Jurang Tayo

Jumat, 02 Agustus 2019

The worst player likenesses in ‘Madden 20’ and the problem behind them - SB Nation

Every year when a new edition of Madden drops, one of the biggest complaints that EA receives is about player likeness. You might have seen a screenshot of Greg Olsen from Madden NFL 20 floating around. It doesn’t look like him at all. It’s pretty bad.

The official word on the Olsen model is the tight end elected not to get scanned for the game.

Where that explanation breaks down is here: EA creates a football game every year and knows full well that there are over 1,000 players on NFL rosters. It isn’t financially feasible to accurately scan and model every single player, and indeed, EA may actually be doing as many players as it can. But Olsen is a team captain, one of the better tight ends to ever play the game, and has been in the league since 2007.

Shouldn’t EA know what he looks like by now? And why aren’t there more options in general?

Madden comes with many default faces, hair styles, and body types built-in, but not nearly enough. That’s the main reason EA should be criticized for poor models. Dozens of real-life players get seemingly no attention at all and instead get a default player model.

The game just needs way, way, way more of those options.

So that’s the problem. Now let’s take a look at some of the more prominent players in Madden NFL 20 who look nothing like themselves.

You should have a good idea of what Olsen looks like, no? Blond hair, blond beard. Been playing forever. You know the guy:

And here’s what you’re presented with when confronted with his Madden 20 player card:

What a model. I don’t even know where to begin. This looks like Olsen in the same way DoodleBob looks like SpongeBob. I can just picture real life Olsen running into Madden 20 Olsen, who holds a football up, screaming random nonsense words into the sky while the real Olsen tries to suss out what hell nature hath created.

It completely boggles my mind there isn’t even a blondish hair and beard to work with.

Maybe you’ve missed Walker. He spent the first few years of his career as a backup to Vernon Davis, before becoming extremely good for Tennessee. This is what he looks like:

And this is the monument to ineptitude that is his Madden likeness:

Not only is this decidedly NOT Walker, it’s also the same exact default face he had last year and the one the bulk of my auto-generated rookies seem to get.

What makes Walker stand out against all the other default player models is that the dude is rated 92 overall and, like Olsen, has been in the league for over a decade! He is legitimately the highest-rated player on his team! Why couldn’t they do literally ANY work on him?

Phillip Lindsay got a haircut ... and plastic surgery

All right, so how about someone younger? Lindsay jumped to the forefront of the Broncos’ running back picture with a 1,000-yard rookie season. Here’s what he looks like:

Let’s see what EA did ...

Here we have another default model that’s so far from reality I’m not sure if anybody at EA has ever looked at a picture of Lindsay. The only thing that’s clear is someone definitely looked at some pictures of Lionel Richie. But why they’ve made Lindsay look like the man who released “Dancing on the Ceiling” a full eight years before the running back was born is beyond me.

You’ll see this face pop up a lot in Madden, because it’s completely stock as far as I can tell.

No love for the kickers, especially Robbie Gould

Kickers! They play longer than any other position. Here’s a refresher of a prominent kicker of the last decade, Gould:

And here is his likeness in Madden:

Is it just me or does Gould look like a big, dumb baby? This is not the face of the 36-year-old second-highest-rated kicker in the league. This is a bunch of babies in a football uniform and the top baby has a big-ass head.

I know Gould doesn’t have a ton of distinct features, but if that doesn’t scream “baseline create-a-character starting template,” I don’t know what does.

Kevin Byard looks unhappy with you

Byard is three years deep into his NFL career and arguably the best safety out there. Hey, here comes Byard now:

Hey, here is whoever the hell this is supposed to be in Madden:

Does Byard’s face look ... angry in Madden? It sure looks angry to me. There’s something around around the cheeks. It sure doesn’t look like Byard, (who, by the way, deserves a ratings bump, too). I don’t know off the top of my head if this is a default face, but if this is a scan or an attempt at a likeness, something ain’t right.

Byard is the highest-paid safety in the league! What even is this player model? He looks like he’s mad that someone screwed up his face!

