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Exciting Kinect Stuff Already Coming Out
Just last week we learned that the Kinect had been hacked wide open and already we're seeing a flood of innovative stuff coming out. Jamie found a page with a lot of pictures and screenshots, and Engadget has more.
The amusing and quite cleverly done telescreen kinect as an advertising tool jokes I read here on slashdot were quite fun to see!
But.....I was very bemused to see this today, reported elsewhere:
"Microsoft's Dennis Durkin voiced an interesting idea at an investment summit last week -- the idea that the company's Kinect camera might pass data to advertisers about the way you look, play and speak. "We can cater what content gets presented to you based on who you are," he told investors, suggesting that the Kinect offered business opportunities that weren't possible "in a controller-based world."
And over time that will help us be more targeted about what content choices we present, what advertising we present, how we get better feedback. And data about how many people are in a room when an advertisement is shown, how many people are in a room when a game is being played, how are those people engaged with the game? How are they engaged with a sporting event? Are they standing up? Are they excited? Are they wearing Seahawks jerseys?
http://www.engadget.com/2010/11/15/microsoft-exec-caught-in-privacy-snafu-says-kinect-might-tailor/
yay?
what's going to happen is M$ is going to take the code and use it to add new features to Kinect in future releases
No they won't. Microsoft is notoriously unable to reuse free (as in libre) software that can't be repackaged into a binary that they can sell for $$$ without releasing the source code for. It's just impossible for them because of their very nature as a closed-source software vendor. Any GPL code out there will not be touched by Microsoft with a 10 foot pole.
Also, if Microsoft wants to create high-tech apps for the Kinect, they have all the available R&D resources to do it on their own. There are a lot of very very smart people working for Microsoft, and if a bunch of unpaid hackers can turn the Kinect into something useful in a matter of hours, so can the Microsoft PhDs and code monkeys.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"Microsoft's Dennis Durkin voiced an interesting idea at an investment summit last week -- the idea that the company's Kinect camera might pass data to advertisers about the way you look, play and speak. "We can cater what content gets presented to you based on who you are," he told investors,
Microsoft adds support for racial profiling!
Exactly. I'm starting to dislike this narrative that has developed here, namely that MS doesn't know what it has and that they're going out of their way to stop people from hacking it.
1. I'm sure the researchers at MS know exactly what they have and that a lot of what you're seeing now has been in their labs for ages. Its just that MS isn't in the 3D video space and aren't trying to sell 3D video software for movie production or whatever.
2. From what I've read from the guy who built the first drivers, there isn't any crypto or other tricks to stop PCs from communicating with the Kinect. Its just a plain jane USB device.
3. At the end of the day the interesting parts of the Kinect are its software. If you wanted a stereo camera or something that could do 3D depth, there are items like this in the 3D space that do a hell of a lot more than VGA resolution.
4. MS is monetizing this technology again in Win8. Gestures are built into the OS, etc. Its not like Kinect doesn't have a future on the PC platform as a commercial device.
Oh well, back to your regularly scheduled "ZOMG MS IS EVIL!!" 2 minutes hate.
Then how come they have never been able to write a better OS than, say, Linux?
Look, I use Linux and I like it as much as the next guy, and I hate to break it to you, but Windows hasn't sucked since XP came out. It's actually a very decent and stable platform nowadays, and has been for a very long time.
The other thing is, most people think it's just natural that they can run Windows 7 on an 64-bit machine and run any old software made for XP-x86 or Vista, perhaps even Win 95 (I haven't tried) without problem. The level of backward-compatibility almost every release of Windows since 3.11 has managed to achieve is nothing short of amazing. Just ask a Mac guy who had to ditch his software collection every time Apple released a new MacOS... People don't give Microsoft enough credit for *that* marvel of engineering, because believe it or not, it works so well that people take it for granted. Me, it never ceases to amaze me...
This said, I prefer to run Linux for other reasons (chiefly that I can tinker, tweak it better than Windows and code for it without paying through the nose), but if I have work to do and Windows is the platform of choice, I use it because it works. I suggest you drop the Linux fanboi attitude if you want to be taken seriously when you talk about Microsoft.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash