tricky77puzzle

Have you ever looked at a comparison for products of the same type and wanted to find one that was just right for you, but there were so many options to sort them by that you just couldn't?

Or did you want to make a scoring system for a game, but couldn't think of anything original?

I "specialize" (in oher words, make a hobby) in tinkering with and combining objective rating systems, making them very obscure but fair nonetheless. If you want an example of my work, try out my Button Masher game (for which I designed the scoring system), or go view my webhost rating system. Their scores are both very complicated, but fair based on achievement.

(I'm sorry, but the game only works on Windows systems with .NET framework 2.0 or higher. I can't program in C that well yet.)

To play the Button Masher game, first configure it. Go to Edit\Reload\FPS (currently 64) and set the number of passes to a relatively high number like 10 or 12. Then, start the game. One of the buttons on the right should turn red. The "keypad" represents the keypad on your keyboard. (Laptop users, use the mouse to click on the buttons instead.) Press it. The counter in the uppermost box should turn red with a number. Don't let that number reach zero! Keep playing until it does. The time that you survive is the actual score, but I added in the third scoring system just as a bonus.

(I'm not sure where this should go, so I decided to put it in General Talk.)

I like Gmail for 3 reasons:1. It has FREE Pop3 access, which means I can use Thunderbird at home to receive all my email.2. It has about 6 GB of storage space, which is more than any provider I know3. Well, it's in sync with my Google account.

I just need something really simple like the bank mod that JLHaslip mentioned. Of course, that forum mod would require me to get the non-"standard" forum software that they have, and I want one for either invision or phpBB. Really, I'm just asking how the basic structure of the program works, whether databases are involved and stuff like that, and how I could make a simple one myself (nothing like hosting credits or secondary services. I just want to use it to keep forum members who actually want to stay on the forum slightly active.)

Well, that's good, but how about this: 4^6x5^7?That equals 4*4*4*4*4*4*5*5*5*5*5*5*5, or 320,000,000.Keep going...

I'd like to use a "credit system" if I ever make a forum as well. It won't be used for anything else, but the works will be the same as (or similar to) this one. Say a user has 0 credits, then his/her account will be deleted, but not banned.The question I'm asking is, where did this credit system come from? How do I go on making one myself?

I would get Linux hosting myself, since it's reliable and things like MySQL are offered, and also because I don't really need ASP.

I've seen a lot of webhosts where a paid upgrade is "Safe Mode OFF". I know here at Xisto that it's turned off by default on all webhosting, but I'd just like to know, why is this an advantage? What features that are enabled are so important that they have to be disabled in safe mode?

So why do you think the script is unknown to so many people? Are they afraid that people will exploit it?I did a calculation while I had 30-something credits. The mods say that the script works logarithmically, so I'm thinking that it works by powers of 10.The calculation went like this:Number of characters in post: 327 (394 total chars - 67 words, to exclude spaces)Credits earned: 0.55Credit ratio: 327 / 0.55 = 594.5454545454545Which is close enough to 600 (ε = 0.01) for me to round it, since I'm pretty sure the admins would choose a round number like 600.I'll do another one once I get to about 105 credits. I don't only post for hosting, you know!

Here's my comments on some of them:

 

20. DriveSpace

 

It's only useless since drives nowadays are so darn big. It's still existent in Vista, I think, only it's just called "compress folder".

 

19. Windows Movie Maker

 

It has all the features of iMovie, but its interface is blah.

 

I've never heard of Web TV for Windows, so I'm not even going to comment.

 

17. Shutdown

 

This feature was useful back in 1997 when computers had to shut down before they could be turned off. Nowadays the only reason I still "shutdown" my computer is because I don't like the blinking light that's on when I sleep. The light on a Gateway GM5474 shines like a lighthouse when it's dark and it annoys me when I sleep.

 

16. Paint

 

This program is useless for editing, but it is good for saving screenshots. Pity it would be useless in Linux if it existed because of the built-in snapshot taker.

