But that comes back to the problem discussed in the summary - the tests are unreliable and not well calibrated, and the secrecy and accusations would continue. Athletes would first try their luck not getting caught in the Pure category (why not?), turning the Open category into a trash can of athletes caught cheating.
They don't *want* to take the drugs, they just want to win.
My bet is that athletes would continue to hide their doping so that they could win the Pure category, and the Open category dies in 2-3 years from lack of interest.
There is no glory in taking the drugs, only in winning.
No kidding. I feel like this scenario of the ISP's backing themselves into a corner with "unlimited" contracts is similar to the sub-prime debt crises that put the United States in the middle of a debt whirlwind. They throw these contracts/loans out there thinking "we can capitalize on this resource (homes/internet) that everyone thinks they basically have a right to nowadays by providing favorable looking terms to even the lowest schmuck."
The difference, though, is that the mortgage creditors got in over their head in bad loans because of people that didn't know what they were doing (jumping into an ARM that they wouldn't be able to handle later). The ISPs got in over their head by people that *knew* what they were doing (internet users making the most of their unlimited connections). Now that more and more people can do the same thing with easily accessible tools, the ISPs are up shit creek.
Seattle is slowly replacing regular crosswalk signs with the ones that show the countdown when the red hand starts blinking. I love these, because 9 times out of ten, when the signs for the crosswalk parallel to the direction of car travel turns solid red (after the countdown), the light turns yellow. I can effectively use them as a "pre-yellow".
Unfortunately, I think that while the counters make the safe drivers safer, I think it makes the dangerous drivers more dangerous. A driver a long ways away can see the sign counting down to single digits, so they will gun it all the way down the block to try to make it through the light.
That's not true. There's nothing he can do about someone running out in the road in front of him, or a similar situation. There will always be situations where a responsible driver will be forced to slam on the brakes.
Yeah, mine is something like that. I abide by the law when it is safe, as I believe that everyone else is generally expecting me to abide by the law.
I will ram through a yellow if a logging truck is following me too close and thinks he can make it too.
What's the legal precedent on this? If I scrape through a yellow light close enough for an officer to attest that I ran a red, but I say I did it in the interest of safety (of myself, my passengers, and others on the road) and I reacted in what I felt to be the most appropriate way (and I am given the chance to explain my choices and my situation), will I get nailed with a ticket?
No, because you're choosing the cases, and no one, including the host, knows what's in them.
In order to turn Deal or No Deal into a Monty Hall analogy, it would have to play like this:
Player picks a case Host opens every single case except yours, and one other. None of the opened cases is the million dollar prize. You choose whether to switch or not.
Obviously, the odds are better in this analogy than in Monty Hall, because he opens so many cases/"doors". It's equivalent to the "alternate" Monty Hall people are talking about where Monty has 100 doors, lets you pick one, then opens them all except yours and one other, and tells you that the prize is behind one of them. The more doors that there are, the greater the odds that the prize is behind the door that is not yours.
Redraw the entire truth table with branches instead of separate rows for each possible outcome. Drawn this way, there are three starting points (CGG, GCG, GGC) and 24 outcomes.
For each starting point, write "1/3" above it. That is the probability of it occurring, since each is equally likely. Step down each node, and for each one, multiply the previous denominator by the total number of branches that could have been taken at the last node. So, for example, you'd have written 1/3 above CGG, and for each of the three branches coming from it (door 1, door 2, door 3), you'd have a 1/9 above it. You'll soon see that in the "Monty" column, when he has no choice about what door he could have picked, you'll have a 1/9 above the node, but when he could chose from two doors, there will be a 1/18 over each (this assumes that his choice of the two doors is random. If it isn't, it doesn't matter, because the probabilities above each choice will sum to 1/9, even if they aren't equal).
Proceed down each branch this way to the end, but don't branch on choosing "switch" or "don't switch." Since we want to see the results if we had picked either "switch" or "don't switch" in every possible situation, just write down the results as if you had picked "switch." We'll logically NOT the results later to simulate picking "don't switch".
When you finish the last column, you'll see that not every outcome has the same probability of occurring. Some of the outcomes will have probabilities of 1/9, and there will be outcomes that have probabilities of 1/18, because there was an extra decision branch involved in Monty picking the door.
Finally, sum up the probabilities of each outcome. "Win" will be 2/3, and "lose" will be 1/3. Obviously, if we logically NOT all the results to represent picking "don't switch" each time, the results invert, so "lose" has 2/3 probability and "win" has 1/3 probability.
Branching on each decision fixes the "problem" of a truth table like yours making it look like each outcome is equally probable.
That's equivalent to providing a table with all possible outcomes of a roll of two dice (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12) and saying that they are all equally likely just because each outcome has one entry in the table, except what you have done is the logical inverse.
The example of the dice is combining multiple outcomes and pretending they are one - you are taking one possibility and branching it on a variable that has no effect on your outcome: the door that Monty picks if you picked the car to start with.
