You're a publisher. You are in business. You publish a magazine. Thus you have a legal responsibility to understand copyright. You still don't get that taking something EVEN WITH THE AUTHOR'S NAME INTACT is copyright infringement, and that just because it doesn't say "DON'T STEAL ME OR I SUE YOU" it doesn't mean it's okay to pinch someone else work. You didn't ask, so you don't get. It doesn't really matter about offering compensation after the event because, by your own public admission, you did something that you shouldn't have. That author has the legal right to block your publication and do all sorts of nasties to you because of that. A lot of copyright cases end up with a financial settlement but that's not *required* or even *satisfactory* to resolution of a problem unless the injured party agrees to that.
"I copied your article from the Times into my book word-for-word, but didn't bother to ask - sorry about that, here's some cash!" - it doesn't work like that, and if you'd asked, the author most likely would have been more than happy to let you have it (your name in a published book = wow) but equally they may be under some contractual restrictions regarding what they can do with that text, they may have licensed it from someone else. But you don't know because you didn't ask.
Then you go and make an essentially naive and unresearched opinion that shows you've never understood copyright law (it doesn't need an attribution or even a copyright symbol to be subject to copyright). You don't immediately retract or explain. Admittedly then you are harassed unnecessarily because of a stupid quote that you stupidly said, but the core of the problem is that you're a publisher that infringed copyrighted content (as far as the world knows, because you've just admitted that). *That's* why advertisers won't want to deal with you, because you could be out of business tomorrow if it turns out that you've been doing it for years because you do not understand copyright law and finally it's caught up with you. It's not a big deal - even the big papers do it - there have been a couple of "whoops, we used your photo without asking" cases in the national press in the UK lately and it's ended up in court or in large settlements.
The problem was not understanding the law surrounding the business you were in. The rest of the "admission" is just emotional padding to try to instil guilt. A lot of people are out of work at the moment, but nowhere near the most in history (and considering the population is ever-growing, that means this *isn't* the worst it's ever been by a long shot), and trying to push that angle is just crass. And we're not talking about someone who wants to bankrupt you, we're talking about someone asking for fair recompense for an infringing act that you just admitted you did.
Nobody cares about the damn recipe, you just made a fool of yourself by not understanding copyright (and in your business, that's like a taxi driver not knowing what a brake is), and then propagated that by making hugely incorrect public statements and trying to paint people as bad.
If you've gone out of business because of your own misunderstanding of a well-known law within your professional field, that's really your fault and no-one else's (and I fail to believe that this one incident is enough to stop the business unless it's through your own unwillingness to actually continue - you were already far, far, overworked but couldn't afford to hire help - sounds exactly like a business on the edge to me, and this was just the straw that broke the camel's back). In future, consult lawyers, don't make public statements, and learn how to do your own job - not painting everyone else as the enemy might help as well, also having a bit more of a steel jaw when it comes to random people on Facebook etc. commenting on you.
I don't really care about copyright and have had websites that I've written stolen and copied byte-for-byte onto confusingly similar domains. I threatened too, and got them removed
"I love you" and "Die, scum" should never be "acted" in the same tone of voice with the same facial expression. Shame, because why he appeared in the Tomb Raider movie he WAS the only one that could actually act.
Thank God, if it keeps Daniel Craig off the screen. I think I'd much rather we spent our money on viruses than an actor so wooden that he must worry about termites.
Actually the table I was talking about was much more simplistic and seemed to just detect a "tap" motion by a quick change in size of the hand (camera was mounted above). Thus a quickly-shrinking hand blob was seen as a "click". It has problems with some small children's hands who hadn't got the hang of holding their palm flat under the image at that moment (so the camera sees an entirely-too-brief sideways images of a hand become a flat hand and doesn't know to interpret it as a "click").
Putting your hand two feet above the table so it cast a shadow on the bit you wanted (projector was mounted right next to camera) and dipping it quickly produced the same "click" response as actually tapping the table that the image was projected on (which was a bit of white MDF).
And I think computer vision is something too simplistic at the moment - it's image filters, edge detection and tweaking of tolerances. Useful for counting sperm to the nearest half-million, but not something that'll approach human-levels of interpretation of the image until, well, the computer is convincingly human. If the Turing Test were to comprise of questions about "what's in this image", it'll be solved in the same time that the plain-line-of-text Turing Test will fool most people into thinking it's actually human.
So we have depth data, and webcam imagery of the same place. Where to go now? That's the problem - the field of image processing isn't actually that well developed that we can do things really useful with it. Sure, the hand-waving paint demonstration is cool but you could do that with a webcam ten years ago if you had the right algorithms. The Kinect only adds the depth-map through some (admittedly clever) physics but that just adds a third dimension that needs to be analysed, filtered, recognised and interpreted.
Yes, we can spot if someone has one hand or two in the air but we always could. We can follow a particular point of interest with some vague accuracy (watch where the bloke's hands go in that green-line-painting demo and what the software draws - they are often out by the whole width of a hand, and lag behind his actual movements) but we always could. We can colourise the images and make them look cool (black for near, pink for a bit away, green for a long way away) but again, that's always been available just with slightly different technology.
The problem we have is that hardware access and access to raw camera data is INCREDIBLY easy compared to actually doing anything useful with them. The green-line-drawing problem is no different to the 200-line VB app I saw in the 1990's that could do handwriting recognition from a shaky pen/mouse stroke - it works, mostly, if you don't need complete accuracy but it's still easily confused and why would you need to do that in the first place? The hard part is now actually interpreting that data and that relies on computer visualisation which is regarded in the same breath as "voice recognition" (which I have *never* got to work well enough for me and I don't have a particularly strong / incomprehensible accent). Yes, you can do a demo that you think looks useful but actually, apart from the odd toy project, there's not much substance underneath it all.
Yeah, you probably can write a quick Wii-Sports-a-like that's fun to play but you probably always could. And the difference is several dozen thousand lines of code to vaguely recognise a particular, fixed, object with limited parameters using what is essentially a webcam image with a little more data (involving processing several 640x480 and one 320x240 image in fractions of a second to obtain a particular data point), or just reading some single-axis acceleration data from a chip that spits it out (e.g. Wiimote) in a format you can use directly and provides roughly the same, if not better, accuracy when it comes to interpreting the correct movement.
The Kinect isn't anything special or revolutionary - sure, it's a nice toy and the depth-function is the best part, but that just adds a whole other dimension (actually a whole other 2D set of data because it obviously can do true 3D) to analyse and try to interpret - you coulda got that with a rapidly scanning laser or even just analysing two stereoscopic images properly. Certain filters and image-processing techniques can form edges, boundaries, object-approximations etc. from the resulting data but they always could and overall you still have to solve the vital problem - what to do with the existing data that you can't already do somehow? Follow hands for cool interactive-whiteboard-like presentations? I saw a multi-touch table at the Museum of London yesterday that did exactly that from a projected image and a single returned 2D webcam image. Follow some object to play pseudo-games? We've been doing that for decades but admittedly required things like reflective spots - Hollywood makes ENORMOUS such of such things, so they might be interested but chances are that this particular toy is way under-performing compared to something their technical guys could knock up in a real studio.
It's a good thing for independent toy-like games but look at the target market - someone who owns a Kinect and a PC (and presumably a 360, but not necessarily), knows it can be plugged into PC, has a knowledge of such independent projects and decide
I haven't bought anything in a real store for ages, PC-games-wise. Why bother? All they stock is the expensive shit and anything older than 3 months is in the "Pre-owned", scratched-to-death pile and still costs 2/3rds of its original price. Plus a lot of PC gear can't be played second-hand anyway (and not because of Steam but because of other DRM) so there is no "cheap" game available in those shops.
