addie

The real advantage of a 120 Hz screen is that you get a much more graceful degradation if you dip below your fps target for a bit. If you're targeting 30 fps but drop to 25, it still feels pretty smooth on a high-refresh screen, whereas that's appallingly clunky on a low-refresh one. A "poor man's gsync", if you will.

They're occasionally the crisp of choice in pubs; an excellent accompaniment to an 80/-. Suppose there's worse criteria for your pub crawls. But aye, a weird omission - you'd be thinking there's plenty of wagons on the Stranraer ferry that could bring a few palletloads over.

Undoubtedly right, but might give the impression that iron is used because it's a better material for weapons than bronze - that's not its advantage.

Bronze is harder than iron, and holds a better edge - bronze knives are lighter than iron ones. (Harder metals aren't necessarily better for swords, tho, as they'll shatter rather than bend.). It also doesn't corrode so readily. Bronze can also be worked around 1000 °C, which can be achieved with primitive forges, whereas iron needs about 1250 and needs much better tech.

The first real advantage iron has over bronze is that iron is everywhere, whereas bronze production needs tin mines, and they're quite rare. If you can achieve the heat, it's much easier to equip your whole army.

The second advantage iron has is that if you can achieve about 1500 °C in your smelter, and you've mastered getting 'some but not too much carbon' alloyed with it, you can make steel, which is a huge improvement over bronze. That's generally not tech that could be achieved by ancient societies, though.

Hey! Spoiler alert for Shaz's change of haircut. At least it doesn't show her making sandcastles, I suppose.

A binary tree is one way of preparing data, usually for sorting. Each node can have a left, right, or both, children.

  A
 / \
B   C
   / \
  D   E

"Inverting the tree" means swapping the children for each node, so that the order that the nodes are visited is reversed. Depending on whether you want to copy the tree or swap it in place then the algorithm is different. C++ provides iterators too, so providing a "order reversed" iterator can be done efficiently as well.

You're going to have to visit every node and do at least one swap for every node, and an efficient algorithm won't do much more than that. Bring unable to do it suggests that the student programmer doesn't understand stacks or recursion yet, so they've more to learn.

It's easy to tell the difference between stoats and weasels. One is weasily recognised and the other is stoatally different.

Lunacid is awesome - old-school dungeon crawling with slick controls. The speed and smoothness makes fighting all the old enemies new again.

The Kings Field games are... very hard to love. They're old-school dungeon crawlers with the most awful, clunky controls that you can imagine. They're all "pre-Miyazaki" FromSoftware games; don't expect many Souls-like touches. Getting killed by a skeleton because you can't turn round to face it in time, or falling down a hole because judging how far you've walked forward is difficult? Far more likely.

A Lunacid follow-up with a little more Ultima / Wizardry about it would be amazing. Bit more environmental variety, a few more RPG trappings, and for the love of all that is holy, a minimap. But I can't see how that would be better done in Sword Of Moonlight rather than just adding them to their existing engine.

After having used Grub for about twenty years (eek) I was uncertain about the alternatives, but systemd-boot is absurdly better. Much better configuration, much better documentation, fixes a while pile of bugs that Grub team had as "won't fix" for years and years. No reason to ever go back.

Tune.

Can't possibly be slower than GCP, either. Performance of BigQuery is something to behold.

Cloud makes sense if you've a very 'spiky' load, I suppose. A website that needs one VM most of the year, but a hundred on a couple of days. Maybe your data processing needs 100 TB of storage a couple of times a month, but not the rest of the time. But for fixed, predictable bread-and-butter stuff?

Well, yes. But I would argue that if you have the skills to defeat eg. the Draconic Sentinel with just two runes, then it's probably not your first rodeo. Stumbling over all the steps to eg. Varre or Hyettas quests on an unguided playthrough, which require specific things in a certain order in a huge world, are not particularly likely either. Its size works against it in that regard.

For people that really love Dark Souls and have finished it repeatedly, including challenge runs? Five hours is probably taking your time, using rubbish weapons for a laugh. For your first time playing through, hell no - probably more like thirty. The first DS has some unreasonable traps for the unwary - one of the stats is a dead end, many of the weapons scale really badly. Maybe better to start with Scholar or 3, that are better balanced.