Absolutely. You can get a PrimeSense or Kinect camera if you are a serious game developer. You can also just purchase a Panasonic D-Imager depth camera for a few grand. Probably there will be a dozen of these cameras at consumer price points within a year or two. Having the data from the cameras, as pointed out, is somewhat limited.
Creating algorithms that will analyze movement takes about 4 years, and you can get this software from Softkinetic and from Omek (I work for Omek). Microsoft has obviously developed its own software, but it probably won't share it with you. Omek also has a gesture recording capability, which means that instead of programming new moves, you can actually stand in front of the camera and record new moves. You need to use a number of different people to get it right, but it does reduce development time dramatically. So anyone serious about this doesn't have to re-create this --it's out there and you can license it. Eventually there may be open source solutions, but it will take a while.
Aha, but you fail to see the actual business case. This paper doesn't have to cost much more, because photocopy companies make money on INK. As long as they can make it in such as way that it works best (or only) with their special ink, Xerox can break even or even lose money on the paper.
I had a similar situation, and what I did was I requested a different terminology in writing (e-mail). The company gave me some explanation that so-and-so was not their intention, and I should list all of my works. I (politely and in writing) said it was none of their business what I was working on during my free time but I wanted to confirm that it was not their intention that they should have control over things I was doing outside of the time I was charging them for. Again, in e-mail, they confirmed that was not their intention. I then kept the written correspondance and signed the contract. I figure if there is any dispute, I will have this written proof that this was not the intention of the contract.
I foolishly don't have a phone for my 6 and 8 year olds and when I was in the library last week, my 6 year old took my phone, apparently to take some photographs of the surroundings, while my 8 year old and I read a book. After 10 minutes I realized he was not returning and found him (4 meters away), in tears as he was tragically unable to call me from the front desk since he had borrowed my phone. If he'd had one of those 4-button phones it wouldn't have saved him anyway, since he would still have borrowed my camera phone....;-)_
Here in Israel we have a toll road with no tollbooths but all the elements which begs this question. (https://kvish6.co.il/). You do not have to slow down -- it's all done with some sort of RF signal or with cameras that photograph your license plate. If you have the RF device it comes off your credit card, otherwise the invoice is sent to the owner's snail adddress registered for that license plate. By definition: not anonymous.
On this toll road, obviously, nobody drives at or below the speed limit. So, in essence, the toll road company has a verifiable speeding record on well over half of the population of the country. I wonder about this every single time I drive on the road.
It's not appropriate to call sending a press release to a news site "spam", because it is *not* unsolicited. Every news site/paper has a submission policy for submitting PR, and actively encourages all relevant industry players to send press releases.
The incompetent individual who sent the PR did not pay attention to the press release submission policy, and he didn't know how to properly address e-mail or stroke journalist egos. However, he was sending a *solicited* e-mail to apropriate individuals. And, as pointed out before, he did actually succeed in getting publicity not only for his client, but for his PR firm, which has a catchy enough name for some people to remember.
Okay, so he's and idjut, but he isn't a spammer by even the broadest definition.
Oh, this sounds like a fantastic idea. Microsoft is going to encourage slashdotters contribute to their code. With all the good-will that Microsoft has generated within the opensource community, success is ensured.
So it is perfectly fine to show women on screen with outrageously large surgically-enhanced boobs halfway out of her shirt, but it's offensive to show men with their completely covered, natural (according to the article) endowment?
It's bad enough when they show us women as sex symbols, but you'd think that they'd at least give us something to ogle, too? Or is the target audience for the superman movie supposed to be straight men only?
Does Amazon adjust book prices according to reviews? If so, maybe they should counter-sue for his writing a sucky book and forcing them to slash prices to get it off their shelves.
The assumption of nonredundant objects doesn't actually hold up in real life. It turns out that most of what people see on their mobile phones IS redundant. CNN breaking news, stock quotes, football goals/touchdowns, etc. I agree that there will be a bandwidth issue with mass use, but it is not as bad as you think.
Much of current optimization relies on the fact that the most-used sites account for more than 60% of the traffic on the mobile network. Future optimizations may be able to find a way to optimize the bandwidth for multicasting in a way that will reduce the problem to some extent.