I just order a retail box online (rare anyway) or I just buy from Steam or GOG. Stop charging me £60+ for a game that'll last a couple of hours and start stocking things that sell. Steam make a killing by selling things like PopCap games, World of Goo, Altitude, etc. - I never, ever see those in the shops and if I do, it's on a shelf in a big department store, not in the "games" store. You aren't complaining about XBox Live or PSN, so you can't really complain about Steam either. The fact is, though, that anything you do stock in my price range I'm more likely to be buying it online - quicker, cheaper, easier.
Give it up - either charge sensible prices, increase your stock range to appeal to customers or damn well concentrate on games console where you make an absolute FORTUNE.
Your family needs to get out more. And you can't really use "we have to perform copyright infringement" as a requirement for a home to have 100Mbps service.
That said, I agree in general that an average home can easily hit 100Mbps requirements without noticing - iPlayer, Wii, Xbox, general browsing (without optimised caches etc.), online gaming, PVR things like Sky Player, Slingbox etc. all add up. If you're not tech-literate and not counting, it's quite easy to bung up a connection like that - not to mention things like OnLive when they come online.
That said, I'm currently running a primary school for 450 users off two 24Mbps ADSL lines that we load-balance at our end. And even that's a bit overkill in my eyes - we were just trying to future-proof ourselves a little with the last upgrade and provide more reliability than speed (we already cut our traffic by 66% just by putting a transparent squid cache in place). For a while when we were in between ISP's we ran the whole place off a couple of 3G dongles and nobody even noticed.
No-one "needs" it because it's just a luxury utility. But, yeah, even under ordinary usage a large family can hit the limits very, very quickly.
No, but it's the same as me saying that I'm in the US and I visited Northern America recently, or I'm in China and I visited Asia recently. Europe is a continent, the US is not (despite its ambitions). ( That said, it's obviously implied to mean "elsewhere in Europe", or "Mainland Europe". And surveys shows that most English (UK, but that's another geography lesson) people don't class themselves as European. How would you like it if we referred to the US using the same word as we do for Canada and thus didn't distinguish between the two of you? How many people think English or even Welsh or Scottish when they refer to their European friends? The UK / Europe is a very difficult subject sometimes. Hell, calling a Welshman English is likely to incur substantial dental bills on it's own, and they are both "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", in fact they are both Great Britain.
Tip: Don't refer to English people as European if you're doing business with them. It can leave a bad taste.
I'm in the UK. There are stories every other week about theft of metals like railway lines and signalling, telephone cabling, even manhole covers etc. for sale on the black market. It costs the companies involved millions each year and they have special insurance for it. This is part of the reason that BT uses as much fibre as they can now and are pushing FTTH or FTTC.
I was stunned to see copper guttering on the outside of buildings when I visited Europe recently. There is no way that something like that would last two seconds in the UK without someone just pulling it off and walking away with it.
My old laptop had an RTL Mini-PCI chip in it that let it serve as a wireless access point even under Windows. You just run the utility, switched to AP mode and filled in the details. You could even then forward it onto another wireless network using a wireless dongle, or do fancy things along the lines of "range-extending" an existing network.
Setting up a hotspot for friends on a 3G dongle took about 5 minutes, and I would't have to have anything "suspicious" looking on my desktop to be inside the cafe and rerouting everyone's connection with a local hotspot identical to, or confusingly similar with, any one I can find.
If you don't trust your connection to the Internet, you need to make sure that you're using a VPN and suitable firewall to ensure that only the things you send are going out the interfaces you want, and properly encrypted. This is the same whether you're at home, in a cafe, round a friend's house, or using a remote VPN to do it (can you trust the access from the VPN endpoint to the general Internet?).
People always find it surprising for me to tell them that VPN'ing into my home PC which is hard-wired to an Internet connection is still one of the best methods to get a secure connection over any medium. And most people just naturally assume that "a firewall or something" will somehow stop their POP3 passwords being read.
First, we get an article that consists of one idiot posting on a blog who openly admits that he clicked delete himself on the popup and thus caused the problem in the first place. If it had been a critical set of Windows backups, the same thing would have happened, or even the System Restore folders.
Then, I realise it's an article by kdawson who I have deliberately blocked because all their submissions have glaring errors and omissions or are nothing more than rumour, but they've handed it off to another person to post on the site. I BLOCKED kdawson for a reason. Don't start slipping their posts around that block which you enable me to use yourselves.
Never seen a program fill up disk because it just doesn't stop writing? Never seen a program delete local files that it has permission to? Never seen a program probe hardware that it was perfectly allowed to but somehow manages to bugger things up?
I agree that, in theory, the OS is at fault for allowing it. But there are some things that no modern OS monitors by default that can easily stop things working properly, and things that no home user would be expected to have restricted on their non-admin Windows account (which is presumably what games SHOULD be run under in the majority of circumstances). (Virtually) Nobody lives in a chroot-bottle world for all their games in real-life. Have you ever filled up your Windows so much that it can't find space for swap and hence crashes, and on reboot can't start up, requiring command-line removal of the overgrown files in order to make the system work again? I have, several times, with a buggy application that just kept allocating for log files and, when under error conditions, just kept spewing errors at the disk-write rate. How about programs responding to hotkeys in preference to the applications that handle them meaning a bad crash can cause all sorts of hell with the keyboard? Even on the best modern operating systems with the best patches, the permissions we give to games allow them to do an awful lot of damage.
Have you ever had a piece of software probe hardware gently and manage to make it lock up either completely or to the point where it's impractical to wait for things to terminate? It's not that tricky when you're pushing things into GPU's. And you only need to slag the hard disk on certain machines and it will kill the responsiveness to the point where people will just hard-off the system rather than wait. That's "damaging" to the machine - anything that causes a filesystem check is potentially incredibly dangerous.
What about a program that deletes your savegames, or deletes files in your home directories, or modifies the registry in perfectly innocent (but unmonitored) ways that cause buggy programs to run at startup, or destroys your file associations, or just causes Windows to go nuts when you read those entries?
It's piss-easy to make a program that can bring almost any OS to its knees if executed as any user unless you're on an extremely well-managed system with a good admin. It's also trivial for such things to happen in the normal course of a badly-written program running (where it doesn't MEAN to do those things, e.g. it just wants to log errors, but then it gets errors while logging, which it then dutifully logs, etc.). Hell, it's usually possible to make the desktop almost unusable just playing with screen resolutions, mouse control and things like hiding the mouse cursors, ignoring termination requests, playing a looping sound that won't quit, etc.
In an "ideal" operating system, it would be trivial to recover from a damaging program. In real-life ones, it's not so easy (How's the OOM killer on Linux doing? They were on about their 18th rewrite last time I looked... minor program with permissions can causes DoS and kill processes that were never intended to be killed unless the machine is managed perfectly). In home setups, just about anything can take down the system, and it's always PARTLY the fault of the application too, because other games / programs DON'T do that.
Windows has a bad idea of what programs should be allowed to do and doesn't cover 1% of the avenues it should - but equally games should NOT be crashing so hard with filesystem handles open without at least attempting to clean up first, but I've seen programs do exactly that (and thus render those files undeletable - even if they are causing problems - without a reboot).
A program crash is so named because the results can still be catastrophic. Otherwise we'd just call it a program "bump".
If online play diminishes after only a year, can't have been that good a game to play online in the first place.
The original CS is over 10 years old and (unless there's a huge release of a new game) tends to sit atop the "Player minutes / month" stats on Steam most of the time, and is always in the top 10.
