I hope it works better than their (current, at least) video player controls. I actually kind of like the voice control for simple tasks ("xbox, pause." "xbox, play.") but just feel stupid trying to fast forward ("xbox, fast forward." "faster." "Faster." "Faster!" "FASTER GODDAMMIT!") I actually felt a bit dirty doing it, especially after a coworker in the next cube said it reminded him of this video.
As much as I like trashing the Kinect, though, it does have a huge potential - they just need to improve the fundamentals a bit and find a *real* use for it beyond the mostly awful heavy-handed game control schemes currently out there. Also, from what I have seen they have made big sacrifices to the presentation of information and general UI usability for controller/remote navigation schemes in order to make one UI for all input methods (big fat buttons for gesture clicking and few selectable items onscreen to limit voice grammar complexity) - which is a shame for apps that no one wants to flail around like an idiot control anyway...
Of course you can't prevent the user from intentionally or negligently infecting their own computer, just like you can't prevent them from smashing it with a sledgehammer.
But with sandboxing you can leave it up to the runtime to tell the user what the app is trying to do, and what permissions it would like granted, so that at least there much less of a chance of being "tricked". If a runtime displays a clear dialog box that says "this application wants access to all files on your hard drive. This is a dangerous permission and should only be granted if it is highly trusted" and you allow it anyway without trusting the app, you get what you deserve...
He's right about the "typically run by competent users" (or in the case of embedded devices, typically built by competent engineers) but "interesting attack target"?
Hackers and botnet owners would love to have access to the millions of always-on Linux servers (often in colos with huge bandwidth available) or the hundreds of millions of TVs, BD players, and (again, always-on) DVRs that run Linux.
That problem has been addressed many times already... sandboxing. The runtime/VM will still have full access, of course, but can control exactly what resources the sandboxed apps can access. That's the one of the major goals of Java,.Net, Flash, DHTML/Javascript, etc.
Don't really need psychic powers when I have spent the last 6+ months working on a Kinect-enabled XBox application - I guarantee I have more experience with the details of Kinect as a motion control and voice command input device than *you* do.
Besides, of course people post their opinions on the topic, that's the point. Your useless snark pointing out that obvious fact contributes nothing to the topic. Have a nice day!
You were comparing it to first round VC just a minute ago!
Wow - again - YOU were the one who brought up "VC", and then for some reason changed the question...
And now that i've posed you a question - that you don't seem to have been able to answer - you're off on a tangent about how this is too little an amount for even seed funding.
Not a tangent, it's relevant and true...
Well the fact is if you've got an idea and want to develop it into a prototype to market to VCs then 20k to sustain yourself (even a small team of 2 or 3) for 3 months while you do it is plenty especially when everything, even the investors, are provided to you.
Yeah, I think I mentioned on another thread - you might be able to get a couple naive starving new college grads to accept this, but for the experienced engineers in the valley they are either going to self-fund/work for *large* equity over pay or expect a decent salary for their efforts - taking neither makes no sense.
How much exactly do you think you would need for this? What's the amount you would require for such a project and how much would you give up to get it?
You want real numbers, sure, what the heck. Joined a startup in 2003 - ~3 people working on it for the first 6 months, 6-9 people for the next year, with a few small angel/seed investments totaling about $1M, maybe 15-20% equity given up? Barely enough to pay office space, capital, and minimal salary over time. Sold for a bit over $10M, so angel investors made 50-100% profit. Sure glad we didn't value the entire company at about $330k from the beginning, wouldn't have made out very well on that. But luckily the founders weren't morons. That's just one example, of course - most startups fail miserably, and a select few strike it big. But if you go into it *expecting* less than this you were better off not bothering...
Still think it was armchair commentary, but I guess I was bored. Now I'm tired. Have fun, hope you take a chance and find your own successful startup some day, just try not to give it all away to investors for the equivalent of a couple months salary...