I like this year’s Madden. Probably a lot more than most people, in fact. But while EA has figured out the gameplay, it needs to pay more attention to the smaller things, especially player likeness. These are just five egregious examples I stumbled upon — there are many players with default faces who look nothing like themselves. And when EA says it makes the most authentic football game out there, these likenesses still take fans out of the “authentic” experience.

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https://www.sbnation.com/nfl/2019/8/2/20749502/madden-nfl-20-worst-player-likenesses-greg-olsen

2019-08-02 15:00:00Z
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Verizon's New 'Unlimited' Plans Are Just Screwing With Us Now - Gizmodo

Illustration for article titled Verizon's New 'Unlimited' Plans Are Just Screwing With Us Now — Photo: Verizon

Starting August 5th, Verizon is rolling out a new batch of “Unlimited” plans. But after seeing the names of the company’s new offering and what they include, I feel like Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride: “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Verizon’s new phone plan lineup includes four “unlimited” packages that start at $70 per month for one line and go up to $90 per month, along with the Just Kids plan the company announced last month.

Start Unlimited is the cheapest plan and includes “unlimited” 4G LTE data, unlimited talk and texting allowances, 480p “DVD-Quality’ video streaming (which doesn’t qualify as HD), talk, text, and data in Mexico and Canada, Verizon Up rewards, and a 6-month subscription to Apple Music. Notably, this plan does not come with 4G LTE hotspot functionality.

Finally, you can also add on support for 5G service for $10 a month, which will upgrade the plan with unlimited 5G data and hotspot usage, assuming you’re in a location that 5G service.

Moving up to Verizon’s $80 per month tier you actually have two somewhat similar plans aimed at slightly different audiences. The highlight of Verizon’s Play More Unlimited plan is that it comes with 720p HD video streaming, while the Do More Unlimited plan offers more productivity-minded bonuses including 500GB of cloud storage, discounts on any additional connected tablets and standalone hotspots, and 50GB of “premium” data, but only 480p video streaming.

The premium data is where things start to get tricky, because despite being called unlimited plans, the fine text at the bottom of Verizon’s infographic notes that “In times of congestion, your [unlimited 4G LTE] data may be temporarily slower than other traffic (only after 25 GB/mo on Play More Unlimited, 50 GB/mo on Do More Unlimited and 75 GB/mo on Get More Unlimited).”

In other words, Verizon’s premium data is essentially a soft data cap, after which your data speeds could be throttled based on network congestion. And despite costing the same, the Play More Unlimited plan only comes with 25GB of premium 4G LTE data instead of 50GB like you get with the Do More Unlimited plan.

Both plans also come with 15GB of 4G LTE hotspot data, and if you use up that data, hotspot data speeds will be reduced to just 600 Kbps, which is basically just a trickle. On top of that, the two plans also come with free unlimited 5G data and hotspot usage, but only for a limited time. After Verizon’s promo goes away, access to 5G will cost $10 a month per line. And with the Play More Unlimited plan’s emphasis on mobile entertainment, it also comes with a free subscription to Apple Music, while the Do More plan only gets a 6-month trial.

Finally, there’s Verizon’s top tier plan which has been somewhat oxymoronically named Get More Unlimited. (How are you supposed to get more of something that’s supposedly infinite?) It comes with everything available in Verizon’s less expensive plans along with 75GB of “premium” 4G LTE data, 720p HD video streaming, 30GB of 4G LTE hotspot data, and Apple Music.

Confused yet? Hopefully, the chart above makes things a little easier to understand. But even so, Verizon splitting its $80 per month offerings into two different plans is particularly frustrating. You can either get more “premium data” or higher quality video streaming. If you want both, you have to upgrade to Get More Unlimited.

Annoyingly, there are a few more small but potentially important details you should know. While all of Verizon’s new “unlimited” plans come with talk, text, and data in Mexico and Canada, you only get 512MB of international data before your data will be reduced to 2G speeds.