If you pick the car to begin with, the number of the door that Monty picks has no effect on your outcome. To be more precise, the number of the door that Monty picks NEVER affects your outcome. If you want to keep the Monty column, you should replace the numbers with the word GOAT and then get rid of all of the duplicate entries, and the table will then represent the probabilities correctly.
Your truth table reflects each possible outcome, but not the odds of each possible outcome. The fallacy can be seen if you remove all the columns but the first four. Take the first set of 8, where the car is door number 1 and doors 2 and 3 have goats behind them.
Why is picking the car represented four times and picking a goat represented four times? That's not right. Of that first scenario, where the car is behind door number one, if I randomly pick one of your 8 lines, I should have 2/3 probability that I pick a goat, and 1/3 that I pick the car, not 1/2 in both cases.
Here's why: each set of 8 should only be a set of 6. Picking the door with the car should be represented two times, not four. You cannot differentiate on the door that Monty picks because the *number* of the door that Monty picks doesn't matter, only what's behind it, and what's behind it is *always* a goat. Your truth table should remove the "Monty" column, because the only things that affect your outcome is what door you pick, and if you switch or not.
I always liked to think of it this way:
If I pick randomly, I have a 2/3 chance of picking a goat. That should be obvious.
If I pick a goat and switch, I win. Picking "switch" or "don't switch" doesn't have a random outcome unless I want it to by flipping a coin or something - I can make a conscious decision to always choose "switch."
Therefore, if I ALWAYS choose "switch," I have a 2/3 chance of winning.
The screen is projected. Multi-touch is enabled through processing images from multiple infrared cameras under the surface. This technique allows for as many touch points as processor power will allow.
"all of the libraries, at least from my experience, are extremely well documented"
I graduated from CSE at UW a couple years ago. Just wanted to clarify one thing here: One of the main arguments against using Java as an introductory teaching tool mentioned in the original article was the huge number of libraries that could be found. You could practically call DoMyHomework() for the intro classes.
However, this isn't how the assignments were graded. If your homework was sorting algorithms in Java, you were asked to *implement* them and experiment with them, not just *use* them. The assignment was structured to ensure that you understood the algorithm, its speed, why it was good for certain situations and not others, etc.
Standard libraries were only used when they were integral to the assignment, such as graphics packages for learning about how modern graphics packages work (points, areas, polygons, brushes, etc.)
[[In the time it takes to get that good at GH, you could learn to play the guitar for real.]]
It's really easy to say that, but I don't think it's true. I five-star songs here and there on expert (none of the insanely hard ones) and I've only been playing for a month or two. Unlike a real guitar, I don't have to spend time learning songs by playing sections over and over, I can just pick up the controller and shred. It's a lot of fun, and very satisfying.
Agreed (::hands shaken::)! Although the conversation has turned towards lockout mechanisms and such, I don't see any reason not to continue it.
In response to tepples' post above, the best move to market a "consolish" game that you've only got a Windows prototype for is to get it out on the Internet and get people talking about it. I'm not exactly sure what Jenova Chen did to get Sony Computer Entertainment's attention with fl0w (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatgamecompany); maybe someone there just happened to be playing web games on their workstation one day and thought, "This would make a great downloadable Playstation game." Stuff still happens like that, but your game has to be unique and above all really fun to play in order to get the attention that it needs and differentiate it from the thousands of hobbyist versions of Desktop Tower Defense.
The difference between DVD FLLC and Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo is that DVD FLLC doesn't pay to manufacture, advertise and distribute your DVD player, and your player likely doesn't have a big DVD FLLC stamp on the front. In other words, DVD FLLC and the player itself aren't linked in the average consumer's mind, unlike MS/XBox Nintendo/Wii Sony/Playstation, where brand is everything. DVD FLLC simply maintains the integrity of an open format that anyone can publish to - they make sure that no one uses the DVD logo on a disc that doesn't conform to the standards. They could try to charge people to create DVD's but it wouldn't happen, because video is a different kind of industry and the money moves around in different ways. If there was one brand of DVD player, made by DVD FLLC, and no one else was allowed to make them, I wager that the DVD format would be much more closed, but the industry just wasn't put together that way. Think of it as a tradition that's too hard to change now.
If video games were more like movies - a set of standards is made available for a licensing fee by a company or for free by a consortium of companies, and you can buy any brand of VideoGamePlayer that you like and they all play the same corpus of games in roughly the same way, no cheating etc. - things would be a lot different. But, because of the way the industry started and grew, it simply doesn't work that way because there appears to be no money in that strategy. Maybe one day it will be that way, who knows. It would certainly invite innovation in software and erase business-level competition that is meaningless to the consumer that just wants to play all the games he is interested in, but it also reduces the opportunity for innovation requiring new standards, like the Wii. The Wii works because every game uses the controllers - they aren't optional peripherals like the NES ROB was, they are key components of the system.