 

15. Windows Aero

 

Yeah I let you know how it works out once I get a graphics card that can run the aero GUI even though the motherboard is vista compatible, I think they meant that vista could run on it with no problems. Well hopefully somewhere they talk about the resource hog known as vista, and the compatibility issues, and other wonderful stuff; however, I have no big problems with Vista since I don't spend enough time to screw it up.

Not to mention that it doesn't even look good. I mean, who really likes Segoe UI here?

 

14. Active Desktop

 

I don't even remember what this is. This was something from 98 that I don't believe is existent in XP or Vista.

 

13. Windows XP Search

 

I completely agree with this one. 98, 2000, and Vista all keep search indexes like Google Desktop search does. I think Vista's search is actually faster. When my old 80-GB hard drive started getting full, I searched for all files that were 6 MB and larger. The engine returned about 30,000 results and took an hour to do so.

 

12. MSN

 

Instead of msn.com it's now live.com. Not to mention that the old Hotmail wasn't very good either. It was the first publicly released version of free HTML mail (back in the good old days when the inbox space was just 2 MB), but then it was bought by Microsoft and it started deteriorating and getting branded "Windows Live Mail". It doesn't even keep the extension "hotmail" anymore!

 

11. Windows Explorer

 

Actually this is pretty useful. Only, I wish Firefox had those kinds of capabilities... then I could start using it like Konqueror on my Linux installment.

 

10. Windows 95 USB

 

Not to mention that it doesn't even work on Windows 95.

 

9. Windows Genuine Advantage

 

Yes, this is crap. There are lot of bypassers now that can get rid of the problem, but I never had a non-genuine copy anyways. I think WGA is borderline spyware...

 

8. End Task

 

End Task is for sissies. I do it the geek's way and use End Process. It's faster and doesn't clog up the HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) as much.

 

7. User Access Control

 

I don't even know what this is. Oh, never mind, I do. It's those warnings that Vista gives you to Cancel/Allow stuff, right? Yeah, that's kind of useless, especially if there is only one user.

Even Linux has this, as "sudo". To bypass it, login as root, although that is VERY NOT RECOMMENDED. I mean, on Windows, it's okay, but not on Unix, where programs have direct access to hardware.

 

6. Automatic Updates (That's the proper title.)

 

I hate this too. If you set the Automatic update to Level 3 (Automatically download and install updates), it turns off automatically in 5 minutes if you don't "restart later". It doesn't automatically turn off if you set it to levels 1 or 2 (I set it to level 2 personally) but the message can only postpone for a limited amount of time. Thank God in Vista the limit is raised to 4 hours.

 

5. Messenger Service

 

I don't know what you're talking about. If you mean the online service that was just branded "MSN", I never used that service, but it's kind of like AOL without the internet access.

 

4. Notifications

 

These aren't that bad, it's just that they get annoying, like you said, with add new hardware.

 

3. IE 6

 

2 words: Use Firefox. I have 3.0 beta 2 installed right now, and it's pretty stable, actually.

 

2. Registry

 

This one is pretty useful. The only problem I have with it is that some things are so damn hard to find in there.

 

1. ActiveX Controls

 

To the guy who says Javascript and Flash are all ActiveX, I think the person here is talking about the controls written in VB. At least the JS and Flash controls aren't exploitable.

Another problem with it, is that people may themselves have their facts wrong. A person could edit a section and in all honesty think they are providing accurate information on the topic, when they indeed are incorrect in some of their facts. They may not mean to be writing false information, but since they believe it to be the truth, that's what gets up there until someone comes along later and discovers that it's not quite right.
I think it's because of things like this, that schools don't allow you to source your information from wikipedia when you are submitting a major paper. They know it's not necessarily going to be correct all the time (though often it is) and would rather see highly credible sources be named so that they know the facts used in the essay or whatever are the correct ones.

Not to mention that sometimes content "isn't encyclopedic"... I had 1 edit reverted because of that. (My username on Wikipedia is Ztobor, and the article was "Albert Einstein".)

I think the error correction response time is much faster than it was before. Also, the response time is faster for major pages than it is for minor ones. (for example, on a disambiguation page for M, I made an edit that said "M is the roman numeral for 1000". About 53 minutes later, it read: "M, 1000 (number), Roman numeral and Unicode".)