Ok, my comment was slightly harsh:) What games have you liked? I have tried a couple and they are awful. Two examples:
Kinect Adventures: brain dead version of dodgeball (but where you try to get hit). Fun for about 3 minutes. And a whitewater rafting game where you control a raft by leaning and *jumping*? Seriously?
Forza 4: basically you sit in front of the TV holding your arms out to steer. The missing part? Pedals! it can't detect that, so it just decides to accelerate & brake for you. Even stupider is the "head tracking", which changes the view based on you turning your head left and right. Sounds like a great idea, except that if you look left, you can't see your TV! Amazing...
I'm sure some of the dance games can be fun if you are into that, but that's a pretty niche market.
So what exactly do you expect to give up for your seed funding then? This is pretty much the identical system as used by YCombinator.
Seriously... $20k ISN'T seed funding, it's petty cash. Joining a startup often means taking a pay cut in return for equity, but if you are working for nothing and giving away significant equity you aren't doing it right. And YCombinator? Yeah...
Clearly this is all rhetorical for you. I have worked at 3 startups, one that failed two that were acquired. Just trying to give some useful input on the thread, and not really interested in armchair commentary...
You still don't give up 6% of your company for $20k if you ever hope to have anything left for yourself after a first round of VC funding. $20k won't cover 2 months of salary for one person in a decent engineering job. And your question was "what do you think you give up in return for VC normally", not "what would you give up for a really small angel investment".
Anyway, I agree, tradition is an aspect of culture, but neither is a "value", and I have yet to be morally judged for putting oranges or cranberries in my salad. And *I* wasn't the one bringing up the swear words or all caps, snark you very much!
Last startup I was at, it was 25% for $10M initially. Do the math - 100/6 * 20k = $330k. If you think that's the potential total value of your idea, it's really not worth pursuing.
Clearly neither you or the other poster you are arguing with even RTFA, so really you are both talking out of your collective asses...
This isn't even Microsoft taking a share or paying out money, it's TechStars, a seed-stage VC company. They have been following this $20k for 6% model for the last 5 years (though I do agree with you that it's an absolutely HORRIBLE deal). Apparently they just convinced Microsoft to support them in this program in exchange for getting people working on interesting ideas for Kinect.
Maybe they would recruit a few young, naive new college grads with this, but IMO 6% is huge for a silly $20,000.
At the last startup I worked at, I think the first round VCs got about 25% for $10M. Second round was even lower percentage. I guess it's just a matter of how big you want to take it, but with $20k for 6% you are valuing your entire company at about $330,000 - an amount so low they are making you take almost all of the risk (assuming you are a decent engineer, you are sacrificing ~$125-150k or more *per year* in salary, benefits, 401k, etc to create a startup, since they aren't even paying enough to scratch the surface of that).
Watch the Youtube link below. X-rays for surgery were useful in about 1985. Clearly it's much easier for a doctor to rotate and scan through the layers of a CT or MRI on their own rather than have to explain every little way the want it manipulated.
Sure, VCs would take more than 6%, but in doing so they usually fund your entire company's operations for a couple of years. $20,000 won't cover 2 months of salary for one good engineer.
if I eat a serving of tomato does it count toward my recommended daily servings of fruits or my recommended daily servings of vegetables?
Does it really matter? The whole food pyramid and nutritional guidelines are just simplifications for people who can't understand enough basic biology to know "food" is just made up of a mix of carbohydrates, proteins/amino acids, fatty acids, soluble/insoluble fiber, vitamins and essential minerals, etc.
The whole point of this thread is that vegetable is a subjective term (culinarily and nutritionally) - and so is a nutritionist's guidelines (often changing based on the nutritional/diet fad study of the month). Tomatoes have more sugars than most other "vegetables", and more vitamins and antioxidants than most other "fruits". So most nutritionists probably wouldn't care which category you throw them in, as long as you eat them regularly.
