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Thread locks too soon
Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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I want to start a man's self-defense course. It's just how to prevent women from kicking you in the balls or macing you. ;)

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Eric Johnson
Member #14,841
January 2013
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Just do what Bobby did: That's my purse! I don't know you!

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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Yeah! Just look at all the snow on my car!

You have an interesting car.. :-/

Quote:

I almost forgot what snow looks like.

The weather is a bit wacky again this year. We've had a couple of blizzards accumulating 6 inches (~15 cm) overnight, followed by above zero rain storms... Fortunately, we still have snow. I'm hoping it stays for the season this time.

I want to start a man's self-defense course. It's just how to prevent women from kicking you in the balls or macing you. ;)

Instead it should be teaching men to protect themselves from child support and alimony and general inequalities. :-/

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
avatar

Yeah! Just look at all the snow on my car!

You have an interesting car.. :-/

Quote:

I almost forgot what snow looks like.

The weather is a bit wacky again this year. We've had a couple of blizzards accumulating 6 inches (~15 cm) overnight, followed by above zero rain storms... Fortunately, we still have snow. I'm hoping it stays for the season this time.

I want to start a man's self-defense course. It's just how to prevent women from kicking you in the balls or macing you. ;)

Instead it should be teaching men to protect themselves from child support and alimony and general inequalities. :-/

Polybios
Member #12,293
October 2010

Just spending some time here while starting up a Java application...

Bruce Perry
Member #270
April 2000

Schnee aus Deutschland! [EDIT: err, Australia]

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Also... BRICKS! ;D

video

--
Bruce "entheh" Perry [ Web site | DUMB | Set Up Us The Bomb !!! | Balls ]
Programming should be fun. That's why I hate C and C++.
The brxybrytl has you.

Rodolfo Lam
Member #16,045
August 2015

And like that... a.cc's thread about Threads locking too soon kept on going 'till the heath death of the universe. Even then, it continued existing towards infinity with ever increasing rest periods after everything else had reached energy equilibrium.

Or maybe the universe just rips appart in the end and nothing survives...

Oh my, this post was really off-topic...

Edgar Reynaldo
Major Reynaldo
May 2007
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MiquelFire
Member #3,110
January 2003
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We had so little snow for the past few years, I think I forgot how to drive in it. Since I got my car early 2015, the first time I had to drive in the snow was March 3, 2017, after I left Meijers to pick up the Switch. And the next snowfall, yesterday.

---
Febreze (and other air fresheners actually) is just below perfumes/colognes, and that's just below dead skunks in terms of smells that offend my nose.
MiquelFire.red
If anyone is of the opinion that there is no systemic racism in America, they're either blind, stupid, or racist too. ~Edgar Reynaldo

Neil Roy
Member #2,229
April 2002
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;D

We get lots of snow here each year.
This is what it normally looks like outside my place (from the winter of 2015)
{"name":"611142","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/e\/1e89d811ba536db2fd45d12152902ed1.jpg","w":1024,"h":768,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/1\/e\/1e89d811ba536db2fd45d12152902ed1"}611142

---
“I love you too.” - last words of Wanda Roy

Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
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I'm happy to see this thread is still alive! \o/

My new car seems OK in the snow so far, but hasn't been too bad yet.

"He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe"

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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I've been playing Player Unknown's Battlegrounds. They finally added another map to the Test servers, but they're hardcore overloaded with players so everything is laggy and buggy as hell. Still, it's fun to play with friends. If you want to join me and Bam, give me a PM.

I recommend it for anyone who likes competitive games played with friends. But playing it solo is like dragging your scrotum across a gravel road.

As for single player games, I bought all three STALKER games on GOG last year. I owned the original at-release in boxed copy but it was buggy-as-hell on release and could barely run on my PC at the time. Now, years later, it's much better.

I beat the third one. It's the prettiest and most polished. And the anomalies are great because every one is almost like a unique puzzle. It's VERY MUCH like what Fallout 3/NV/4 should have been. Fallout 1/2 are great RPGs but the RPG elements basically get in the way of the fun in 3/NV/4. They pull AWAY your immersion. Instead of exploring and thinking "oh no what's that bad thing" you think "I've got 182 hitpoints, nothing can hurt me and I can simply hit the VATS button and freeze time." STALKER is scary as hell.

All three are technically "STALKER 1" (they were going to make a 2 but the company collapsed for politics/money/etc reasons.) So think of them as all expansions and they're worth it. Shadow of Chernobyl is "ep #1", Clear Sky is "ep #2", Call of Pripryiat is #3.