And if you select one of the plans with a 6-month trial of Apple Music, unless you live in New Mexico, you better remember to cancel your sub after the trial ends, or else you’ll be charged $10 a month per line.

In the end, the thing that is truly infuriating is the manner in which Verizon tosses around terms like “unlimited” and “premium data,” which somehow has only gotten worse since the last time Verizon updated its phone plans. Depending on which plan you choose, Verizon’s definition of “unlimited data” changes, and even when you’re staring at the chart, between deciphering the names of each plan and determining which features and limitations matter most, trying to figure out which plan is right for you is enough to make your head spin.

Why does picking a phone plan need to be this difficult?

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https://gizmodo.com/verizons-new-unlimited-plans-are-just-screwing-with-us-1836909106

2019-08-02 14:53:00Z
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New Galaxy Note 10 specs leak packs a huge surprise that no one saw coming - BGR

With just a few days to go until the Galaxy Note 10 becomes official, we have an unexpected twist in the Note 10 story. It turns out we didn’t know everything there was to know about the upcoming handset after all, as Samsung might have one surprise left. Well, it would have been a surprise if it didn’t just leak…

Samsung flagship phones usually come with two different processors, including the latest Qualcomm and Samsung processors. The Snapdragon flagship platform usually powers the US- and China-bound Galaxy S or Note phones, while a comparable Exynos chip made by Samsung is found inside the versions sold around the rest of the world.

This will change significantly starting with the Galaxy Note 10, well-known leaker Evan Blass revealed on Twitter. “In the US, only Verizon Note 10 models will be Qualcomm-powered, and they will be regular Snapdragon 855, NOT SD855+,” he said. “The other carriers, like the rest of the world, will have Exynos 9825 versions, I’m told.”

In a previous message, Blass said that Qualcomm’s newest Snapdragon 855+ platform would power some of the Galaxy Note 10 and Note 10+ phones. That’s not going to be the case if this new information is accurate.

It’s unclear at this time why only Verizon’s Note 10 phones will pack Snapdragon 855 chips. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that Verizon still operates a CDMA network, or that Verizon will also sell the 5G version of the Galaxy Note 10. Or both. Then again, Sprint also operates a CDMA network and might sell the Note 10 5G phones soon as well.

As for the new Exynos 9825, recent reports have shown that the new chip will be faster than the Exynos 9820 chip that powers the Galaxy S10 sold outside of the US and China. The upgrade is what made us wonder whether the Qualcomm version of the Note 10 would get the brand new 855+ platform a few weeks ago. But it sure looks like that’s out of the question, and Samsung is also seemingly looking to reduce its reliance on Qualcomm silicon.

The Galaxy Note 10 series will be unveiled on August 7th, at which point the phones’ specs will be made official.

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https://bgr.com/2019/08/02/galaxy-note-10-specs-leak-snapdragon-855-vs-exynos-9825-versions/

2019-08-02 13:36:00Z
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Nintendo And Tencent Share More Details About Switch Launch In China - Nintendo Life

Nintendo's plans to introduce the Switch and its games to the Chinese market appears to have taken another positive step today as the company, along with partner Tencent, have revealed more concrete plans.

The information comes from a press event hosted at the ChinaJoy gaming conference in Shanghai. Various Tencent staffers including Qian Wei, the general manager of the company's Nintendo Cooperation Department, and ex-Nintendo of Europe president Satoru Shibata took to the stage to discuss the partnership and how the two would complement each other going forward.

Essentially, it appears Tencent will offer cloud services and servers necessary for Switch's online platform and will localise Nintendo's games into Simplified Chinese for release in the market. The Switch's eShop will be slightly different in China, with Tencent's WeChat payment system being implemented for easy payments, and games like Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild have now been announced.

Nintendo shares were seen to significantly rise recently after it was confirmed that Tencent would distribute the Switch in the country a few months ago.