One of the side effects of the industry growing up this way ended up being one of biggest advantages that consoles have over PCs that I already mentioned: the hardware does more than conform to a standard, it behaves exactly the same way in every console of a given brand. "Standards" are the reason that PC games can be impossible to get working on every PC in the world: there's way too many factors for a standard to consider for it to be comfortably precise (I may run Windows, but it may have some goofy registry keys or weird hardware, and no standard can be detailed enough to consider everything like that), so everyone has their own implementation of the standards. With consoles, a Box is a Box is a Box. Console manufacturers see that as a great advantage, one that they work very hard to create and defend for the companies publishing games for them, and so it's one of the reasons why those companies pay the manufacturer. In essence, publishing a game on a console is a "privilege" because of the way the industry is set up and because of the features of consoles considered to be beneficial to game publishers over PCs, and so you've got either to pay for that privilege or impress someone enough that they're willing to invest in you.
I'm not quite sure how your questions here tie in to what all the posts above were about (thought we were talking more about fanboyism, stupid arguments, etc.) but maybe I didn't read closely enough. Regardless, it's an interesting topic, so I'll bite.
By lockout chips, are you referring to the mechanisms that keep an average Joe can't develop and sell games for a console? Looking at your second question, I imagine so.
I don't see how having a fixed set of hardware has anything to do with having a lockout chip. That aside - I'm not entirely sure how all the lockout mechanisms work (I'm pretty sure that they're implemented through software/BIOS now instead of on a chip, like the infamous NES lockout chip) or how all the money moves around the industry, but I'm pretty sure that console manufacturers put in these mechanisms for two reasons. A) It gives them control over what gets published on the system in terms of quality and content (so our average Joe can't make a 360 game that says "Microsoft and Xbox suck donkey balls" and distribute it). As far as I know, they don't exercise this control often, but if they wanted to they could. B) Those mechanisms are there so the integrity of the console can be guaranteed. Once you mod a 360, it's technically not a 360 anymore, because it doesn't do exactly what a 360 can do (it likely does more). That lockout mechanism will essentially scream bloody murder that it's been modded. Maybe it will do it in such a way that some software doesn't care, but it still means a lot to the manufacturer because it lets them do things like control what machines are allowed on their gaming network and control piracy. This also works to the advantage of the average end user: no modders on XBox Live means no cheaters, and no piracy means cheaper games (theoretically). Additionally, it also protects the identity of a product in the marketplace - Microsoft doesn't want there to effectively be multiple versions of the 360, which would happen if mod chips were easy, legal and allowed on XBox Live.But most importantly, the mechanisms are there so C) the manufacturer can make sure that there is a contract in place for every distributer so that they get a bit of money for every game sold. I'm pretty sure this is how it works, but not completely - please correct me if I'm wrong. It's my understanding that for every game a publisher sells, Microsoft gets some cash from that sale.
Games and consoles are sold on a free market (I speak from the US). Unfortunately, that doesn't mean "everyone is free to do whatever they want with their hardware, mod it up, make games, etc." What it does mean is that Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft/whoever else is free to sell a machine that locks out stuff they don't want on it, and under our laws they can prosecute anyone who defeats that lockout mechanism. They can also refuse to support a modified device, and declare a warranty void if the machine is tampered with in a way that they don't like. This topic always irritates me when people complain that their awesomely modded console can't connect to the game network or can't receive updates anymore. You can hack up that console all you want in your own home and I don't think anyone is going to break down your door to stop you, but that XBox Live network you're trying to connect to? That's Microsoft's network, not yours, and so is the update software you want to get from them. They are free to do whatever they want with it, including blocking your machine that, now modded, is technically no longer a 360.
What "free market" also means is that although a small subset of people may recognize your game as unique and innovative, if it doesn't sell well, the people that the money goes to aren't going to be happy about it, even if you don't care.
Now don't get me wrong - as for your second question, it's a shame that hobbyists can't develop games on console platforms. I wish they could. I do believe that not allowing them to is a block to innovation in video games, but not as big as the block that a lack of com
A console has a predefined set of hardware (sans hard storage - as in, you can get a 360 with or without a hard drive, but they all have the same guts), a PC doesn't. By "predefined," I don't mean that the hardware conforms to a set of standards, I mean that every GameBox out there has hardware that behaves in the exact same way. If a developer can get a GameBox's hardware to do backflips in order to render some crazy scene, they can publish that code in a game, and it will work on every GameBox. Additionally, a console is streamlined to play games - gaming may not be its only purpose, but I can't think of a console where you can't just slap a game in and play. The same can't be said for PCs - the developers have to adhere to a set of standards, and the owner/user has to make sure that the everything is in place on their machine in order to play a game correctly. PC hardware is fairly standardized, but no two people have exactly the same installation of Windows. This is why console games get better looking over the life of a console - developers figure out how to better utilize what they're given, and what they're given never changes. PC game developers don't have this kind of optimization in mind because the hardware ALWAYS gets better.
