You could use the exact same arguments to ask "why the flying fuck didn't Microsoft release it for Windows 7 too". If it's such an amazing piece of hardware for it's price (I'm told it's a perfectly capable motion capture device, and you've just said that it's dirt cheap for them to manufacture), it's tricky to see why they'd limit themselves to simulated tennis and virtual pets.
I have heard a few rumors they will. If not as an original policy decision, then as a reaction to all the hype. If it sustains.
One good reason why they haven't even announced a PC version would be that it isn't really a good thing to attach to a PC yet. Look at the videos that have been released so far. It can separate a hand from the background when it is held significantly close to the cameras. And it's really designed to separate a human silhouette from it's background. Fairly coarse control. Which is good enough for a console game control system. Not good enough to replace a mouse. Console games are played from a further distance than PC games.
Personally.. I'd be willing to bet they are working on MK II The closeup version, with higher resolution, and the ability to use it for much finer control. Then the PC version would come out.
As far as making a killing.. Obviously not. Remember, the $150 is retail. So retail price - retailer markup - manufacturing, packaging, shipping = profit. So $100 profit per unit.. no way in hell. Optimistically.. $10-20 profit.. Possibly less. Which in hardware, is not a bad profit.
I'm not saying your point is wrong- far from it. I just genuinely can't see the logic here.
New hardware is risky. And selling this as a really worthwhile mass appeal device will be hard. The stories being discussed are about how appealing it is to hackers who are doing stuff like making virtual whiteboards, auto aiming paintball turrets etc. Not budget motion capture rigs and desktop UI devices.. Don't get me wrong.. It is an interesting device. Just not a mainstream interesting device as it currently stands, outside console stuff.
But then, this is Ballmer's Microsoft we're talking about. Trying to spot strategy there is like trying to knit with egg noodles.
Very true. But remember. He is the figurehead of the business side. CEOs schmooze. They are the place where the buck is supposed to stop. They don't really need to understand the finer detail.
I bet Microsoft will be all over the courts trying to stop this thing, and you know what?!.. I bet this news will sell thousands more units, knowing we can screw around with it in our own way.. they just don't get it.
Why?
The parts have been shown to cost about $50. Add a few dollars per unit manufacturing, packaging, transport.. And you have a nice little profit. So despite the whiner chorous insisting it is selling at a loss.. It isn't.
Each one sold, is more money for Microsoft. Each one sold puts an MS logo in front of the buyer. Each one sold increases the chances of games being written including the kinect for the xBox. And more enthusiastic reception if and when they release a Windows SDK for it.
So..Other than some vague paranoid "because it's Microsoft" excuse.. Why the flying fuck would they stand in the way of this thing selling?
Bizarrely, you would think it would be in the interests of the Train Operating Companies for the public to have convenient access to this data - but the association that represents them seems more interested in making a quick buck on licensing Android and iPhone apps.
You are obviously not compartmentalising enough. Companies that run public services such as this do not concern themselves with petty utility or such trivial things as efficiency. They have a brief,and they will stick to it no matter what. Their goal is to publish the timetable data. Not for anybody to actually use it.
Perhaps, but the end user won't see "MPEG-LA refuses to license H.264 for free software". They'll see "Firefox won't play this cute cat movie" and stop there.
Ahh.. You mean like when iPhone and iPad users see the little lego brick and angrily return their iProduct..
First they came for the BSA. I did not speak up because I do not hold any software patents. Then they came for the makers of cellphones and their weird plugs... I did not speak up, because I too was tired of a drawer full of chargers. Then they came for the ISPs promising fast unlimited connections. I did not speak up, because my connection was neither fast or unlimited.
Now they come for some other shyster hiding behind terms and conditions in ambiguous legalese..
The difference is that nobody would want to play a chess game on a board that size. Go grew to 19x19 by player preference, not as some artificial limit to make it hard to beat the computer.
Don't be so sure.. The most common Shogi is played on a 9x9 board with 40 pieces. True enough.. Just as the most common western chess is played with an 8x8 board and 32 pieces. That is far from the only Shogi though.
Maka-Dai-Dai Shogi has a 19x19 board, with 192 pieces.
There are plenty of variant rules that make for an even more interesting game, one of which has the piece take on the move of the piece in front of it. Others have specific rules about drops, others don't have drops..
There is a Shogi variant, Tai Shogi which has a 25X25 board, and 354 pieces. Something I've wanted to make for years, even if only as a display piece. And there may be bigger I haven't heard of.
Or at the other end of the scale, a 4X5 Micro Shogi board with 10 pieces.