There will never be a time when everyone thinks that way - you always get fools willing to do such things. Also, there are things such as beta-tests, demos etc. that combat the situation such that you don't get a reputation for buggy code before a game is released.
And if people were all like me it would just mean that a company would have to build a reputation for reasonably bug-free software first. Like all the games that I *do* play because I know they'll be okay - It's not an industry-killing idea... it's like saying that nobody will buy a newspaper if they always have biased content. Of course that's not true, but someone with a brain will still avoid such a newspaper.
I do have a personal blacklist of companies that have screwed me over, that I think are trying to screw me over, and those that are doing things so incredibly stupid / poor that I want to avoid them. It hasn't made me miss out on any big titles that I later have to bite my tongue and go back and try, and it hasn't made things impossible to buy, and it's saved me a lot of money. A lot of people I know do exactly the same in lots of areas. Would you buy a car without trying it first? How about some clothes? You "can't" return video games so it's just prudent to subject them to more scrutiny before buying - and that means knowing they work as expected. Play a demo, play a friend's copy, play the in-store demo, etc. and decide. Don't piss your money away on something because it uses a brand name of a game you previously enjoyed, or because it's been hyped in some magazines - in every case, that sort of reputation comes to an end once a company realises it can just cash in on the name for 2-3 buggy follow-up titles before anyone notices.
I'm not saying "Don't buy games", I'm saying "Don't buy ANYTHING without knowing what you're buying, and don't buy things you KNOW are crap just because they have a brand attached to them."
Worse than that - how about a lightbulb that, when it blows every 2-3 hours, takes out the house fuses with it? The damage a crashing program can do to a PC (especially if running code on the GPU and / or running as admin) can be quite devastating. Even "deleting all your personal files" or "causing filesystem damage through a hard crash" can be done by a low-permission program that's badly programmed.
Personally, I think you're exactly the kind of person that lets them get away with that crap. Hell, you've put me off the game for life in a few short paragraphs. I've played PC games for decades - I've seen my share of weird bugs and had to manually debug / patch quite a few myself. I also program myself so I know the avenues that things can take and know it's not really possible to have a "bug-free" game. But what you describe is *disgusting* for a retail product. I can't remember the last time I had any of the 200+ games on my Steam account crash - possibly a weird issue with Zombie Driver not likely a "fake" joystick driver I installed that I had to debug with the programmers because they hadn't seen it before.
How you can then sum it up into a "mostly positive" review, I have no idea. To me, it reads:
- The game has issues with the majority manufacturer of PC gaming graphics cards. This causes even way over-specced machines to run the game noticeably slow to the user. - The game crashes - a lot. Over 12 crashes in 35 hours is a crash every 2-3 hours. I don't accept that from buggy shell script glue, let alone a professional game. That stops any potential purchase for me dead in the water. Hell, I get annoyed if a game crashes 12 times in its LIFE on my machine that I can't attribute to something I did wrong (I can't name a single time that Half-life (any version) or the Doom series or the Quake series or the Unreal series has ever crashed on me and they all pushed the boundaries at the time - I can name some isolated incidents of crashes in L4D2 (when I run out of swap space and kept-Alt-Tabbing to try to fix it before something went wrong) and GTA3 (when it crashed twice on me and nearly got uninstalled for doing so). - The game has obvious, easily worked around bugs in poorly scripted cut sequences that render the game unplayable unless you happen to have an earlier save. It takes a second to write check-scripts for uncompletable quests and "somehow" fix them (by respawing the items in question, or just letting the user continue). You experienced three quests which glitched to the point the game was unplayable in the single run through of the game. God knows how many a testing team should have caught on random hardware. - You had display issues with sinking monsters that could easily make it possible for you to be attacked by invisible beings that the game is drawing in the wrong place. - There are other reports besides yours that almost every aspect of the game has bugs - from display to AI to sound to loading games to just plain crashing at random.
And that's AFTER it's received a post-release patch! That's so bad that if I worked at the company, I'd be cringing and disassociating myself from it. When Frontier:Elite II was released, it had a reputation for being a very buggy game and that was nothing in comparison to what you describe.
"In short, the bugs are an irritation, but the game is very, very good."
The *gameplay* may be good, when it's not crashing, making you reload or just displaying everything in the wrong place. The game, however, sounds like shit. And those sorts of bugs are NOT an irritation - if I have to restart a program more than twice, I stop trusting it and start doing things like checking my hardware. I don't tolerate it from the operating system, I don't tolerate it for my firewall, or my office suite, why should I tolerate it from the one thing that I pick up and expect to work without me having to debug the damn machine? A crash a day is too much, for any single program. Hell, I get concerned about my machine if I get a crash each month and I run an XP image that's been following me around for the last 5 years without reinstallation on three different sets of hardware.
Stop buying and tolerating this buggy crap. If a game crashes, that means that it nearly wrote over memory it shouldn't have and could corrupt your data, your operating system, even your hardware. You were "saved" by things like DEP and similar but that doesn't mean it's acceptable.
Never, ever buy a game without the chance to test it first. I've lost count of the number of game demos that I've installed only for them to not work, be incredibly slow, to have fatal bugs, to be so dull as to be unplayable, or just be annoying/crap in their execution. I don't go on to buy the games and save myself a lot of money.
Download demos first. Play your friend's copy. Don't be the guinea pig, because in a few weeks everyone will KNOW if there are problems with the game anyway. It's really not that important or practical to have the game for the first week - the servers will be overloaded, the software will need to be patched, and other gamers won't get an "advantage" over you in the space of a week or two. Plus, the price will come down and you'll be able to get second-hand copies (if the activation system even allow you to do that).
Stop pre-ordering. Stop buying games that you can't try out first. Stop buying games from companies that screw you over. Stop listening to the hype and paid reviewers. Start being an intelligent consumer who actually makes informed purchases. It's very simple. When something is in the "under £10" category, then it can be worth a punt even if you can't find any reviews, but a full-price game? I want a demo, or at least play on a friend's machine.
Such techniques mean that I've avoided many of the big-name flops and saved myself an awful lot of wasted money. The last big disappointment for me was Black & White and then I learned not to waste money on things without waiting for others to find the problems. Now I buy my games a year or two after they come out - the initial period of zero games is hard (but with the current indie scene, that's made much easier, and a recession helped) but after that you get the best games, on hardware capable of getting their full value, avoiding all the known flops, fully patched, with still-active servers (if the servers empty within the first year, it's hard to call a game a big success) and you don't have to pay full-price.
I very much doubt anyone is silly enough to confuse Canada and America over here, it would be quite an embarrassing gaffe for a UK prime minister to do so, even for something quite minor. However, the UK is pushing for a "Silicon Valley" in London (the Docklands area is already highly connected and there are lots of datacentres there) and to do so is trying to pull in American talent and companies. I think he almost certainly means America and that it's actually an ill-advised statement that was said on the spur of the moment rather than properly researched. I can't imagine fair use ever applying to a Mickey Mouse image in the US.
Oh, and: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, (with Great Britain comprising England, Wales and Scotland). So I'm English, British and from the UK simultaneously. It's great for confusing foreigners, especially foreign post-offices, because when abroad we can just address our mail "England" and we're pretty much the only country to call ourselves that ("Inglese" etc. tend to be spelled with different starting letters). So something addressed "England", "GB", "Britain", or "UK" (or any of the longer / shorter variants) should come to the same place. And then we wonder why our postcards arrive home after we do.
"Imagine the protests that would ensue if Internet services arbitrarily blocked video only to Internet Explorer or Firefox browsers!"