Not having enough money to afford all the consoles does not make you "fake" or "shallow," but defending your choice of a single console by screaming about it at the top of your lungs on the Internet does. You wouldn't be fanboying (ooh, I like that as a verb) if you owned every console on the market because a) You'd have games coming out of your ears and b)You wouldn't have to defend your choice.
Let's take John, a make-believe guy. John is enamored with the anonymity the Internet provides (we all are - if you use the Internet, you enjoy its anonymity in one way or another), and he happens to be a person that has a lot of time to play games and surf the Internet. John has $650 to spend on a console and games. He decides to spend it on a GameBox and a couple of games, which bars him from buying any other consoles because he doesn't have enough money. John cares deeply about the success of the GameBox as opposed to the other consoles because it's the one he owns, and he wants to see it get all the best games, so he posts trollish statements all over Internet message boards about it. He does this because he is insecure about his purchase, even if it's just that touch of buyer's remorse that everyone gets when they make an expensive purchase, regardless of how much they enjoy it. John is known around these parts as a "console fanboy."
What John needs to realize is that a) his statements make no difference to anyone, and b) that if the GameBox actually did "win the war" and wiped all of the other consoles off the face of the planet, it would probably be a raw deal for everyone who plays console games because the lack of competition would result in a dearth of innovation.
There's a lot of condescending talk about enjoying video games for the graphics, or Wii games just for the controls, or PC games just for the online components, but it's a valid reason to enjoy a game or a set of games. Who am I to say that you're stupid because you only enjoy games with good graphics; it's like saying you're stupid because you don't like pepperoni pizza. Maybe you only enjoy shooters, and so having that gigantic monitor for your souped-up PC makes sense, and the mouse/keyboard control set really does make the most sense for you. The people who like games mostly for their graphics are the luckiest among us - the graphics are always going to get better, up until we've got VR implants and can't tell the difference between reality and a realistic video game. What a fun hobby you must enjoy, seriously. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for quality, innovative gameplay, new control methods, new genres enabled by new technology, etc. There will always be shovelware. Those qualities in games are becoming more rare than "teh grafix," and discussing and debating them is more subjective.
People don't mind with Steam because Valve produces the games themselves and then distributes them over Steam, which is their own distribution channel. This is in stark contrast to the notion of the MPAA, which most people view as a body that buys movies direct from the artist for pennies and then turn around and sell them to the public for many times more than that because they can and because they like money. It's much more complicated than that of course, but that's not my point here.
I don't mind Valve doing it because all the money goes directly to THEM. It is in my best interest that people pay full price for the games, because I like Valve's games, I think they're worth the purchase price and I would like for them to keep making games.
I am a consumer and I am not screwed in the slightest. But, I didn't try to screw Valve by buying a copy sold for cheap through another distribution channel. I like Steam and would like it to stick around.
From posts I've read on this thread and others, it sounds like a few people have been outright lied to by EB/GameStop regarding the PS3 or Wii. You can toss my story on that stack too.
The EB games at Northgate Mall in Seattle told customers that if they preordered a Wii game (for which preorders were available weeks ago) that you would be called the day before the console was able to be preordered. If you confirmed that you wanted one and could come in and pay before end of day Friday (as if anyone wouldn't - why would they get a game and not the system?), that your spot in line would be the same spot that you preordered the game in and you wouldn't have to wait in line for the store to open.
I was the ninth or tenth person to preorder a game (Zelda, of course). I got my phone call last night to inform me that "the store is opening at 9 AM tomorrow morning so you may want to get there early." Asking some confused questions, I confirmed that they reneged on the deal. The reason I preordered a game is that, like many people, I have a job and can't wait outside of a video game store at 8 in the morning.
Guess I'll call around and see if anyone has any guaranteed-launch-day-availability preorders tonight. If not, I suppose I'll join those that will simply head to Target, Wal-Mart or Best Buy on launch day and hope for the best, or maybe even wait for a while and see what Costco offers for a bundle. I would have liked to have one guaranteed on launch day, but it sounds like with the availability they have I should likely be able to get one before the holidays with no problem.
It seems a shame to take a recreational activity that you love and make it your sole source of income.
Yes, I do believe you can love your work. But this guy took a thing that he truly loved that *wasn't* work and *made it* his work. Playing games for a living sounds great, but anything loses its luster once you are chained to it if you want to eat and have a place to live.
For all you gamers, think of how excited you are when a new blockbuster game comes out and you can't wait to get your hands on it. Now take that feeling and completely invert it, and I think that that about approximates what this guy must feel when that happens. "Oh man, a new game... guess I better start getting good at this one too. Back to ten hours of practice a day."
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In other news, gamers test-drive careers in evolutionary science and find them to be mind-numbingly boring.
Something besides the MacBook that doesn't have the Firewire port?
That really is a matter of opinion.
That about wraps it up.
I remember that class.
I said I was -100% confident of one of my first test questions and they gave me a diploma.