I believe the system works like this:If your credits are below 1, you get 1 credit per 200 characters in the post.If your credits are between 1 and 10, you get 1 credit per 300 characters in the post.If your credits are between 10 and 100, you get 1 credit per 600 characters.If your credits are between 100 and 1000, you get 1 credit per 900 characters.And so on. It's pretty hard to get 10000 credits, so I don't think anyone will need to suffer against the 1/1500 credit ratio...The character count does not count any BBCode, spaces, punctuation marks, or line returns.Admins or moderators, tell me if this is wrong.

I think Wikipedia is a great source. As of 2005, the content management system became a lot more different than it is today, and there are much more rules about citing sources and other things today than there ever were before.Wikipedia has a great editor system now, and should always be trusted as a source for general information. (Note I said general. If it's something as specific like the number down to the ones' digit about a country's population, I'd say check the source.)

I've used filters for similar purposes.Of course, the person who said that some activation emails might be deleted is right: if you're waiting for an application email and it doesn't show up in your inbox (Strangely, though, I've never had that problem), it might have been deleted.I don't advise people use this, otherwise people might not receive activation emails the way they might want to.

I myself am pro-choice for any issue. Sure, homosexuality is "unnatural" and all that, but sometimes we have that natural impulse. Not all of us do - maybe about five percent of the population. They are genetically dispositioned to do so - they can't control it.Here in Canada, homosexually married couples are legally allowed to become common-law partners, which have the same rights as formally married couples anyway.If someone in a religion doesn't want their people to be gay, then let them preach that to their people. Don't make it spill over into the legal areas, which are to be unaffected by religion.I would never marry another man myself, but I still think others should have those rights.

I don't see why people drink at all. I'm 14 and I think beer and wine and all that such tastes weird.Pral is right, though. If we want to really eradicate overdrinking, we can't just blindly try to stop it. That would result in a dystopia filled with more policemen and lawyers than anything else.If I ever go to parties when I'm 18, I'd like to be a designated driver.

Submachine 5 is a new release in the all-too-well-known Submachine series, a point-and-click game where the objective is to either escape a room or collect some item by pointing on items and interacting with them.

Here is the complete series on Arcadetown.com.

Tell me what you think... I am not the creator of this game. If you have any comments, give them to him (her?), not to me.

Just as a note, this thread could possibly become considered spam... I would be careful.... the moderators/admin may consider it as spam if people are simply just listing numbers over and over... maybe if the posters explained how they got an answer... something along those lines may help.

Well, I don't intend for it to become spam, so yes, people will have to explain how they got their numbers. As a side note, you cannot repeat a number once it has already been said.

What is the largest number you can make with 3 one-digit numbers?You've no doubt heard this one before. The answer you all know and love is 9 ^ 9 ^ 9, or some 369-million digit number that appears in Pi somewhere but no one cares to memorize.Here are a few rules to that game:1. The number must be less than infinity.2. You cannot use unary operators. (Unary operators are operators that only require one argument to work, such as factorials. 1 + 2 = 3 is a binary operator, since it has two arguments, 1 and 2.)3. If you use an iterated binary operator (one that is recursive, like 3^^3 which equals 3 ^ 3 ^ 3 or 3 ^ 27 or 7625597484987), you must define the number of times that the function or operator is iterated.4. You may combine digits to form larger numbers. (999 is allowed, for example.)Even abiding these rules, one can make much larger numbers than 9^9^9 using only fours, for example 4^^^^4 (4 arrows). This equals 4^^^4^^^4^^^4, which in turn equals 4^^^4^^^(4^^4^^4^^4), which equals 4^^^4^^^(4^^4^^(4^4^4^4)), and so on. It is truly a very large number, much more than 369 million digits.Here is the first question of this "big numbers contest": What is the largest number you can make with four one-digit numbers?

