Go back even farther and you’ll get to a point where entire games were written in assembly and assets might been written with a hex editor (and even that description might be higher level than what they actually did).

My dad had a computer class in high school that involved filling in ordered punch cards and then they’d send them off to a university to run them on their mainframe and they’d send the output punch cards back. That wouldn’t have even been assembly, it would have been machine code, though they probably marked the punch cards to be easier to remember what bits meant what. But it would take like a week to find out there was a mistake in the code.

Sounds crazy from where we are today, but that’s all they had at the time. If you wanted to do something awesome, you could either give up, invent a better way, or just buckle down and do it the hard way.

Lol only 4 hours given? Sounds like the study runners also didn’t have enough patience to really study this. Or designed the study for the conclusion.

We had a Mickey game that came with a dark maroon piece of paper with a bunch of Mickey poses on it, each one had a number or letter code (it would show a pose and you had to give it the code for the pose to start the game). The black ink on dark maroon paper was intended to prevent photocopying.

We also had this F1 racing game that had a bunch of F1 history in its manual and would ask F1 history trivia to get into the game.

The way I suspect some of them were made: get 10 random people, present the problem to them and ask each person what they think the solution is. Say no to the first 9, then say yes to whatever the 10th person guesses. If they guess something previously guessed, then keep prompting for more information until the solution is so specific even people on the right track will be confused by it.

Also add endless segments where several specific squares of the grid have mandatory items, something prevents you from systematically searching the entire grid, and if you go too far, you die.

It goes even farther than that: games in the 80s didn’t even necessarily have consistent designs that could be trained in the first 30 minutes. Especially the adventure games. They were also perfectly willing to let you lose the game in act 1 but not tell you about it until act 3, where the way they do “tell you” is you don’t have any possible solution for a problem.

Like if you don’t get that delicious pie plus another food source early on, you’ll either die of starvation or the yeti will eat you later in the game.

But if you know what to do, the game becomes trivial.

Lol King’s Quest was a funny journey for me. I started with KQV as a kid and was always curious about the previous games. It wasn’t until I got them all via abandonware sites as an adult that I realized 5 was the perfect one to start on because the previous ones all relied on vague text parsers to handle all the actions, ones where typing “grab stick” instead of “get stick” could be the difference between having a fun or frustrating time.

So you’re saying there’s now a version of KQIV that has an interface similar to KQV and involves no guessing which verb/noun they want specifically?

Though my record with point and click adventure games hasn’t been great since KQVI. I did beat both 5 and 6 on my own as a kid (getting the 100% win on 6 with no help still gave me a pang of pride when I thought of it just now, when all those pieces start fitting together), but find I don’t have the patience to solve similar games these days (even without the “sometimes punishes clicking the wrong pixel with death” that KQ liked to do). I never did finish KQVII, even. Action games were just more engaging.

No, the exact % depends on how stable everything else is.

Like a trivial example, if you have 3 programs, one that sets a pointer to a random address and tries to dereference it, one that does this but only if the last two digits of a timer it checks are “69”, and one that never sets a pointer to an invalid address, based on the programs themselves, the first one will crash almost all the time, the second one will crash about 1% of the time, and the third one won’t crash at all.

If you had a mechanism to perfectly detect bit flips (honestly, that part has me the most curious about the OP), and you ran each program until you had detected 5 bit flip crashes (let’s say they happen 1 out of each 10k runs), then the first program will have something like a 0.01% chance of any given crash being due to bit flip, about 1% for the 2nd one, and 100% for the 3rd one (assuming no other issues like OS stability causing other crashes).

Going with those numbers I made up, every 10k “runs”, you’d see 1 crash from bit flips and 9 crashes from other reasons. Or for every crash report they receive, 1 of 10 are bit flips, and 9 of 10 are “other”. Well, more accurately, 1 of 20 for bit flip and 19 of 20 for other, due to the assumption that the detector only detects half of them, because they actually only measured 5%.