So it's SoC, CS, and CoP on the forums.

SoC is much cruder interface (e.g. no hotkeys for various useful items), no upgrades for weapons (unless you find an upgraded one), no repairing items so you have to replace good ones. I actually like the "no repair" mechanic though because the "best" stuff you find... will eventually wear away. So it's like a temporary (~2-6 real-life hour) boost.

Artifacts (which provide stat boosts/protection boosts) are very basic, however, and "almost" pointless compared to the later games. They're just littering the ground everywhere and you pick them up. Contrast with CoP and it's REALLY FUN because every artifact is like a puzzle to solve. How do you "get to it" without being killed by the anomaly that shoots fire, or pulls you into a gravity field and rips you apart.

But SoC (#1), is definitely the most immersive and fun. The few scripted sequences really add a lot to texture the environment. There are powerful factions that are at war with people, loners who have no faction, and bandits who are like leaches that ambush people and steal. They exist in the other games but this one has the most scripted sequences.

In #3, you can carry lots of stuff but even on the 2nd-to-last difficulty (Veteran, which I'm playing all 3 on), it was way too easy. I also can't remember too many 'notable' events. The game felt way too short even though hour-wise it's been around the same as the rest. So I can only imagine that the 3rd one has many hours of boring walking around.

I'm going to be putting a review of the series up soon.

[edit] Separate question though: Does anyone have experience with bluetooth headphones? All I want is wireless headphones I can wear while my TV/computer/phone/whatever plays a video/audio so I can walk around the house and clean. But so far, all the sets I've tried are HORRIFIC for distance. On my laptop my most recent set goes... 3 feet... before cutting out. Connecting to my phone, it goes maybe 6-10 feet. Which is absolutely pathetic for a "wireless" standard.

I mean, I get it. It's far enough to eliminate short cable runs like headphone cables. But the standard is supposed to support upto a 100 feet! So it's like they're not even trying to support significant ("room length") distances.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

Derezo
Member #1,666
April 2001
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Does anyone have experience with bluetooth headphones?

I have a pair of plantronics backbeat fit headphones. They reach everywhere in my small apartment when connected to any of my devices (LG G5, MacBook Pro, or my Acer desktop). At work I can move anywhere in my department when connected to the macbook..

They'll go about 20 meters, I can almost make it to the next department ;D
I just got a bluetooth dongle for my linux machine at work, but haven't tested the range on that yet.

"He who controls the stuffing controls the Universe"

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
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I've never had Bluetooth fail under 10 feet. I thought the original Bluetooth standard was I think 30 feet or so. That's all that I expect from Bluetooth anyway. Higher versions might have increased that for all that I know. I generally would carry my phone in a pocket or something, but you should probably be able to walk around the room at least without it dropping off. You should probably actually be able to walk around most of the house, unless the house is large or the building materials (or other objects) somehow interfere.

My original "meeting" rig was cheap Chinese crap (~USD$10) that my brother got me. My current rig cost me more like USD$30 at Meijer, but I recently saw another unit at a "TJ Max" for about USD$15 that looked just as good (not very, but good enough). It can sometimes be hard to find a set for a reasonable price, at least where I live, but they exist if you can wait.

If I had a Bluetooth headset that was failing within 10 feet I'd return it unless I thought there was something else interfering. It is of course just using electromagnetic radiation so if you have other devices polluting the space around you with colliding frequencies of electromagnetic radiation it can interfere with the signal strength..

Arvidsson
Member #4,603
May 2004
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I still haven't completed any of the STALKER games, but someday! Have you tried any mods to the games as well? I came across this: http://themiserymod.com/. Seems pretty cool if you like hardcore survival games and unfair masochistic gameplay :)

Audric
Member #907
January 2001

I also bought the 3 games in the most recent GOG sale, and enjoyed them. Slightly disappointed by how trade is so limited and the faction systems seem to lead nowhere, but it's an interesting game experience all the same. Each of the 3 games has some points where it succeeds more than the 2 others.
Misery 2 provides an interesting challenge ('Black road') where you start in a very difficult situation, and I really enjoyed playing this part. But afterwards, balance seems completely off, I gave up because I don't see how you're supposed to earn more resources per day than what you need to stay alive. Misery 1 is less advanced (no crafting), but much more balanced in this regard.