Civilization advances and retreats. Because we are in the middle of the quickest advance in all time, it can be hard to see that, but I don't think there is any reason to say that the horse harness, for example, was inevitable; it took thousands of years before it was available. And yet, it had a large impact on society. There is no reason society must 'progress.'
Nope.. Sequential events enabled it to happen. Elephants don't have harnesses. They are smart enough to be steered with foot pressure or a pointy stick possibly even verbal commands. So if we had never left Africa, and had used elephants for heavy pulling jobs, the harness would not exist.
1) Domesticate large animals for food. Reduces the need to hunt. 2) Realise that the large domesticated animals are stronger than you are, so tie them to the thing you want to pull. 3) Realise that steering the animal the way you want it to go instead of leading it along means you can get pulled too. invent the harness. Which did not happen in one go. It took lots of ideas before the current ones existed, and the current ones have stagnated because horses are mostly recreational animals these days. 4) Lots of ideas, including a harness. Although they were more likely for oxen or dogs than horses at that point.
Now you have the ideal conditions to create various means of steering horses, powering machines, all kinds of things other than just sitting on it's back and hoping nothing startles it. But the main factor in this invention is not the horse, or even domestication of the horse. It's the need to pull a load. Which is where the thousands of years between domestication and harnesses for horses comes in. People rode horses with no saddle or harness. Why the hell would anybody be stupid enough to make a hands free self steering vehicle need steering? And why waste all that good leather? It took agriculture to make the need to pull stuff a reality.
Invention springs from need. Not from any divine isolated inspiration. Nothing suddenly appears. It grows from what has gone before.
Oh come on. USB-to-ISP programmers are cheap and there are lots to choose from. You can build one yourself if you want. You don't need to buy a new one with every controller either, because it's not tied to the application board.
Oh come on yourself. I'm not the one trying to compare a prototyping board to a chip.
And where do you get the idea that the ATMega is somehow tied to the Arduino boards?
With great difficulty these days. Unless you have a computer with a real parallel port lying around, you need a programmer of some sort as well. The nice thing about the Arduino is that it comes with a suitable serial bootloader already installed, and an integrated USB-to-serial interface too.
Exactly my point. I got myself an Arduino starter kit last Christmas. First time I ever really tried doing hands on electronics. I actually learned and retained more in a week of playing with it than I did when I was reading electronics magazines regularly.
The one near me, when it actually sells what I want, doesn't have it in stock. The central London ones might be better.. Although they are still working from the same catalogue.
...can still get Atmel Atmega8 chips for two dollars a piece and do everything the Arduinos do. These microcontrollers literally need no external hardware other than a power supply.
PC Pro was useless and irrelevant years ago. The only people that pay attention to that rag is PHB's or really really dumb executives.
I may be a bit paranoid, but I always look with suspicion on any product name that has the word "Pro" in it. Also any product with High quality, Magic, Wonder, or Buddy in it's name.
Agreed wholeheartedly. DRM is a rental, not a purchase. But in this case, it is stated up front, and never presented as a purchase.
Library books, streaming rented video, limited time anything, fair enough. The customer is under absolutely no illusion that they are doing anything but renting.
Where DRM is a con, is when customers are fooled into thinking that they own a copy of the transitory DRM infected object.
If something like Sandboxie were bundled with the operating system, mail clients would by default run mail attachments in a sandbox. But you're right that it wouldn't stop "This application wants to break out of jail: Cancel or Allow?" from getting a click on Allow. The only thing that can stop that is mandatory verification of the hardware maker's digital signature on everything from the bootloader on up, as seen in iPhone and other consoles.
Does that include Jailbroken iPhones and consoles running homebrew apps?
If not.. Then your solution is not going to work.
NEVER underestimate the clueless user's aptitude for defeating security measures.
Slashdot Mirror
No, there are 3 kinds of people: those who can count and those who can't.
So which ones understand binary?
You could use the exact same arguments to ask "why the flying fuck didn't Microsoft release it for Windows 7 too". If it's such an amazing piece of hardware for it's price (I'm told it's a perfectly capable motion capture device, and you've just said that it's dirt cheap for them to manufacture), it's tricky to see why they'd limit themselves to simulated tennis and virtual pets.
I have heard a few rumors they will. If not as an original policy decision, then as a reaction to all the hype. If it sustains.
One good reason why they haven't even announced a PC version would be that it isn't really a good thing to attach to a PC yet. Look at the videos that have been released so far. It can separate a hand from the background when it is held significantly close to the cameras. And it's really designed to separate a human silhouette from it's background. Fairly coarse control. Which is good enough for a console game control system. Not good enough to replace a mouse. Console games are played from a further distance than PC games.
