That's EXACTLY what I'm complaining about. The author was purposely HIDING the statistics to make it appear bad. Read between the lines: 17 percent worse than what? Themselves BEFORE? Or worse than the pencil-and-paper group? If it's the latter, then that means they memorized 16% BETTER than before, which is STILL an improvement. If it's the former, it is highly improbable to happen and I'll have to question their method.
Speaking of questioning the method, I have a strong feeling that they actually used pencil-and-paper to test ALL of the kids before AND after! Believe me, the medium AFFECTS the memorization; many people use short-term visual memory to memorize words on these kinds of tests efficiently. If they asked the pencil-and-paper kids to do the test on a DS, I'll bet you two to one that they'll perform WORSE than the DS kids.
And I have a very GOOD reason to question the method:
In logic tests the Nintendo children registered a 10 per cent improvement, as did the pencil-and-paper group. The children who had no specific training improved 20 per cent.
Wow, suddenly BOTH groups are worse than the control group! Smell a conspiracy? I do too.
"Before and after the course, the kids were given tasks including logic tests, memorizing words on a map, doing sums, and interpreting symbols. Researchers found that children using the Nintendo DS system didn't show any significant improvement in memory tests. They did do 19 percent better in math, but so did the pencil-and-paper group, while the fourth group did 18 percent better."
If anything, this actually PROVES that Brain Age is just as good as traditional methods, if not BETTER, while at the same time being FUN for the kids because in their minds, they are at play, not at work.
"If it doesn't work on children, it won't work on adults," Lieury said.
Can you say "non-sequitur"? As children our brains are more agile because we get frequent practice in school, but as adults we don't. I even remember the friggin' game pointing that one out!
It definitely worked for me. As a kid I used to breeze through simple maths, but as an adult I started losing that touch, frequently needing calculators to do simple math. But when I started using Brain Age everyday, I've gone back to my maths skill level as a kid.
If there's anyone who's a charlatan, it's this guy, purposely withholding statistics that prove him wrong.
By the way, I'm not sure why some software never takes this route. When I see scanners and other tools ask me if it is okay to update I wonder what power are they really trying to give me.
The power to do the update without disturbing your work.
Any kind of software installation presents a risk of breaking stuff. You don't want stuff to break when you're in the middle of an important task and you're on a deadline.
For that matter, that's also why I don't want updates to run "quietly and unobtrusively". I hate it when I'm in the middle of making slides 5 minutes before the presentation and my computer suddenly slows down because of a browser auto-update (simply because I just had my browser on to look up stuff while doing the slides).
I think the guy *shouldn't* have gone through the trouble and just got another e-mail address.
Reason? He may be able to convince Verizon to grant him the email address, but he won't be able to convince the rest of the Internet to stop filtering the messages he sends.
Let's face it, the spam filtering that's currently in place in many systems on the 'net isn't very smart, and it would take years to fix (assuming it ever does get fixed).
The not-so-evil answer is that if you release all of the creature features right now for free, upon release of the game there wouldn't be surprises left in terms of these features -- you would have seen 'em all.
I'm assuming of course that the paid creature editor isn't released yet (or isn't gonna be released anytime soon, at least significantly before the game's release).
On the other hand, if it HAS been released, then the reason's exactly as you said.
No, by "bad gaming experience" I mean running the game with inaccurate visual effects. I, for one, would prefer running the non-10.1 version just to see ALL of the effects properly, even if it costs me a few FPS.
Your own TechReport link only states that the original DirectX 10.1 implementation is faster on the Radeon than it is on the Nvidia by 3fps on average, but you are forgetting that the game is not rendering the exact same thing across both cards in this way. (Oh, and note that the median low score of the Nvidia card is actually faster. That matters a lot because that means the card is still faster during parts of the game with incredible slowdown, regardless of whether DX10.1 was available on the Radeon or not.