Eric Johnson
Member #14,841
January 2013
avatar

I've never played any of the STALKER games. I'd check it out, but I have too many games as it is. I recently finished The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I picked it up originally in late April for about 10 bucks. It lasted me 175 hours, so that's a pretty sweet return on investment! I feel like playing Skyrim now, but think I'll put that off until later so as to not burn myself out. The past two days I've been playing Grow Up again. I first played it back in January, and this time was just as fun as the first.

Erin Maus
Member #7,537
July 2006
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STALKER is great. Never won any of them but had fun anyway. My brother enjoyed them more--he actually won them!

I did watch the movie that (may have?) inspired the games, though. That movie was beautiful.

---
ItsyRealm, a quirky 2D/3D RPG where you fight, skill, and explore in a medieval world with horrors unimaginable.
they / she

MiquelFire
Member #3,110
January 2003
avatar

Today was a bad day weather-wise. When I got home, my car looked like a candy cane :P

---
Febreze (and other air fresheners actually) is just below perfumes/colognes, and that's just below dead skunks in terms of smells that offend my nose.
MiquelFire.red
If anyone is of the opinion that there is no systemic racism in America, they're either blind, stupid, or racist too. ~Edgar Reynaldo

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
avatar

The first stalker is the crudest but the story... oh man... it can't be beat. I don't want to spoil anything, but there are multiple endings and they are not exactly what you're expecting. I definitely recommend reaching the end and then Googling the wiki to figure out WTF was going on.

Clear Sky is a prequel. Call of Pripryat is a sequel to the first.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
avatar

Today was a bad day weather-wise. When I got home, my car looked like a candy cane :P

The weather suddenly dipped up here. Last two days were approximately -20 C with the wind-chill factor (allegedly; I work from home so I rarely go "outside"). I did go out both days, but I bundled up with a scarf and all the rest so I didn't really feel how cold it was.

Re: How to drive on snow or ice:

Pretty much imagine that your control inputs could not actually obey: hitting the brakes might not actually slow you down, turning might not actually turn. Slow down to accommodate. Slowing down is really the key to driving in slippery conditions. Other than that, if you start to skid avoid stopping or going forces (don't hit the brakes, and let off of the accelerator/throttle) and turn in the direction that you want to go. Just like riding a motorcycle, looking where you want to go will probably make you just automatically do it.

Today I went for a drive to get my finacee replacement windshield wipers since hers had worn out. Since I work from home usually my truck also just needed dto be driven so the battery wouldn't drain too much too start. On the way home, I was a bit exhausted from working all day and being a bit careless. I had no traffic travelling in my direction near me. I was going up a shallow hill around a shallow corner, and my backend got loose and kicked out. Fortunately it wasn't a very extreme skid. Before I even knew I was skidding I had corrected the problem already. :P

As a side note, if you want to learn how to handle "losing" control the best option (aside from paying a company a lot of money to train you) is to take the car to an empty street or parking lot and practice skidding at low speeds. You can cause a skid doing what I said not to earlier: hit the brakes or accelerator aggressively. If you're going slow the amount of damage you cause should be negligible if you actually lose control, and if there are no objects around you there's pretty much no risk (unless you manage to do something crazy like flip your car over).

I emphasize "aggressively" because you can totally still use the brakes and accelerator while skidding without losing control, but you have to be gentle and anticipate losing control so you can back off again.

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
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The worst (and only real harm) of snow and rain driving isn't the snow or rain. It's the other drivers.

Black ice doesn't magically appear when a Wizard gets angry. And how to handle it is the same way... every time.

If your car stops responding, you're using your tires too much. Use them less. Reduce your brakes, and reduce your turning. Your tires can only put so much force into the ground and the ice and other inclement-conditions are reducing that maximum force. Turning uses force to turn. Stopping (or accelerating! But most people don't have as much power to accelerate as they do to brake). Now, ABS helps because it's actually braking less. Hundreds of times a second it's checking if all wheels are rotating the same and releasing your brake pressure for a fraction-of-a-second if they're not. This "hit-release-hit-release" is better for panicking drivers. But smart drivers should know "how much brake they have" so they don't have to get into a panicking scenario. You can always "test your brakes" in bad weather while you're driving to get some sample points of how much you can brake before they start to slip. If you can barely touch the brakes before slipping (the ABS kicks in and the pedal sinks a bit and vibrates loudly), get the hell off the road, or slow down big time! The faster you are, the more kinetic energy it takes to change your speed or turn. (kinetic energy is, KE=1/2mV^2 <-- velocity is SQUARED. 2X fast is 4X the energy! Meanwhile a twice as heavy car is only twice as much energy. Slow. Down.)

