It was reaveled how dangerous it was around 1986, after the Challenger disater. There were too many incentives to ignore it.
Commercial crew would probably not come to be (at least not in its current form) if SpaceX wasn't around to prove that it's possible
This reminds me that I once worked in one city, and attended university in another city.
At some point, there were train lines works that lasted for a few years, which meant that almost any train ride was delayed. You got a ticket back for half an hour delay, and two for a full hour.
In addition, my workplace paid me a set amount of money to cover ttain travel expenses for each work day.
I think that for most of my studies I effectively didn't pay for train travel, and had time to work while on the train.
You did have to wait in line to get the ticket after the train ride, and the train officer wasn't too happy about giving out tickets, bit it usually worked...
You can estimate mip levels per triangle and subdivde them based on the wanted mip level across z lines, instead of doing the calculation per pixel. It's a bit wonky, but can work, at least for the bigger triangles.
I've linked some code that does something along those lines for mipmapping [1].
yeah I was wondering if you could use blue noise mipmaps, trilinear sample from it, then round to 0 or 1. With the right mipbias it feels like it should look OK.
Another story: I was abroad, and someone got my card details and made purchases for thousands of $ in a different part of the country that I don't usually visit and certainly doesn't purchase there stuff for that amount of money.
Nobody even cared, but a payment I made for 2 euros wasn't accepted becuase reasons, and every online purchase needed some authorization.
When I called them, they said they'll look into the purchases. Well, they cancelled the purchases quite fast, but the surrealism of it all...
When I worked at another large credit card issuer, I was told the algorithm to detect fraud was essentially a black box. No one left at the company really knew how it worked or how to change it, so it was left intact and new rules were simply added on top.
There's always some third party thing I'm trying to figure out why it's telling me 'no' and not providing useful error messages and it's because they can't tell me without also telling the mischief-makers.
This is increasingly not a thing. I haven't had to do this in a very long time and my primary credit cards don't even have it in the apps/website anymore.
It's for job security. Your replacement won't be able to figure out anything, will be very slow, get fired, and then they'll rehire you at consulting rates.
If the replacement can't figure out how to use an IDE that gives them the answer, they're very likely going to be slow - but auto has nothing to do with it. They're just not an experienced dev.
There is another point to consider here. The state of anti-virus solutions before Microsoft released Defender was horrible (probably still is).
It was full of ad infested solutions, which would crash your computer from time to time.
Defender at least was reasonably performant and tended to be stable.
You could say that since they had access to kernel source, they were better informed, but I guess if there was an API, the provided documentation would solve the issue (not necessarily, not everyone bothers to read the docs).
But then you get back on how to enforce equal and open access for everyone (the EU did try to make Microsoft open the Word file format, but turned out it was so complicated and documented in legacy code only, that Micorsoft had trouble giving useful docs)
Yes. Defender was legitimately better than the alternatives. In fact no AV at all was better - which is something that I learned from Google's Project Zero.
He wrote this piece in 1989, and then went on and designed Monkey Island 2, which did things like having solutions to puzzels depend on other puzzels in differnet islands in the most annoying way possible, on purpose.
That’s really ironic. I liked the idea of the LucasArts adventures very much, but they generally turned out to be too “puzzly” for me, in that you got stuck if you didn’t “get” what the puzzle wanted from you, you missed some object you needed to pick up, or you didn’t mindlessly try out every object-verb-item combination or every dialog path. And very often, things I wanted to try that seemed sensible weren’t possible.
> they generally turned out to be too “puzzly” for me
Loom, I think, was like that sometimes, but Monkey Island wasn't too bad. Sierra's King's Quest series, however, was notorious in this respect, where the thing to do was something arbitrary you could not reason to in a million years.
That's the kind of thing that sucks in adventure games. In real life, I can be creative to a very large degree because reality has content, specifically, to the degree that I grasp that reality. A ball of clay is a ball of clay, and because I understand what clay is, I know what I can do with it. But in a game, a ball of clay is just a symbol. There is no ball of clay. It is a nominal entity, an image or word plus some code that simulates maybe some aspects of it in very constrained ways (in adventure games, this is truly very narrow, as in, if user clicks these two things with this action, then show picture and display text, the end). And this might be okay if the author has arranged things sensibly, but sometimes you end up with truly bizarre ideas. You wonder how these things passed QA.
