2 out of 5, I'd say. Adding lots of configuration menus and control options is extra work, but I'd say DRM and useless network services are things that would be less work if they were never introduced in the first place. Also, wouldn't it be easier to develop the game on PC first, then port to console?
Also, many of the settings mentioned, such as aspect ratio and sound/music volume, should be in the console version already.
Have you tried moving the monitor closer? I use a 24" at 1920x1080, placed about 50-60 cm from my eyes. This is at the lower end of what OSHA suggests, but looks much the same as a 32" display at 70-80 cm. The only difference is whether your eyes can comfortably focus at that distance. I'm myopic enough to need glasses to see anything beyond 30 cm properly, so the decreased viewing distance is not a problem, but if you have even mild hyperopia, I'd advise against this.
You're missing the point. cat is not supposed to distinguish between file types nor behave differently based on the file type; the only change to its behaviour is to propagate the MIME type information (which, unfortunately, is guessed from the file's extension rather than a proper MIME type field in the filesystem). The terminal is the one that does all the interpreting, and, as I mentioned, this already happens, albeit to a lesser extent.
In practically any sane terminal emulator, you're not seeing the bytes, you're seeing a picture generated from these bytes by interpreting it as text with embedded control codes. This is merely an extension of that concept; instead of just "clear the screen" and "switch text colour to red" you also have "display the following PNG". Considering that there are tons of different sets of escape sequences in use, one more would hardly be a problem. Since the author suggests that the metadata identifying the data type (MIME-style) would be separate from the actual data, legacy programs would presumably just ignore the additional information and behave like they used to.
if you know your problem reduces to TSP or SAT or CLIQUE, you can tell your boss this is not feasible for our input size, so we either need to relax the problem or approximate the solution. If you don't know this you're going to waste your time writing a program that takes 4 years to calculate the answer.
I think you mean: "you know TSP or SAT or CLIQUE reduces to your problem". By reducing one problem to another (quickly enough; polynomial time is good for NP-completeness proofs), you can show that the problem you have reduced to is at least as hard as the one you reduced from. Lots of easy problems reduce to SAT, but SAT doesn't reduce to them. In other words, "I can reduce SAT to my problem in polynomial time. Hence, if I can solve my problem in polynomial time, I can solve SAT in polynomial time, proving P=NP. Since nobody's been able to do that in 40 years, I wouldn't bet my career on doing it."
Doing a quick look on wiki it looks like they used latin for the negative powers and greek for positive powers but why they got rid of all those weird imperial gotchas that were known by common folk just to turn around and start chucking in latin/greek gotchas is beyond me.)
An international system has to have international terminology, so they used the international languages of science and learning: Latin and Greek (remember those Harvard entrance exams a few weeks ago?). That said, I'd have suggested exponential notation myself...
Bit late now, but it's rather a pity that the Metric system couldn't have had imperial equivalences. There is no good reason why the metre couldn't have been 100 inches, or why the gram couldn't have been defined as 1/1000 pound. Actually, some engineers do: the "mil" is 0.001 inch - most electronic components use a 0.1" pin-spacing.
What you fail to realise is that different countries (and sometimes even different towns) had different interpretations of these units. Should they have used a French inch (27.07 mm), a Swedish inch (24.74 mm), a Bavarian inch (24.3216 mm), an Austrian inch (26.34 mm) or what? Furthermore, these units have a nasty habit of changing all the time; the only way to get everyone (i.e. the UK and its colonies) to agree on exactly what an inch is was to define it as 25.4 mm. Either way, for most people there wouldn't have been an exact equivalent to the old system whichever unit you choose. At this point, you realise that the metre is essentially a metric yard.
Fahrenheit gives a better range of usable temperatures than Celcius. "It's in the 60s" vs. "It's in the 50s", etc. There's no scientific reason for using Celcius instead of Fahrenheit, either. Unless you are boiling water on a day to day basis, there's really no excuse not to be using Kelvin for everything.
Up north, it's very convenient to be able to look at the sign of the temperature to determine whether there's a risk of ice or snow on the road. Also, how are you supposed to make tea (or coffee, if that's what you prefer) without boiling water? That said, the Celsius scale is not very well integrated into SI.
Likewise, the fuckers could have kept one Imperial units for distance, etc., and simply tacked base-10 onto it (kiloyards, centiyards) instead replacing them with arbitrary units like meters and saddling us with a secondary measurement system that is no more scientific in terms of the base unit than the Imperial.
From a European point of view, the question is which unit to use. Before the metric system, there were, for example, literally dozens of different feet. The yard differs from the metre by less than some of these different feet differ. Also, there are still several different gallons in use. Surely it's better to give the common unit a new name rather than call it a "yard" and confuse everyone.
All you metric purists that aren't using lightseconds and Kelvin, should really check your sense of superiority at the door.
A foot is roughly one light-nanosecond, right?
If they die the instant the player sees them, there's not much point in making them smart.
There's still a point, if it means they can sneak up on the player and shoot him in the back before he sees them.
The extremest form of emphasis on OOP in teaching CS, objects-first, as seen, for example, in Kölling's Objects First with Java, has been heavily criticised lately in the computer science education community. One recent visible critique was Moti Ben-Ari's Objects Never? Well, Hardly Ever! (PDF, unofficial version to avoid ACM paywall), (paywalled official ACM version).
Similar things are happening at my own university, where objects-first has been seen as an important preparation for future programming work. The CS course for engineering majors who won't be doing any more programming switched from Java to Python and covering OOP briefly at the end of the course; the CS course for CS majors and others who will be studying more programming is due to do the same this autumn.
Be advised that upgrading a running system with zypper dup with the installation DVD as the source will break the package manager halfway. I've spent a few hours sorting out the mess left by the upgrade from 11.3 (which is actually quite little) and it seems to work pretty well (most of the other problems were due to having too small a boot partition; make it 100 MB instead of 50 MB). Phonon is still failing to use my sound card, but I disable most of the KDE system sounds anyway.
Performance seems to have improved quite a bit in most applications and quite a few performance issues in the previous version have been fixed, so I'm liking 11.4 so far.
Actually, Randall Garrett wrote the first verse and the chorus, and Asimov continued from there (source: Isaac Asimov: I. Asimov: A Memoir).
The Wall Street Journal has a report including a comparison video.
I finally managed to pull a copy of the v0.8 source from archive.org, and it seems that you can still access the CVS repository even though it seems to be missing from the SourceForge page. I can find references to contributions by Vasile Laurentiu Stanimir (the main developer) and Silviu Simen in the source code and Teodorescu Cristian in the commit logs. The latter is interesting as he seems to have started work on WinMTR 0.9 in 2004, contradicting Appnor's statement of inactivity.
While Appnor could get away with this if they had, for example, rewritten all external contributions, the fact that the recent v0.9 was released after "only 8 years 11 months and 5 days of inactivity" (according to their own website!) makes it hard to believe they've actually done much in the way of rewriting during those 10 years mentioned in the summary.
While I'm not familiar with Romanian copyright law, the country has ratified the Berne convention, which I don't think allows as short a period of 10 years before copyright expires.
Since they've removed all downloads from SourceForge, it's a bit tricky to check the original copyright.
The one day you'd sell your soul for something, souls are a glut.