Er, I can probably name half a dozen sites that do just that, and a lot worse. Anyone remember the Olympics where only Silverlight (and hence Windows) could be used to view the online streaming video? Or ITV Player which only worked on Silverlight (and was later changed to Flash because they were losing viewers left, right and center)? Or BBC iPlayer that can't download to Linux machines without hacks (and can't play online without Flash)?
This happens all day, every day. The difference is that nobody bothers to notice - it's a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you only want people with IE to watch your streams, only people with IE will watch your streams. If that fits into your business model, it's good, if it doesn't, that's bad. But, hell, that's happened since the first day that there was more than one option to display content.
For a generic video site, it's an incredibly stupid business decision to limit yourself to one possible type of viewing apparatus. For some particular content providers, that's *exactly* what you want. It's nothing new at all.
"Sophiscated model" = depth map + two offset images at resolutions where a dozen pixels could represent a major limb. The problem is not forming a "model" from the things in front of you - a $2 laser with a moving mirror does that for every sculpture and work of art in the world in a matter of seconds down to sub-millimetre accuracy - it's interpreting poor data indirectly from cheap sensors and then trying to apply any sort of sophisticated interpretation to that *automatically* given an infinity of possibilities.
Interpreting such data to actually work out what possible positions such data could represent for a single human being standing there is far beyond some of the best stuff operational in ideal lab conditions. Thus it becomes a noise-cancellation exercise and then trying to interpret two-three layers of "blobs" as a human when a human themselves probably couldn't do it with any better accuracy, and certainly not to the extent that non-trivial assumptions (e.g. standing / sitting / moving left / moving right etc. would work out). I'll be impressed if, even with the best PhD work in the world, it can reliably tell the number of people in the image given ideal circumstances and a small group of people just playing a handful of games normally. The initial reviews look like they back me up on this.
"Hard science" and "image recognition" really rub against each other rather than sit in the same sentence - plus it's more a mathematical exercise than computer science. Image processing (and just about any processing of such enormous amounts of sensor data) is *bloody* difficult for even the simplest of tasks, or else we'd be up to here in small robots that cost a fortune but *can* actually hover all your house without running over the cat (hint: the ones we currently have, can't).
Because one of your "few friends" put it somewhere where "the entire globe" could see it. Nothing new there. They've always been able to do that. And it's the "friend" that does that that's the problem, same as if your private sex photos end up in the newspaper - blame your friend, not the paper, because there were a million and one other avenues for those photos to get into the public domain and they ALL start with your friend.
And again, those sorts of HR department investigations are (in most civilised countries) completely 100% inaccurate and completely 100% illegal (because of the poor accuracy, and the right to a private life, and it being a complete breach of data protection laws - a PC just got sacked in the UK for looking up her dates on the police national computer without there being any good reason, and it's no different - those people had a right to privacy). They could stop you working there because they "don't approve" of your first name or date of birth or because you remind them of their abusive father or because you used to date their girlfriend just as easily and untraceably. That's why a lot of HR departments are basically panels of people and it would take collaboration (and thus organised corruption of the department) to subvert such things. Facebook didn't change anything there. The internet didn't change anything. Fifty years ago, it would still have been stupid to go to your home town and ask people on the street if they knew a "John Smith" and get employment references from them for every employee and that stood a MUCH better chance of someone actually talking about the right John Smith. And even if they went to your house and asked your father for a reference and he says you're out on the town, or spending the night in a police cell, that's your *father's* fault for revealing the information in the first place.
Facebook didn't change anything, it just offers a route. The choice of that route still has to come from people who take photos of you pissed out of your skull and think it's funny for them to be shown to others without your consent even if it *might* affect your employability. Or, if you work in certain professions where you KNOW some private actions will affect your career (e.g. getting pissed while working for alcoholic anonymous, or making a porn movie while working for a school) it's in your employment contract and local established law / case history and thus you're wrong in DOING those actions whether or not they are notified to your employers. Stop using Facebook as a scapegoat. The site is crap, it has a bad history of data protection and it pisses me off something chronic with its attempts to get me to give all sorts of data away - but, hell, if my friends were stupid or I was doing stuff that I "didn't want my employer to know about" anyway, that's not Facebook's fault - that's the fault of the first step of such things being made "public" - either the friend that posts the image (or even TAKES it) or the person shown affecting their employability anyway.
Open source drivers? For an MS-produced device that only works on MS-consoles and probably plays all sorts of non-standard tricks to avoid it's use as a direct PC peripheral? Oh, right. See you in several years then.
$150 actually gets you three very low-spec webcams - Two 640x480, but the other one is 320x240 IR cam almost exactly the same as the WiiMote's infrared "sensor", cheap and most laptops now have them built in "for free". Four microphones (10p throwaway electronics - hence why every laptop has one by default). The expense is in the software and image processing, always has been, always will be, and that's the bit that's INCREDIBLY hard to write accurately and have it work quickly (i.e. chances are that it's set to a particular set of criteria and won't work in odd conditions, won't be programmable and/or puts all it's work to the host processor which means some poor sod has to reinvent all the image processing algorithms without hitting a patent using what is basically three off-the-shelf webcams). I wouldn't be surprised if any "drivers" that do appear for the Kinect actually work because they have been doing this on much cheaper hardware first (e.g. a bunch of second hand 640x480 USB webcams and a multi-input sound card) - hell, getting a simple motion-detection algorithm working can be a pain - ever tried to set up Motion on a couple of cameras? You can spend your life tweaking, making image masks, etc. and that's just to say "the image changed" or "it didn't" against a background of auto-focus, auto-exposure cameras looking into someone's back yard.
And like all things reliant on software-based recognition, it will not be as accurate or as quick or as adjustable as you need it to be. Voice recognition hasn't improved much in 15 years. (But voice synthesis has because that's "easy" in comparison). My bank still can't understand when I say my account number and thus have reverted to DTMF tones to do that entry. Fingerprint recognition hasn't improved much in 15 years (with optical fingerprint scanners like one I own or the ones built into IBM laptops) - hence open-source software that's quite basic is just as good as the commercial offerings for hundreds of pounds and people are touting "iris recognition" as the next best thing (with the same problems, but new rounds of investment). 3D image recognition hasn't improved much in 15 years - robots still bounce off walls they didn't see and cars still crash with "crash-proof" control software (like the extremely expensive and hi-tech demo a few months ago where two "crash-proof" cars rammed each other incessantly over multiple trials because their image recognition and distance sensors just were not processing the data in the right way - in front of the world's press for a "crash-proof" car from a major car manufacturer.
These things has ALWAYS been in their current state, it's just that we can do more of them faster now. It doesn't mean that throwing a quad-core 3GHz at the problem somehow solves the fact that the algorithms are crap, limited and that computers can only do what we tell them and not automatically recognise shapes, sizes, colours, etc. unless told exactly how. Hell, show people a bit of software that can actually work out (vaguely reliably) if there's a cow in an random image and you'll be a millionaire.
The current state of any of these processes is enough for basic tasks (arguably enough for gaming but, again, they've been around for decades so people HAVE used them in video-controlled gaming devices for years for everything from the NES to the PC and they all flopped), but anyone who's ever used voice recognition software for a long time, or been involved with professional projects aimed at image processing will tell you - beyond a certain point, there's no "groundbreaking" tricks to use that can get you better recognition even if you trawl through PhD papers. It's all pretty much the same thing - run an image through some basic Photoshop-style filters, try to identify edges and clusters, filter based
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You're a publisher. You are in business. You publish a magazine. Thus you have a legal responsibility to understand copyright. You still don't get that taking something EVEN WITH THE AUTHOR'S NAME INTACT is copyright infringement, and that just because it doesn't say "DON'T STEAL ME OR I SUE YOU" it doesn't mean it's okay to pinch someone else work. You didn't ask, so you don't get. It doesn't really matter about offering compensation after the event because, by your own public admission, you did something that you shouldn't have. That author has the legal right to block your publication and do all sorts of nasties to you because of that. A lot of copyright cases end up with a financial settlement but that's not *required* or even *satisfactory* to resolution of a problem unless the injured party agrees to that.