Ubisoft itself has already stated that it was a bug (and a very legitimate one), and it was THEIR bug to fix. You might complain "oh it's a very minor bug, there was no reason to remove DX10.1 support altogether", but if you're like me (I'm a graphics programmer myself), you'd understand the need to make all of the visual effects accurate, and apparently the only USE of the DX10.1 support in Assassin's Creed was for this one (buggy) part of the game, so Ubisoft was right about disabling 10.1 support on their game. Those people who are claiming "Nvidia's just dirty dealing so Assassin's Creed would run slower on Radeon's" are just blatantly uninformed, or probably just biased to begin with. (Oh, and might I point out that your "dirty dealing" article does not mention anything about Ubisoft's alleged deal with Nvidia either; you're just grasping at straws.)
TR: Does the removal of this "render pass during post-effect" in the DX10.1 have an impact on image quality in the game?
Beauchemin: With DirectX 10.1, we are able to re-use an existing buffer to render the post-effects instead of having to render it again with different attributes. However, with the implementation of the retail version, we found a problem that caused the post-effects to fail to render properly.
TR: What specific factors led to DX10.1 support's removal in patch 1?
Beauchemin: Our DX10.1 implementation was not properly done and we didn't want the users with Vista SP1 and DX10.1-enabled cards to have a bad gaming experience.
That's what I thought when I started playing Drummania (a Konami arcade game where Rock Band's drum portion was loosely based on).
Then it got really tiring. Literally. I was struggling to finish songs because my arms are getting tired with the fast rolls. I'm getting callouses all over my hands. I'm getting leg cramps from hitting the bass pedal too fast. Etc.
That is, until I met a few people playing the game who taught me some basics that you do on the real drums. Things like basic posture and stick control, bounce-rolling, perididdling, the heel-and-toe technique for hitting the pedal, etc.
Then the game became infinitely easier.
The real problem is that games like these do NOT actually teach you those basics at all; they just assume that you will learn it intuitively after playing the game for hours, but it's not really the case for some people, e.g. me.
So, yeah, you definitely need MORE information to play drums on a rhythm game like this than just "hit the pad corresponding to the color of the note". It's a totally different game than, say, DDR, where you don't NEED to learn how to dance to play it.
Actually I meant n^3. In a high-level view, that means checking each polygon with each and every other polygon, which you have to clip with all other polygons surrounding the target polygon just to compute the area being shadowed. Compared to rendering a shadow volume in a stencil buffer (using the aforementioned technique of course), and rendering the same scene with the mask that was produced, which just takes linear time.
It just looks undramatic when I say "cubic time", so I just said it's polynomial.;)
> Anyone can make a High poly game that requires excessive processing power.
Pardon me for nitpicking, but how exactly is Doom 3 a high-poly game that requires "excessive" processing power? If you took Doom 3's graphics on its own and slapped it on an older engine, it would take much, much longer to draw at the same quality.
You're clearly underestimating the massive engineering effort put into making the game. If you think Doom 3's engine was just created by "anyone", think again. Setting aside who made that graphics engine (as there are already lots of Carmack fanboys in the world to emphasize that point), the algorithms used in the game are the product of years of research work by other guys who aren't even directly involved in Doom 3's making.
The shadows alone, though largely derided by most people for making the game "too dark", is only made possible due to Everitt, Kilgard and other people's groundbreaking research work on the area. I currently have their papers on my desk. Without those algorithms, Doom 3's shadows would approach *polynomial* time just to get it to render!
If you want to criticize the game itself, go ahead. (I personally liked the game's atmosphere more than Half-Life 2, but my subjective opinions rarely count for anything.) But don't discount the fact that it took real people with great minds to actually make these stuff. I could say with absolute certainty that Doom 3 is ground-breaking in the graphics arena.
> As if there is a group of impovrished, and unscrupulous lawyers sitting around saying, "gee, if only there were software patents, then we'd be able to make some money".
Unfortunately, there is. Hence the current software patent situation in the US.
History tells us that incomplete things actually commands more value, like money notes, stamps etc.
Wha-?
The only reason why incomplete money notes and stamps "command more value" is because they are rare, not because they are better. In fact, they are obviously worse than the complete thing: they cannot actually be used to buy stuff or send mail, respectively, because they are decommissioned. The value comes from the mere possession of the said item.
With incomplete music that gets easily duplicated and is just as accessible to people as the complete thing, the rarity value is lost, and the incomplete music is just crap.
