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Joel discusses how Microsoft failed design for the Office 2007 packaging – it’s hard to even open

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Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Death Blossom strategy, which, sadly, has nothing to do with The Last Starfighter and everything to do with Sudoku.

This strategy is based on extending Aligned Pair Exclusion but uses Almost Locked Sets to make some clever reductions. From the components used it could be named Aligned ALS Exclusion but Mike Barker, who formulated it first in this thread, hit on “Death Blossom” because it starts with a cell designated as the “stem” which points to Almost Locked Sets, or the “petals”, and is a great deal more flowery.

That’s right – a Sudoku strategy given the same name as the ultimate weapon in The Last Starfighter is actually based on an advanced strategy for Sudoku seemingly (but not really) named after primates. And it’s an even more advanced strategy. That makes for some crazy ultimate weapon monkies, or something.

And the provider of all this Sudoku strategy awesomeness apparently has a new book coming out soon for more Sudoku madness. If you aren’t doing Sudoku, you should be – and this book could be the perfect introduction for you.

Technorati Tags: Sudoku, Death Blossom, Crazy ultimate weapon monkies, The Logic of Sudoku

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In the future, we can expect some great advances in automotive technology.

LIGHTER, more powerful and comfortable cars, that will cost less, run further without adjustment and will be easier to handle, are being forecast, by automotive engineers.

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In Europe automobiles have been made to run as far as eighty miles to the gallon of gasoline. Supercharging, or forcing the gas into the cylinders instead of allowing it to be drawn in by the suction of the piston, has enabled the weight of the motor to be cut down and resulted in performance undreamed of a few years ago.

Puts the cars we suffer with now to shame, doesn’t it? We’ll soon see improvements in pick-up, quieter and more fuel-efficient city driving, longer lasting tires, more resilient finishes on the paint jobs, and better long-term driving.

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