the posts (and they get marked as read), and then a new post is made to that same thread, the orange icon appears again, but rather than jumping to the new post, it jumps to the same post as earlier. This is especially annoying when there are several pages of posts between that earlier "new post" and this newest one.
Only if you log out and log in again will the orange icons start jumping to the new posts, rather than remembering only what was the newest post at the time you first logged in.
(Of course logging out has the annoying side-effect of marking everything as read. This is especially frustrating if for some reason you end up logged out by accident. This sometimes happens, and you basically lose all "new post" marks and have no way of knowing anymore which threads had new posts when you logged in last time.)
At least the three first values are what they should (too lazy to see if 199 is the correct amount of a graph with 4 nodes), so it's probably exactly that.
That page also gives formula, but it also involves another sequence (which has formula involving yet another sequence, and that one doesn't have simple formula listed, only way to calculate it using maple).
Seems to be a lot more complicated than I expected. (Or perhaps not, thinking about it.)
The whole idea that if someone takes someone else's keypress file and submits it here verbatim without the author's permission (regardless of whether the submitter claims he made it himself or fully admits it's not his) we automatically reject it on grounds of ownership (and shaky arguments of copyright) is, IMO, a bit dubious.
Granted, it's common courtesy to not publish something verbatim without an author's consent. However, this kind of rule can open a can of worms.
For instance, what happens if the person who submits the keypress file makes some modifications to it? Can it then be considered acceptable to publish? How many modifications are needed for it to be acceptable? (Certainly if he modifies just the last frame of the file and nothing else, it's not "enough", but if he modifies 50% of it, it probably will be considered acceptable. Where is the line?)
As I commented earlier, claiming copyright on a keypress file is dubious at best. You can claim copyright, but that doesn't mean it necessarily has any legal weight (in the same way as you could claim copyright on a chess game record or food recipe, which would mean squat in most jurisdictions).
I was reading http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TriangRelations (instead of doing work), and started wondering how to count all those combinations of n people in a love relationship with each other.
From the setup these rules are obvious:
1) The relationship between n people is represented by a directional graph consisting of n nodes and which is connected (in other words you can reach any node from any other node by following one or more connections, either forward or backward). That is, no isolated groups.
2) Connections can be one-way or two-way (and count as two different situations).
3) All isomorphic graphs are considered equal, and thus counted only once. (For example, "A loves B, who loves C" is equal to "A loves C, who loves B". It's the same type of relationship, just with the labels changed.)
Is there a formula that tells how many different relationships (ie. different graphs according to the rules above) are possible with n people?
EDIT: actually before you point out, on the case of equal by copying before the judge decision my text is wrong that would only fit longer, I would point out its copied and request the judge cancel the submission. Copying and reverse engineering basically everything besides inputs that do not affect the run are the same to me.
When will you get into your thick skull that you can't own a method of playing a game? Not by any law, nor even by common practice. If someone comes up, for example, with a new trick in a game to save time, he doesn't own that trick, nor can be forbid others using it. If he publishes the trick, it's fair game for anybody to use. It doesn't matter how closely others replicate the trick.
What makes one mascot better than another? Marketability? (Even then, how would this be measured? Number of extraneous items that the character appears on? Pure # of sales for main titles?) Number of games starred in? I really can't think of anything else.
OTOH marketability and logic/sense don't always go hand-in-hand... :P
For what it's worth, I have to side with gia here, even if I am likely to be the only one. gia, you are not alone.
Then perhaps you could explain to me his position, because I don't understand it. It looks to me that he is having a tantrum because someone is using the same strategies has he did, as if he had some kind of right to them and could forbid others from doing the same things. (Well, that's the impression I get because he doesn't explain himself clearly.)
henke37 wrote:
Menu navigation is patently trivial and not worthy of copyright.
All this talk about "copyright" is moot, if not a bit ridiculous.
Unless you are a lawyer specialized on copyright laws, and hence you really know what you are talking about, I don't think discussing what might or might not be copyrightable is useless, if not even counterproductive.
Copyright is really fuzzy, and varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. In most of them for example things like food recipes, computer algorithms and chess or go game records (which parallel key input files) do not fall under copyright. Whether a key input file falls under copyright is, as far as I can tell, completely undecided because there's no official statement about it. (It would have to be either tested on court, in which case it would still be copyrighted in that one jurisdiction, not everywhere, or some kind of other official statement would be needed.) Hence discussing copyright issues with regards to them is rather moot.
Methods for doing things are more clearly not copyrightable (which is why things like food recipes and computer algorithms aren't). In the US you could file a patent, but I think that even there that's no longer the case (AFAIK they changed it recently). You simply can't claim ownership of a computer game strategy and forbid others from replicating it. That's, as far as I know, pretty unambiguous. (Check, for example, this.)
I would have to know the reason why it's not syncing on the console before forming an opinion. If it's not syncing because the emulator is not emulating the hardware properly, then I think the emulator should be fixed. If it's not syncing because, somehow, the game is getting some truly non-deterministic input from somewhere that could in theory be proper for the run to sync, then go for the fastest (because the TAS is, after all, representing what could be possible on the console given the right circumstances).
Noob Irdoh wrote:
even the room temperature or a slight variation in the voltage supplied can alter the behaviour and the outcome of the game.
Could you elaborate? Usually computers are by definition deterministic and non-determinism is undesirable and would cause erratic behavior and constant malfunction.
I still vehemently believe that Mario is a way better mascot than Sonic though
Thinking about it logically, it actually doesn't make much sense.
