For money, they sell legal Mame roms. They've made the deals - it's perfectly legit. Use them, and perhaps they'll expand their currently limited catalogue.
Shredder may have made a mistake, but it was a gameplay mistake - not a bug. We're in agreement on this, and I'm not quite sure how you thought otherwise after reading my post.
The bug was in Jonny's program - it identified a possible draw condition without being clear that it wanted to take the draw. While it may have been clear in this situation that taking the draw was the right move, there are many other situations when taking the draw is the wrong play. In my last post, which I'm not sure you read, I compared this to the choice of which piece to promote a pawn to.
Imagine if I dialog box popped up that said "Promote Pawn". For the purposes of a competition like this, that would be a bug. It moves the burden of decision to the operator, which isn't a real option.
Why else would it identify this than to claim the draw?
When conventions aren't formalized, there's a capacity for misunderstandings. There's all sorts of ambiguous interfaces for this that could be made. What if the program had simply had a label showing "third repetition"? Would that be clear enough? Why not just standardize on a message that has a clear intent - a popup box saying "Draw claimed: third repetition" (or some other standardized wording). Similar standardization should be made for any other decision that the program may need to make during the course of a game.
PS: I realize that this isn't the most natural way to read the situation. But it's the best way, I think, to resolve the situation to satisfaction. Why? Because it places the blame on the competitor (the program) rather than on an outside force (the operator or the judge).
Admonishing the operators or judges might help, but fixing the programs (via standardization of this sort of decision) will fix the problem forever.
If a draw claim is available (to your opponent), then you are by definition not in a favorable position.
The option to draw is only available to the person who has the move. Thus, it's quite possible that a draw claim is available while you are in a favorable position (and thus choose not to take it). In this situation, you'd also want to make it unavailable to your opponent's next turn by breaking the repetition.
However, as some ambiguity does remain it's a good safeguard for the ICGA to specify a list of acceptable phrases that are to be taken to mean "claim a draw" (and thus direct instructions the human may not decline to follow).
I think that's the important thing here - make it clear that the computer is responsible for the decision and there's no more silliness here. It's an unfortunate situation - and it arose purely due to unclear rules. I don't think anyone needs admonishment, and I think the resolution reached is fair enough to all parties.
They may also need a rule in place in the odd case that neither computer claims a draw in a repeating situation.
A draw isn't automatic, it needs to be claimed. As such, there's a decision to be made. The program in question wasn't set up to make that decision clear. It's the same as if it didn't tell the operator what piece to promote a pawn to. Is the operator just to make an assumption and drop a queen? That's silly - it's a program bug.
In the future, this just needs to be a requirement - the message box needs to say "I claim a draw - three repetitions". In addition, the program needs to be smart enough not to mention anything if a draw claim is available in a favorable position.
Microsoft actually does a pretty good job of following its own guidelines. Not perfect, but fair. File dialogs aren't perfectly consistent (I hate the ones in Office 2000), but they're usually similar.
Apple is about the same in terms of overall compliance, but generally writes their guidelines to suit how they did it in their latest apps (PS: this is why their guidelines often seem senseless or arbitrary).
The most important thing is interface standards within individual applications. It's also important to use native widgets (as much as possible) and common fonts. This is where a lot of "amateur" software is horrible.
My point was that while Go is a more difficult game to beat a human at, that that isn't necessarily such an amazing or interesting thing. While we may not see a good computer Go player for a while (well, a computer can already beat me), that hardly makes Go some last bastion of human supremacy. If we're looking broadly at "things that humans do better", Go is one where the difference in skill is actually relatively small and easily overcome.
There's all sorts of problems, like the ones I mentioned, that humans will be better at long after Go champs are getting trashed.
Barring a sudden barrier to computer research, computers will beat us at Go someday. Soundly. It's a big game, but it's deterministic and fairly easy to comprehend.
If our only goal is to find a game that we're better at, how about "fashion design" or "turning Twinkies into poop" or "writing sit-com episodes, not including Friends".
This phase will pass. They used to race cars against horses, and for a time they might have lumped them together in a speed record/contest.
But there's no motorbikes in the Kentucky Derby.
I think competitive human chess will survive long after machines are much better at the game. It'll be interesting to see if play styles wildly diverge once computers are both better than us and geared to playing each other.
...have never sold well. Very few people have two suitable controllers for the PC, so we see abominations like Street Fighter II for the PC was (they changed moves to be keyboard accessible).
Perhaps the next megahit fighter will be ported - but I'm sure we won't see Tekken 4.