But that comes back to the problem discussed in the summary - the tests are unreliable and not well calibrated, and the secrecy and accusations would continue. Athletes would first try their luck not getting caught in the Pure category (why not?), turning the Open category into a trash can of athletes caught cheating.
They don't *want* to take the drugs, they just want to win.
My bet is that athletes would continue to hide their doping so that they could win the Pure category, and the Open category dies in 2-3 years from lack of interest.
There is no glory in taking the drugs, only in winning.
Haha, first thing I thought of actually.
Would you mind if we balance this glass of milk where your visiting friend accidentally was killed?
No kidding. I feel like this scenario of the ISP's backing themselves into a corner with "unlimited" contracts is similar to the sub-prime debt crises that put the United States in the middle of a debt whirlwind. They throw these contracts/loans out there thinking "we can capitalize on this resource (homes/internet) that everyone thinks they basically have a right to nowadays by providing favorable looking terms to even the lowest schmuck."
The difference, though, is that the mortgage creditors got in over their head in bad loans because of people that didn't know what they were doing (jumping into an ARM that they wouldn't be able to handle later). The ISPs got in over their head by people that *knew* what they were doing (internet users making the most of their unlimited connections). Now that more and more people can do the same thing with easily accessible tools, the ISPs are up shit creek.
Seattle is slowly replacing regular crosswalk signs with the ones that show the countdown when the red hand starts blinking. I love these, because 9 times out of ten, when the signs for the crosswalk parallel to the direction of car travel turns solid red (after the countdown), the light turns yellow. I can effectively use them as a "pre-yellow".
Unfortunately, I think that while the counters make the safe drivers safer, I think it makes the dangerous drivers more dangerous. A driver a long ways away can see the sign counting down to single digits, so they will gun it all the way down the block to try to make it through the light.
That's not true. There's nothing he can do about someone running out in the road in front of him, or a similar situation. There will always be situations where a responsible driver will be forced to slam on the brakes.
Yeah, mine is something like that. I abide by the law when it is safe, as I believe that everyone else is generally expecting me to abide by the law.
I will ram through a yellow if a logging truck is following me too close and thinks he can make it too.
What's the legal precedent on this? If I scrape through a yellow light close enough for an officer to attest that I ran a red, but I say I did it in the interest of safety (of myself, my passengers, and others on the road) and I reacted in what I felt to be the most appropriate way (and I am given the chance to explain my choices and my situation), will I get nailed with a ticket?
No, because you're choosing the cases, and no one, including the host, knows what's in them.
In order to turn Deal or No Deal into a Monty Hall analogy, it would have to play like this:
Player picks a case
Host opens every single case except yours, and one other. None of the opened cases is the million dollar prize.
You choose whether to switch or not.
Obviously, the odds are better in this analogy than in Monty Hall, because he opens so many cases/"doors". It's equivalent to the "alternate" Monty Hall people are talking about where Monty has 100 doors, lets you pick one, then opens them all except yours and one other, and tells you that the prize is behind one of them. The more doors that there are, the greater the odds that the prize is behind the door that is not yours.
You're almost there.
Redraw the entire truth table with branches instead of separate rows for each possible outcome. Drawn this way, there are three starting points (CGG, GCG, GGC) and 24 outcomes.
For each starting point, write "1/3" above it. That is the probability of it occurring, since each is equally likely. Step down each node, and for each one, multiply the previous denominator by the total number of branches that could have been taken at the last node. So, for example, you'd have written 1/3 above CGG, and for each of the three branches coming from it (door 1, door 2, door 3), you'd have a 1/9 above it. You'll soon see that in the "Monty" column, when he has no choice about what door he could have picked, you'll have a 1/9 above the node, but when he could chose from two doors, there will be a 1/18 over each (this assumes that his choice of the two doors is random. If it isn't, it doesn't matter, because the probabilities above each choice will sum to 1/9, even if they aren't equal).
Proceed down each branch this way to the end, but don't branch on choosing "switch" or "don't switch." Since we want to see the results if we had picked either "switch" or "don't switch" in every possible situation, just write down the results as if you had picked "switch." We'll logically NOT the results later to simulate picking "don't switch".
When you finish the last column, you'll see that not every outcome has the same probability of occurring. Some of the outcomes will have probabilities of 1/9, and there will be outcomes that have probabilities of 1/18, because there was an extra decision branch involved in Monty picking the door.
Finally, sum up the probabilities of each outcome. "Win" will be 2/3, and "lose" will be 1/3. Obviously, if we logically NOT all the results to represent picking "don't switch" each time, the results invert, so "lose" has 2/3 probability and "win" has 1/3 probability.
Branching on each decision fixes the "problem" of a truth table like yours making it look like each outcome is equally probable.
