Small issue: I accidentally right-clicked one of the arrow buttons and it stuck in the pressed position, causing the snake to curl into itself and end my game before I could left-click out of the context menu.
There is a level editor with the ability to show the optimal result for a custom level. In theory, one could recreate any official level and reveal the best solution that way. However, I haven't tried this to verify any intentional roadblocks by the developer.
Handbrake is fine if you truly need to reencode (aka “transcode”) your video, but if you find yourself with a video that your player can’t read, you might be able to just change the container format (remux it) using ffmpeg, copying the video and audio streams directly across.
With video there are 3 formats: the video stream itself, the audio stream itself, and the container (only the container is knowable from the extension). Formats could technically be combined in any combination.
The video stream especially is costly in CPU to encode, and can degrade quality significantly to transcode so it’s just a shame to re-encode if the original codec is usable.
Container format mkv is notorious for not being supported out of the box on lots of consumer devices, even if they might have codecs for the audio and video streams they typically contain. (It has cool features geeks like, though, but for some reason it gets less support.)
Subtitles are another kind of stream aside from video/audio.
Also there's one user-level aspect of MKV that makes it not too surprising to me: It can contain any number of video/audio/subtitle streams and the interface needs some way of allowing the user to pick between them. Easier to just skip that complexity, I guess.
If you search the page you'll find a reference to having “numerous foot guns”.
I can't say I've experienced either of the ones mentioned, but I have had trouble in the past with output resolution selection (ending up with a larger file than expected with the encoding resolution much larger than the intended display resolution). User error, of course, but that tab is a bit non-obvious so it might be fair to call it a footgun.
the short version is there's nothing wrong with it for your use case.
The author's POV is that the handbrake is a lossy conversion and often people use it in cases where they could have used a different tool that is lossless.
My uses of handbrake are that I always want a lossy conversion so no issue. A good example is anytime I make screen capture and want to post it on github. I want it to be under the 10meg limit (or whatever it is) so I want it to be re-encoded to be smaller. I don't mind the loss in quality.
I'm down to just one unmatched expression, but it's going to require undoing many others to fix.
With so many wildcards (`.*`) involved, it feels as though making a few assumptions along the way is unavoidable. If I start over and only make moves I can prove are correct, I don't get very far.
This satellite’s mission is soil readings. Most scientists are not part of the intelligence community. They may have noticed anomalous readings and excluded them from their analysis, but they don’t really have anyone to talk to about the military implications. Plus, while this is cool that you can detect this interference with a science satellite, the major space powers all have military and intelligence satellites that can map the interference at greater precision, so the NASA scientists can pretty much ignore this unless they are particularly interested in the soil readings in this part of the world.
It's not impossible that the Pentagon could have thought "alright, we want these readings. is there a civilian use for this kind of data and decided to see if a civilian project could be sprung up... Though that's more of a Cold War conceit. These days they would just do it themselves, it's probably an easy and cheap project.
Just as there are commercial earth imagery satellites, I would expect there are commercial RF source detection satellites. There are obvious sales channels to hedge funds, countries, militaries, and commercial transmission operators (searching for causes of interference).
Hedge funds is the fun one: detecting economic activity and growth (independent of official government figures).
I don't think this is lost on anybody, even if it's not the main mission. SMAP also provides a near-real-time data product which may interest people in this area.
It was effectively a "distributed" license key, broken into a large number of parts and structured as a challenge-response, so that it would be difficult to answer without a full photocopy of the manual.
My favourite variant of this was F-19 Stealth Fighter asking you to do aircraft identification, which you could get from the manual .. or any library book on US warplanes.
Least favourite was some game (TMNT?) which printed the codes in gloss black on matte black.
Microprose games had awesome manuals. Typically more than a hundred pages full of details going well beyond explaining the game itself. For example, in a flight simulator it had details on every plane in the game, the historical context of the missions, dogfighting techniques, etc...
The manual to Grand Prix 2 taught me more about car racing than any other bit of reading, video, or whatever media. It had so much about how to drive, how to use telemetry, etc.
Not that I turned that knowledge into good results but that's another topic.
One that comes to mind was the manuals and bits and pieces that came with Infocom text-based adventure games. They were nice bits of cruft to have alongside the actual game but in certain instances puzzles within the game could only be solved by referring to something on the card, or booklet, supplied with the game. I can't recall if it was The Hitchhiker's Guide, or Leather Goddess of Phobos, but the requirement popped up quite deep into the game.