Personally.. I'd be willing to bet they are working on MK II The closeup version, with higher resolution, and the ability to use it for much finer control. Then the PC version would come out.
As far as making a killing.. Obviously not. Remember, the $150 is retail. So retail price - retailer markup - manufacturing, packaging, shipping = profit. So $100 profit per unit.. no way in hell. Optimistically.. $10-20 profit.. Possibly less. Which in hardware, is not a bad profit.
I'm not saying your point is wrong- far from it. I just genuinely can't see the logic here.
New hardware is risky. And selling this as a really worthwhile mass appeal device will be hard. The stories being discussed are about how appealing it is to hackers who are doing stuff like making virtual whiteboards, auto aiming paintball turrets etc. Not budget motion capture rigs and desktop UI devices.. Don't get me wrong.. It is an interesting device. Just not a mainstream interesting device as it currently stands, outside console stuff.
But then, this is Ballmer's Microsoft we're talking about. Trying to spot strategy there is like trying to knit with egg noodles.
Very true. But remember. He is the figurehead of the business side. CEOs schmooze. They are the place where the buck is supposed to stop. They don't really need to understand the finer detail.
And a lot of that profit goes to the over $200 million they spent to license and develop the technology. The plans didn't appear out of thin air.
So selling the bloody things might possibly be a good idea yes?
I bet Microsoft will be all over the courts trying to stop this thing, and you know what?!.. I bet this news will sell thousands more units, knowing we can screw around with it in our own way.. they just don't get it.
Why?
The parts have been shown to cost about $50. Add a few dollars per unit manufacturing, packaging, transport.. And you have a nice little profit. So despite the whiner chorous insisting it is selling at a loss.. It isn't.
Each one sold, is more money for Microsoft.
Each one sold puts an MS logo in front of the buyer.
Each one sold increases the chances of games being written including the kinect for the xBox. And more enthusiastic reception if and when they release a Windows SDK for it.
So..Other than some vague paranoid "because it's Microsoft" excuse.. Why the flying fuck would they stand in the way of this thing selling?
OpenKinect
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Yep..Standard practice for sensibly run email groups.
1) File transfer fails
2) Press the bloody button again, and re-download it at no extra cost.
3) Get a grown-up to read the book to you.
At the very least, find out how the process works before trying to use it as an excuse for pirating.
Bizarrely, you would think it would be in the interests of the Train Operating Companies for the public to have convenient access to this data - but the association that represents them seems more interested in making a quick buck on licensing Android and iPhone apps.
You are obviously not compartmentalising enough.
Companies that run public services such as this do not concern themselves with petty utility or such trivial things as efficiency. They have a brief,and they will stick to it no matter what. Their goal is to publish the timetable data. Not for anybody to actually use it.
Perhaps, but the end user won't see "MPEG-LA refuses to license H.264 for free software". They'll see "Firefox won't play this cute cat movie" and stop there.
Ahh.. You mean like when iPhone and iPad users see the little lego brick and angrily return their iProduct..
And you think a gun would be any use against a drop bear???
First they came for the BSA. I did not speak up because I do not hold any software patents.
Then they came for the makers of cellphones and their weird plugs...
I did not speak up, because I too was tired of a drawer full of chargers.
Then they came for the ISPs promising fast unlimited connections.
I did not speak up, because my connection was neither fast or unlimited.
Now they come for some other shyster hiding behind terms and conditions in ambiguous legalese..
And I say good on em!
The difference is that nobody would want to play a chess game on a board that size. Go grew to 19x19 by player preference, not as some artificial limit to make it hard to beat the computer.
Don't be so sure.. The most common Shogi is played on a 9x9 board with 40 pieces. True enough.. Just as the most common western chess is played with an 8x8 board and 32 pieces. That is far from the only Shogi though.
Maka-Dai-Dai Shogi has a 19x19 board, with 192 pieces.
There are plenty of variant rules that make for an even more interesting game, one of which has the piece take on the move of the piece in front of it. Others have specific rules about drops, others don't have drops..
There is a Shogi variant, Tai Shogi which has a 25X25 board, and 354 pieces. Something I've wanted to make for years, even if only as a display piece. And there may be bigger I haven't heard of.
Or at the other end of the scale, a 4X5 Micro Shogi board with 10 pieces.
http://trout.customer.netspace.net.au/ Old VB program that works great on Linux under WINE too. So you can try lots of different variants
Chess is a complex game, but there are a huge number of variants. Most are unknown outside the few who play them.
Civilization advances and retreats. Because we are in the middle of the quickest advance in all time, it can be hard to see that, but I don't think there is any reason to say that the horse harness, for example, was inevitable; it took thousands of years before it was available. And yet, it had a large impact on society. There is no reason society must 'progress.'