This is absolutely the number one security breach today, actually, and it's internal as external. Oh, you don't have access to that directory on the company's intranet? well, let me just email that document to you...
Companies do need to protect themselves. There's some very interesting development in that area, in fact. http://www.vidius.com/
This kind of alliance between creatives has a good history of working in the comics industry. Malibu was that kind of a cooperative at first, started by a bunch of creatives who turned to someone with passion for comics and business sense. In the end they sold to Marvel, which didn't end well, but it could quite clearly be considered a success for the people who founded the group.
Right now the founder is doing this: http://platinumstudios.com/, and that seems to be going quite well. While they don't make much on the comics themselves, they leverage the best of their materials to go to mass market and to Hollywood. It's a good business strategy, and they seem to have tremedous respect for their creative people.
Despite this horrible story, most parents are not as freaked out about their kids as yours were. I don't think most parents need control over what their kid is eating. OTOH, what happens if it turns out the kid is tremendously overweight or underweight or buying only junkfood with the money?
I mean, when you are talking about the kind of parents who would have your bowel movements analyzed to find out what you ate, you aren't talking about the norm. The norm is they will sometimes take a look, if you are overweight. If you aren't overweight, they will not have the time to bother with such stuff.
I am a parent, and I am not a control freak. I'd like to have the data, but most of the time I wouldn't even look at it. Most parents genuinely want the best for their children, and want them to be independent. For those parents, this information could be helpful.
Well, obviously nobody here is well-versed in how to artificially inseminate chickens. One quick rub on the male's rear and one quick rub on the female's rear is all it takes. Human cybersex takes too many rubs. Now all they need is a virtual way to connect between the two chicken's that have virtually been rubbed.
As someon doing a first startup in my late 30s, I have to agree that finding good ideas does not come naturally to everyone. I also have to say that my MBA helped me identify what makes an idea good. None of my undergrad math or programming classes taught me what a customer was or why they might have a problem that I could solve. We need to change our undergraduate computer science and science programs to require one class in entrepreneurship.
As a middle-aged person, I am fortunate enough to have been financially "conservative" so I can now afford to do a startup -- but I agree with the basic point that this is simpler when you are young and have fewer fiancial obligations. If you are strapped with college loans, and you have to work for "the man" you can still develop stuff in your spare time on weekends and evenings if you don't have kids.
As a young person, you don't realize how much of your time is your own -- that time IS money if you use it properly.
Unless you know what's going on in serious documentation, you don't understand what this is about. Serious documentation (books, manuals, etc.) has been moving away from Microsoft Word for a decade now, but it has had a lot of bumps along the way. Any reasonable-sized company with a documentation library is going to be using something like FrameMaker, Xmetal, RoboHelp, AuthorIt or any other number of real publishing packages.
One problem with this is that each software package is good for a particular type of publishing (print, PDF, online help, HTML) and not as good or useless for the others. The other problem is that the collaboration models on most of these programs are weak.
But the really big issue is that the companies making these products tend either to get bought out by the big guys or go belly-up after a few years when the new tool-de-jour hits the shelves. In the last few weeks, two tools (RoboHelp and FrameMaker) announced end-of-life. Now if you are HP and you are using one of these, you are now stuck with thousands of pages of documentation in a semi-proprietary format. This happens to you every few years, and you pop several thousand or several hundred thousand dollars in the conversion each time.
It just so happens that the tool-du-jour right now is something called AuthorIT, which isn't even a cousin of a word processor. It's a database that stores documents, and stores output properties. It actually is the one tool that does a good job of producing print and online documentation (CHM, HTML, XML, whatever) The single-sourcing capablity is why it is the tool-du-jour, and why a lot of the big companies use it. CA alone has a million pages in this format.
But AuthorIt isn't any bigger than those previous tool companies, and their format is just as proprietary, although you can have HTML and XML output, so in theory you are in pretty good shape for converting. Still, these big companies are using it for their big documentation projects.