That's equivalent to providing a table with all possible outcomes of a roll of two dice (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, and 12) and saying that they are all equally likely just because each outcome has one entry in the table, except what you have done is the logical inverse. The example of the dice is combining multiple outcomes and pretending they are one - you are taking one possibility and branching it on a variable that has no effect on your outcome: the door that Monty picks if you picked the car to start with. If you pick the car to begin with, the number of the door that Monty picks has no effect on your outcome. To be more precise, the number of the door that Monty picks NEVER affects your outcome. If you want to keep the Monty column, you should replace the numbers with the word GOAT and then get rid of all of the duplicate entries, and the table will then represent the probabilities correctly.
Your truth table reflects each possible outcome, but not the odds of each possible outcome. The fallacy can be seen if you remove all the columns but the first four. Take the first set of 8, where the car is door number 1 and doors 2 and 3 have goats behind them.
Why is picking the car represented four times and picking a goat represented four times? That's not right. Of that first scenario, where the car is behind door number one, if I randomly pick one of your 8 lines, I should have 2/3 probability that I pick a goat, and 1/3 that I pick the car, not 1/2 in both cases.
Here's why: each set of 8 should only be a set of 6. Picking the door with the car should be represented two times, not four. You cannot differentiate on the door that Monty picks because the *number* of the door that Monty picks doesn't matter, only what's behind it, and what's behind it is *always* a goat. Your truth table should remove the "Monty" column, because the only things that affect your outcome is what door you pick, and if you switch or not.
I always liked to think of it this way:
If I pick randomly, I have a 2/3 chance of picking a goat. That should be obvious.
If I pick a goat and switch, I win. Picking "switch" or "don't switch" doesn't have a random outcome unless I want it to by flipping a coin or something - I can make a conscious decision to always choose "switch."
Therefore, if I ALWAYS choose "switch," I have a 2/3 chance of winning.
The screen is projected. Multi-touch is enabled through processing images from multiple infrared cameras under the surface. This technique allows for as many touch points as processor power will allow.
These are funny once, Mike, not funny always.
"I don't understand, Man."
"all of the libraries, at least from my experience, are extremely well documented"
I graduated from CSE at UW a couple years ago. Just wanted to clarify one thing here: One of the main arguments against using Java as an introductory teaching tool mentioned in the original article was the huge number of libraries that could be found. You could practically call DoMyHomework() for the intro classes.
However, this isn't how the assignments were graded. If your homework was sorting algorithms in Java, you were asked to *implement* them and experiment with them, not just *use* them. The assignment was structured to ensure that you understood the algorithm, its speed, why it was good for certain situations and not others, etc.
Standard libraries were only used when they were integral to the assignment, such as graphics packages for learning about how modern graphics packages work (points, areas, polygons, brushes, etc.)
[[In the time it takes to get that good at GH, you could learn to play the guitar for real.]] It's really easy to say that, but I don't think it's true. I five-star songs here and there on expert (none of the insanely hard ones) and I've only been playing for a month or two. Unlike a real guitar, I don't have to spend time learning songs by playing sections over and over, I can just pick up the controller and shred. It's a lot of fun, and very satisfying.
Agreed (::hands shaken::)! Although the conversation has turned towards lockout mechanisms and such, I don't see any reason not to continue it.
In response to tepples' post above, the best move to market a "consolish" game that you've only got a Windows prototype for is to get it out on the Internet and get people talking about it. I'm not exactly sure what Jenova Chen did to get Sony Computer Entertainment's attention with fl0w (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thatgamecompany); maybe someone there just happened to be playing web games on their workstation one day and thought, "This would make a great downloadable Playstation game." Stuff still happens like that, but your game has to be unique and above all really fun to play in order to get the attention that it needs and differentiate it from the thousands of hobbyist versions of Desktop Tower Defense.
The difference between DVD FLLC and Microsoft/Sony/Nintendo is that DVD FLLC doesn't pay to manufacture, advertise and distribute your DVD player, and your player likely doesn't have a big DVD FLLC stamp on the front. In other words, DVD FLLC and the player itself aren't linked in the average consumer's mind, unlike MS/XBox Nintendo/Wii Sony/Playstation, where brand is everything. DVD FLLC simply maintains the integrity of an open format that anyone can publish to - they make sure that no one uses the DVD logo on a disc that doesn't conform to the standards. They could try to charge people to create DVD's but it wouldn't happen, because video is a different kind of industry and the money moves around in different ways. If there was one brand of DVD player, made by DVD FLLC, and no one else was allowed to make them, I wager that the DVD format would be much more closed, but the industry just wasn't put together that way. Think of it as a tradition that's too hard to change now.
If video games were more like movies - a set of standards is made available for a licensing fee by a company or for free by a consortium of companies, and you can buy any brand of VideoGamePlayer that you like and they all play the same corpus of games in roughly the same way, no cheating etc. - things would be a lot different. But, because of the way the industry started and grew, it simply doesn't work that way because there appears to be no money in that strategy. Maybe one day it will be that way, who knows. It would certainly invite innovation in software and erase business-level competition that is meaningless to the consumer that just wants to play all the games he is interested in, but it also reduces the opportunity for innovation requiring new standards, like the Wii. The Wii works because every game uses the controllers - they aren't optional peripherals like the NES ROB was, they are key components of the system.