Nope.. Sequential events enabled it to happen. Elephants don't have harnesses. They are smart enough to be steered with foot pressure or a pointy stick possibly even verbal commands. So if we had never left Africa, and had used elephants for heavy pulling jobs, the harness would not exist.
1) Domesticate large animals for food. Reduces the need to hunt.
2) Realise that the large domesticated animals are stronger than you are, so tie them to the thing you want to pull.
3) Realise that steering the animal the way you want it to go instead of leading it along means you can get pulled too. invent the harness. Which did not happen in one go. It took lots of ideas before the current ones existed, and the current ones have stagnated because horses are mostly recreational animals these days.
4) Lots of ideas, including a harness. Although they were more likely for oxen or dogs than horses at that point.
Now you have the ideal conditions to create various means of steering horses, powering machines, all kinds of things other than just sitting on it's back and hoping nothing startles it.
But the main factor in this invention is not the horse, or even domestication of the horse. It's the need to pull a load. Which is where the thousands of years between domestication and harnesses for horses comes in. People rode horses with no saddle or harness. Why the hell would anybody be stupid enough to make a hands free self steering vehicle need steering? And why waste all that good leather? It took agriculture to make the need to pull stuff a reality.
Invention springs from need. Not from any divine isolated inspiration. Nothing suddenly appears. It grows from what has gone before.
Oh come on. USB-to-ISP programmers are cheap and there are lots to choose from. You can build one yourself if you want. You don't need to buy a new one with every controller either, because it's not tied to the application board.
Oh come on yourself. I'm not the one trying to compare a prototyping board to a chip.
And where do you get the idea that the ATMega is somehow tied to the Arduino boards?
With great difficulty these days. Unless you have a computer with a real parallel port lying around, you need a programmer of some sort as well. The nice thing about the Arduino is that it comes with a suitable serial bootloader already installed, and an integrated USB-to-serial interface too.
Exactly my point.
I got myself an Arduino starter kit last Christmas. First time I ever really tried doing hands on electronics. I actually learned and retained more in a week of playing with it than I did when I was reading electronics magazines regularly.
Possibly depends on the store.
The one near me, when it actually sells what I want, doesn't have it in stock. The central London ones might be better.. Although they are still working from the same catalogue.
...can still get Atmel Atmega8 chips for two dollars a piece and do everything the Arduinos do. These microcontrollers literally need no external hardware other than a power supply.
So how do you get the program into the chip?
Sigh. And I'm stuck with Radio Shack.
Could be worse.I'm stuck with Maplin.
PC Pro was useless and irrelevant years ago. The only people that pay attention to that rag is PHB's or really really dumb executives.
I may be a bit paranoid, but I always look with suspicion on any product name that has the word "Pro" in it. Also any product with High quality, Magic, Wonder, or Buddy in it's name.
Because they are a business. The childish pissing matches only play out in the press. Not in reality.
Well.. I would.. But people keep releasing games for Linux, or telling me about windows games that run well under WINE. Sorry.. I'll try harder.
What happens when it becomes possible to jailbreak a popular e-reader and circumvent the 'expiration date' feature of the DRM?
How do you jailbreak an e-book reader? They don't come locked down and castrated, so no point.
Suing libraries, I'll bet.
How much..
ADE has been cracked for ages now. As has Mobi, and no doubt the mobi variant that the Kindle uses. So pay up..
All eBooks with DRM are loaned.
Agreed wholeheartedly. DRM is a rental, not a purchase. But in this case, it is stated up front, and never presented as a purchase.
Library books, streaming rented video, limited time anything, fair enough. The customer is under absolutely no illusion that they are doing anything but renting.
Where DRM is a con, is when customers are fooled into thinking that they own a copy of the transitory DRM infected object.
If something like Sandboxie were bundled with the operating system, mail clients would by default run mail attachments in a sandbox. But you're right that it wouldn't stop "This application wants to break out of jail: Cancel or Allow?" from getting a click on Allow. The only thing that can stop that is mandatory verification of the hardware maker's digital signature on everything from the bootloader on up, as seen in iPhone and other consoles.
Does that include Jailbroken iPhones and consoles running homebrew apps?
If not.. Then your solution is not going to work.
NEVER underestimate the clueless user's aptitude for defeating security measures.
A democratic institution representing the desires and best interests of it's electorate?
What gives?
Too many people to effectively bribe.
removing the uniforms? sounds good. :p
Well.. Until you see the Ryanair flight attendants. Think BUUUUUUUUUUUDGET.