There isn't any reason to eliminate difficulty settings in an adaptive game. Easy may have a different algorithim than hardcore.. or it may just have more lenient limits to the adjustable parameters. So.. for instance, damage taken by players has a lower minimum, damage dealt has a higher minimum, enemy accuracy has higher minimum variance. And, if nothing else at all, having difficulty settings gives the game a starting point, so it doesn't have to learn that I'm not a rank rookie at FPS every time I pick up a new FPS game.
I don't find difficulty the way its done now to be terribly great. Games were hard is good but not really challenging, yet hardcore is just wtf controller-flinging ridiculous. Or games where hard difficulty isn't so difficult, except for a handful of critical challenges that are just stupidly frustrating.
Sadly, the developers that are delivering those type of games are probably going to deliver adaptable difficulty of the same (dubious) quality.
Also.. it may not be feasible to deliver adaptable difficulty for some time. Or ever. I'm pretty confident that the principle is good. But i don't know what it would take, in terms of code, processor time, whatever. So.. I'm not 100% convinced actual implementation will be any good either. Could end up the way 3d tv/movies are (currently).. gimmicky.
And the pre determined difficulties are all we ever need. Rock Band on hard is okay, but generally easier than I care for. Expert, on the other hand, is usually too much for me. Neither setting is suitable.
If I were playing say.. Bioshock, and all I wanted to do was run and gun and not give a damn.. I could. Even if the game had adaptive difficulty, I could. Because the difficulty would respond to the fact that I was playing in a fashion that involved high volumes of fire and little care about damage taken.
Your point is meaningless because my point is that if you play in a way that is unskilled but fun, an adaptable game will adapt down for you. As I said, an adaptable game with poor adaptation is bad implementation not a failure of principle. You argue that adaptable difficulty is a failure in principle but have utterly failed to make any case as for why.
For the player seeking a difficult challenge, the game keeps adapting to his improving skills giving him that challenge. For the player seeking a casual experience, don't exert yourself. The game won't ramp up difficulty and thus you'll get the casual experience you want. If the game can't deliver on either one, thats a failure in implementation not principle.
Its games that don't adapt to skill that removes player ability to choose the experience. You get what was coded and no more (or less). Making the same assumption of two gamers of equal skill, an unadaptable game will deliver a boring snoozefest to the challenge-seeker in order to deliver an enjoyable game to the casual, skilled gamer. Or the challenge-seeker gets his skill-pushing game that freezes out the casual gamer.
And yes, games are about entertainment. They are interactive entertainment. So if you don't have the skill to play, you do not get anywhere and they're not entertaining. If you have too much skill for the game, you breeze through and they're not entertaining. This is no small part of the draw of multiplayer games. Gives you the opportunity to go against challenges of your own skill level.
1) Your federal republic of germany isn't setting a speed limit and then charging to bypass it, as far as I'm aware. I have nothing against dismissing speed limits (even if only on certain segments of highways, like it is in Germany). But charging for some people to bypass the speed limit while others (in possibly the same model car, with better driving records) are subject to fines, insurance premium hikes, and possibly demerit points on your license for the same act.. is not the same as german law. If it is "okay" to drive above the posted speed limit, it should not matter if you've paid up on your protection money or not.
2)Texas restricts firearms carry at any location that posts a sign, specified in law, not just "special districts". Texas respects the individual's right to self defense, but also respects private property rights.
Do you know it, mofo? No. You do not. It is not ironic that apple hardware (iphones) is being used to entice people into a scam on apple software. Especially when the software is what you use to keep your iphone up to date.
Perhaps if they were scamming you into buying music for a zune, we could talk irony.
Last I knew, which was quite some time ago, Blizzard was real explicit about the fact that you were uploading while fetching a patch. Upload speed and bytes transferred provided in the update pane.
Its the companies that don't tell you that you're part of their distribution network, or how much of your bandwidth is being consumed, that this article is against.
Well.. banks can continue to make money on frozen accounts. And.. banks can pay out less money to depositors in order to cover their costs of compliance. Your only choice is to hold cash rather than deposit.
ISPs on the other hand, charge fees. Watch the ISPs, assuming they lose in court, attach a "government compliance fee" in a separate line item. Just to make the government's "it won't cost taxpayers" line appear as the BS it is. Unless, of course, there are lots of French taxpayers without net access.
Although, it would amuse me most if the ISP that connects Elysee Palace billed them for the entire cost of the system, and disconnected them for failure to pay.