One of the side effects of the industry growing up this way ended up being one of biggest advantages that consoles have over PCs that I already mentioned: the hardware does more than conform to a standard, it behaves exactly the same way in every console of a given brand. "Standards" are the reason that PC games can be impossible to get working on every PC in the world: there's way too many factors for a standard to consider for it to be comfortably precise (I may run Windows, but it may have some goofy registry keys or weird hardware, and no standard can be detailed enough to consider everything like that), so everyone has their own implementation of the standards. With consoles, a Box is a Box is a Box. Console manufacturers see that as a great advantage, one that they work very hard to create and defend for the companies publishing games for them, and so it's one of the reasons why those companies pay the manufacturer. In essence, publishing a game on a console is a "privilege" because of the way the industry is set up and because of the features of consoles considered to be beneficial to game publishers over PCs, and so you've got either to pay for that privilege or impress someone enough that they're willing to invest in you.
I'm not quite sure how your questions here tie in to what all the posts above were about (thought we were talking more about fanboyism, stupid arguments, etc.) but maybe I didn't read closely enough. Regardless, it's an interesting topic, so I'll bite.
By lockout chips, are you referring to the mechanisms that keep an average Joe can't develop and sell games for a console? Looking at your second question, I imagine so.
I don't see how having a fixed set of hardware has anything to do with having a lockout chip. That aside - I'm not entirely sure how all the lockout mechanisms work (I'm pretty sure that they're implemented through software/BIOS now instead of on a chip, like the infamous NES lockout chip) or how all the money moves around the industry, but I'm pretty sure that console manufacturers put in these mechanisms for two reasons. A) It gives them control over what gets published on the system in terms of quality and content (so our average Joe can't make a 360 game that says "Microsoft and Xbox suck donkey balls" and distribute it). As far as I know, they don't exercise this control often, but if they wanted to they could. B) Those mechanisms are there so the integrity of the console can be guaranteed. Once you mod a 360, it's technically not a 360 anymore, because it doesn't do exactly what a 360 can do (it likely does more). That lockout mechanism will essentially scream bloody murder that it's been modded. Maybe it will do it in such a way that some software doesn't care, but it still means a lot to the manufacturer because it lets them do things like control what machines are allowed on their gaming network and control piracy. This also works to the advantage of the average end user: no modders on XBox Live means no cheaters, and no piracy means cheaper games (theoretically). Additionally, it also protects the identity of a product in the marketplace - Microsoft doesn't want there to effectively be multiple versions of the 360, which would happen if mod chips were easy, legal and allowed on XBox Live.But most importantly, the mechanisms are there so C) the manufacturer can make sure that there is a contract in place for every distributer so that they get a bit of money for every game sold. I'm pretty sure this is how it works, but not completely - please correct me if I'm wrong. It's my understanding that for every game a publisher sells, Microsoft gets some cash from that sale.
Games and consoles are sold on a free market (I speak from the US). Unfortunately, that doesn't mean "everyone is free to do whatever they want with their hardware, mod it up, make games, etc." What it does mean is that Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft/whoever else is free to sell a machine that locks out stuff they don't want on it, and under our laws they can prosecute anyone who defeats that lockout mechanism. They can also refuse to support a modified device, and declare a warranty void if the machine is tampered with in a way that they don't like. This topic always irritates me when people complain that their awesomely modded console can't connect to the game network or can't receive updates anymore. You can hack up that console all you want in your own home and I don't think anyone is going to break down your door to stop you, but that XBox Live network you're trying to connect to? That's Microsoft's network, not yours, and so is the update software you want to get from them. They are free to do whatever they want with it, including blocking your machine that, now modded, is technically no longer a 360.
What "free market" also means is that although a small subset of people may recognize your game as unique and innovative, if it doesn't sell well, the people that the money goes to aren't going to be happy about it, even if you don't care.
Now don't get me wrong - as for your second question, it's a shame that hobbyists can't develop games on console platforms. I wish they could. I do believe that not allowing them to is a block to innovation in video games, but not as big as the block that a lack of com
A console has a predefined set of hardware (sans hard storage - as in, you can get a 360 with or without a hard drive, but they all have the same guts), a PC doesn't. By "predefined," I don't mean that the hardware conforms to a set of standards, I mean that every GameBox out there has hardware that behaves in the exact same way. If a developer can get a GameBox's hardware to do backflips in order to render some crazy scene, they can publish that code in a game, and it will work on every GameBox. Additionally, a console is streamlined to play games - gaming may not be its only purpose, but I can't think of a console where you can't just slap a game in and play. The same can't be said for PCs - the developers have to adhere to a set of standards, and the owner/user has to make sure that the everything is in place on their machine in order to play a game correctly. PC hardware is fairly standardized, but no two people have exactly the same installation of Windows. This is why console games get better looking over the life of a console - developers figure out how to better utilize what they're given, and what they're given never changes. PC game developers don't have this kind of optimization in mind because the hardware ALWAYS gets better.
