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Microsoft Says Kinect Left Open By Design
kai_hiwatari writes "Around two week ago when Adafruit announced a bounty for developing an open-source driver for the Kinect, Microsoft made it clear that they didn't condone it. Now Microsoft seems to have realized the potential of their device and has made a U-turn. Alex Kipman, Xbox Director of Incubation, now says that they left the Kinect open by design. Kipman said, 'What has happened is someone wrote an open-source driver for PCs that essentially opens the USB connection, which we didn't protect, by design, and reads the inputs from the sensor.'"
He's probably right. You should see what they did with Windows Phone 7; the protocol they speak over USB is encrypted, even though the protocol is known, and the data being transferred is usually also known. It has deep security.
Now, maybe they didn't leave it open specifically because they wanted people to write an open source driver, but if they had been serious about keeping it closed, they would have almost certainly given it a better attempt.
Qxe4
If Microsoft's knee-jerk reaction is the wrong one, well, that's to be expected. They're assholes by nature. But, if after sleeping on it (and consulting with their lawyers and engineers and finding out there's nothing they can do that won't eat up every cent of profit they might have made on the thing) they come up with the right decision, I'm willing to forget their previous stance. Keep it up long enough, and they might even earn some goodwill.
I do agree that this is certainly better than them being complete idiots and trying to fight this til the end of time. However, if they didn't want to come off as asshats I think they should have said, "originally we had said that the Kinect should remain closed. However, we see that a group of talented enthusiasts has taken our hardware and done some truly innovative stuff with it. We now see that value in this, and wish to commend them on their hard work. In fact, we're so stoked about this that we've decided to donate a Kinect to 100 high school robotics teams across the country." Now THAT would look good on Microsoft.
Yes isn't it, but I heard the NPR interview and there were many long pauses before this guy said the things he said. I suspect that he got a long talking to when he got back to the evil empire and that Microsoft's new open stance on this is really just them watching the ass of the horse run away while they stand in the open barn door.
The part that really got me was when Ira asked him if M$ was going to sue anyone for doing this. There was probably 30 seconds of dead air while the guy squirmed in his seat and then he said no.
The difference between Canada and the USA is that in Canada healthcare is a right and gun ownership is a privilege.
What is not standard about the USB ports on the Xbox? You can even hook up a regular old USB keyboard to it (makes debugging so much easier, by just adding some keyboard listeners to your code and let them fire debug stuff), it's the only device except for my PC that will charge my MP3 player (USB power handshake thing) , and inside the plastic shell lies a regular laptop SATA drive, with a funky connector to connect it to the Xbox (I've broken the thing open because my drive likes to spin down after initial boot, giving me a E68, but a quick disconnect-connect fixes that). That the drive is signed by microsoft with a file on the first couple of sectors is just DRM/anti-piracy/money grabbing, but you can rip it out, format it and use it as a normal drive, nothing abnormal about it.
If you're really so gung-ho for open, I don't see why you would be interested in a PS3, with all the rampant "shove it up your ass" anti-modding updates sony has been going on for the last year or so, or the fact that you'd have to re-encode your MKV's to watch on the damn thing.
The perfect open system is a Windows PC (Linux gaming is still a sad affair, even with Wine) with a beefy videocard, a x360 controller, all hooked up to a nice TV. The Games For Windows thing makes it almost into an Xbox (can't tell the difference between Just Cause 2 PC or Xbox, even the tooltips give you the correct icons0, you get better graphics and you can do whatever the hell you want with it. A cheap dualcore system with a 5770 goes for not that much money these days, and can keep up at full HD resolutions with ease. Also gives you access to every codec you will ever need, as well as multitasking, free multiplayer gaming, home entertainment system and whatever you cook up yourself in whatever programming language that you prefer.
PS: Slight hate on the PS3 for all the "fsck linux" attitude, but not intentional as a flame post
On-Topic: I hope they release some sort of (un)official extension for XNA with kinect integration soon, do that and I will buy the thing in a trifle, just to do some hacking with it. I'd guess the thing could also be used at parties: no flying wii-motes to hit expensive TV's :D.