You don't need 100% darkness to get a reasonable picture out of an X1 - unless you're a real videophile, which I'm not. You will need to get something in the room's windows, though. I'd say if you can read comfortably in a room, it's too bright.
Whether a projector makes a good TV replacement depends on how much you use the TV. I'm kind of an "event" TV-watcher (ie, the TV goes on for Simpsons or for a basketball game) so it works great for me. You certainly don't want to have a projector on as background TV while cleaning.
The bulb for my Epson Powerlite S1 (also a great projector) is about $250. I figured I'll spend that about once every 4 years - and by that time I might just go buy another $1000 projector as they should be amazing by then.
As long as you have an appropriate room (a large paintable wall far that's darkenable during the day), the projector is easily the way to go.
Try http://playstation2-linux.com/. Or one of the other hundreds of sites google will return. Linux is pretty much officially supported on the PS2, and it's easy to do.
The better question is "why does nobody care about it?" And the answer is that the PS2 isn't amazing hardware.
Changing architectures will not change whether the new box can be hacked. And if it can be hacked to run code at all it can be hacked to run Linux. Or OpenBSD. Both, and many others, are very portable - and any obscurity about the system's setup will be penetrated. Heck - changing architectures will just make the hacking more interesting.
I'm not saying that "security" won't be a priority, just that it is not overwhelmingly affected by architecture - and certainly isn't affected enough to dictate a major change like the one they're doing.
This change was about performance, price, and possibly politics.
There's actually very few remaining of the snooty critic you describe - and more people who are interested in this kind of review than you probably think.
Who's the most popular film critic right now? Probably still Ebert. And look at his reviews. Sure he scores some movies high that you might find boring. But he also gives good scores to movies that are technical and artistic voids - if they're done well and entertaining.
If you haven't found a critic out there that likes the same things you do, you're just lazy. If you think that critics are retarded or art-snobs because they like movies you don't, you've yet to realize people like different things.
of course with a large majority of games today being carbon copies of other games is there any real entertainment left?
You've conflated originality and entertainment value. They're different things. Starcraft wasn't terribly original - was it a bad game? Star Control II was a sequel for heaven's sake - I suppose that means it had no entertainment value.
..all the time. In either case, you have to find a specific reviewer that enjoys the same kind of things you do. Once you do, you can avoid a lot of crud you wouldn't like, and find stuff you may have otherwise missed.
Right now, there's game reviewers that talk about the things important to me. The WSJ guy may be interested in other stuff about games, or discussion from other angles. I can see that, but it's silly to pretend that this different coverage he wants would be better across the board.
Similarly, I'm happy with Ebert for film. Others may want more esoteric information or deeper analysis than Ebert provides. Or more shallow. But that doesn't mean that Ebert is somehow wrong - he gives many people (including me) precisely the information they want about a picture.
If you look beyond the mainstream, there's plenty of different review sources for games out there - just as there are for film. You can't review criticism based just on the Eberts of the world. To do so is just lazy.
Darth Maul, eh? I thought he was a potentially great character - but they didn't give him much to do. If he would have had some more screen time to establish himself, I think it would really have helped the movie.
...but they're not going to be porting "Windows" in any meaningful way. DirectX will have to be fiddled with - but even that will be a much simpler enterprise in this case as they won't need to port the old interfaces.
...as I also have a computer. And, like you, I get a lot of value out of it that I wouldn't get out of a console. However, I also know plenty of people for whom none of our bonuses would be a bonus.
Many people can have all their gaming desires met cheaper, simpler and better with a console. They're not illiterate or retarded - they just like different things.
I would never have guessed it would be that high. I'd like to see the experimental apparatus - not because I doubt the results, but because I'd be interested to see how this was implemented.
Does anyone really have a justification for more than 50fps?
50 is sort of a silly number - most people have their refresh at 60 or 72. To a seasoned FPS gamer, 60 is distinguishable from 50. Whether 130 is distinguishable from 120 is another question - the answer to which is definitely no, even if you had a monitor capable of such silliness.
However, these numbers are really not what we're worried about a lot of the time - we're worried about absolute minimum framerate. Often a game will be chugging along at 51, then hit 11 right when the player wants fine control. It sometimes takes a rather large average framerate score to yield a game that plays smoothly at all times.
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For money, they sell legal Mame roms. They've made the deals - it's perfectly legit. Use them, and perhaps they'll expand their currently limited catalogue.
Saying Jonny was not specific enough is just a big, stinking, dirty bandaid.
I guess it is. But I think it's also a solution that works, and lets everyone move on with the actual point of the competition.
Shredder may have made a mistake, but it was a gameplay mistake - not a bug. We're in agreement on this, and I'm not quite sure how you thought otherwise after reading my post.
The bug was in Jonny's program - it identified a possible draw condition without being clear that it wanted to take the draw. While it may have been clear in this situation that taking the draw was the right move, there are many other situations when taking the draw is the wrong play. In my last post, which I'm not sure you read, I compared this to the choice of which piece to promote a pawn to.
Imagine if I dialog box popped up that said "Promote Pawn". For the purposes of a competition like this, that would be a bug. It moves the burden of decision to the operator, which isn't a real option.
Why else would it identify this than to claim the draw?
When conventions aren't formalized, there's a capacity for misunderstandings. There's all sorts of ambiguous interfaces for this that could be made. What if the program had simply had a label showing "third repetition"? Would that be clear enough? Why not just standardize on a message that has a clear intent - a popup box saying "Draw claimed: third repetition" (or some other standardized wording). Similar standardization should be made for any other decision that the program may need to make during the course of a game.
PS: I realize that this isn't the most natural way to read the situation. But it's the best way, I think, to resolve the situation to satisfaction. Why? Because it places the blame on the competitor (the program) rather than on an outside force (the operator or the judge).
Admonishing the operators or judges might help, but fixing the programs (via standardization of this sort of decision) will fix the problem forever.
If a draw claim is available (to your opponent), then you are by definition not in a favorable position.
The option to draw is only available to the person who has the move. Thus, it's quite possible that a draw claim is available while you are in a favorable position (and thus choose not to take it). In this situation, you'd also want to make it unavailable to your opponent's next turn by breaking the repetition.
See the regular FIDE rules for how this works.
However, as some ambiguity does remain it's a good safeguard for the ICGA to specify a list of acceptable phrases that are to be taken to mean "claim a draw" (and thus direct instructions the human may not decline to follow).
I think that's the important thing here - make it clear that the computer is responsible for the decision and there's no more silliness here. It's an unfortunate situation - and it arose purely due to unclear rules. I don't think anyone needs admonishment, and I think the resolution reached is fair enough to all parties.
They may also need a rule in place in the odd case that neither computer claims a draw in a repeating situation.
A draw isn't automatic, it needs to be claimed. As such, there's a decision to be made. The program in question wasn't set up to make that decision clear. It's the same as if it didn't tell the operator what piece to promote a pawn to. Is the operator just to make an assumption and drop a queen? That's silly - it's a program bug.
In the future, this just needs to be a requirement - the message box needs to say "I claim a draw - three repetitions". In addition, the program needs to be smart enough not to mention anything if a draw claim is available in a favorable position.
Microsoft actually does a pretty good job of following its own guidelines. Not perfect, but fair. File dialogs aren't perfectly consistent (I hate the ones in Office 2000), but they're usually similar.
Apple is about the same in terms of overall compliance, but generally writes their guidelines to suit how they did it in their latest apps (PS: this is why their guidelines often seem senseless or arbitrary).
The most important thing is interface standards within individual applications. It's also important to use native widgets (as much as possible) and common fonts. This is where a lot of "amateur" software is horrible.
My point was that while Go is a more difficult game to beat a human at, that that isn't necessarily such an amazing or interesting thing. While we may not see a good computer Go player for a while (well, a computer can already beat me), that hardly makes Go some last bastion of human supremacy. If we're looking broadly at "things that humans do better", Go is one where the difference in skill is actually relatively small and easily overcome.
There's all sorts of problems, like the ones I mentioned, that humans will be better at long after Go champs are getting trashed.
That's all I'm saying...
Barring a sudden barrier to computer research, computers will beat us at Go someday. Soundly. It's a big game, but it's deterministic and fairly easy to comprehend.
If our only goal is to find a game that we're better at, how about "fashion design" or "turning Twinkies into poop" or "writing sit-com episodes, not including Friends".
This phase will pass. They used to race cars against horses, and for a time they might have lumped them together in a speed record/contest.
But there's no motorbikes in the Kentucky Derby.
I think competitive human chess will survive long after machines are much better at the game. It'll be interesting to see if play styles wildly diverge once computers are both better than us and geared to playing each other.
...have never sold well. Very few people have two suitable controllers for the PC, so we see abominations like Street Fighter II for the PC was (they changed moves to be keyboard accessible).
Perhaps the next megahit fighter will be ported - but I'm sure we won't see Tekken 4.
You don't need 100% darkness to get a reasonable picture out of an X1 - unless you're a real videophile, which I'm not. You will need to get something in the room's windows, though. I'd say if you can read comfortably in a room, it's too bright.
