Btw, one book I was really disappointed with is The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.
Firstly, it's really short. It's thin, uses a big font, large marginals and large line spacing, and lots of full-page decorative images with little or no informative content. It's more like a longish essay than a book.
Secondly, it contained little information I didn't know already (and I'm no physicist).
Thirdly, about the only thing that I wasn't acquinted with, and which the book heavily promotes, is the M-theory, which I felt was presented without too much justification. AFAIK the M-theory, like all the string theories it's composed of, has little or no predictive power, and no experimental evidence to speak of. Presenting it as the answer to everything felt quite unjustified.
Fourthly, it was full of really lame and unfunny jokes. And I'm not exaggerating a bit.
If Micky & co were active english-speaking communitymembers here, which u had all interacted with related to the TAS-work they had done, there is no doubt in my mind that this whole debate would be non-existant.
I suppose that makes you either a troll or an idiot, depending on the sincerity of that comment.
That being said, I have a suggestion that may alleviate some of the debate: publish the movie but make sure it has the tag "entertainment/speed trade-offs".
But this movie doesn't have those. The tag is applied to runs where maximum speed is sacrificed in order to increase entertainment. That doesn't apply to this submission at all.
Nach wrote:
I couldn't agree with you more. Further, we should round up everyone that doesn't have a strong German rooted or German sounding name, take them out back, and shoot them.
I suppose nordic people are safe too, considering that we belong to the aryan race and all...
Many people have the notion that all drugs that affect the brain are harmful and dangerous, dull your senses and capacity for thinking, and that psychiatrists are just quack doctors making random experiments on people with dangerous drugs.
You should also hear the other side of the coin. For example, a guy explained to me how he has this attention deficit disorder, which caused him great problems in learning and doing work (in other words, it was very difficult for him to concentrate on one thing for even moderate periods of time, making studying and learning anything very difficult, as well as doing any kind of work or job).
A doctor prescribed a drug for him, and his life made a 180-degree turn. He told how it was like the difference between night and day. He could concentrate on things, he could easily learn new things, he could perform his job significantly more efficiently than before. He could finally feel the joy of learning, working, and getting things done satisfactorily. The quality of his life increased enormously.
Are psychotropic drugs sometimes misprescribed or abused? Of course. But so is all medicine in one form or another. That doesn't make the medicine or the medical practice bad.
So now we can add scientology to the endless list of things you believe.
I could immediately spot blatant straw man argumentation, fallacy of equivocation and cherry-picking in the first few minutes of the first video. That probably sets up the tone for the rest of it, so I decided tl;dw. Sorry.
It depresses me that both SDA and TASVideos have this strange subjective attraction to "entertainment" versus speed and somehow weigh them against eachother as if that is a fair system.
Well, the primary goal of the website is entertainment, not record-keeping. That comes as a secondary goal.
If someone made a run that was 1 frame faster than this, but mostly consisted of a black screen, should it be published just because it's faster?
(Though odds are, it'd desync on the emulator for the same reason that files generated on an emulator might desync on a console).
OTOH it would probably greatly help in improving the emulation accuracy (although doing so would obviously break backwards compatibility with existing keypress files, as they would start desyncing exactly as they do on the real console).
Since then, I've swapped them on at least a dozen machines, as well as hot swapped mice without any issues at all. I don't know what to believe...
AFAIK the technical specification of the PS/2 port doesn't require support for hot-swapping, and I assume that the oldest and cheapest motherboards had no safety measures against it, so you could potentially damage the circuit, and even in the best cases the system would not detect the swapping. Better motherboards probably have safety measures to avoid this, even if the standard doesn't require it.
We could also have Firewalls that are hard to pass.
I do a lot of network related programming, and also manage networks. Till this day, I'm still not quite sure what a "firewall" is.
I suppose it's a bit like a brickwall, but made of fire instead of bricks.
More seriously, I suppose it's, roughly, any device or program that can be configured to restrict access to networked resources (either inbound or outbound), as opposed to a networked device accepting any and all requests without discrimination.
NP Man with a Knapsack. (Is the reference perhaps too obscure?)
NP Problems could also be really tough enemies on their own. NP Hard ones even tougher.
We could also have Firewalls that are hard to pass.
Sorry, no wisdom, but I'm thinking that motherboards (at least if you buy them yourself rather than bying a pre-assembled PC) often come with additional optional parts (such as game/joystick ports, etc). I suppose you have checked that yours didn't come with such a splitter already.
I liked The Greatest Show On Earth by Dawkins. I have also heard good things about The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan, and have actually ordered it (but it still hasn't arrived and hence I still haven't had an opportunity to read it).
I'm still wondering if it would be theoretically possible to change the camera angles without redoing the run, by using some script/program that changes the camera movements and compensates the joystick positions accordingly.
Though the run has a brand new set of names on it, it still feels like the 0-star run, only with someone else's additions. Now, I certainly know it's more complicated than this, but this is what I see as a viewer. As such, it feels almost disrespectful to the efforts of the previous team to replace it as such. This isn't a problem here alone, I'll add. In any similar case I think some tribute should be given to the previous team.
I can certainly understand the potential feelings of disappointment an author (or authors) could get if their very hard work is obsoleted by somebody else's, especially if the improvement is very minor. However, that's just the harsh reality that TASers have to live with.
(Although, thinking about it, perhaps the movie listing mechanism could be changed so that the entire history of a TAS is preserved with equal importance given to every publication, listing the publications in cronological order from the oldest to the newest and fastest/best. This way TAS authors wouldn't feel so much that their hard work has gone to waste.)
Personman wrote:
This video now has only 24% No votes, well within reason for publication under Nach's 30% rule.
Since the 'meh' votes don't care either way, we could split them equally among the yes and no votes for fairness, in which case we would get a clean 30-70% split.
I'm still waiting for the actual examples to back up the claim.
Find them yourself.
I can only conclude that there are no such examples and hence there is no precedent for this situation, and thus arguing "it has been done before" is invalid.
In English, grammatical gender is almost always restricted to living things with distinct sexes (and even then, animals are often referred to with "it" rather than "he" or "she")
In most English-speaking countries pets are usually referred to with gender pronouns. In nautical terminology a ship is always a "she".
If this doesn't get published, then we should revert a few super mario bros (nes and N64) runs cause many of them improved prior runs by a few mere frames. Some of them actually had bad camera angles and bad "style" but still were accepted. I definitely vote yes because it improves the current published run. Yeah, the camera handling was a bit annoying but not to the extent for me to vote no.
I agree. Why should those be published and not this one? If someone gets a world record time in a 100m race by just a tiny fraction of a second, they don't get denied the record because the judge didn't like the way the runner moved his arms.
I'm still waiting for the actual examples to back up the claim (ie. that in the past runs have been accepted which improved the previous only by a few frames and had worse camera angles). I'm not saying there aren't examples. I just don't remember any, nor has any actual example been brought up so far.