"I copied your article from the Times into my book word-for-word, but didn't bother to ask - sorry about that, here's some cash!" - it doesn't work like that, and if you'd asked, the author most likely would have been more than happy to let you have it (your name in a published book = wow) but equally they may be under some contractual restrictions regarding what they can do with that text, they may have licensed it from someone else. But you don't know because you didn't ask.
Then you go and make an essentially naive and unresearched opinion that shows you've never understood copyright law (it doesn't need an attribution or even a copyright symbol to be subject to copyright). You don't immediately retract or explain. Admittedly then you are harassed unnecessarily because of a stupid quote that you stupidly said, but the core of the problem is that you're a publisher that infringed copyrighted content (as far as the world knows, because you've just admitted that). *That's* why advertisers won't want to deal with you, because you could be out of business tomorrow if it turns out that you've been doing it for years because you do not understand copyright law and finally it's caught up with you. It's not a big deal - even the big papers do it - there have been a couple of "whoops, we used your photo without asking" cases in the national press in the UK lately and it's ended up in court or in large settlements.
The problem was not understanding the law surrounding the business you were in. The rest of the "admission" is just emotional padding to try to instil guilt. A lot of people are out of work at the moment, but nowhere near the most in history (and considering the population is ever-growing, that means this *isn't* the worst it's ever been by a long shot), and trying to push that angle is just crass. And we're not talking about someone who wants to bankrupt you, we're talking about someone asking for fair recompense for an infringing act that you just admitted you did.
Nobody cares about the damn recipe, you just made a fool of yourself by not understanding copyright (and in your business, that's like a taxi driver not knowing what a brake is), and then propagated that by making hugely incorrect public statements and trying to paint people as bad.
If you've gone out of business because of your own misunderstanding of a well-known law within your professional field, that's really your fault and no-one else's (and I fail to believe that this one incident is enough to stop the business unless it's through your own unwillingness to actually continue - you were already far, far, overworked but couldn't afford to hire help - sounds exactly like a business on the edge to me, and this was just the straw that broke the camel's back). In future, consult lawyers, don't make public statements, and learn how to do your own job - not painting everyone else as the enemy might help as well, also having a bit more of a steel jaw when it comes to random people on Facebook etc. commenting on you.
I don't really care about copyright and have had websites that I've written stolen and copied byte-for-byte onto confusingly similar domains. I threatened too, and got them removed
Damn - beat me to it.
"I love you" and "Die, scum" should never be "acted" in the same tone of voice with the same facial expression. Shame, because why he appeared in the Tomb Raider movie he WAS the only one that could actually act.
Thank God, if it keeps Daniel Craig off the screen. I think I'd much rather we spent our money on viruses than an actor so wooden that he must worry about termites.
Actually the table I was talking about was much more simplistic and seemed to just detect a "tap" motion by a quick change in size of the hand (camera was mounted above). Thus a quickly-shrinking hand blob was seen as a "click". It has problems with some small children's hands who hadn't got the hang of holding their palm flat under the image at that moment (so the camera sees an entirely-too-brief sideways images of a hand become a flat hand and doesn't know to interpret it as a "click").
Putting your hand two feet above the table so it cast a shadow on the bit you wanted (projector was mounted right next to camera) and dipping it quickly produced the same "click" response as actually tapping the table that the image was projected on (which was a bit of white MDF).
47 times a day.
And I think computer vision is something too simplistic at the moment - it's image filters, edge detection and tweaking of tolerances. Useful for counting sperm to the nearest half-million, but not something that'll approach human-levels of interpretation of the image until, well, the computer is convincingly human. If the Turing Test were to comprise of questions about "what's in this image", it'll be solved in the same time that the plain-line-of-text Turing Test will fool most people into thinking it's actually human.
So we have depth data, and webcam imagery of the same place. Where to go now? That's the problem - the field of image processing isn't actually that well developed that we can do things really useful with it. Sure, the hand-waving paint demonstration is cool but you could do that with a webcam ten years ago if you had the right algorithms. The Kinect only adds the depth-map through some (admittedly clever) physics but that just adds a third dimension that needs to be analysed, filtered, recognised and interpreted.
Yes, we can spot if someone has one hand or two in the air but we always could. We can follow a particular point of interest with some vague accuracy (watch where the bloke's hands go in that green-line-painting demo and what the software draws - they are often out by the whole width of a hand, and lag behind his actual movements) but we always could. We can colourise the images and make them look cool (black for near, pink for a bit away, green for a long way away) but again, that's always been available just with slightly different technology.
The problem we have is that hardware access and access to raw camera data is INCREDIBLY easy compared to actually doing anything useful with them. The green-line-drawing problem is no different to the 200-line VB app I saw in the 1990's that could do handwriting recognition from a shaky pen/mouse stroke - it works, mostly, if you don't need complete accuracy but it's still easily confused and why would you need to do that in the first place? The hard part is now actually interpreting that data and that relies on computer visualisation which is regarded in the same breath as "voice recognition" (which I have *never* got to work well enough for me and I don't have a particularly strong / incomprehensible accent). Yes, you can do a demo that you think looks useful but actually, apart from the odd toy project, there's not much substance underneath it all.
Yeah, you probably can write a quick Wii-Sports-a-like that's fun to play but you probably always could. And the difference is several dozen thousand lines of code to vaguely recognise a particular, fixed, object with limited parameters using what is essentially a webcam image with a little more data (involving processing several 640x480 and one 320x240 image in fractions of a second to obtain a particular data point), or just reading some single-axis acceleration data from a chip that spits it out (e.g. Wiimote) in a format you can use directly and provides roughly the same, if not better, accuracy when it comes to interpreting the correct movement.
The Kinect isn't anything special or revolutionary - sure, it's a nice toy and the depth-function is the best part, but that just adds a whole other dimension (actually a whole other 2D set of data because it obviously can do true 3D) to analyse and try to interpret - you coulda got that with a rapidly scanning laser or even just analysing two stereoscopic images properly. Certain filters and image-processing techniques can form edges, boundaries, object-approximations etc. from the resulting data but they always could and overall you still have to solve the vital problem - what to do with the existing data that you can't already do somehow? Follow hands for cool interactive-whiteboard-like presentations? I saw a multi-touch table at the Museum of London yesterday that did exactly that from a projected image and a single returned 2D webcam image. Follow some object to play pseudo-games? We've been doing that for decades but admittedly required things like reflective spots - Hollywood makes ENORMOUS such of such things, so they might be interested but chances are that this particular toy is way under-performing compared to something their technical guys could knock up in a real studio.
It's a good thing for independent toy-like games but look at the target market - someone who owns a Kinect and a PC (and presumably a 360, but not necessarily), knows it can be plugged into PC, has a knowledge of such independent projects and decide
I haven't bought anything in a real store for ages, PC-games-wise. Why bother? All they stock is the expensive shit and anything older than 3 months is in the "Pre-owned", scratched-to-death pile and still costs 2/3rds of its original price. Plus a lot of PC gear can't be played second-hand anyway (and not because of Steam but because of other DRM) so there is no "cheap" game available in those shops.