I assume that you probably already know this, so you are perfectly capable of using your common sense and planning your own menus:)
"Hostage"? There are going to be a lot of pissed off Al Qaeda in Pakistan. "We have been waiting two weeks for the ransom on this journalist, why won't they reply to our texts!"
Home-grown vine-ripened tomatoes can be sweeter than a lot of the "traditional" fruits out there. Commercial tomatoes are picked green and gassed with ethylene to turn red without developing any more sugars that normally happens when ripening.
Since a lot of the naive reasoning to leave Earth is that we are destroying the ecosystem, even terraforming other planets in the solar system seems far fetched for a long time. If humans have the capability of turning Mars into a livable planet, they will already have the capability to make sure Earth is a livable planet, as well....
Biology - Vegetable =leaf, stem, or root of a plant.
Sorry, just not true. There is no scientific biological definition of "vegetable" - it's purely a common/culinary term.
Culinary - Fruit = Sweet taste, normally served at the end of the meal
Vegetable = mild or bland taste, served with main course
This one is actually even stupider. Not sure I should bother, but... what is a pepper? It's a biological fruit and culinary vegetable, but fits neither of your silly definitions.
First, corn is iffy. There are botanical definitions that exclude it from being a fruit, as the fruit wall is virtually nonexistent. And peanuts? You've got to be kidding me. Yeah, sure, it's a fruiting plant, but you can't seriously tell me you eat the shell. It's an edible seed.
Well, first - he called peanuts a legume, not a fruit. And second - salted peanut shells are awesome! I don't eat a ton of them but they are great fiber and pretty damn tasty in moderation (try one if you don't believe me).
And there is not really much debate on corn... as he said, the kernels are a caryopsis, which is clearly a "fruit" by biological definition.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope it works better than their (current, at least) video player controls. I actually kind of like the voice control for simple tasks ("xbox, pause." "xbox, play.") but just feel stupid trying to fast forward ("xbox, fast forward." "faster." "Faster." "Faster!" "FASTER GODDAMMIT!") I actually felt a bit dirty doing it, especially after a coworker in the next cube said it reminded him of this video.
The Count Censored
As much as I like trashing the Kinect, though, it does have a huge potential - they just need to improve the fundamentals a bit and find a *real* use for it beyond the mostly awful heavy-handed game control schemes currently out there. Also, from what I have seen they have made big sacrifices to the presentation of information and general UI usability for controller/remote navigation schemes in order to make one UI for all input methods (big fat buttons for gesture clicking and few selectable items onscreen to limit voice grammar complexity) - which is a shame for apps that no one wants to flail around like an idiot control anyway...
Of course you can't prevent the user from intentionally or negligently infecting their own computer, just like you can't prevent them from smashing it with a sledgehammer.
But with sandboxing you can leave it up to the runtime to tell the user what the app is trying to do, and what permissions it would like granted, so that at least there much less of a chance of being "tricked". If a runtime displays a clear dialog box that says "this application wants access to all files on your hard drive. This is a dangerous permission and should only be granted if it is highly trusted" and you allow it anyway without trusting the app, you get what you deserve...
He's right about the "typically run by competent users" (or in the case of embedded devices, typically built by competent engineers) but "interesting attack target"?
Hackers and botnet owners would love to have access to the millions of always-on Linux servers (often in colos with huge bandwidth available) or the hundreds of millions of TVs, BD players, and (again, always-on) DVRs that run Linux.
That problem has been addressed many times already... sandboxing. The runtime/VM will still have full access, of course, but can control exactly what resources the sandboxed apps can access. That's the one of the major goals of Java, .Net, Flash, DHTML/Javascript, etc.
Don't really need psychic powers when I have spent the last 6+ months working on a Kinect-enabled XBox application - I guarantee I have more experience with the details of Kinect as a motion control and voice command input device than *you* do.
Besides, of course people post their opinions on the topic, that's the point. Your useless snark pointing out that obvious fact contributes nothing to the topic. Have a nice day!