Apparently you missed the second set of "Radeon Graphics" and "FirePro Graphics" where there is no mention of AMD. Specifically for machines that will be bearing the Intel Inside stickers.
Or we could think about this rationally.. if the Christian god is real, the new testament says he's a pretty forgiving guy. So if he's the one waiting for me in the afterlife, I'll say "oops" and he'll say "I forgive you" and we'll go about our days.
The god from the torah and old testaments is way too much of a douchebag for me to cozy up to, so if he's the jealous mofo waiting for me, he's as likely to burn me for panting after Allison Munn as anything else. I like to not reward bad behavior, even when it is all-powerful bullies instead of everyday ones.
If we're talking Islam.. well.. I haven't got time to make in depth, or even more than cursory, investigations into every religion. If Muhammad won't go to the mountain, the mountain should go to him. Only.. he doesn't have an address, so that trip is on indefinite hold. Sorry.
Buddhists, have less to say about believe this is go to hell. Its more, regardless of belief, the intent of your actions impacts your circumstances after rebirth. Good and bad. Also, all life is suffering. So.. if they're right, what I believe won't matter. I'll be reborn somewhere anyway. And it'll involve suffering. Not exactly a compelling argument for me to believe now.
Shinto makes no real claim that poor choices are going to be punished in the afterlife, so not believing doesn't really negatively affect me.
I could go on, but.. yeah.. you get the idea. And atheism takes less faith than a religion. I don't believe in any god because there is no purely logical or evident reason for me to do so. I'll freely acknowledge that proving a negative is next to impossible. But the religious have the easier burden of proving a positive.. and fail.
* spoken from the point of view of a marketing person.
We could say much the same thing for Snoop Dogg these days.
Not to mention that the people with hacking skills are the ones most likely to know about nerdcore.
But, oh right, this isn't about cybercrime. This is about selling Norton software. Which is why they aren't using icons that hackers might actually respond to.
You and I have very difference opinions on notable degradation. 80% of original capacity.. is huge.
Under optimal conditions, Li batteries degrade just a few % per year. Under average conditions, 8-10% is fairly normal. Under poor conditions, 25-35% loss in a year is reasonable. And you could kill one entirely in less than a year under worst case conditions.
From the fighting game community sites, they don't like the disc either. The general response to this controller is "yay! a d-pad that sucks less!... priced so high that we'd rather get an arcade stick!"
Not that you need a PSN account to play your games, retrieve game patches, or firmware updates. So.. not at all like signing a contract to actually be able to move the car you purchased.
How is it an arms race? They didn't make it so that these criteria are what makes email important to everybody. It learns whats important to each user, individually. Thats a much harder target.
If you read LKML messages every time, they'll start getting marked important. If i just look now and then, it won't be so marked in my inbox. You can help it learn by flagging a message important, or one that was incorrectly flagged important you can tag as unimportant. You can set up filters.
Unlike a search engine, what keyword, phrases, or grammatical construction the sender uses won't flag the message as important when the criteria is based on the receiver's behavior.
You have an odd way of viewing things. You pay for them to host Marketplace content? Whaaaat? Marketplace content is either advertising (trailers, demos) or content you pay for. And you don't have to be a Gold subscriber to get the privilege of paying for that content. I know.. its a shock. They want you to buy things even if you don't buy Gold. Who'd have thought.
Its also funny how other consoles, and PC systems, have access to that sort of stuff, and multiplayer policing, and matchmaking, and rankings... at no further cost to the end user.
At $5/month from every Gold subscriber, they should be hosting every match. If all they're going to do is matchmaking and advertising, they can do that at no cost to the end user.
New UI and Avatars.. available to people who don't pay for Gold.
Paying gets you multiplayer, access to Hulu Plus (if you pay for that and are in the US), Netflix (if you pay for that), Sky TV (if you pay for that and are in the UK), and similar services in Portugal or Australia.
So, really, what you pay for is multiplayer.. that they don't even host. They do the matchmaking and get out of the way.
And how many multiplayer games are hosted by one of the player's consoles, rather than a Microsoft server? I haven't played all that many XBL games, admittedly, but only one of them was not hosted on a 360 in the match.
I guess if we twist things around, we might view it as a step forwards.
If we could animate corpses to do manual labor, would you object because they're slave.. zombies?
Embryos that were created for other purposes, such as IVF, and are going to be destroyed anyway are not being murdered when we collect the stem cells before destruction. It is ethically neutral at worst. No damage is being done that will not happen anyway. It is the source activity generating the embryos to be destroyed where the potential for ethics violations can occur. And I'm thinking you're going to have a real tough time making a case that helping women/couples that can't have children to have children is unethical.