The worst was King's Quest V, which you could play for 3-4 hours and soft lock yourself by deciding to go east into the mountains before you had done _everything_ possible in town and west in the desert. It didn't warn you you couldn't return, and if you didn't have an extra save it was back to the beginning.
Soft lock failure states are incredibly bad design... Instant deaths well, those can be acceptable with decent save system. But even Sierra in some cases managed to nearly entirely avoid soft lock failures... So leaving them in is well only bad work.
King's Quest felt particularly bizarre in some of the puzzles as well. I fondly recall the meager progress I managed in the 6th iteration, getting up that cliff, figuring out how to use the hero's ring as a bargaining chip, and I think I got to the minotaur part on the cover too. I got stuck too much to care, and put it aside.
Then I got the full color walk through book.
As I followed the guide, it was mind boggling not only how little progress I had made, but just how many different ways and paths to different endings I had missed! You didn't necessarily soft lock yourself as easily as others, but you could very easily screw yourself out of other options surprisingly quick.
Then I played The Dig. By comparison, The Dig felt like an accessible masterpiece. I didn't feel like I was straining for the right hidden pixel either across environments. The story wasn't unforgiving. There were only two real endings, and relatively easy to backtrack to.
I'm not GP, but I've played a few adventure games and was very excited to try Monkey Island because of its sense of humor and style. But it felt basically unplayable to me (basically it felt like the only strategy was brute force), here's the puzzle that made me give up:
Give the jawbreaker to Blondebeard to loosen his gold tooth, then give him
the pack of gum. When he blows the bubble with the tooth in it, pop it with
the pin and the tooth will drop out. Get the gold tooth, then exit the shop.
(To get the gold tooth on Mega-monkey, chew the pack of gum to get the chewed
gum. Inhale from the helium balloon, use the gold tooth in the chewed gum and
then chew the tooth in gum. It will float out the window of the shop and land
in the mudpuddle outside. Use the pie pan in the mudpuddle to get the tooth).
That’s not Monkey Island 2 (Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge), it’s Monkey Island 3 (The Curse of Monkey Island), which Ron Gilbert was not involved with (I believe).
That was the toughest puzzle in Monkey Island 3 for me, I remember being stuck on it as a kid for a long time, weeks maybe, until we read the solution somewhere, either a website or a game magazine. And it was the one puzzle keeping us from progressing to the next CD I believe. My father, not understanding english, was one to try every item with everything, brute forcing his way around, even he couldn't crack it. I think on easy mode this puzzle doesn't require all the steps. The other tough one was the dueling banjos, I think I had to write down the sequences on a piece of paper. It's still my favorite game ever, left such a big impact on me, from the intro music, humorous cut scenes, drawing style, the sense of wonder and excitement, everything was just perfect.
I remember that puzzle from Monkey Island 3. I mean, yes, the game is tricky but think about all the hints the game is giving you: „gold tooth“, „jaw breaker“ and I think in the dialog tree with Blondebeard you could compliment him about the gold tooth … and the mud puddle where you dig for gold using a pan like like gold diggers did in the clichés about the gold rush. So I mean it could be worse.
You get the hang for these kinds of puzzles once you played a couple of them.
On the other hand what I hate most in adventure games are random logic puzzles to open a door or find out where you need to go next. This is usually a cheap way to slow the game down. Lucas Arts was guilty of this kind of thing after Ron Gilbert left in „The Dig“, too, which still was a great game nevertheless.
The fun part is that puzzle you're describing is only in the optional Mega-Monkey mode where you chose to get more difficult puzzles at the start of the game. In normal mode, you can walk out the door with the gold tooth as soon as you get it.
He talks about rosetta not implementing nested pointer enter instruction. For newer apps, there is also the issue that rosetta doesn't implement AVX and newer instructions, due to patent issues