My computer runs Vista without a hiccup (except when I run certain XP-compatible programs, then it throws up completely), but that's because it's pretty darn good. It gets a 5.2 on the "Vista Experience Index".When I don't use vista, I have Kubuntu 7.10 installed in case something goes wrong with Windows (like a corrupt Chinese filename such as ??????.mp3) and I have to fix it in a Unix-like operating system which won't return errors with bad filenames.Other than that, I don't really have much beef with Vista.

Of course, my answer was much more a technical one rather than a spiritual one... if you wanted an esoteric answer, you could have specified.I don't really think about esoteric or existential questions. I like to practical-ize them and answer them that way.I think it you teleported an actual human being, the chemical bonds that held the person together wouldn't exist anymore, since you really can't just put two atoms together and expect them to bond. There are a lot of things to take into consideration.

You know something, the model of secrecy is reversed. The people are exposing all their information to companies who don't have to reveal anything to the people in return. It should be the companies that reveal every non-personal detail to the people, who in turn only need to expose minimal information such as name and home address. (A country that actually enforces this would rate 5.0 on Privacy International's index.)In the US right now, almost every public place is surveilled, and even some private places. The situation is a little better in Canada, but it is slowly decaying.I don't think people need to reveal everything they know to the government or any other organization, even if it is kept away in a database. This is because it creates a panopticon - you can't see the government or other people, but the government can see everyone, or at least their basic data and medical records. It's kind of like a "Big Brother" situation. Implementing anti-privacy standards won't reduce terrorism either - the terrorists most likely won't be registered.Also, I don't like how every person is issued a number upon entering a country. It seems like you're treating the people like objects, giving them ID numbers and all that. I would much rather prefer having a unique name as my ID, as numbers tend to create an image of conformity and strict-ness.On the Internet, however, people can choose to reveal as much or as little information as they want. This is okay. It won't prevent any abuse if everyone is required to release their ASL (age/sex/location) or N/ASL (name) on chat rooms.Well, that's my $0.02.

It's funny, but in Ontario, where I live, it's completely legal to possess and smoke marijuana - just not to privately traffick it. In other places, it's not usually enforced.

 

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

 

It says here that the LD(50) of cannabis is about 1242 mg/kg for males through ingestion, or an average adult man eating approximately 80 grams of the stuff.

 

I still wouldn't want to smoke marijuana, though... it could get seriously addictive.

I don't really care about speed because they all run equally fast on my computer (IE excluded, it actually runs pretty slowly.)

So, your question is, if there are two teleportation terminals, 1 and 2, what would happen if we put terminal 1 into terminal 2?First of all, this has to be possible (i.e. terminal 1 has to be smaller than terminal 2). Second, if we do turn it on, whatever is in terminal 1 will fall into terminal 2. Therefore, you have to put something into terminal 1 before it will appear in terminal 2. So, I'm guessing the answer is: nothing.Now, if you're talking about portal holes, like the ones in Portal, that's a different question. After the game, let's name the two portals Blue and Yellow.You're asking what will happen if we put Yellow into Blue. Well, First that has to be possible. Let's say Blue is on one tablet (tablet 1), and Yellow is on another (tablet 2). You're asking what would happen should we insert tablet 1 into Yellow.So, if we insert tablet 1 into Yellow, it would have to come out of blue, the portal that the tablet is situated on. So, the tablet basically comes out of itself. But it's still in the portal, so I'm guessing that if you looked into the portal, you'd see an infinite number of regressively smaller tablets protruding out of an infinite number of regressively smaller Blue portals.What do you think?

I can't say Xisto is the perfect host for me yet. I haven't been with them for more than a week yet!Of course, the forum looks promising, and it's much better than the one at 110mb. They actually used to be the best - yes, better than Xisto - until they started becoming a paid host, like other members have already said.To the person who hopes that Xisto won't become like 110mb, it won't. That's because only people who really care about belonging to the community will actually get the hosting.I believe the reason that 110mb has started to take away all the features it has is because it has a lot of dead members. Not dead as in deceased, but dead as in they don't visit the site or the forum anymore. If they had a post-to-host credit system like Xisto does, then they would probably still be completely free today.