Firefox has a nice addon called CookieSafe. It not only lets you set up white and black lists for cookies, with options for the standard site-determined expiration and forced expiry at end of session, but it lets you grant a temporary permission to set cookies. When you close the browser, temporary permissions are revoked.
I default deny. And I can whitelist sites I visit with 2 mouse clicks. Right click on the statusbar icon, left click on the permission to grant: Allow, Allow Session, Allow Temporary.
Virtually all the bad are rejected out of hand. I go places where cookies do useful things, and I still get to enjoy the benefit. I go somewhere that cookies must be enable in order to merely look around, and usually I just close that tab.
No technical wizardry necessary. Users just need to care a little, which they largely do not.
Actually, it would probably make good sense financially. Whatever payout by settlement would be felt in stock price by roughly settlement$/shares. Not just Paul Allen's shares. If he's the sole owner of the patents (I couldn't tell from the article, and patent files make me eyes bleed), then he would gain financially by collecting all of the settlement but sharing the losses with the rest of the stockholders of Microsoft.
It may be that Microsoft has a license agreement already (very plausible). But if they don't, its the non-financial costs that, to me, would top the list of why he wouldn't. Other big owners of Microsoft are rich, connected people that he knows pretty well. Much the same reason I don't sue my neighbors and then ask them to watch my place while I'm on vacation.
If you think getting access to some Blackberry emails are going to solve any real national security problems, you're dreaming. But it can definitely be abused in the name of security.
There are already end-to-end encryption solutions for voice and SMS services. They're already available on multiple mobile platforms. And this isn't accounting for things like a secure shell or VNC client on a mobile device to get a protected machine with secured communications.
I mean, I get it. The indian government feels like it needs to do something, but don't fool yourself into believing this particular move is going to be effective.
Slashdot Mirror
There isn't any reason to eliminate difficulty settings in an adaptive game. Easy may have a different algorithim than hardcore.. or it may just have more lenient limits to the adjustable parameters. So.. for instance, damage taken by players has a lower minimum, damage dealt has a higher minimum, enemy accuracy has higher minimum variance. And, if nothing else at all, having difficulty settings gives the game a starting point, so it doesn't have to learn that I'm not a rank rookie at FPS every time I pick up a new FPS game.
I don't find difficulty the way its done now to be terribly great. Games were hard is good but not really challenging, yet hardcore is just wtf controller-flinging ridiculous. Or games where hard difficulty isn't so difficult, except for a handful of critical challenges that are just stupidly frustrating.
Sadly, the developers that are delivering those type of games are probably going to deliver adaptable difficulty of the same (dubious) quality.
Also.. it may not be feasible to deliver adaptable difficulty for some time. Or ever. I'm pretty confident that the principle is good. But i don't know what it would take, in terms of code, processor time, whatever. So.. I'm not 100% convinced actual implementation will be any good either. Could end up the way 3d tv/movies are (currently) .. gimmicky.
And the pre determined difficulties are all we ever need. Rock Band on hard is okay, but generally easier than I care for. Expert, on the other hand, is usually too much for me. Neither setting is suitable.
If I were playing say.. Bioshock, and all I wanted to do was run and gun and not give a damn.. I could. Even if the game had adaptive difficulty, I could. Because the difficulty would respond to the fact that I was playing in a fashion that involved high volumes of fire and little care about damage taken.
Your point is meaningless because my point is that if you play in a way that is unskilled but fun, an adaptable game will adapt down for you. As I said, an adaptable game with poor adaptation is bad implementation not a failure of principle. You argue that adaptable difficulty is a failure in principle but have utterly failed to make any case as for why.
Uh.. what?
For the player seeking a difficult challenge, the game keeps adapting to his improving skills giving him that challenge. For the player seeking a casual experience, don't exert yourself. The game won't ramp up difficulty and thus you'll get the casual experience you want. If the game can't deliver on either one, thats a failure in implementation not principle.
Its games that don't adapt to skill that removes player ability to choose the experience. You get what was coded and no more (or less). Making the same assumption of two gamers of equal skill, an unadaptable game will deliver a boring snoozefest to the challenge-seeker in order to deliver an enjoyable game to the casual, skilled gamer. Or the challenge-seeker gets his skill-pushing game that freezes out the casual gamer.
