Well, you could impose some limits, such as:
1) The translation patch must be "officially" titled 100% complete (by the creators of the translation).
2) It must have been unchanged for at least a year. (In other words, it really is the final translation and clearly nobody is working on it anymore.)
3) The source of the translation should be "reputable". (Although this can be quite a hard rule to define precisely.)
The voting system could be (at least in theory) changed so that you could vote only by posting (and your post must be non-empty). This would increase the amount of comments explaining the votes, but on the other hand it would also in some cases significantly decrease the signal-to-noise ratio of the voting thread, with tons and tons of "I voted yes" (and nothing else) posts which are useless. (There are certain TASes that have got over a hundred votes. Imagine if every single one was accompanied by a "I voted yes" post.)
jimsfriend wrote:
PS: I posted this earlier today and it vanished! (Deleted? Eaten by the grue? Something else?) ctrl+v gives me try #2 imo
Using an outdated codec that has been the state-of-the-art standard a long time ago as an example of an obscure codec that you can find on the ISO/ITU website is a pretty retarded argument to make IMO.
You get no argument from me on that, given that it was you who brought up the whole MPEG 1 as an example of an "obscure standardized codec".
If a standardized format is obscure its probably because it once was a standard a very long time ago, like MPEG 1.
I'm not sure we are talking about the same thing when we are using the word "standard". What do you mean "it once was a standard a very long time ago, like MPEG 1"? You mean MPEG 1 is not a standard anymore? Do standards expire?
Standardization is no guarantee of quality, popularity nor support. Likewise non-standardization isn't guarantee of the opposite.
I don't really understand what does it matter if it might not be a standard officially recognized by some international standardization committee. What's important is not that it's standard, but that it's popular and widely supported. (I'm pretty sure you could search an official international standard for a really obscure audio format which basically no media player supports. The argument "but it's standard" wouldn't be of much help.)
This very subject has been discussed to some extent in this thread, but let me nevertheless pose a conjecture. (In fact, I came up with this when I was in high school, but back then I didn't have enough mathematical knowledge to postulate it as precisely and unambiguously as here.)
Let's assume we have two functions f(x) and g(x), and a constant c, such that:
1) Both f(x) and g(x) are smooth functions (around x=c).
2) f(c) = 0 and g(c) = 0.
3) The nth derivative of f(x) is non-zero at c. (I think this is a more formal way of stating that f(x) is not simply the function "0". Is there a better way?)
Conjecture: limx->c f(x)g(x) = 1
Can this conjecture be proven as true (or a counter-example given)? (In case there is a counter-example, is there any way to modify one of the prerequisites, or add a new one, that would make it true?)
but i can place zero into x infinity times.
0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0+0....=(x is not equal to 0)
I think you are confusing "inf*0" with "limx->inf x*0", which are not the same thing (the former is undefined, the latter is zero).
How about this instead: -1 = (-1)3 = (-1)6/2 = ((-1)6)1/2 = 11/2 = 1.
(The task here is, of course, to tell which '=' is incorrect and why.)
That said, Javascript isn't a good idea either, because I know there are people (including me) who usually surf the Internet with Javascript disabled
You should really use NoScript rather than just disabling javascript because many websites depend on javascript. With NoScript you can allow javascripts on a per-site basis.
But anyways, the only drawback of having javascripts disabled would be that you see only the default screenshot and are unable to browse the rest. That isn't such a big deal, really. You simply see the movie entry as any other movie entry. It's not like the page would become disabled or unwatchable.
Just use Flash for the animation, it is both widely supported and supports the normal rgb colorspace.
Using flash is both overkill (like shooting flies with a cannon) and unnecessary. It's better to just use javascript, which suffices for this task more than enough.
I don't personally have experience with large-scale game engines, but I have a friend who has worked in several big game companies (including Ubisoft in Canada) for many years, and has been writing his own game engine as a hobby. I haven't followed closely the status of the project, but I know it's quite a big ordeal for one single person to do.
The project in question has a web page: http://www.spinxengine.com/
#1: Competing with UDK.
Unreal Development Kit is indeed free and tested, but my engine will offer better technology in general. My goal is to meet or beat CryEngine 3, coming close to Frostbite 2. If you had the choice between a free Unreal Engine 3 and a $100 CryEngine 3, which would you pick?
I hate to be a party pooper (I sometimes get flack because of that, a recent case involving asm being a good example), but please don't take it the wrong way if I can't help but feel a bit skeptical.
I don't doubt your expertise and competence as a programmer, but the amount of work doable by a single person (I'm assuming you are doing this alone because you didn't mention anybody else) is physically limited, no matter how skillfull and experienced he might be.
Modern game engines, such as Unreal Engine, are really huge projects, developed by teams of people (the amount probably counting in the dozens, if not even hundreds if we take into account all the people that have contributed during the history of the game engine in question) and often quite large budgets. There's a lot more to a game engine than just the binary that's linked to the game executable (such as all kinds of design and conversion tools). Even if the engine consisted solely of the executable binary and nothing else, it's still a quite large and complex project. Many of the algorithms and technologies are far from trivial to implement (many of which are related to making the engine as fast as possible, for example by hidden surface removal algorithms and so on). Of course if the engine consists only of a binary library and nothing else, its usefulness will be severely limited (because you then need a big bunch of third-party tools to make everything else.)
I'm not trying to discourage you from doing this (and I'm not saying that such one-man projects are impossible and do not exist, because examples do exist), but I'm just wondering if you are not being a bit unrealistically (no pun intended) optimistic.
When you asked that, I understood that you were asking how one could come to the conclusion that the number 1 would never be reached while doing only a finite number of computations, but you seem to be looking for an algorithm that determines whether it terminates or not.
Not necessarily an algorithm, but any mathematical method to assess if the counter-example is indeed valid (and thus proves the conjecture as false). In other words, how would a mathematician check the validity of the proposed counter-example?
I'm not sure I understand correctly. Unless I'm mistaken, you seem to talk about methods that could in some cases be used to disprove or prove the counter-example as valid, rather than a sureproof way of telling if it is.
As far as I understand, a theoretical counter-example to the Collatz conjecture doesn't need to cause a loop (which doesn't contain 1), but could cause the series to grow forever. If the counter-example would cause such a loop, then it could indeed be verified programmatically (at least in theory, if there's enough RAM and time). However, if the alleged counter-example causes the series to just grow and grow, never reaching a stable loop (or collapsing to 1), how would you verify that it's indeed a counter-example to the conjecture?
If someone gave an alleged counter-example to the Collatz conjecture, how could one check if it's indeed a valid counter-example? (After all, you can't just run an algorithm on it for infinity. Even if it seems to grow forever, maybe it just takes a really, really long time to reach a value which causes it to eventually collapse to 1.)