I just order a retail box online (rare anyway) or I just buy from Steam or GOG. Stop charging me £60+ for a game that'll last a couple of hours and start stocking things that sell. Steam make a killing by selling things like PopCap games, World of Goo, Altitude, etc. - I never, ever see those in the shops and if I do, it's on a shelf in a big department store, not in the "games" store. You aren't complaining about XBox Live or PSN, so you can't really complain about Steam either. The fact is, though, that anything you do stock in my price range I'm more likely to be buying it online - quicker, cheaper, easier.
Give it up - either charge sensible prices, increase your stock range to appeal to customers or damn well concentrate on games console where you make an absolute FORTUNE.
Your family needs to get out more. And you can't really use "we have to perform copyright infringement" as a requirement for a home to have 100Mbps service.
That said, I agree in general that an average home can easily hit 100Mbps requirements without noticing - iPlayer, Wii, Xbox, general browsing (without optimised caches etc.), online gaming, PVR things like Sky Player, Slingbox etc. all add up. If you're not tech-literate and not counting, it's quite easy to bung up a connection like that - not to mention things like OnLive when they come online.
That said, I'm currently running a primary school for 450 users off two 24Mbps ADSL lines that we load-balance at our end. And even that's a bit overkill in my eyes - we were just trying to future-proof ourselves a little with the last upgrade and provide more reliability than speed (we already cut our traffic by 66% just by putting a transparent squid cache in place). For a while when we were in between ISP's we ran the whole place off a couple of 3G dongles and nobody even noticed.
No-one "needs" it because it's just a luxury utility. But, yeah, even under ordinary usage a large family can hit the limits very, very quickly.
Is there a chance to fix this system?
Yes. Stop buying that stuff. Amazing how that simple answer is so often overlooked.
No, but it's the same as me saying that I'm in the US and I visited Northern America recently, or I'm in China and I visited Asia recently. Europe is a continent, the US is not (despite its ambitions).
(
That said, it's obviously implied to mean "elsewhere in Europe", or "Mainland Europe". And surveys shows that most English (UK, but that's another geography lesson) people don't class themselves as European. How would you like it if we referred to the US using the same word as we do for Canada and thus didn't distinguish between the two of you? How many people think English or even Welsh or Scottish when they refer to their European friends? The UK / Europe is a very difficult subject sometimes. Hell, calling a Welshman English is likely to incur substantial dental bills on it's own, and they are both "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland", in fact they are both Great Britain.
Tip: Don't refer to English people as European if you're doing business with them. It can leave a bad taste.
I'm in the UK. There are stories every other week about theft of metals like railway lines and signalling, telephone cabling, even manhole covers etc. for sale on the black market. It costs the companies involved millions each year and they have special insurance for it. This is part of the reason that BT uses as much fibre as they can now and are pushing FTTH or FTTC.
I was stunned to see copper guttering on the outside of buildings when I visited Europe recently. There is no way that something like that would last two seconds in the UK without someone just pulling it off and walking away with it.
My old laptop had an RTL Mini-PCI chip in it that let it serve as a wireless access point even under Windows. You just run the utility, switched to AP mode and filled in the details. You could even then forward it onto another wireless network using a wireless dongle, or do fancy things along the lines of "range-extending" an existing network.
Setting up a hotspot for friends on a 3G dongle took about 5 minutes, and I would't have to have anything "suspicious" looking on my desktop to be inside the cafe and rerouting everyone's connection with a local hotspot identical to, or confusingly similar with, any one I can find.
If you don't trust your connection to the Internet, you need to make sure that you're using a VPN and suitable firewall to ensure that only the things you send are going out the interfaces you want, and properly encrypted. This is the same whether you're at home, in a cafe, round a friend's house, or using a remote VPN to do it (can you trust the access from the VPN endpoint to the general Internet?).
People always find it surprising for me to tell them that VPN'ing into my home PC which is hard-wired to an Internet connection is still one of the best methods to get a secure connection over any medium. And most people just naturally assume that "a firewall or something" will somehow stop their POP3 passwords being read.
First, we get an article that consists of one idiot posting on a blog who openly admits that he clicked delete himself on the popup and thus caused the problem in the first place. If it had been a critical set of Windows backups, the same thing would have happened, or even the System Restore folders.
Then, I realise it's an article by kdawson who I have deliberately blocked because all their submissions have glaring errors and omissions or are nothing more than rumour, but they've handed it off to another person to post on the site. I BLOCKED kdawson for a reason. Don't start slipping their posts around that block which you enable me to use yourselves.
Never seen a program fill up disk because it just doesn't stop writing? Never seen a program delete local files that it has permission to? Never seen a program probe hardware that it was perfectly allowed to but somehow manages to bugger things up?
I agree that, in theory, the OS is at fault for allowing it. But there are some things that no modern OS monitors by default that can easily stop things working properly, and things that no home user would be expected to have restricted on their non-admin Windows account (which is presumably what games SHOULD be run under in the majority of circumstances). (Virtually) Nobody lives in a chroot-bottle world for all their games in real-life. Have you ever filled up your Windows so much that it can't find space for swap and hence crashes, and on reboot can't start up, requiring command-line removal of the overgrown files in order to make the system work again? I have, several times, with a buggy application that just kept allocating for log files and, when under error conditions, just kept spewing errors at the disk-write rate. How about programs responding to hotkeys in preference to the applications that handle them meaning a bad crash can cause all sorts of hell with the keyboard? Even on the best modern operating systems with the best patches, the permissions we give to games allow them to do an awful lot of damage.
Have you ever had a piece of software probe hardware gently and manage to make it lock up either completely or to the point where it's impractical to wait for things to terminate? It's not that tricky when you're pushing things into GPU's. And you only need to slag the hard disk on certain machines and it will kill the responsiveness to the point where people will just hard-off the system rather than wait. That's "damaging" to the machine - anything that causes a filesystem check is potentially incredibly dangerous.
What about a program that deletes your savegames, or deletes files in your home directories, or modifies the registry in perfectly innocent (but unmonitored) ways that cause buggy programs to run at startup, or destroys your file associations, or just causes Windows to go nuts when you read those entries?
It's piss-easy to make a program that can bring almost any OS to its knees if executed as any user unless you're on an extremely well-managed system with a good admin. It's also trivial for such things to happen in the normal course of a badly-written program running (where it doesn't MEAN to do those things, e.g. it just wants to log errors, but then it gets errors while logging, which it then dutifully logs, etc.). Hell, it's usually possible to make the desktop almost unusable just playing with screen resolutions, mouse control and things like hiding the mouse cursors, ignoring termination requests, playing a looping sound that won't quit, etc.
In an "ideal" operating system, it would be trivial to recover from a damaging program. In real-life ones, it's not so easy (How's the OOM killer on Linux doing? They were on about their 18th rewrite last time I looked... minor program with permissions can causes DoS and kill processes that were never intended to be killed unless the machine is managed perfectly). In home setups, just about anything can take down the system, and it's always PARTLY the fault of the application too, because other games / programs DON'T do that.
Windows has a bad idea of what programs should be allowed to do and doesn't cover 1% of the avenues it should - but equally games should NOT be crashing so hard with filesystem handles open without at least attempting to clean up first, but I've seen programs do exactly that (and thus render those files undeletable - even if they are causing problems - without a reboot).
A program crash is so named because the results can still be catastrophic. Otherwise we'd just call it a program "bump".
If online play diminishes after only a year, can't have been that good a game to play online in the first place.