So if your car starts to drift and you can't steer. LAY OFF THE BRAKES (free up the force for steering!), and center your steering to the direction you're going. The second your tires are going the direction you're "floating" they will re-engage and give you the ability to steer again. They say "turn into the spin" which is the opposite of most people's natural instinct of "it's not turning, so I'll turn harder" which only increase the demanded force from the tires. A tire "plowing" sideways through the road/snow/etc is not as efficient at stopping (putting energy into the ground) as one pointed in the direction you're going.

Also, 4WD means nothing. All cars have 4 wheel brakes! The only time it ever is useful is because the way differentials work. Every car has a differential to allow one wheel to turn faster or slower than the other. If you drive along a circle, the wheel on the inside of the circle has to travel less than the one on the outer. HOWEVER, the big drawback is the differential puts a force equal to the max of both tires. If any ONE tire is slipping, then BOTH tires do nothing. For 99% of people, situations where you can actually utilize a 4WD(*) car, people will never encounter.

Meanwhile, what's actually dangerous about driving? OTHER. PEOPLE. You can't predict how these stupid people, who are panicking, and all have "their idea" of how to "win" against climate weather. They'll hit the gas then slam the brakes. They'll slide down the CENTER OF THE LANE (including heading at you) because it's "safer" than the normal lanes. (Except they're too stupid to realize that tire-worn paths of the street are the safest and the center of the road hasn't been driven on and will likely be extremely slippery.)

So, "less is more", "steer into the spin", and my personal recommendation is "know your brakes BEFORE you start slipping." But again, the biggest danger... is other people driving their 4000+ lbs machines straight at you thinking their "ABS and AWD" will magically turn their cars into tanks with treads that grip like glue. Most of the time slippy conditions have tons of warnings before you enter a panic scenario and you shouldn't be relying on your normal braking distance / following distance to the next car if you don't know for sure that your brakes are going to work just as good. ABS doesn't make a bad driver a good one. It can't tell you the tires are going to slip until after it's too late to make decisions. Like slamming your car into the one in front of you because you hit a just-started-to-rain greasy spot at an intersection when you could have slowed down early if you were aware of the driving conditions instead of on your cellphone. (When it just starts to rain is often the worst because it helps the oils/grease/etc start to float from the pavement providing more lubrication than say, heavy-duty rain that your tire has to slosh through and has already washed much of the gunk off the streets.)

*Technically, people call "4WD" a part-time AWD where you manually turn it on and shouldn't be ever used on clean-condition streets. It doesn't have a center differential so if your front and rear tires "Want" to move different rates, it has to eat the tires away (the weakest part in the physical link between engine and ground) and puts additional wear on the gears. "AWD" is "always on" AWD and does have a center differential, but usually it's a viscous coupling. A viscous coupling allows a small amount of slippage between front and rear, but, it's a fluid between two discs. That fluid heats up as the discs rotate at different speeds. So, if you're rapidly spinning the rears or the fronts, that "differential" between the two heats the fluid and becomes effectively a solid link. The fluid coupling ... couples... and it demands that all tires rotate together allowing a "one or two" wheels slipping scenario to keep the other two tires rotating. This is basically only useful for people who are off-roading / adventuring. If you need AWD for your daily driving, you probably shouldn't be on the road.

**You can test your tire power easily with a five speed too. Slam the gas for a brief moment. Depending on what gear you're in / power you output, you'll be able to be able to feel it slipping. The higher the gear that it slips, the more dangerous your driving conditions. If you can slip your car in 5th gear (the least torgue gear), get the hell off the road. If you can slip by slamming it in first gear (the more torque gear) you're still probably fine / impacted a minor amount. But the "slam the brake" testing works even with automatics. The only issue with autos is... you slam the gas and they try to downshift. So it's harder to get a measurement. (Also a torque converter actually multiplies torque but that's way too much math/detail.)

Oh, lastly, like Bam says: Practice. Practice. Practice. It's fun, and good to learn in a relatively "safe" environment. You want this stuff to be memorized / muscle memory. You don't want to have to think "which way am I turning the wheel" in a split-second panic scenario.

[edit] Man, that was way longer than I expected it to be.

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin

bamccaig
Member #7,536
July 2006
avatar

4x4 is useful for starting out in slippery conditions, but it's useless once you're moving on the street. But trucks and SUVs are heavy and high, and these things are bad for handling. Front-engine front-wheel drive cars are probably the most ideal vehicle in winter driving. Perhaps an AWD car like a Subaru, but as already noted the added driven wheels only help you start going, and a light front-wheel drive car usually isn't too bad to get moving in slippery conditions as it is.