I don't know what percentage of documentation uses all these other tools, but suffice it to say it's a lot, and it's more critical stuff than most of what is written in Word. These people don't care about the documents written in Word. They are all on the standards body so that they don't have to keep losing all their documentation styles, templates and layouts every time a new kind of online help or new kind of documentation product becomes popular.
I fail to see how this robot is going to prove whether robots can live in harmony with humans. It's like user testing "Reader Rabbit" software and then saying, "Yep, people can work with computer programs."
And while we're on the topic -- don't we already have robotic dogs which seem to work fine with people? This "experiment" has the word "pointless"" written all over it. Even as a publicity stunt it isn't going anywhere. The article was very short and even here on slashdot it's hard to work up any excitement about it.
Well, if it's as easy as homegrowing a PC -- then lawnmowing robots under ORPP will be as common as Linux on home computers! The replacement of human workers with robots will approach the pace of the replacement of Windows PCs on the corporate desktop with Linux boxes!
Now is the time to prepare for this imminent threat to factory workers worldwide. Oh, wait...
Whether we like it or not, there are underlying messages within the games, and players are there to push the limits, since the risks are basically none. Anyone whose been following TSO (designed to be Perfect-land) knows about the Alphaville elections' being rigged, which can only be described as humorous. There was a big discussion about what we are teaching our teenagers, as the losing non-rigged candidate is in RL a 14-year-old girl. To which I can only respond -- we are teaching them that elections are rigged, that's why in English we have the phrase gerrymandering. And just wait until we get electronic voting...
In any case, the question becomes, as game developers and designers, what is our responsibility in creating the framework and rules of these alternate realities? Can we do better? Or at least, can we create a few games where antisocial behavior isn't the most fun behavior available?
One of the striking passages from "The Utopian Entrepreneur" was about doing a focus group, discussing the Purple Moon games. One of the fathers was a bit distressed that the game had ethical content, but when asked later in the interview about his opinion on the ethical content of Mortal Kombat, for example, he answered that it was not a game about ethics -- but Purple Moon was.
With the amount of time our kids are spending playing games, we owe it to ourselves to offer some alternative to games where the basic goal is to smash stuff up, overthrow a government or make lots of Simoleans. Takers, anyone?
While it is hard to imagine why someone would want to be exposed in this kind of public network, I can imagine its uses as a business or social tool in a closed network. In The Sims Online, which is a closed network, a similar tool is quite useful, but that's only a pretend world.
In the real world, I could imagine its use for something like ediets.com, as a closed network. Although the people are real, they are using handles and their personal info is protected. At the same time, they are quite involved in making friends within the network for emotional support. Similarly, I am sure there are business based on suppliers, etc, who could use such a thing for their intranet.
In this context it could be quite useful. However, I agree completely that it must be a non-download-based service, working directly from your browser.
I don't think it matters that it works only with IE for most uses. I use Mozilla, but let's face it -- for some sites I need IE so I have that on my computer too. It would be too inconvenient for most of our lives to stand on principle and never view sites that are IE biased.
The point is that if they want to do a spam archive, you would expect them to do some minimal research. This page clearly shows that SpamArchive.org has not done the following basic background work:
1. Told me who they are so that I might trust them.
2. Told me anything about their technology/database so that I might know if it is really going to be useful. For all I know they haven't even thought about the collection, storage and retrival issues behind dealing with this. 3. Collected the archives supposedly uncoordinated that already exist and collated them. 4. Added even one link to a relevant site. You would assume that to undertake such a project they would at least have visited a few sites before concluding there was nothing out there. Posting couple of relevant URLs wouldn't be too much work.
In short, I am not impressed that someone who can do 20 minutes of work is the same someone who can undertake the huge project proposed here. It looks like they think that somehow all they need is for people to send them information by e-mail, and for a few other people to volunteer to do the work. Not a promising start.
Even I know how to buy a domain name and write a few paragraphs of text on a white background. There is nothing about this archive to hint at its origin or credibility. This is a/. worthy story?
Most individual users would put up the extra $30 for an operating system by someone already recognized as an industry leader, rather than Xandros, a newcomer. To me the exra $30 sounds worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely. You can get a PrimeSense or Kinect camera if you are a serious game developer. You can also just purchase a Panasonic D-Imager depth camera for a few grand. Probably there will be a dozen of these cameras at consumer price points within a year or two. Having the data from the cameras, as pointed out, is somewhat limited.