And yes, games are about entertainment. They are interactive entertainment. So if you don't have the skill to play, you do not get anywhere and they're not entertaining. If you have too much skill for the game, you breeze through and they're not entertaining. This is no small part of the draw of multiplayer games. Gives you the opportunity to go against challenges of your own skill level.
Couple of nitpicks.
1) Your federal republic of germany isn't setting a speed limit and then charging to bypass it, as far as I'm aware. I have nothing against dismissing speed limits (even if only on certain segments of highways, like it is in Germany). But charging for some people to bypass the speed limit while others (in possibly the same model car, with better driving records) are subject to fines, insurance premium hikes, and possibly demerit points on your license for the same act.. is not the same as german law. If it is "okay" to drive above the posted speed limit, it should not matter if you've paid up on your protection money or not.
2)Texas restricts firearms carry at any location that posts a sign, specified in law, not just "special districts". Texas respects the individual's right to self defense, but also respects private property rights.
Apparently you learned what irony isn't from a song, and that is all you know about the word. Let me help you out with that.
Irony:
If you can't see the irony in being scammed into buying music from a service offered inside of the iTunes Music Store client, you may be beyond help.
Do you know it, mofo? No. You do not. It is not ironic that apple hardware (iphones) is being used to entice people into a scam on apple software. Especially when the software is what you use to keep your iphone up to date.
Perhaps if they were scamming you into buying music for a zune, we could talk irony.
Last I knew, which was quite some time ago, Blizzard was real explicit about the fact that you were uploading while fetching a patch. Upload speed and bytes transferred provided in the update pane.
Its the companies that don't tell you that you're part of their distribution network, or how much of your bandwidth is being consumed, that this article is against.
Well.. banks can continue to make money on frozen accounts. And.. banks can pay out less money to depositors in order to cover their costs of compliance. Your only choice is to hold cash rather than deposit.
ISPs on the other hand, charge fees. Watch the ISPs, assuming they lose in court, attach a "government compliance fee" in a separate line item. Just to make the government's "it won't cost taxpayers" line appear as the BS it is. Unless, of course, there are lots of French taxpayers without net access.
Although, it would amuse me most if the ISP that connects Elysee Palace billed them for the entire cost of the system, and disconnected them for failure to pay.
Apparently you missed the second set of "Radeon Graphics" and "FirePro Graphics" where there is no mention of AMD. Specifically for machines that will be bearing the Intel Inside stickers.
So.. pay up on your failed guarantee.
I wish this was my area of expertise.. I'd make something just so they'd come buy it from me. And then I'd make a new one.
Or we could think about this rationally.. if the Christian god is real, the new testament says he's a pretty forgiving guy. So if he's the one waiting for me in the afterlife, I'll say "oops" and he'll say "I forgive you" and we'll go about our days.
The god from the torah and old testaments is way too much of a douchebag for me to cozy up to, so if he's the jealous mofo waiting for me, he's as likely to burn me for panting after Allison Munn as anything else. I like to not reward bad behavior, even when it is all-powerful bullies instead of everyday ones.
If we're talking Islam.. well.. I haven't got time to make in depth, or even more than cursory, investigations into every religion. If Muhammad won't go to the mountain, the mountain should go to him. Only.. he doesn't have an address, so that trip is on indefinite hold. Sorry.
Buddhists, have less to say about believe this is go to hell. Its more, regardless of belief, the intent of your actions impacts your circumstances after rebirth. Good and bad. Also, all life is suffering. So.. if they're right, what I believe won't matter. I'll be reborn somewhere anyway. And it'll involve suffering. Not exactly a compelling argument for me to believe now.
Shinto makes no real claim that poor choices are going to be punished in the afterlife, so not believing doesn't really negatively affect me.
I could go on, but.. yeah.. you get the idea. And atheism takes less faith than a religion. I don't believe in any god because there is no purely logical or evident reason for me to do so. I'll freely acknowledge that proving a negative is next to impossible. But the religious have the easier burden of proving a positive .. and fail.
We could say much the same thing for Snoop Dogg these days.
Not to mention that the people with hacking skills are the ones most likely to know about nerdcore.
But, oh right, this isn't about cybercrime. This is about selling Norton software. Which is why they aren't using icons that hackers might actually respond to.
You and I have very difference opinions on notable degradation. 80% of original capacity .. is huge.
Under optimal conditions, Li batteries degrade just a few % per year. Under average conditions, 8-10% is fairly normal. Under poor conditions, 25-35% loss in a year is reasonable. And you could kill one entirely in less than a year under worst case conditions.
