metadigital

It is a trade-off: user-friendliness versus complexity of the toolset.

Just watched The Shipping News: I knew this film had a good pedigree, but I had not seen it until now. Superb cast. (The plot is a bit silly.)

I'll stick it if it needs it.

Why do you want a booting copy of your old drive (data)?

(Always nice to be appreciated.)

CONSPIRACY

I do get a perverse sense of enjoyment at reading the destructive power of munitions. :">

Never got any earlier requests.

It's dead. You keep beating the poor beast. Even if Obsidian aren't bored with reading it, I am.

Deep Blue was also a supercomputer, so it could do pretty well in those moments.

They should have the same system as the sports news on tv: "If you don't want to know the score, look away now ..!" )

Perhaps they are projections? Certainly not cost averaging ...

Deep Blue did not make its moves immediately. In the first game it was a bit more mechanistic, not using more than 3 minutes for a move, but as the game came to a close, there were moves that were taking as many as 6 minutes. Some moves took as much as 15 minutes. Kasparov's issue was that Deep Blue wasn't designed to be a good chess player, but rather it was designed specifically to be Kasparov. He also regretted playing the final game, as he wasn't really mentally into it (as evidence by his conceding defeat after only 19 moves). The big advantage Deep Blue had was that it didn't get fatigued. Kasparov spent more time analyzing the games than any other game he had taken part in, and by the end he had lost his fighting spirit. He also admits that his prior experience with computer chess players led him to some false assumptions about Deep Blue. This was part of the reason why he lost Game 2 (it also led to him speculating that Deep Blue was being tampered with, since Game 1 was more in line with how computer chess players tend to play). The fact that it was making moves that he absolutely did not expect shocked him, and added to the pressure. That's what psyched him out. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> I suspect your expansion on my point was concerning my poetic licence over "immediate" ... I don't know about you, but I've played many computer chess opponents that take hours, days ... even PBEM games.

Easy to say especially for someone who doesn't indulge in "what-if" thinking. You really think the US is invulnerable to the world, don't you? That's just amazing.

Wow, well done Mus?. I couldn't beat those eunuchs with barbeques.

Mainline heroine, it's quicker.

I am cleverer.

Well, time pressure is one way: people get harried when they have less time to make decisions (and too much information to process); that's what RTS games use to good effect.

Why no Nintendo Wii development

Excellent comment, I wholeheartedly concur. Gaining a +1 on your Will save for completing a task is infinitely more rewarding than having to cart yet another Sling +1 off to the local merchant for some shiny. Another great idea: it is much better to have odd magical items that encourage a player to specialize their PC along a path; what I mean is that a low level character might find a nice magic weapon that is of a type that is extremely rare, and so they would eschew the normal "long sword specialisation" for a katana, for example ... and that requires the extra exotic arms feat, etc. The player could also choose to not do this.

That's exactly how Kasparov was beaten by the IBM Deep Blue; the computer was busy scanning all the possible moves from the current position, so that when Kasparov eventually made his move the computer moved immediately. Part of the psychological strategy of the IBM team. (It is a commonly held belief that Kasparov was the superior player; the IBM team used all sorts of meta-gaming techniques to put him off his best game.)

I think that's a fair enough trade-off: you either get to know how well you're doing by hearing status reports from both sides, or you play with Fog and don't get any info until the end (either very good or very bad ).

There are many ways it could be handled; an entire conversation / series of conversations could be represented by a single dialogue option; or a more granular approach could be used where each critical option could be micro-managed (like a mini-game) and the player would try to balance the praise with guile and prevent the NPC from detecting any manipulation ... say "[Lie] Of course your bum doesn't look big in that!"

What do you mean by "ghost" your harddrive to DVD? You can take a backup of it that is stored on a bunch of contiguous DVDs.