I haven't looked at the code with much thought, but at least you are using the variable 'a' uninitialized the first time the loop is executed. The behavior is thus undefined.
I'd also say the popularity of Halo makes this statement completely invalid:
Warp wrote:
FPS games in a game console are not fun for casual playing.
Units sold does not necessarily correlate to how suitable the game is for casual players. Would you say that, for example, the target audience of Half-Life is casual gamers?
I could list maybe 5 good PSP games on a good day.
Let me guess: You don't count ports nor remakes of existing games in that.
If that's correct, my question would be: Why not? Not everyone has played older console games, and all those remakes and ports are actually completely new to them. I myself am one of those people (I have never owned nor played any game console), and I find many of the PSP-remade games very enjoyable, addictive and refreshing.
Could you mention which of these games (which I have bought for the PSP) are not good in your opinion, and why? And "it's a remake" is not a convincing answer to me. (Not all of these are remakes at all, in fact.)
- Final Fantasy
- Final Fantasy II
- Final Fantasy VII: Crisis Core
- Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lions
- Tales of Eternia
- Star Ocean: First Departure
- Star Ocean: Second Evolution
- Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness
- Valkyrie Profile: Lenneth
- Patapon
- Patapon 2
- Tekken Dark Resurrection
- God of War: Chains of Olympus
- Silent Hill: Origins.
(Yes, I like JRPGs, why?)
I own a few more games too. Besides them, there are other games which I believe are generally considered rather good, although I have not got around buying them, such as the Monster Hunter and the Grand Theft Auto series.
The reason is not the specs, most of the console that sells well have a lower price. With a lower price, the console sells more, and more game are developed for it and it's a running cycle.
At least the DS and the PSP have about the same price, so in that case it's not the decisive factor...
Btw, it seems that Nintendo has understood some basic truth about
computing: It's not processing power that sells. Consider this:
Xbox 360: Triple-core CPU at 3.2 GHz, 512 MB of RAM.
Units sold: 30 million.
PS3: A 3.2 GHz Cell microprocessor, which consists of one PowerPC-based
core and six SPE cores, 256 MB of RAM.
Units sold: 22 million.
Nintendo Wii: A single-core CPU at 729 MHz, 88 MB of RAM.
Units sold: 50 million.
PlayStation Portable: 333 MHz CPU, 32 MB of RAM (plus 2 MB of GPU RAM).
Units sold: 50 million.
Nintendo DS: A 67 MHz main CPU and a 33 MHz coprocessor, 4 MB of RAM.
Units sold: 100 million.
I think that the problem is that in the western cultures beauty is not one of the admired qualities of men, and thus not associated with manliness and masculinity. At most a manly man can be handsome, but not really beautiful, which is more reserved for women and all things feminine.
AFAIK the Japanese culture has always had a different perspective on masculine beauty, all the way from the Heian period and even earlier. (The anime character Fujiwara no Sai would be a perfect example of this.)
Btw, can anyone tell me what is the music style used in the star light zone?
It sounds like something you could hear in a cruise ship or something. (I suppose some would call it "elevator music".)
This is one of the most entertaining videos I have seen in some time. Good job.
Btw, there's one level where the "record" time is shown as 11.31 seconds, but the completion time in this TAS is 15.46. How is that possible? Would that record time be even attainable?
What I'm worried about is the world thinking that terrorism by the Palestinians is somehow justified. Regardless of what the reason for terrorist acts may be, it's never justifiable.
Literally the same can be said about Israelites, really.
I also find it wrong that the word "terrorism" has suffered a huge inflation and is being used as an umbrella term for everything (in a similar way as eg. the term "racism" is). Any act of war is called "terrorism", not because it would be, but simply to show disagreement.
There are clear differences between acts of terrorism and military acts of war:
- Military war is usually aimed at the enemy military forces, in order to disable them. It's usually considered a good thing to minimize civilian casualties, if possible. On the other hand, acts of terrorism are invariably targeted towards civilians and their aim is to maximize civilian casualties.
- Likewise military war usually targets enemy military infrastructure and tries to minimize damage to civilian infrastructure. Acts of terrorism try to maximize destruction of civilian infrastructure.
- War is usually declared in advance, as a last resort when all peaceful negotiations fail. One of the ideas is that the other country gets to move its civilians to safety, if possible, Acts of terrorism have no specific warning in advance because the objective is to kill as many civilians as possible, after all.
Many people deliberately define terrorism as "civilians died". That's not the definition. The definition is "civilians were the main target". Israel has not committed any terrorist acts. It has performed military operations. Yes, civilians have died because of them, but the civilians were not the target.
On the other hand, Palestinian terrorists target civilians and try to maximize casualties. That's the pure definition of terrorism.
If you disagree with Israel's military operations, ask yourself what would your country do if it was constantly being attacked by some neighboring people.
Btw, this is an interesting article about the subject: http://www.thelocal.se/17466/20090209/
While I have no qualms with the existence of Israel as a state, I am worried with the way that its land has been gathered and the way it acts to the former owners of that land, the Palestinians.
What I'm worried about is the world thinking that terrorism by the Palestinians is somehow justified. Regardless of what the reason for terrorist acts may be, it's never justifiable.
I'm also worried that even though it's a well-known and well-published fact that Palestinians teach antisemitism and hatred to their small children, the world mainly ignores it. Nobody shows concern nor reproach.
Also the world is not in the least worried about antisemitism in general, not by Palestinians or by anyone else. Heck, even some elected politicians in some western countries show open antisemitism with impunity.