The original CS is over 10 years old and (unless there's a huge release of a new game) tends to sit atop the "Player minutes / month" stats on Steam most of the time, and is always in the top 10.
There will never be a time when everyone thinks that way - you always get fools willing to do such things. Also, there are things such as beta-tests, demos etc. that combat the situation such that you don't get a reputation for buggy code before a game is released.
And if people were all like me it would just mean that a company would have to build a reputation for reasonably bug-free software first. Like all the games that I *do* play because I know they'll be okay - It's not an industry-killing idea... it's like saying that nobody will buy a newspaper if they always have biased content. Of course that's not true, but someone with a brain will still avoid such a newspaper.
I do have a personal blacklist of companies that have screwed me over, that I think are trying to screw me over, and those that are doing things so incredibly stupid / poor that I want to avoid them. It hasn't made me miss out on any big titles that I later have to bite my tongue and go back and try, and it hasn't made things impossible to buy, and it's saved me a lot of money. A lot of people I know do exactly the same in lots of areas. Would you buy a car without trying it first? How about some clothes? You "can't" return video games so it's just prudent to subject them to more scrutiny before buying - and that means knowing they work as expected. Play a demo, play a friend's copy, play the in-store demo, etc. and decide. Don't piss your money away on something because it uses a brand name of a game you previously enjoyed, or because it's been hyped in some magazines - in every case, that sort of reputation comes to an end once a company realises it can just cash in on the name for 2-3 buggy follow-up titles before anyone notices.
I'm not saying "Don't buy games", I'm saying "Don't buy ANYTHING without knowing what you're buying, and don't buy things you KNOW are crap just because they have a brand attached to them."
Worse than that - how about a lightbulb that, when it blows every 2-3 hours, takes out the house fuses with it? The damage a crashing program can do to a PC (especially if running code on the GPU and / or running as admin) can be quite devastating. Even "deleting all your personal files" or "causing filesystem damage through a hard crash" can be done by a low-permission program that's badly programmed.
Personally, I think you're exactly the kind of person that lets them get away with that crap. Hell, you've put me off the game for life in a few short paragraphs. I've played PC games for decades - I've seen my share of weird bugs and had to manually debug / patch quite a few myself. I also program myself so I know the avenues that things can take and know it's not really possible to have a "bug-free" game. But what you describe is *disgusting* for a retail product. I can't remember the last time I had any of the 200+ games on my Steam account crash - possibly a weird issue with Zombie Driver not likely a "fake" joystick driver I installed that I had to debug with the programmers because they hadn't seen it before.
How you can then sum it up into a "mostly positive" review, I have no idea. To me, it reads:
- The game has issues with the majority manufacturer of PC gaming graphics cards. This causes even way over-specced machines to run the game noticeably slow to the user.
- The game crashes - a lot. Over 12 crashes in 35 hours is a crash every 2-3 hours. I don't accept that from buggy shell script glue, let alone a professional game. That stops any potential purchase for me dead in the water. Hell, I get annoyed if a game crashes 12 times in its LIFE on my machine that I can't attribute to something I did wrong (I can't name a single time that Half-life (any version) or the Doom series or the Quake series or the Unreal series has ever crashed on me and they all pushed the boundaries at the time - I can name some isolated incidents of crashes in L4D2 (when I run out of swap space and kept-Alt-Tabbing to try to fix it before something went wrong) and GTA3 (when it crashed twice on me and nearly got uninstalled for doing so).
- The game has obvious, easily worked around bugs in poorly scripted cut sequences that render the game unplayable unless you happen to have an earlier save. It takes a second to write check-scripts for uncompletable quests and "somehow" fix them (by respawing the items in question, or just letting the user continue). You experienced three quests which glitched to the point the game was unplayable in the single run through of the game. God knows how many a testing team should have caught on random hardware.
- You had display issues with sinking monsters that could easily make it possible for you to be attacked by invisible beings that the game is drawing in the wrong place.
- There are other reports besides yours that almost every aspect of the game has bugs - from display to AI to sound to loading games to just plain crashing at random.
And that's AFTER it's received a post-release patch! That's so bad that if I worked at the company, I'd be cringing and disassociating myself from it. When Frontier:Elite II was released, it had a reputation for being a very buggy game and that was nothing in comparison to what you describe.
"In short, the bugs are an irritation, but the game is very, very good."
The *gameplay* may be good, when it's not crashing, making you reload or just displaying everything in the wrong place. The game, however, sounds like shit. And those sorts of bugs are NOT an irritation - if I have to restart a program more than twice, I stop trusting it and start doing things like checking my hardware. I don't tolerate it from the operating system, I don't tolerate it for my firewall, or my office suite, why should I tolerate it from the one thing that I pick up and expect to work without me having to debug the damn machine? A crash a day is too much, for any single program. Hell, I get concerned about my machine if I get a crash each month and I run an XP image that's been following me around for the last 5 years without reinstallation on three different sets of hardware.
Stop buying and tolerating this buggy crap. If a game crashes, that means that it nearly wrote over memory it shouldn't have and could corrupt your data, your operating system, even your hardware. You were "saved" by things like DEP and similar but that doesn't mean it's acceptable.
Never, ever buy a game without the chance to test it first. I've lost count of the number of game demos that I've installed only for them to not work, be incredibly slow, to have fatal bugs, to be so dull as to be unplayable, or just be annoying/crap in their execution. I don't go on to buy the games and save myself a lot of money.
Download demos first. Play your friend's copy. Don't be the guinea pig, because in a few weeks everyone will KNOW if there are problems with the game anyway. It's really not that important or practical to have the game for the first week - the servers will be overloaded, the software will need to be patched, and other gamers won't get an "advantage" over you in the space of a week or two. Plus, the price will come down and you'll be able to get second-hand copies (if the activation system even allow you to do that).
Stop pre-ordering. Stop buying games that you can't try out first. Stop buying games from companies that screw you over. Stop listening to the hype and paid reviewers. Start being an intelligent consumer who actually makes informed purchases. It's very simple. When something is in the "under £10" category, then it can be worth a punt even if you can't find any reviews, but a full-price game? I want a demo, or at least play on a friend's machine.
Such techniques mean that I've avoided many of the big-name flops and saved myself an awful lot of wasted money. The last big disappointment for me was Black & White and then I learned not to waste money on things without waiting for others to find the problems. Now I buy my games a year or two after they come out - the initial period of zero games is hard (but with the current indie scene, that's made much easier, and a recession helped) but after that you get the best games, on hardware capable of getting their full value, avoiding all the known flops, fully patched, with still-active servers (if the servers empty within the first year, it's hard to call a game a big success) and you don't have to pay full-price.
Stop pissing your money away on crap.
I very much doubt anyone is silly enough to confuse Canada and America over here, it would be quite an embarrassing gaffe for a UK prime minister to do so, even for something quite minor. However, the UK is pushing for a "Silicon Valley" in London (the Docklands area is already highly connected and there are lots of datacentres there) and to do so is trying to pull in American talent and companies. I think he almost certainly means America and that it's actually an ill-advised statement that was said on the spur of the moment rather than properly researched. I can't imagine fair use ever applying to a Mickey Mouse image in the US.
Oh, and: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, (with Great Britain comprising England, Wales and Scotland). So I'm English, British and from the UK simultaneously. It's great for confusing foreigners, especially foreign post-offices, because when abroad we can just address our mail "England" and we're pretty much the only country to call ourselves that ("Inglese" etc. tend to be spelled with different starting letters). So something addressed "England", "GB", "Britain", or "UK" (or any of the longer / shorter variants) should come to the same place. And then we wonder why our postcards arrive home after we do.