Who is talking about average consumers? We’re not trying to market something here.

Improved overall system stability and data accuracy? With error correction, you can also push performance farther, since you can tolerate a certain amount of errors, instead of needing to aim for 0% error rate.

That’s just one approach to addiction. Personally, I think it assumes people are weak with no self-control, which seems to be exactly the argument you’re making.

The emphasis on abstinence and any exposure at all being a failure might even make binging more likely if someone gives in just a little, as their counter is now reset, so might as well take advantage.

And the obsession/fascination with the addiction target continues or even gets ramped up.

I like the moderation approach a lot better. I don’t binge drink every weekend anymore, but if I do feel like having a drink every now and then, I just do instead of spiraling because I need to treat it like some sort of personal failure.

Just make sure you have permission from the leg’s owner first or things can get complicated legally.

Yeah, it’s all about a) whether microbes can get to it, b) whether microbes can survive on it, and c) whether microbes can thrive on it. If the answer to any of those is no, then it won’t decompose.

If it just relies on a, then opening it starts its countdown.

If it just relies on b, then it won’t rot but the preservatives might be an issue for us, too. Though it could rot eventually if circumstances change (like it gets soaked with clean water or if the preservatives break down over time).

If it just relies on c, then it might just be waiting for some moisture for an existing colony to take off, but it’ll just sit until then.

Eggs are a and maybe a bit of b mixed in. You don’t even need to refridgerate eggs if they weren’t washed like they do for commercially available ones (at least in north america, dunno about elsewhere). Not that unwashed eggs are necessarily better, as they can have bacteria on the outside of the shell from things like chicken shit.

Once I understood the role moisture plays, I stopped using a lid on my garbage so that it would dry out and stink less. It works unless I’m thowing out a bunch of fish guts or something that stores/traps moisture well, and even then, the stink isn’t as bad.

Gambling, pretty much. They go all in on a bet that it will explode and make tons of money, take out loans based on that expectation, setting themselves in a position where either it is a major success or it is an utter failure, no in between.

The gaming market is so saturated these days that it’s kinda baffling this approach is still being taken. Like I hadn’t even heard of this game before this.

The outside would be burnt and the inside raw. There might be a layer of well-cooked chicken between them, though just cutting through it to see that will contaminate the cooked bit from the raw bit. That’s why the penicillin sauce is so important.

A decent number of them have already sent cash gifts. Which is already spent paying off the loan for the wedding planner and the artists that made some concept art of the theme which is being presented as actual footage of the venue, despite a few of the visuals being things that cutting edge technology cannot physically produce.

Oh and after the last meeting where some of this was laid out, the wedding planner just started laughing hysterically, left the room, and isn’t answering or returning calls. The kids who were playing out front know a bit more information but are worried they’d get in trouble if they repeated what she said about the groom.

Just flashbang every room before you enter it, just to be safe.

That comment was basically Microsoft’s business plan ever since like windows 8 until they made it no longer true by making windows so bad “what OS should I use” did become a topic, at least with the nerdier segment of the population.

Though on the other hand, that 90%+ segment of the population still doesn’t gaf other than “why are computers so hard?” style complaints.

There’s a lot of food that won’t rot if left out to dry.

Not that McDonald’s is any good, just that that particular experiment was flawed because there was no control showing that other food left out in similar circumstances would have decomposed more (and even then, decent burger patties make McDonald’s’ look like jokes; “thick and juicy” is more likely to decompose than thin and whatever you’d call the moisture level in a McDonald’s burger).

Would that be 100 dollars percent or 100 percent dollars?

Similarly, snow piles can be dangerous. Like the kind made by machines clearing parking lots that kids love to play on. Depending on how packed it is, there could be gaps a kid could fall in and get stuck, plus kids scream when they are having fun, so many adults might just filter out the sound of child screaming.

The ones at schools might be specifically made with kids playing on them in mind, but I doubt that’s the case for ones in random parking lots, though maybe I’m just underestimating typical snow plough training.