I drove cars all my life. Rear and front wheel drive. The rear wheel drive ones are fun to mess around in, but scary to lose control in at higher speeds. One time when I was about 17 I was driving my dad's Crown Victoria down back country roads in the dead of winter doing about 80 km/h and in the blink of an eye my rear wheels kicked out and I was pointed at the ditch, but still traveling down the road... I ended up fishtailing from ditch to ditch a few times before I got it back under control, just in time to pass safely by an oncoming car who had surely slowed down to avoid me. That shit will pucker your asshole! And rear-wheel drive cars are painful to get moving from a dead stop in the winter. The front-wheel drive cars are great.

I never really knew what to expect of trucks, but everybody loves them so you'd think they'd be great. Then I got my Ranger. And it is great. It pretty much can't get stuck on roads no matter the conditions (unless the roads are all glare ice and nobody should be on the street). I can switch it into 4x4 and drive through 12" of snow. I can get moving instantly from a dead stop even if the streets are slippery. But it's heavy, and that 4x4 doesn't help turning or stopping. It understeers like a motherfucker in 4x4. :P I used to think that the brakes were also terrible in it, but now that the ABS module is disabled I'm starting to think that the ABS was just buggered in it (knock on wood, but I haven't had trouble yet and seem to stop better than I could with the ABS in past years). Nevertheless, the brakes still aren't very good. I know to be afraid of it in the winter because the weight of the truck (and the relatively high center of gravity) make it very unstable. Still, all I have to do is slow down and I'm fine.

My advice is to target a light vehicle for winter driving. A heavier vehicle with bells and whistles is still at a disadvantage over a lighter vehicle. And front-wheel drive is all you really need (if that's not enough, go home and stay there!).

Append: Fog lights are a very nice thing to have though. They can give you visibility during near white-out conditions that normal lights and brights cannot. Your normal lights will reflect back and blind you, but the fog lights are positioned lower on the vehicle so they don't reflect into your eyes. My truck has them, and since it's a little higher up it has an advantage there. My little car for my finacee doesn't have them, and we had to turn around the other day because blowing snow made it difficult to see the road!

Neil Roy
Member #2,229
April 2002
avatar

Playing Skyrim and barely able to move because I pick up everything in sight! ;D

---
“I love you too.” - last words of Wanda Roy

Chris Katko
Member #1,881
January 2002
avatar

I played Skyrim and after 80 hours of lugging stupid loot back and forth between mines, I said "F it. I'm a developer and a game player for over 20 years. I know what I'm doing" and I modified the weight limit. I increased it a little... and then a little... and then F it, I put it up to like 15,000 kg. I picked up everything in the various Dwemer ruins, took it back, and then just crafted hundreds of armors/etc. It eventually got to be a problem on my machine because there was a noticable "lag" whenever you opened the inventory screen (to loot someone, for example) and things like armors DRASTICALLY increase the time for some reason.

Before that though, I "tried" to be a role player. I tried mods that make your horses have inventory (because WHY WOULDN'T THEY?). I tried using their insane, shitty, inventory of your companions.

But wait... I'm a steath guy. So any COMPANIONS I bring will either be SEEN by the enemies, or, they'll take a shot. So I have to micromanage through their shit interface every single companion every time I "think" there might be a battle. ... And then they die anyway and I have to reload.

The game's mechanics / controls are poorly designed such that multiple overlapping things interfere with each other. Like companions + stealth. Where any normal stealth game would have that a thousand times more balanced / more polished.

The UI and AI are so terrible that the game is so much more fun if you just play alone. All they had to do was add key bindings for "companion halt/attack", etc but nope. That's too much for the console gamers this game was designed for. >:(

That said, if you enjoy it, that's great. I was just frustrated over my 100 hours of gameplay that I had to keep manually, the using mods, to fix their own game. AND THEY EVEN CORRUPTED MY GAME so multiple quests broke (before I installed any mods!) and I had to manually look up various "story flags" and set them myself through the console to activate and fix things.

As a developer, I'm super happy they gave me the "option" of using the console to fix their game. As a gamer, I'm offended that I had to. And this was all with the "most recent" patches installed, Legendary Edition Skyrim that came out long after the initial release.

(STALKER is also full of insane glitches including save game corruption in Clear Sky. !@$%@!#$!@#$#@!$#!@#)

-----sig:
“Programs should be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.” - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
"Political Correctness is fascism disguised as manners" --George Carlin



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