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http://www.nintendolife.com/news/2019/08/nintendo_and_tencent_share_more_details_about_switch_launch_in_china

2019-08-02 13:35:00Z
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Android users in Europe will get to pick their default search provider - Engadget

Deleting your Siri voice recordings from Apple’s servers is confusing — here’s how - The Verge

Last night, Apple joined Google in ceasing its program of having human graders listen to user voice commands recorded by its voice assistant. Apple didn’t specify whether or not it was actually ceasing whether those recordings still take place at all. I asked and haven’t received a clear answer.

For all of Apple’s well-earned reputation for protecting privacy, sometimes the actual controls it provides to users to handle their data settings are weak, opaque, or nonexistent. It’s ironic because Apple has a much better set of default technologies and policies when it comes to user data. In general, Apple wants to avoid having your data and make it easier for you to stop sharing it with others.

But this issue where Siri recordings are saved on it servers — albeit anonymized — has revealed a new problem, one that Apple is going to need to do a better job of handling as it shifts more and more of its businesses to services. Because Apple doesn’t truck in user data, the company doesn’t have the same experience Google, Amazon, and even Facebook do in offering users control over the data it does collect, and it certainly doesn’t have the same experience in dealing with privacy concerns when they do happen.

Amazon, Google, and even Facebook each have a specific web site where you can review data privacy settings for their assistants, delete data, and generally get information on what each company knows about you. Here they are, with the full URL written out (you should avoid blindly clicking any link that purports to take you directly to your account settings):

We have written up guides with more detailed instructions for deleting your data from both the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.

Apple does not offer a privacy portal website for your Siri data, or any particular settings screen to fix it in an app. Its general privacy page is a big set of very clear explanations of what Apple’s policies are, but no specific information on your data or checkboxes to delete it. The only thing you can do from Apple’s website is download or delete all of your data.

In some part, this is a result of Apple’s relatively unique, device-focused infrastructure. It’s harder for Apple to make a web-based privacy portal when it focuses so much effort on keeping data on discrete devices.

Still, Amazon and Google make it relatively easy to turn off voice logging on their assistants at the links above, although doing so may break some features. Apple doesn’t even offer the ability to use Siri without your voice getting saved to its servers. Apple stresses that your recorded utterances are not associated with your Apple account, but that is cold comfort if you’re truly worried about a human contractor potentially hearing private information the HomePod accidentally heard in your house.

It gets worse: while you can delete your utterances from Apple’s servers, the process for doing so is so completely unintuitive that the only way you could possibly learn how to do it is to Google it and find an article like this.

It’s possible the future update it promised last night will allow you to use Siri without having your voice saved on Apple servers. But read Apple’s statement carefully and you’ll see the opt out is for “grading,” not necessarily recording: “Additionally, as part of a future software update, users will have the ability to choose to participate in grading.”

Apple’s most recent iOS security guide is a masterclass of how to explain to consumers and security experts alike how to keep an operating system private. But check out page 69, where Apple details its data retention policies for your voice recordings:

User voice recordings are saved for a six-month period so that the recognition system can utilize them to better understand the user’s voice. After six months, another copy is saved, without its identifier, for use by Apple in improving and developing Siri for up to two years. A small subset of recordings, transcripts, and associated data without identifiers may continue to be used by Apple for ongoing improvement and quality assurance of Siri beyond two years. Additionally, some recordings that reference music, sports teams and players, and businesses or points of interest are similarly saved for purposes of improving Siri.

“What happens on your iPhone stays on your iPhone” has apparently become “What happens on Siri stays on Apple’s servers, potentially forever.”

How to delete your voice recordings from Apple’s servers

Here’s how to delete your recorded voice remarks on an iPhone — but you’ll need to repeat similar processes on every Apple device you own. What you’re going to do is delete all of the information Apple gets from Siri, including recordings of your voice. But the way you do that isn’t by going to the Privacy section of your settings. Instead, do this:

Go to “Settings” > “Siri & Search”
Turn off all the ways there are to activate Siri. There are two: “Listen for ‘Hey Siri’” and “Press Side Button for Siri.”
When you turn off the last way to activate Siri, that effectively turns Siri off. You’ll get a warning that there is one more step you need to take to delete your data from Apple’s servers.
Go to “Settings” > “General” > “Keyboard.” Scroll down to where you see “Enable Dictation.” When you tick that to off, you’ll get a warning that if you ever want to use it again, you’ll have to go through some re-uploading.