Creating algorithms that will analyze movement takes about 4 years, and you can get this software from Softkinetic and from Omek (I work for Omek). Microsoft has obviously developed its own software, but it probably won't share it with you. Omek also has a gesture recording capability, which means that instead of programming new moves, you can actually stand in front of the camera and record new moves. You need to use a number of different people to get it right, but it does reduce development time dramatically. So anyone serious about this doesn't have to re-create this --it's out there and you can license it. Eventually there may be open source solutions, but it will take a while.
Aha, but you fail to see the actual business case. This paper doesn't have to cost much more, because photocopy companies make money on INK. As long as they can make it in such as way that it works best (or only) with their special ink, Xerox can break even or even lose money on the paper.
I had a similar situation, and what I did was I requested a different terminology in writing (e-mail). The company gave me some explanation that so-and-so was not their intention, and I should list all of my works. I (politely and in writing) said it was none of their business what I was working on during my free time but I wanted to confirm that it was not their intention that they should have control over things I was doing outside of the time I was charging them for. Again, in e-mail, they confirmed that was not their intention. I then kept the written correspondance and signed the contract. I figure if there is any dispute, I will have this written proof that this was not the intention of the contract.
I foolishly don't have a phone for my 6 and 8 year olds and when I was in the library last week, my 6 year old took my phone, apparently to take some photographs of the surroundings, while my 8 year old and I read a book. After 10 minutes I realized he was not returning and found him (4 meters away), in tears as he was tragically unable to call me from the front desk since he had borrowed my phone. If he'd had one of those 4-button phones it wouldn't have saved him anyway, since he would still have borrowed my camera phone.... ;-)_
Here in Israel we have a toll road with no tollbooths but all the elements which begs this question. (https://kvish6.co.il/). You do not have to slow down -- it's all done with some sort of RF signal or with cameras that photograph your license plate. If you have the RF device it comes off your credit card, otherwise the invoice is sent to the owner's snail adddress registered for that license plate. By definition: not anonymous.
On this toll road, obviously, nobody drives at or below the speed limit. So, in essence, the toll road company has a verifiable speeding record on well over half of the population of the country. I wonder about this every single time I drive on the road.
It's not appropriate to call sending a press release to a news site "spam", because it is *not* unsolicited. Every news site/paper has a submission policy for submitting PR, and actively encourages all relevant industry players to send press releases.
The incompetent individual who sent the PR did not pay attention to the press release submission policy, and he didn't know how to properly address e-mail or stroke journalist egos. However, he was sending a *solicited* e-mail to apropriate individuals. And, as pointed out before, he did actually succeed in getting publicity not only for his client, but for his PR firm, which has a catchy enough name for some people to remember.
Okay, so he's and idjut, but he isn't a spammer by even the broadest definition.
The first rule of screenwriting is get it copyrighted, in which case he would have a copy at the US copyright office.
Oh, this sounds like a fantastic idea. Microsoft is going to encourage slashdotters contribute to their code. With all the good-will that Microsoft has generated within the opensource community, success is ensured.
So it is perfectly fine to show women on screen with outrageously large surgically-enhanced boobs halfway out of her shirt, but it's offensive to show men with their completely covered, natural (according to the article) endowment?
It's bad enough when they show us women as sex symbols, but you'd think that they'd at least give us something to ogle, too? Or is the target audience for the superman movie supposed to be straight men only?
Does Amazon adjust book prices according to reviews? If so, maybe they should counter-sue for his writing a sucky book and forcing them to slash prices to get it off their shelves.
The assumption of nonredundant objects doesn't actually hold up in real life. It turns out that most of what people see on their mobile phones IS redundant. CNN breaking news, stock quotes, football goals/touchdowns, etc. I agree that there will be a bandwidth issue with mass use, but it is not as bad as you think.
Much of current optimization relies on the fact that the most-used sites account for more than 60% of the traffic on the mobile network. Future optimizations may be able to find a way to optimize the bandwidth for multicasting in a way that will reduce the problem to some extent.