Whether a projector makes a good TV replacement depends on how much you use the TV. I'm kind of an "event" TV-watcher (ie, the TV goes on for Simpsons or for a basketball game) so it works great for me. You certainly don't want to have a projector on as background TV while cleaning.
The bulb for my Epson Powerlite S1 (also a great projector) is about $250. I figured I'll spend that about once every 4 years - and by that time I might just go buy another $1000 projector as they should be amazing by then.
As long as you have an appropriate room (a large paintable wall far that's darkenable during the day), the projector is easily the way to go.
Try http://playstation2-linux.com/. Or one of the other hundreds of sites google will return. Linux is pretty much officially supported on the PS2, and it's easy to do.
The better question is "why does nobody care about it?" And the answer is that the PS2 isn't amazing hardware.
Changing architectures will not change whether the new box can be hacked. And if it can be hacked to run code at all it can be hacked to run Linux. Or OpenBSD. Both, and many others, are very portable - and any obscurity about the system's setup will be penetrated. Heck - changing architectures will just make the hacking more interesting.
I'm not saying that "security" won't be a priority, just that it is not overwhelmingly affected by architecture - and certainly isn't affected enough to dictate a major change like the one they're doing.
This change was about performance, price, and possibly politics.
There's actually very few remaining of the snooty critic you describe - and more people who are interested in this kind of review than you probably think.
Who's the most popular film critic right now? Probably still Ebert. And look at his reviews. Sure he scores some movies high that you might find boring. But he also gives good scores to movies that are technical and artistic voids - if they're done well and entertaining.
If you haven't found a critic out there that likes the same things you do, you're just lazy. If you think that critics are retarded or art-snobs because they like movies you don't, you've yet to realize people like different things.
of course with a large majority of games today being carbon copies of other games is there any real entertainment left?
You've conflated originality and entertainment value. They're different things. Starcraft wasn't terribly original - was it a bad game? Star Control II was a sequel for heaven's sake - I suppose that means it had no entertainment value.
..all the time. In either case, you have to find a specific reviewer that enjoys the same kind of things you do. Once you do, you can avoid a lot of crud you wouldn't like, and find stuff you may have otherwise missed.
Right now, there's game reviewers that talk about the things important to me. The WSJ guy may be interested in other stuff about games, or discussion from other angles. I can see that, but it's silly to pretend that this different coverage he wants would be better across the board.
Similarly, I'm happy with Ebert for film. Others may want more esoteric information or deeper analysis than Ebert provides. Or more shallow. But that doesn't mean that Ebert is somehow wrong - he gives many people (including me) precisely the information they want about a picture.
If you look beyond the mainstream, there's plenty of different review sources for games out there - just as there are for film. You can't review criticism based just on the Eberts of the world. To do so is just lazy.
Darth Maul, eh? I thought he was a potentially great character - but they didn't give him much to do. If he would have had some more screen time to establish himself, I think it would really have helped the movie.
Maybe his top half will return for Episode III.
SSL exists a layer below HTTP. The router wouldn't be in position to mess with these packets. Banking should be safe
Still, there's lots of web applications that have problems caused - for example a stock ticker that read information from a web page.
TPM was indeed horrible. AotC, on the other hand, was only a disappointment - not an abomination. The trend is positive. I'll go see the 3rd one.
On the other hand, look at the trend going into the 3rd Matrix. Not good.
It is my strong belief that if we the people can stop Microsoft by tying our need to their product..
..but then you turn around and say do it with lawsuits:
Come on, folks, let's take care of this the American way.
Which is it?
...but they're not going to be porting "Windows" in any meaningful way. DirectX will have to be fiddled with - but even that will be a much simpler enterprise in this case as they won't need to port the old interfaces.
...as I also have a computer. And, like you, I get a lot of value out of it that I wouldn't get out of a console. However, I also know plenty of people for whom none of our bonuses would be a bonus.
Many people can have all their gaming desires met cheaper, simpler and better with a console. They're not illiterate or retarded - they just like different things.
I would never have guessed it would be that high. I'd like to see the experimental apparatus - not because I doubt the results, but because I'd be interested to see how this was implemented.
Does anyone really have a justification for more than 50fps?
50 is sort of a silly number - most people have their refresh at 60 or 72. To a seasoned FPS gamer, 60 is distinguishable from 50. Whether 130 is distinguishable from 120 is another question - the answer to which is definitely no, even if you had a monitor capable of such silliness.
However, these numbers are really not what we're worried about a lot of the time - we're worried about absolute minimum framerate. Often a game will be chugging along at 51, then hit 11 right when the player wants fine control. It sometimes takes a rather large average framerate score to yield a game that plays smoothly at all times.