You might have been wondering why I am so strident that Apple has a problem here, but think about how weird the above steps really are. These are dark patterns on multiple levels.

First, the “privacy” section of the iPhone’s settings doesn’t have anything related to deleting your Siri data. Second, the way you disable Siri isn’t to just uncheck “Use Siri,” but instead uncheck what seems like nothing more than different options for activating Siri. Thirdly and most egregiously: there is no way to know that unchecking those options is how you delete data you might not want Apple to have. To figure that out, you have to click the “Our approach to privacy” link on Apple’s privacy page or, as I mentioned above, Googling it.

And even if you get through all that, here’s the kicker: you have to go through all those steps on all of your Apple devices to delete Siri’s data, but turning Siri or Dictation back on means that data logging starts anew.

Recently, 9to5Mac pointed to a downloadable iOS profile created by a security researcher that should stop server-side logging. It looks relatively innocuous to my untrained eye, but it’s never a good idea to just install profiles from the internet, so I recommend against it.

Enterprise users and schools have the option to build and install a profile themselves using Apple’s Configurator tool which supposedly disables server-side logging for Siri. It’s designed to help administrators manage small fleets of Apple devices, and technically against Apple’s terms of service for consumers to use on their own phones. It’s fairly easy to click the wrong box in this tool and mess up your phone, so again I recommend against it.

Unfortunately, the only way regular users have to stop Apple from keeping voice recordings is to turn off Siri and Dictation and never use either of them again. Apple takes a strong privacy stance, but this is definitely an area where it should be doing better by its users.

This is all terrible. But here is the good news: Apple’s data practices are much, much more private than what Google or Amazon do. It doesn’t track you for advertising purposes across the entire web. It doesn’t want to know your location or what you’ve purchased.

That is all great! But it is not a replacement for clear and obvious privacy settings for the data Apple has about you. Because Apple surely does know some things! It has an advertising business inside the App Store. It knows what Apple products you own. There’s that iCloud loophole, wherein it really can turn over your synced data to governments if legally required, just like everybody else.

Apple collects vastly less data about you than Facebook, Google, or Amazon do — but it’s not nothing. And the surprising-not-really-surprising revelation that it is storing recordings of your voice just like Google and Amazon is proof of that.

Apple has had fewer privacy scandals than everybody else in big tech (although there have still been some big ones). Apple is also trying to build technology that’s private by design. But Apple has a blind spot to giving users control when it comes to the data it actually does collect, and it’s created some some bad user interfaces because it. So the very good news in all of this is that the complaint here is fundamentally about product design — something Apple ostensibly knows something about.

Privacy is not an all-or-nothing thing when it comes to technology. All the other big tech giants have learned that the hard way and had to radically improve the tools they offer to users to manage their data.

Now it’s Apple’s turn.

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https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/2/20734681/apple-siri-privacy-settings-how-to-delete-voice-servers

2019-08-02 12:21:13Z
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Jumat, 02 Agustus 2019

The worst player likenesses in ‘Madden 20’ and the problem behind them - SB Nation

Phillip Lindsay got a haircut ... and plastic surgery

No love for the kickers, especially Robbie Gould

Kevin Byard looks unhappy with you

Verizon's New 'Unlimited' Plans Are Just Screwing With Us Now - Gizmodo

New Galaxy Note 10 specs leak packs a huge surprise that no one saw coming - BGR

Nintendo And Tencent Share More Details About Switch Launch In China - Nintendo Life

Android users in Europe will get to pick their default search provider - Engadget

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Deleting your Siri voice recordings from Apple’s servers is confusing — here’s how - The Verge

How to delete your voice recordings from Apple’s servers