This is absolutely the number one security breach today, actually, and it's internal as external. Oh, you don't have access to that directory on the company's intranet? well, let me just email that document to you...
Companies do need to protect themselves. There's some very interesting development in that area, in fact. http://www.vidius.com/
This kind of alliance between creatives has a good history of working in the comics industry. Malibu was that kind of a cooperative at first, started by a bunch of creatives who turned to someone with passion for comics and business sense. In the end they sold to Marvel, which didn't end well, but it could quite clearly be considered a success for the people who founded the group.
Right now the founder is doing this: http://platinumstudios.com/, and that seems to be going quite well. While they don't make much on the comics themselves, they leverage the best of their materials to go to mass market and to Hollywood. It's a good business strategy, and they seem to have tremedous respect for their creative people.
Despite this horrible story, most parents are not as freaked out about their kids as yours were. I don't think most parents need control over what their kid is eating. OTOH, what happens if it turns out the kid is tremendously overweight or underweight or buying only junkfood with the money?
I mean, when you are talking about the kind of parents who would have your bowel movements analyzed to find out what you ate, you aren't talking about the norm. The norm is they will sometimes take a look, if you are overweight. If you aren't overweight, they will not have the time to bother with such stuff.
I am a parent, and I am not a control freak. I'd like to have the data, but most of the time I wouldn't even look at it. Most parents genuinely want the best for their children, and want them to be independent. For those parents, this information could be helpful.
Well, obviously nobody here is well-versed in how to artificially inseminate chickens. One quick rub on the male's rear and one quick rub on the female's rear is all it takes. Human cybersex takes too many rubs. Now all they need is a virtual way to connect between the two chicken's that have virtually been rubbed.
As someon doing a first startup in my late 30s, I have to agree that finding good ideas does not come naturally to everyone. I also have to say that my MBA helped me identify what makes an idea good. None of my undergrad math or programming classes taught me what a customer was or why they might have a problem that I could solve. We need to change our undergraduate computer science and science programs to require one class in entrepreneurship.
As a middle-aged person, I am fortunate enough to have been financially "conservative" so I can now afford to do a startup -- but I agree with the basic point that this is simpler when you are young and have fewer fiancial obligations. If you are strapped with college loans, and you have to work for "the man" you can still develop stuff in your spare time on weekends and evenings if you don't have kids.
As a young person, you don't realize how much of your time is your own -- that time IS money if you use it properly.
Unless you know what's going on in serious documentation, you don't understand what this is about. Serious documentation (books, manuals, etc.) has been moving away from Microsoft Word for a decade now, but it has had a lot of bumps along the way. Any reasonable-sized company with a documentation library is going to be using something like FrameMaker, Xmetal, RoboHelp, AuthorIt or any other number of real publishing packages.
One problem with this is that each software package is good for a particular type of publishing (print, PDF, online help, HTML) and not as good or useless for the others. The other problem is that the collaboration models on most of these programs are weak.
But the really big issue is that the companies making these products tend either to get bought out by the big guys or go belly-up after a few years when the new tool-de-jour hits the shelves. In the last few weeks, two tools (RoboHelp and FrameMaker) announced end-of-life. Now if you are HP and you are using one of these, you are now stuck with thousands of pages of documentation in a semi-proprietary format. This happens to you every few years, and you pop several thousand or several hundred thousand dollars in the conversion each time.
It just so happens that the tool-du-jour right now is something called AuthorIT, which isn't even a cousin of a word processor. It's a database that stores documents, and stores output properties. It actually is the one tool that does a good job of producing print and online documentation (CHM, HTML, XML, whatever) The single-sourcing capablity is why it is the tool-du-jour, and why a lot of the big companies use it. CA alone has a million pages in this format.
But AuthorIt isn't any bigger than those previous tool companies, and their format is just as proprietary, although you can have HTML and XML output, so in theory you are in pretty good shape for converting. Still, these big companies are using it for their big documentation projects.