Halal? Please tell me you are joking now... your original rant was that this is a *Western* site :)
You were comparing it to first round VC just a minute ago!
Wow - again - YOU were the one who brought up "VC", and then for some reason changed the question...
And now that i've posed you a question - that you don't seem to have been able to answer - you're off on a tangent about how this is too little an amount for even seed funding.
Not a tangent, it's relevant and true...
Well the fact is if you've got an idea and want to develop it into a prototype to market to VCs then 20k to sustain yourself (even a small team of 2 or 3) for 3 months while you do it is plenty especially when everything, even the investors, are provided to you.
Yeah, I think I mentioned on another thread - you might be able to get a couple naive starving new college grads to accept this, but for the experienced engineers in the valley they are either going to self-fund/work for *large* equity over pay or expect a decent salary for their efforts - taking neither makes no sense.
How much exactly do you think you would need for this? What's the amount you would require for such a project and how much would you give up to get it?
You want real numbers, sure, what the heck. Joined a startup in 2003 - ~3 people working on it for the first 6 months, 6-9 people for the next year, with a few small angel/seed investments totaling about $1M, maybe 15-20% equity given up? Barely enough to pay office space, capital, and minimal salary over time. Sold for a bit over $10M, so angel investors made 50-100% profit. Sure glad we didn't value the entire company at about $330k from the beginning, wouldn't have made out very well on that. But luckily the founders weren't morons. That's just one example, of course - most startups fail miserably, and a select few strike it big. But if you go into it *expecting* less than this you were better off not bothering...
Still think it was armchair commentary, but I guess I was bored. Now I'm tired. Have fun, hope you take a chance and find your own successful startup some day, just try not to give it all away to investors for the equivalent of a couple months salary...
Ok, my comment was slightly harsh :) What games have you liked? I have tried a couple and they are awful. Two examples:
Kinect Adventures: brain dead version of dodgeball (but where you try to get hit). Fun for about 3 minutes. And a whitewater rafting game where you control a raft by leaning and *jumping*? Seriously?
Forza 4: basically you sit in front of the TV holding your arms out to steer. The missing part? Pedals! it can't detect that, so it just decides to accelerate & brake for you. Even stupider is the "head tracking", which changes the view based on you turning your head left and right. Sounds like a great idea, except that if you look left, you can't see your TV! Amazing...
I'm sure some of the dance games can be fun if you are into that, but that's a pretty niche market.
So what exactly do you expect to give up for your seed funding then? This is pretty much the identical system as used by YCombinator.
Seriously... $20k ISN'T seed funding, it's petty cash. Joining a startup often means taking a pay cut in return for equity, but if you are working for nothing and giving away significant equity you aren't doing it right. And YCombinator? Yeah...
Clearly this is all rhetorical for you. I have worked at 3 startups, one that failed two that were acquired. Just trying to give some useful input on the thread, and not really interested in armchair commentary...
You still don't give up 6% of your company for $20k if you ever hope to have anything left for yourself after a first round of VC funding. $20k won't cover 2 months of salary for one person in a decent engineering job. And your question was "what do you think you give up in return for VC normally", not "what would you give up for a really small angel investment".
You're welcome, Major... oh, too easy.
Anyway, I agree, tradition is an aspect of culture, but neither is a "value", and I have yet to be morally judged for putting oranges or cranberries in my salad. And *I* wasn't the one bringing up the swear words or all caps, snark you very much!
Last startup I was at, it was 25% for $10M initially. Do the math - 100/6 * 20k = $330k. If you think that's the potential total value of your idea, it's really not worth pursuing.
Clearly neither you or the other poster you are arguing with even RTFA, so really you are both talking out of your collective asses...
This isn't even Microsoft taking a share or paying out money, it's TechStars, a seed-stage VC company. They have been following this $20k for 6% model for the last 5 years (though I do agree with you that it's an absolutely HORRIBLE deal). Apparently they just convinced Microsoft to support them in this program in exchange for getting people working on interesting ideas for Kinect.