"Imagine the protests that would ensue if Internet services arbitrarily blocked video only to Internet Explorer or Firefox browsers!"
Er, I can probably name half a dozen sites that do just that, and a lot worse. Anyone remember the Olympics where only Silverlight (and hence Windows) could be used to view the online streaming video? Or ITV Player which only worked on Silverlight (and was later changed to Flash because they were losing viewers left, right and center)? Or BBC iPlayer that can't download to Linux machines without hacks (and can't play online without Flash)?
This happens all day, every day. The difference is that nobody bothers to notice - it's a self-fulfilling prophecy - if you only want people with IE to watch your streams, only people with IE will watch your streams. If that fits into your business model, it's good, if it doesn't, that's bad. But, hell, that's happened since the first day that there was more than one option to display content.
For a generic video site, it's an incredibly stupid business decision to limit yourself to one possible type of viewing apparatus. For some particular content providers, that's *exactly* what you want. It's nothing new at all.
"Sophiscated model" = depth map + two offset images at resolutions where a dozen pixels could represent a major limb. The problem is not forming a "model" from the things in front of you - a $2 laser with a moving mirror does that for every sculpture and work of art in the world in a matter of seconds down to sub-millimetre accuracy - it's interpreting poor data indirectly from cheap sensors and then trying to apply any sort of sophisticated interpretation to that *automatically* given an infinity of possibilities.
Interpreting such data to actually work out what possible positions such data could represent for a single human being standing there is far beyond some of the best stuff operational in ideal lab conditions. Thus it becomes a noise-cancellation exercise and then trying to interpret two-three layers of "blobs" as a human when a human themselves probably couldn't do it with any better accuracy, and certainly not to the extent that non-trivial assumptions (e.g. standing / sitting / moving left / moving right etc. would work out). I'll be impressed if, even with the best PhD work in the world, it can reliably tell the number of people in the image given ideal circumstances and a small group of people just playing a handful of games normally. The initial reviews look like they back me up on this.
"Hard science" and "image recognition" really rub against each other rather than sit in the same sentence - plus it's more a mathematical exercise than computer science. Image processing (and just about any processing of such enormous amounts of sensor data) is *bloody* difficult for even the simplest of tasks, or else we'd be up to here in small robots that cost a fortune but *can* actually hover all your house without running over the cat (hint: the ones we currently have, can't).
Because one of your "few friends" put it somewhere where "the entire globe" could see it. Nothing new there. They've always been able to do that. And it's the "friend" that does that that's the problem, same as if your private sex photos end up in the newspaper - blame your friend, not the paper, because there were a million and one other avenues for those photos to get into the public domain and they ALL start with your friend.
And again, those sorts of HR department investigations are (in most civilised countries) completely 100% inaccurate and completely 100% illegal (because of the poor accuracy, and the right to a private life, and it being a complete breach of data protection laws - a PC just got sacked in the UK for looking up her dates on the police national computer without there being any good reason, and it's no different - those people had a right to privacy). They could stop you working there because they "don't approve" of your first name or date of birth or because you remind them of their abusive father or because you used to date their girlfriend just as easily and untraceably. That's why a lot of HR departments are basically panels of people and it would take collaboration (and thus organised corruption of the department) to subvert such things. Facebook didn't change anything there. The internet didn't change anything. Fifty years ago, it would still have been stupid to go to your home town and ask people on the street if they knew a "John Smith" and get employment references from them for every employee and that stood a MUCH better chance of someone actually talking about the right John Smith. And even if they went to your house and asked your father for a reference and he says you're out on the town, or spending the night in a police cell, that's your *father's* fault for revealing the information in the first place.
Facebook didn't change anything, it just offers a route. The choice of that route still has to come from people who take photos of you pissed out of your skull and think it's funny for them to be shown to others without your consent even if it *might* affect your employability. Or, if you work in certain professions where you KNOW some private actions will affect your career (e.g. getting pissed while working for alcoholic anonymous, or making a porn movie while working for a school) it's in your employment contract and local established law / case history and thus you're wrong in DOING those actions whether or not they are notified to your employers. Stop using Facebook as a scapegoat. The site is crap, it has a bad history of data protection and it pisses me off something chronic with its attempts to get me to give all sorts of data away - but, hell, if my friends were stupid or I was doing stuff that I "didn't want my employer to know about" anyway, that's not Facebook's fault - that's the fault of the first step of such things being made "public" - either the friend that posts the image (or even TAKES it) or the person shown affecting their employability anyway.
Open source drivers? For an MS-produced device that only works on MS-consoles and probably plays all sorts of non-standard tricks to avoid it's use as a direct PC peripheral? Oh, right. See you in several years then.
$150 actually gets you three very low-spec webcams - Two 640x480, but the other one is 320x240 IR cam almost exactly the same as the WiiMote's infrared "sensor", cheap and most laptops now have them built in "for free". Four microphones (10p throwaway electronics - hence why every laptop has one by default). The expense is in the software and image processing, always has been, always will be, and that's the bit that's INCREDIBLY hard to write accurately and have it work quickly (i.e. chances are that it's set to a particular set of criteria and won't work in odd conditions, won't be programmable and/or puts all it's work to the host processor which means some poor sod has to reinvent all the image processing algorithms without hitting a patent using what is basically three off-the-shelf webcams). I wouldn't be surprised if any "drivers" that do appear for the Kinect actually work because they have been doing this on much cheaper hardware first (e.g. a bunch of second hand 640x480 USB webcams and a multi-input sound card) - hell, getting a simple motion-detection algorithm working can be a pain - ever tried to set up Motion on a couple of cameras? You can spend your life tweaking, making image masks, etc. and that's just to say "the image changed" or "it didn't" against a background of auto-focus, auto-exposure cameras looking into someone's back yard.
And like all things reliant on software-based recognition, it will not be as accurate or as quick or as adjustable as you need it to be. Voice recognition hasn't improved much in 15 years. (But voice synthesis has because that's "easy" in comparison). My bank still can't understand when I say my account number and thus have reverted to DTMF tones to do that entry. Fingerprint recognition hasn't improved much in 15 years (with optical fingerprint scanners like one I own or the ones built into IBM laptops) - hence open-source software that's quite basic is just as good as the commercial offerings for hundreds of pounds and people are touting "iris recognition" as the next best thing (with the same problems, but new rounds of investment). 3D image recognition hasn't improved much in 15 years - robots still bounce off walls they didn't see and cars still crash with "crash-proof" control software (like the extremely expensive and hi-tech demo a few months ago where two "crash-proof" cars rammed each other incessantly over multiple trials because their image recognition and distance sensors just were not processing the data in the right way - in front of the world's press for a "crash-proof" car from a major car manufacturer.
These things has ALWAYS been in their current state, it's just that we can do more of them faster now. It doesn't mean that throwing a quad-core 3GHz at the problem somehow solves the fact that the algorithms are crap, limited and that computers can only do what we tell them and not automatically recognise shapes, sizes, colours, etc. unless told exactly how. Hell, show people a bit of software that can actually work out (vaguely reliably) if there's a cow in an random image and you'll be a millionaire.
The current state of any of these processes is enough for basic tasks (arguably enough for gaming but, again, they've been around for decades so people HAVE used them in video-controlled gaming devices for years for everything from the NES to the PC and they all flopped), but anyone who's ever used voice recognition software for a long time, or been involved with professional projects aimed at image processing will tell you - beyond a certain point, there's no "groundbreaking" tricks to use that can get you better recognition even if you trawl through PhD papers. It's all pretty much the same thing - run an image through some basic Photoshop-style filters, try to identify edges and clusters, filter based