Filipino Programmer | Philippines

While spending 3 long days of no work, I have looked into the web for some puzzles and trivia dealing with dominant brain puzzles and informations. Accidentally I found an article about Bill Gates, and his story about the game Petals Around the Rose. Unfortunately Bill, solved this game longer than I tried the game myself. Okay so you might be thinking how the games work, well the games need a regular dice, it does not matter how many but, the game usually uses 5 dice. The rules are simple :

1. The name of the game is Petals Around the Rose, and the name is significant.
2. The roller will tell you how many petals are around the rose based on the dice roll results
3. If you have figured out the answer for 5 or more consecutive rolls, it is understood that you have solved the puzzle, and you should not tell the answer to anybody.

I have created a simple PHP script which emulates the games, if you are up to the challenge play Petals Around the Rose

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When Apple announced iPhone with multi-touch interface, from Microsoft’s announcement of Surface Computing, It was clear that we are approaching a new trend of computing. Imagine computers without mouse at all, just using your fingers to navigate and explore everything on your computer. Jeff Han of Perceptive Pixel and Popular Mechanics explains why Multi-Touch Sensing devices will help us makes our daily computing lives easier and a lot of fun.

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Microsoft Corp unveils their latest technology that brings to life those clear big screens featured on the movie “The Minority Report”, the project was code named “Project Milan” and later called Microsoft Surface, the first in a new category of surface computing products from Microsoft. The product announced at D5 conference was a built-in multi-functional new kind of touchscreen tabletop computer. Basically the interface accepts multi-input commands just like the iPhone which was previously announced by Apple. And the amazing part of that is Surface can interact with wireless digital devices such as camera/cellphone. Surface uses cameras to sense objects, hand gestures and touch. This user input is then processed and the result is displayed on the surface using rear projection.

What are the key attributes of surface computing?
Surface computing has four key attributes:
• Direct interaction. Users can actually “grab” digital information with their hands and interact with content by touch and gesture, without the use of a mouse or keyboard.
• Multi-touch contact. Surface computing recognizes many points of contact simultaneously, not just from one finger, as with a typical touch screen, but up to dozens and dozens of items at once.
• Multi-user experience. The horizontal form factor makes it easy for several people to gather around surface computers together, providing a collaborative, face-to-face computing experience.
• Object recognition. Users can place physical objects on the surface to trigger different types of digital responses, including the transfer of digital content.

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May 11, 2007, Microsoft Corp. and flash memory maker SanDisk Corp. partnered to build a new generation of USB drives and memory cards which lets users carry on their own pocket their personalized desktops and applications to any Windows PC.

SanDisk spokesman Mike Langberg

Think of this as taking U3 to the next level. Microsoft’s involvement is important because it will bring better integration with the operating system; it’s a name other hardware manufacturers know.

(more…)

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