The fact is that in modern society children are the epitome of innocence and purity who are completely unable of doing anything wrong (eg. lie) and who are revered and protected as holy semi-gods. If a child, who by this dogma is completely unable to lie, accuses someone of molesting him, that's all the proof of guilt society needs. Even if legal courts are forced to free the accused because of the letter of the law, in the eyes of the public the accused will always be guilty. After all, there was unrefutable proof: The word of someone who is physically unable to tell lies or do anything wrong.
(Of course this wouldn't be the first time children have been coached to lie, deliberately or by mistake. There have been corroborated cases of this.)
No, but anyone who is/has been active in the site itself will definitely see/feel a difference in the site. Don't downplay this.
I'm not downplaying anything. I'm saying that the Megaman helmet is a great symbol and IMO shouldn't be dropped lightly. Personally I don't consider a change in the server to be such a drastic change in the public image of the website that it would merit that.
I have the need for this algorithm in practice.
Suppose you have the rotation notation <angle1, angle2, angle3>. That means: "First rotate around the X axis by angle1 degrees, then around the Y axis by angle2 degrees, and finally around the Z axis by angle3 degrees."
Also assume that you can apply any amount of such rotations in succession. For example, you could first apply the rotation <0, 35, 60>, then <15, -50, 0> and then <-5, 0, 20>.
It is, in fact, possible to create from any amount of such successive rotations one single <angle1, angle2, angle3> triplet which produces the exact same transformation as all those successive rotations. In other words, any amount of successive rotation triplets can be collapsed into one. However, I don't know how this is done.
May I ask all the people who have their desktop full of shortcuts and files: What's the point?
I find it hard to believe that you would need all of those programs and files on a daily basis and constantly (so that it would justify having a shortcut right there in the desktop).
Wouldn't it be better and handier to distribute program shortcuts and files hierarchically inside folders and subfolders? If you need a program once of twice a week (or even once a day), it's IMO not such a big burden to navigate to the folder where it's located. Also if the folder hierarchy is logical, you will know where to look for a specific item even after months of not using it.
The advantage is, of course, that as new programs and files are added during the years, the user interface is kept clean and tidy, rather than more and more cluttered as time passes.
There is a major change and I believe that a new logo would be a good idea.
The "major" change is only internal, and basically invisible to the users. It's not like the users are now been offered something drastically different.
Up until a week ago the whole site was served from Bisqwit's computer at his home. Now it's a shared server Nach and adelikat rented from some hoster (can't remember who exactly). The problem is that the available RAM is too low for the site to work properly (or at all, to be slightly more descriptive). Nach is currently reprogramming/reconfiguring parts of the site to consume less RAM so that we could go on as usual.
Wait, it's a shared server now? In the other thread Nach said something along the lines of it being a dedicated server. (Ok, I think he didn't say that, but he did say that the admins have full root access to the entire server, which would seem odd if it's shared and not dedicated.) Maybe I just got confused.
You're not going to get much of a war for declaring XChat, it's clearly the best. XD
Unrelated to which irc client is the "best", I have a technical question. I have asked this in the xchat official forum and in the OpenSUSE newsgroup, and got exactly 0 answers. Not expecting any answers here either, but it doesn't hurt to try. Maybe someone here will have some suggestions. (I apologize for the long post.)
In the past I had OpenSUSE 11.0 installed in my computer. It was an upgrade on top of OpenSUSE 10.2 (which in turn was an upgrade on top of SUSE 9.3). I used XChat as my IRC client, and it had no problems in showing kanjis and other special UTF8 symbols: They worked out of the box the very first time I installed and tried XChat. (I'm using a special local proxy software which intelligently converts everything which comes from the IRC server to UTF8.)
However, due to some problems (long story) I had to make a fresh installation of OpenSUSE 11.0 from scratch. I restored the contents of my home directory to the new system. Everything else is working fine, just the same way as before, except for XChat.
For some reason I cannot figure out, XChat is no longer showing kanjis nor other special symbols in its text box. Please note that:
- Kanjis and other special symbols work and are showing properly in the XChat input box. However, they are not showing in the main text box. Thus it's clearly not a problem in the entire program, just in the text box in particular.
- It's not a problem with the font. It doesn't matter which font I choose, it doesn't work. With some fonts the kanjis show as empty space, while with others they show as dotted squares. The exact same font shows the kanjis just fine eg. in Konsole.
- The UTF8 codes are there in the text box. If I copy-paste the text from the main text box to eg. Konsole (or the XChat input box), the kanjis show up just fine. In other words, XChat (or anything else) is not mangling or destroying the UTF8 codes: They are still there intact, and can be copied somewhere else and they work just fine. XChat is just not showing them properly.
- Most curiously, this problem is only happening with kanjis and other exotic symbols. It's not happening with more conventional non-ascii characters, such as umlaut vowels. These are also UTF8-encoded, and XChat is showing them fine, so it's clearly interpreting the contents of the main text box as UTF8 and not something else. For some reason it seems to be mapping only part of the UTF8 characters to the font, but not all of them.
- I have tried changing server settings, to no avail. (OTOH I'm pretty sure that cannot be the problem because, as said, the UTF8 codes are there in the text box just fine. They are just not showing properly.)
- As already mentioned, they worked just fine with my previous installation of OpenSUSE 11.0, but after a reinstall they stopped working. Thus I know for a fact that they can be made to work. I just can't figure out what got broken in the process.
- Also as mentioned, XChat seems to be the only app which is exhibiting this problem. For example Konsole and KWrite are showing the kanjis just fine, even with the exact same font as I'm using in XChat.
- Yes, I have tried to closely examine all possible XChat settings that might be related to the issue (at least those available in the GUI), to no avail. XChat doesn't seem to have many such settings.