From the fighting game community sites, they don't like the disc either. The general response to this controller is "yay! a d-pad that sucks less! ... priced so high that we'd rather get an arcade stick!"
Not that you need a PSN account to play your games, retrieve game patches, or firmware updates. So.. not at all like signing a contract to actually be able to move the car you purchased.
How is it an arms race? They didn't make it so that these criteria are what makes email important to everybody. It learns whats important to each user, individually. Thats a much harder target.
If you read LKML messages every time, they'll start getting marked important. If i just look now and then, it won't be so marked in my inbox. You can help it learn by flagging a message important, or one that was incorrectly flagged important you can tag as unimportant. You can set up filters.
Unlike a search engine, what keyword, phrases, or grammatical construction the sender uses won't flag the message as important when the criteria is based on the receiver's behavior.
You have an odd way of viewing things. You pay for them to host Marketplace content? Whaaaat? Marketplace content is either advertising (trailers, demos) or content you pay for. And you don't have to be a Gold subscriber to get the privilege of paying for that content. I know.. its a shock. They want you to buy things even if you don't buy Gold. Who'd have thought.
Its also funny how other consoles, and PC systems, have access to that sort of stuff, and multiplayer policing, and matchmaking, and rankings ... at no further cost to the end user.
At $5/month from every Gold subscriber, they should be hosting every match. If all they're going to do is matchmaking and advertising, they can do that at no cost to the end user.
Sony may have stated such a thing, but I doubt it. Netflix works without PSN+, and has done so since before PSN+ was rolled out.
Hulu Plus may or may not be available to free PSN. I don't know, can't check.
New UI and Avatars .. available to people who don't pay for Gold.
Paying gets you multiplayer, access to Hulu Plus (if you pay for that and are in the US), Netflix (if you pay for that), Sky TV (if you pay for that and are in the UK), and similar services in Portugal or Australia.
So, really, what you pay for is multiplayer.. that they don't even host. They do the matchmaking and get out of the way.
And how many multiplayer games are hosted by one of the player's consoles, rather than a Microsoft server? I haven't played all that many XBL games, admittedly, but only one of them was not hosted on a 360 in the match.
I guess if we twist things around, we might view it as a step forwards.
If we could animate corpses to do manual labor, would you object because they're slave.. zombies?
Embryos that were created for other purposes, such as IVF, and are going to be destroyed anyway are not being murdered when we collect the stem cells before destruction. It is ethically neutral at worst. No damage is being done that will not happen anyway. It is the source activity generating the embryos to be destroyed where the potential for ethics violations can occur. And I'm thinking you're going to have a real tough time making a case that helping women/couples that can't have children to have children is unethical.
Firefox has a nice addon called CookieSafe. It not only lets you set up white and black lists for cookies, with options for the standard site-determined expiration and forced expiry at end of session, but it lets you grant a temporary permission to set cookies. When you close the browser, temporary permissions are revoked.
I default deny. And I can whitelist sites I visit with 2 mouse clicks. Right click on the statusbar icon, left click on the permission to grant: Allow, Allow Session, Allow Temporary.
Virtually all the bad are rejected out of hand. I go places where cookies do useful things, and I still get to enjoy the benefit. I go somewhere that cookies must be enable in order to merely look around, and usually I just close that tab.
No technical wizardry necessary. Users just need to care a little, which they largely do not.
Actually, it would probably make good sense financially. Whatever payout by settlement would be felt in stock price by roughly settlement$/shares. Not just Paul Allen's shares. If he's the sole owner of the patents (I couldn't tell from the article, and patent files make me eyes bleed), then he would gain financially by collecting all of the settlement but sharing the losses with the rest of the stockholders of Microsoft.
It may be that Microsoft has a license agreement already (very plausible). But if they don't, its the non-financial costs that, to me, would top the list of why he wouldn't. Other big owners of Microsoft are rich, connected people that he knows pretty well. Much the same reason I don't sue my neighbors and then ask them to watch my place while I'm on vacation.
If you think getting access to some Blackberry emails are going to solve any real national security problems, you're dreaming. But it can definitely be abused in the name of security.
There are already end-to-end encryption solutions for voice and SMS services. They're already available on multiple mobile platforms. And this isn't accounting for things like a secure shell or VNC client on a mobile device to get a protected machine with secured communications.
I mean, I get it. The indian government feels like it needs to do something, but don't fool yourself into believing this particular move is going to be effective.