Slashdot Mirror
That's EXACTLY what I'm complaining about. The author was purposely HIDING the statistics to make it appear bad. Read between the lines: 17 percent worse than what? Themselves BEFORE? Or worse than the pencil-and-paper group? If it's the latter, then that means they memorized 16% BETTER than before, which is STILL an improvement. If it's the former, it is highly improbable to happen and I'll have to question their method.
Speaking of questioning the method, I have a strong feeling that they actually used pencil-and-paper to test ALL of the kids before AND after! Believe me, the medium AFFECTS the memorization; many people use short-term visual memory to memorize words on these kinds of tests efficiently. If they asked the pencil-and-paper kids to do the test on a DS, I'll bet you two to one that they'll perform WORSE than the DS kids.
And I have a very GOOD reason to question the method:
Wow, suddenly BOTH groups are worse than the control group! Smell a conspiracy? I do too.
From TFA:
If anything, this actually PROVES that Brain Age is just as good as traditional methods, if not BETTER, while at the same time being FUN for the kids because in their minds, they are at play, not at work.
Can you say "non-sequitur"? As children our brains are more agile because we get frequent practice in school, but as adults we don't. I even remember the friggin' game pointing that one out!
It definitely worked for me. As a kid I used to breeze through simple maths, but as an adult I started losing that touch, frequently needing calculators to do simple math. But when I started using Brain Age everyday, I've gone back to my maths skill level as a kid.
If there's anyone who's a charlatan, it's this guy, purposely withholding statistics that prove him wrong.
... which is probably why Google recommended Firefox alongside Chrome, because otherwise they would have recommended just Chrome.
The point is that the term "projection", as used by the GGP post, is correct anyway, and the continuity is preserved.
"4-D projects to 3-D projects to 2-D projects to 1-D" sounds better than "4-D projects to 3-D projects to 2-D encodes to 1-D" ... don't you think?
The power to do the update without disturbing your work.
Any kind of software installation presents a risk of breaking stuff. You don't want stuff to break when you're in the middle of an important task and you're on a deadline.
For that matter, that's also why I don't want updates to run "quietly and unobtrusively". I hate it when I'm in the middle of making slides 5 minutes before the presentation and my computer suddenly slows down because of a browser auto-update (simply because I just had my browser on to look up stuff while doing the slides).
I think the guy *shouldn't* have gone through the trouble and just got another e-mail address.
Reason? He may be able to convince Verizon to grant him the email address, but he won't be able to convince the rest of the Internet to stop filtering the messages he sends.
Let's face it, the spam filtering that's currently in place in many systems on the 'net isn't very smart, and it would take years to fix (assuming it ever does get fixed).
I think it's time to be wary if the girl you're dating has an analog stick, let alone two.
A paper on how to avoid slashdotting, posted on slashdot. /me clicks obsessively on links
Question: So how DO you handle flash crowds?
MS Answer: We don't. We'll force them to install Silverlight.
The not-so-evil answer is that if you release all of the creature features right now for free, upon release of the game there wouldn't be surprises left in terms of these features -- you would have seen 'em all.
I'm assuming of course that the paid creature editor isn't released yet (or isn't gonna be released anytime soon, at least significantly before the game's release).
On the other hand, if it HAS been released, then the reason's exactly as you said.
No, by "bad gaming experience" I mean running the game with inaccurate visual effects. I, for one, would prefer running the non-10.1 version just to see ALL of the effects properly, even if it costs me a few FPS.
Your own TechReport link only states that the original DirectX 10.1 implementation is faster on the Radeon than it is on the Nvidia by 3fps on average, but you are forgetting that the game is not rendering the exact same thing across both cards in this way. (Oh, and note that the median low score of the Nvidia card is actually faster. That matters a lot because that means the card is still faster during parts of the game with incredible slowdown, regardless of whether DX10.1 was available on the Radeon or not.
Ubisoft itself has already stated that it was a bug (and a very legitimate one), and it was THEIR bug to fix. You might complain "oh it's a very minor bug, there was no reason to remove DX10.1 support altogether", but if you're like me (I'm a graphics programmer myself), you'd understand the need to make all of the visual effects accurate, and apparently the only USE of the DX10.1 support in Assassin's Creed was for this one (buggy) part of the game, so Ubisoft was right about disabling 10.1 support on their game. Those people who are claiming "Nvidia's just dirty dealing so Assassin's Creed would run slower on Radeon's" are just blatantly uninformed, or probably just biased to begin with. (Oh, and might I point out that your "dirty dealing" article does not mention anything about Ubisoft's alleged deal with Nvidia either; you're just grasping at straws.)