Maybe they would recruit a few young, naive new college grads with this, but IMO 6% is huge for a silly $20,000.
At the last startup I worked at, I think the first round VCs got about 25% for $10M. Second round was even lower percentage. I guess it's just a matter of how big you want to take it, but with $20k for 6% you are valuing your entire company at about $330,000 - an amount so low they are making you take almost all of the risk (assuming you are a decent engineer, you are sacrificing ~$125-150k or more *per year* in salary, benefits, 401k, etc to create a startup, since they aren't even paying enough to scratch the surface of that).
Watch the Youtube link below. X-rays for surgery were useful in about 1985. Clearly it's much easier for a doctor to rotate and scan through the layers of a CT or MRI on their own rather than have to explain every little way the want it manipulated.
$20,000 for 6% of your business?!
Sure, VCs would take more than 6%, but in doing so they usually fund your entire company's operations for a couple of years. $20,000 won't cover 2 months of salary for one good engineer.
You clearly haven't tried the Kinect. Currently it satisfies neither of those.
Wait, your preferred salad ingredients are now "cultural values"?
I know you were dying to post your silly rant, but you could have waited for a better thread so you didn't look like such a fool...
if I eat a serving of tomato does it count toward my recommended daily servings of fruits or my recommended daily servings of vegetables?
Does it really matter? The whole food pyramid and nutritional guidelines are just simplifications for people who can't understand enough basic biology to know "food" is just made up of a mix of carbohydrates, proteins/amino acids, fatty acids, soluble/insoluble fiber, vitamins and essential minerals, etc.
The whole point of this thread is that vegetable is a subjective term (culinarily and nutritionally) - and so is a nutritionist's guidelines (often changing based on the nutritional/diet fad study of the month). Tomatoes have more sugars than most other "vegetables", and more vitamins and antioxidants than most other "fruits". So most nutritionists probably wouldn't care which category you throw them in, as long as you eat them regularly.
I assume that you probably already know this, so you are perfectly capable of using your common sense and planning your own menus :)
"Hostage"? There are going to be a lot of pissed off Al Qaeda in Pakistan. "We have been waiting two weeks for the ransom on this journalist, why won't they reply to our texts!"
You need to grow your own tomatoes, then.
Home-grown vine-ripened tomatoes can be sweeter than a lot of the "traditional" fruits out there. Commercial tomatoes are picked green and gassed with ethylene to turn red without developing any more sugars that normally happens when ripening.
Since a lot of the naive reasoning to leave Earth is that we are destroying the ecosystem, even terraforming other planets in the solar system seems far fetched for a long time. If humans have the capability of turning Mars into a livable planet, they will already have the capability to make sure Earth is a livable planet, as well....
That's no more "traditional" than your very Western definition of "salad" and "dessert." The other 80% of the planet has other traditions...
Biology - Vegetable =leaf, stem, or root of a plant.
Sorry, just not true. There is no scientific biological definition of "vegetable" - it's purely a common/culinary term.
Culinary - Fruit = Sweet taste, normally served at the end of the meal
Vegetable = mild or bland taste, served with main course
This one is actually even stupider. Not sure I should bother, but... what is a pepper? It's a biological fruit and culinary vegetable, but fits neither of your silly definitions.
First, corn is iffy. There are botanical definitions that exclude it from being a fruit, as the fruit wall is virtually nonexistent. And peanuts? You've got to be kidding me. Yeah, sure, it's a fruiting plant, but you can't seriously tell me you eat the shell. It's an edible seed.
Well, first - he called peanuts a legume, not a fruit. And second - salted peanut shells are awesome! I don't eat a ton of them but they are great fiber and pretty damn tasty in moderation (try one if you don't believe me).
And there is not really much debate on corn... as he said, the kernels are a caryopsis, which is clearly a "fruit" by biological definition.