I don't know what percentage of documentation uses all these other tools, but suffice it to say it's a lot, and it's more critical stuff than most of what is written in Word. These people don't care about the documents written in Word. They are all on the standards body so that they don't have to keep losing all their documentation styles, templates and layouts every time a new kind of online help or new kind of documentation product becomes popular.
I fail to see how this robot is going to prove whether robots can live in harmony with humans. It's like user testing "Reader Rabbit" software and then saying, "Yep, people can work with computer programs."
And while we're on the topic -- don't we already have robotic dogs which seem to work fine with people? This "experiment" has the word "pointless"" written all over it. Even as a publicity stunt it isn't going anywhere. The article was very short and even here on slashdot it's hard to work up any excitement about it.
Well, if it's as easy as homegrowing a PC -- then lawnmowing robots under ORPP will be as common as Linux on home computers! The replacement of human workers with robots will approach the pace of the replacement of Windows PCs on the corporate desktop with Linux boxes!
Now is the time to prepare for this imminent threat to factory workers worldwide. Oh, wait...
Whether we like it or not, there are underlying messages within the games, and players are there to push the limits, since the risks are basically none. Anyone whose been following TSO (designed to be Perfect-land) knows about the Alphaville elections' being rigged, which can only be described as humorous. There was a big discussion about what we are teaching our teenagers, as the losing non-rigged candidate is in RL a 14-year-old girl. To which I can only respond -- we are teaching them that elections are rigged, that's why in English we have the phrase gerrymandering. And just wait until we get electronic voting...
In any case, the question becomes, as game developers and designers, what is our responsibility in creating the framework and rules of these alternate realities? Can we do better? Or at least, can we create a few games where antisocial behavior isn't the most fun behavior available?
One of the striking passages from "The Utopian Entrepreneur" was about doing a focus group, discussing the Purple Moon games. One of the fathers was a bit distressed that the game had ethical content, but when asked later in the interview about his opinion on the ethical content of Mortal Kombat, for example, he answered that it was not a game about ethics -- but Purple Moon was.
With the amount of time our kids are spending playing games, we owe it to ourselves to offer some alternative to games where the basic goal is to smash stuff up, overthrow a government or make lots of Simoleans. Takers, anyone?
While it is hard to imagine why someone would want to be exposed in this kind of public network, I can imagine its uses as a business or social tool in a closed network. In The Sims Online, which is a closed network, a similar tool is quite useful, but that's only a pretend world.
In the real world, I could imagine its use for something like ediets.com, as a closed network. Although the people are real, they are using handles and their personal info is protected. At the same time, they are quite involved in making friends within the network for emotional support. Similarly, I am sure there are business based on suppliers, etc, who could use such a thing for their intranet.
In this context it could be quite useful. However, I agree completely that it must be a non-download-based service, working directly from your browser.
I don't think it matters that it works only with IE for most uses. I use Mozilla, but let's face it -- for some sites I need IE so I have that on my computer too. It would be too inconvenient for most of our lives to stand on principle and never view sites that are IE biased.
If Windows is like Budweiser, does that make Lindows parallel to Bud Lite?
The point is that if they want to do a spam archive, you would expect them to do some minimal research. This page clearly shows that SpamArchive.org has not done the following basic background work:
1. Told me who they are so that I might trust them.
2. Told me anything about their technology/database so that I might know if it is really going to be useful. For all I know they haven't even thought about the collection, storage and retrival issues behind dealing with this.
3. Collected the archives supposedly uncoordinated that already exist and collated them.
4. Added even one link to a relevant site. You would assume that to undertake such a project they would at least have visited a few sites before concluding there was nothing out there. Posting couple of relevant URLs wouldn't be too much work.
In short, I am not impressed that someone who can do 20 minutes of work is the same someone who can undertake the huge project proposed here. It looks like they think that somehow all they need is for people to send them information by e-mail, and for a few other people to volunteer to do the work. Not a promising start.
Even I know how to buy a domain name and write a few paragraphs of text on a white background. There is nothing about this archive to hint at its origin or credibility. This is a /. worthy story?
Most individual users would put up the extra $30 for an operating system by someone already recognized as an industry leader, rather than Xandros, a newcomer. To me the exra $30 sounds worth it.