A mascot is usually an animal (sometimes mythological), possibly a more or less anthropomorphic one (like Sonic is). Sometimes it could be a robot. Humans are seldom, if ever, used as mascots, possibly because of the implications. (Mascots, while usually not pets, have a lot in common with them, and human pets would have quite unfortunate implications.)
Even for a human mascot, Mario is a bit odd one. A fat Italian plumber probably in his forties. A rather stereotypical Italian in many depictions. What kind of mascot is that?
None of you have cared to look for my run and read the comments, or you would realize p4wn3r did not make this on his own, he didn't even have to reverse engineer the video as I wrote on my comments everything he needed to understand and replicate the run.
You don't own a method of playing a game even if you came up with it first. People can replicate it all they like. Get over it.
I don't even understand what is it that you are complaining. It has already been said that strategies used in the run were attributed to you. What else do you want? You can't claim ownership of a strategy and forbid people from using it.
Who would have thought that a new route would be found at this point? Easy yes.
Btw, why is it not possible to reach the final boss right away, but the minibosses have to be defeated first?
I don't know. If that image is not scaled, then I suppose. I don't know why you were talking about there being tens of thousands of colors due to filtered scaling.
Fast forward a couple days to the alignment from the prediction and look at the 7.0+'s around Vanuatu. 3 in just AN HOUR IN A HALF. 7.0, 7.1, 7.4 in that order.
I really can't understand what you are getting at. Earthquakes happen, there are often foreshocks and aftershocks. There's nothing unusual about this, even though you make it sound like this is highly unusual.
I'm pretty certain that many such strings of earthquakes have happened when there is no planetary alignment of any kind. Some is bound to happen when there is some kind of alignment. Predict such an earthquake on each alignment, and you will be right eventually, especially if we give it an error margin of +-1 day, giving us a three-day window (as seems to be the case here).
Making a random prediction and making a prediction based on evidence is not the same thing.
Making a prediction based on random "evidence" is the same thing as making a random prediction. You could take any recurring phenomenon you like and use it to "predict" earthquakes and you will most probably have the same rate of success. Planetary alignment is not any more special than anything else.
Obviously if you get 365 people and assign them all a specific date for a big quake to happen, one of them is bound to be correct. That isn't what happened here.
It's the other way around: Have earthquakes every day of the year, and "predict" that earthquakes will happen on a specific day, and there's a pretty good chance that it will be correct. However, it's not any more impressive than predicting that the sun will raise on the 15th of May. Or predicting that the 12th of June will be a really hot day.
I'm not saying planetary alignments cause earthquakes. I'm saying there is A LOT of evidence that alignments may cause increased seismic activity.
"A lot" of evidence? Can you give references to peer-reviewed publications? If there is indeed "a lot" of such evidence, surely you can give us a dozen such publications. (And please don't insult my intelligence by resorting to conspiracy theories.)
Warp wrote:
sonicpacker wrote:
to predict it 9 months in advance
I'm curious to know why you think the timeframe is of any significance. What does it matter if the earthquake was "predicted" the previous week or 20 years ago? What difference does that make? It's not like earthquakes become more and more certain (and hence easier to predict) the closer they are to happening. This is not weather forecasting.
Maybe to you it's not like weather forecasting since you obviously don't even acknowledge legitimate evidence as being possibly true. It's clearly more impressive to say a specific thing will happen long before it actually ends up happening.
You are avoiding the question. Exactly why is it impressive?
The comparison to weather forecasting is pretty relevant: If they crunch all the numbers in a supercomputer array and come up with the conclusion that tomorrow will be sunny, and even give a specific average local temperature, that's nothing impressive. This is because weather can be predicted from current data and measurements to a relatively high degree of accuracy.
However, if someone gave an accurate prediction of the weather for every single day for the next full year, and he would be completely right, that would be quite impressive. (Even predicting one week forward is too difficult by number crunching because weather patterns are too random for that. Predicting an entire year, and doing it accurately, would be an impressive feat indeed.)
Earthquakes are a completely different story, though. We do not currently have any way to measure and predict the occurrence of earthquakes, and thus they are still very unpredictable. A magnitude 9 earthquake could happen within one hour somewhere for all we know. The amount of time between the "prediction" and when the earthquake happens is not really relevant. Whether such a prediction was made last week or 20 years ago doesn't make much difference. It's not any more or less impressive.
I would be more impressed if someone used planetary alignments to not only predict earthquakes with an error margin of a couple of days, but to an accuracy of an hour, the place where it will happen, and its magnitude, and did so consistently.
Also, I could perhaps buy that an alignment of the Moon, the Earth and the Sun would make earthquakes more likely, and this was backed up with peer-reviewed data. That's because the Moon and the Sun have a significant gravitational effect on the Earth due to tidal forces, and it might be plausible that they affect how continental plates behave. OTOH, has such an effect ever been demonstrated?
As for the "manual" option, I don't see how picking the colors manually is reasonably doable when the input image contains 10303 colors (due to filtered rescaling).
How about not scaling it, but use the original image data?
The cyan of Mario Paint is considerably darker and of different hue & saturation than the cyan background in that SMB3 level.
Maybe it's just my monitor, but it looks pretty darn close to me:
If the color picking algorithms are that bad, then perhaps the colors should be picked manually. After all, there aren't that many to choose from.
Exhibit B:
There's no contest. I rest my case.
If the color picking algorithms are that bad, then perhaps the colors should be picked manually. After all, there aren't that many to choose from.