They weren't license keys, persey, as all the printed material was the same, but a tacit test as to whether you had bought the actual game, or just copied the disk.
Leisure Suit Larry had a twist on this where it “verified” you were an adult by asking questions that older people were much more likely to know: “During the 70s, Carroll O'Connor portrayed a…”
They were multiple choice and some of them were very tongue-in-cheek, like Richard Nixon was an “audio technician or plumber’s friend”.
Besides not being a one time activation, it was not a "one key". The game would ask you for "N-th word on the M-th paragraph on P-th page", at each start for example. We are talking about an age where you would not have scanners or mobile phones with cameras.
We live in a completely different world now. Imagine: you just bought a game, that was probably not cheap, and you won't play it because it requires opening a printed booklet you got with installation media and already have next to you? Sounds unlikely, especially since you already went through the trouble of going/driving to a physical store and installing the game (often from multiple cds/floppies, and it often took a long time). And it's not like you had a choice - another game was another drive away, and there were no refunds.
And yeah, we were younger.
Today we live in a world of constant connectivity and instant gratification. It's a better world, but a little nostalgia won't hurt
Yeah, I did put the time in for X-Wing back in the day. A friend made copies of his disks, and let me borrow the manual so that I could copy the relevant bits down into a notebook. Took a while, but I had lots of time so not a big deal.
Yes because the license key was easy to write down on a sticky note and provide it with the copied floppy disk. With this mechanism you either needed to have a copy of the entire manual, or at least all the answers to the questions it would ask.
I remember one of the later Wizardry games (I believe it was Return of Werdna) came with a pamphlet full of codes that was printed on very dark brown paper that made it very difficult to make legible photocopies.
It wasn't individual per install. Anyone with the game manual could find the word or code in the book. Some games asked for a random word from the manual on boot, so you couldn't just share the code, you needed to share the entire manual (or decompile or something to find all the words it is looking for).
And the manuals usually themselves had "copy protection". Many were printed in variations of dark colours, such that any easily accessible copier would just copy a black page.
this was the comment i was looking for! i remember those red pages and found them annoying on even legitimately purchased games (which is how copy protection has always been IME - makes it so legitimate purchasers of a game got annoyed and hence, got cracks for games to just not be as annoyed!)
Off-topic, so I hope not to spark too much side discussion here.
While I agree with your correction and this always bugs me, the common usage of the phrase "begs the question" seems to have become synonymous with "raises the question", as opposed to what I understand to be its former — and perhaps original — meaning which was associated with the informal logical fallacy by the same name.
Normally you would write a program that is a game of Doom when you run it (you create a program, then compile it and run). Dmitri created a program that does nothing and he don't even run it. But while it's compiling, it does a lot of tricky things to make typescript compiler to run Doom as a side effect.
It's extremely hacky because Typescript is not even a runtime, it's not meant to run any code at all. Typescript is a thing that takes .ts file and produces .js file (which you then run using different program - a javascript runtime).
TypeScript types are a kind of Prolog [1] (sort of, kind of, not entirely). Like any language they have primitives (`boolean`, `string`, `true`, 'Manchester'), functions (`type WaitWhat<T> = { yesReally: T }`), variables (`type X = number;`), and conditionals (`type Huh<T> = T extends Foo ? Bar : Baz`). You run the types program by asking `tsc` to check the types of some program - e. g. `type Foo<T extends number> = { x: T }; type Bar = Foo<string>;`. Getting output out of the type system other than via "hover over the type in VSCode" is probably a bit more involved, but it's definitely doable (I suspect some abuse of the Language Server Protocol here).
It might be helpful to look at something like Typescript Tic Tac Toe in the type system [1]. You can comment out individual lines in the GameLoop type, and then hover over `____________DISPLAY___________` to see the current game state. Illegal moves will result in type errors.
Running Doom in the type system effectively means a lot more types have been generated (effectively a C to typescript-type compiler was created if I understood this correctly), then the game was started with no inputs entered. Theoretically if the author had infinite time and compute resources, the history of control inputs up to a certain point in play could be put in a tuple, and the type system would generate the state of the game given the code and the moves which the user had input so far. This state would include what's on the screen, but also internal state variables controlling things like where the enemies were moving, whether projectiles are in air, their direction, collision detection, etc.
Small issue: I accidentally right-clicked one of the arrow buttons and it stuck in the pressed position, causing the snake to curl into itself and end my game before I could left-click out of the context menu.
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