Not having enough money to afford all the consoles does not make you "fake" or "shallow," but defending your choice of a single console by screaming about it at the top of your lungs on the Internet does. You wouldn't be fanboying (ooh, I like that as a verb) if you owned every console on the market because a) You'd have games coming out of your ears and b)You wouldn't have to defend your choice.
Let's take John, a make-believe guy. John is enamored with the anonymity the Internet provides (we all are - if you use the Internet, you enjoy its anonymity in one way or another), and he happens to be a person that has a lot of time to play games and surf the Internet. John has $650 to spend on a console and games. He decides to spend it on a GameBox and a couple of games, which bars him from buying any other consoles because he doesn't have enough money. John cares deeply about the success of the GameBox as opposed to the other consoles because it's the one he owns, and he wants to see it get all the best games, so he posts trollish statements all over Internet message boards about it. He does this because he is insecure about his purchase, even if it's just that touch of buyer's remorse that everyone gets when they make an expensive purchase, regardless of how much they enjoy it. John is known around these parts as a "console fanboy."
What John needs to realize is that a) his statements make no difference to anyone, and b) that if the GameBox actually did "win the war" and wiped all of the other consoles off the face of the planet, it would probably be a raw deal for everyone who plays console games because the lack of competition would result in a dearth of innovation.
There's a lot of condescending talk about enjoying video games for the graphics, or Wii games just for the controls, or PC games just for the online components, but it's a valid reason to enjoy a game or a set of games. Who am I to say that you're stupid because you only enjoy games with good graphics; it's like saying you're stupid because you don't like pepperoni pizza. Maybe you only enjoy shooters, and so having that gigantic monitor for your souped-up PC makes sense, and the mouse/keyboard control set really does make the most sense for you. The people who like games mostly for their graphics are the luckiest among us - the graphics are always going to get better, up until we've got VR implants and can't tell the difference between reality and a realistic video game. What a fun hobby you must enjoy, seriously. Unfortunately, the same can't be said for quality, innovative gameplay, new control methods, new genres enabled by new technology, etc. There will always be shovelware. Those qualities in games are becoming more rare than "teh grafix," and discussing and debating them is more subjective.
People don't mind with Steam because Valve produces the games themselves and then distributes them over Steam, which is their own distribution channel. This is in stark contrast to the notion of the MPAA, which most people view as a body that buys movies direct from the artist for pennies and then turn around and sell them to the public for many times more than that because they can and because they like money. It's much more complicated than that of course, but that's not my point here.
I don't mind Valve doing it because all the money goes directly to THEM. It is in my best interest that people pay full price for the games, because I like Valve's games, I think they're worth the purchase price and I would like for them to keep making games.
I am a consumer and I am not screwed in the slightest. But, I didn't try to screw Valve by buying a copy sold for cheap through another distribution channel. I like Steam and would like it to stick around.
From posts I've read on this thread and others, it sounds like a few people have been outright lied to by EB/GameStop regarding the PS3 or Wii. You can toss my story on that stack too.
The EB games at Northgate Mall in Seattle told customers that if they preordered a Wii game (for which preorders were available weeks ago) that you would be called the day before the console was able to be preordered. If you confirmed that you wanted one and could come in and pay before end of day Friday (as if anyone wouldn't - why would they get a game and not the system?), that your spot in line would be the same spot that you preordered the game in and you wouldn't have to wait in line for the store to open.
I was the ninth or tenth person to preorder a game (Zelda, of course). I got my phone call last night to inform me that "the store is opening at 9 AM tomorrow morning so you may want to get there early." Asking some confused questions, I confirmed that they reneged on the deal. The reason I preordered a game is that, like many people, I have a job and can't wait outside of a video game store at 8 in the morning.
Guess I'll call around and see if anyone has any guaranteed-launch-day-availability preorders tonight. If not, I suppose I'll join those that will simply head to Target, Wal-Mart or Best Buy on launch day and hope for the best, or maybe even wait for a while and see what Costco offers for a bundle. I would have liked to have one guaranteed on launch day, but it sounds like with the availability they have I should likely be able to get one before the holidays with no problem.
It seems a shame to take a recreational activity that you love and make it your sole source of income.
Yes, I do believe you can love your work. But this guy took a thing that he truly loved that *wasn't* work and *made it* his work. Playing games for a living sounds great, but anything loses its luster once you are chained to it if you want to eat and have a place to live.
For all you gamers, think of how excited you are when a new blockbuster game comes out and you can't wait to get your hands on it. Now take that feeling and completely invert it, and I think that that about approximates what this guy must feel when that happens. "Oh man, a new game... guess I better start getting good at this one too. Back to ten hours of practice a day."