Yeah? Well my computer is so fast that it loads pages before I request them.
Yeah? Well my computer is so fast that it's been doing exactly that since 1997!(IE4 kicks your newfangled browsers' ass, now get off my lawn!)
That's what I thought when I started playing Drummania (a Konami arcade game where Rock Band's drum portion was loosely based on).
Then it got really tiring. Literally. I was struggling to finish songs because my arms are getting tired with the fast rolls. I'm getting callouses all over my hands. I'm getting leg cramps from hitting the bass pedal too fast. Etc.
That is, until I met a few people playing the game who taught me some basics that you do on the real drums. Things like basic posture and stick control, bounce-rolling, perididdling, the heel-and-toe technique for hitting the pedal, etc.
Then the game became infinitely easier.
The real problem is that games like these do NOT actually teach you those basics at all; they just assume that you will learn it intuitively after playing the game for hours, but it's not really the case for some people, e.g. me.
So, yeah, you definitely need MORE information to play drums on a rhythm game like this than just "hit the pad corresponding to the color of the note". It's a totally different game than, say, DDR, where you don't NEED to learn how to dance to play it.
> I don't like toot my own horn
/chaos ensues
I don't like toot either, but he's YOUR horn so I couldn't care less.
(It's funny. Laugh.)
Which leads one to think... what kind of politics would be involved to prevent this transistor technology from becoming affordable?
Patents, perhaps?
> I think he means order(n^2).
;)
Actually I meant n^3. In a high-level view, that means checking each polygon with each and every other polygon, which you have to clip with all other polygons surrounding the target polygon just to compute the area being shadowed. Compared to rendering a shadow volume in a stencil buffer (using the aforementioned technique of course), and rendering the same scene with the mask that was produced, which just takes linear time.
It just looks undramatic when I say "cubic time", so I just said it's polynomial.
> Anyone can make a High poly game that requires excessive processing power.
Pardon me for nitpicking, but how exactly is Doom 3 a high-poly game that requires "excessive" processing power? If you took Doom 3's graphics on its own and slapped it on an older engine, it would take much, much longer to draw at the same quality.
You're clearly underestimating the massive engineering effort put into making the game. If you think Doom 3's engine was just created by "anyone", think again. Setting aside who made that graphics engine (as there are already lots of Carmack fanboys in the world to emphasize that point), the algorithms used in the game are the product of years of research work by other guys who aren't even directly involved in Doom 3's making.
The shadows alone, though largely derided by most people for making the game "too dark", is only made possible due to Everitt, Kilgard and other people's groundbreaking research work on the area. I currently have their papers on my desk. Without those algorithms, Doom 3's shadows would approach *polynomial* time just to get it to render!
If you want to criticize the game itself, go ahead. (I personally liked the game's atmosphere more than Half-Life 2, but my subjective opinions rarely count for anything.) But don't discount the fact that it took real people with great minds to actually make these stuff. I could say with absolute certainty that Doom 3 is ground-breaking in the graphics arena.
5. ...
6. Profit!
(Seriously, this plan might actually work out in the end.)
> As if there is a group of impovrished, and unscrupulous lawyers sitting around saying, "gee, if only there were software patents, then we'd be able to make some money".
Unfortunately, there is. Hence the current software patent situation in the US.
What, an "early demise" article, and no mention of BSD?
/me ducks
Good news for you! They already released FDISK! In fact, it's bundled with every copy of Windows!
You should give it a try! Now! Quick!
The only reason why incomplete money notes and stamps "command more value" is because they are rare, not because they are better. In fact, they are obviously worse than the complete thing: they cannot actually be used to buy stuff or send mail, respectively, because they are decommissioned. The value comes from the mere possession of the said item.
With incomplete music that gets easily duplicated and is just as accessible to people as the complete thing, the rarity value is lost, and the incomplete music is just crap.
Oh, I trust you all right. Unfortunately, you didn't give me any way to contact you, so I cannot give you the money. Too bad. ;P