Find me a game aimed at core gamers that uses Kinect in any significant way and isn't worse for it. There isn't one. There is games like Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, which flat out didn't work half the time because Kinect can't pick up subtle movements reliably.
Then there's the space requirements, the "no kids running in front of it while I'm playing" requirements, and the other realities that get in the way.
It's a cool piece of tech. It's lousy as a control scheme.
And when the Oracle.net driver goes to shit, who you gonna call?
Hint: Microsoft and Oracle will blame each other and it'll take six months to get a fix. My day job is dealing with both of them, and it does happen sometimes. I don't care for node.js much at all, but the idea that it's somehow inherently more dangerous than stuff from big companies is just nonsense.
The feds are over reliant on contractors for everything. Contractors are there to just milk as much money as they can out of the system. They do a pretty good job.
"The total cost to the taxpayer of this incident was $2.7 million: $823,000 went to the security contractor for its investigation and advice, $1,061,000 for the acquisition of temporary infrastructure (requisitioned from the Census Bureau), $4,300 to destroy $170,500 in IT equipment, and $688,000 paid to contractors to assist in development a long-term response. Full recovery took close to a year."
Implementation, probably. You've got a sizable group that can't watch this type of 3D at all due to how their eyes work, that obviously aren't buyers. But then you've got anybody watching TV *with* those people, who also can't watch 3D stuff because the person they're with won't be able to see it.
You've got the people who can watch it but get headaches (like me). You've got the people who don't want to wear stupid glasses (or deal with the viewing angles of stereoscopic stuff).
The biggest hurdle facing it is that TV has to be a huge mass market to be successful. 3D is doing better at the movies, but fewer people are going to the movies (compensated by higher prices), and the movie version seems to work better.
Believe it or not, I actually think this is better.
Let's be honest here, the reveal and everything since has been a fiasco. Mattrick was the guy in charge, and he blew it in "they'll teach this in business schools" fashion. They made a lot of mistakes with the Xbox One, Sony took their lunch money, and pre-orders have been disappointing.
Ballmer can't really do worse, though I don't expect he'll do a ton better. So much damage has already been done to the brand name that trying to sell it as the most expensive system on the market isn't going to fly. People don't hear the name "Xbox One" and think "worth a premium price". They hear it and think "that's the thing my friends on Facebook said sucked, why would I pay more for that?"
Ballmer might also be open to the drastic step necessary to right the ship - make a version without the Kinect and charge $100 less for it. Pricing problem solved, and early adopter core gamers don't give a rats ass about Kinect anyway.
The stock has moved around within a given range without really growing out of it for what, ten years now?
Besides, this short term thinking is what makes companies fail in the long run. Ballmer's job has been to grow into new markets. The company did that with the Xbox 360 (and then tried to piss it all away with the Xbox One), but hasn't exactly been tearing up the phone or tablet spaces.
The board should be asking "is this the right guy to grow the company in 5 years?" and not "is this the right guy to meet expectations for Q2?"
Yeah, nothing says "stabbed in the back" quite like someone telling people what their own government is doing to them.
It's funny, not that long ago one of the main principles of America was that you shouldn't blindly trust the government. And now the government is saying "our secret stuff is fine, you can trust us" and people are buying it.
Unlike the good guys in America, which spies on its citizens and charges them with espionage for speaking out against the government.
When it comes to curtalizing citizen activity, at least the Chinese are honest about it. The shameless hypocrisy coming from the US government is insulting.
The only relevant things about Google's enterprise performance should be how seriously they treat those offerings. That they're playing around with driverless cars on the side really doesn't matter in the slightest.
If it does, then obviously people should be equally concerned that Microsoft is more focused on trying to sell phones and Xboxes than it is on what their enterprise customers are actually using (since they're sure as hell not using Windows 8).
Minecraft got a special sweetheart deal from Microsoft that throws most of the indie restrictions out the window. They also don't have to pay to post patches, unlike others (who pay tens of thousands of dollars, something no other platform is doing to indies anymore).
Microsoft's idea of "supporting indie games" is to find ones that got mainstream already and exempt them from the rules. Which is a sure sign that the rules are crap, but you know. This is Microsoft we're talking about.
Yay, let's significantly increase the cost of making light bulbs (instead of simply making an attachment that screws into the socket and then takes a normal bulb), so we can increase the power requirements to run the light bulbs, so we can add yet more signals and interference to an already overcrowded wifi spectrum, so that we can make our light bulbs hackable... all in an effort to do what? Avoid having to flick a switch?
About the only thing they're not doing is wrong is suckering people out of money on kickstarter.
If it's really dead like Cobol, I could spend the rest of my life doing nothing but supporting stuff using it, and make a pretty good career out of it.
This is what tends to lead to meetings where the head of IT comes in and tells everyone that they're adopting because the sales rep showed him a powerpoint presentation of how it would magically fix everything.
People acting as managers in a field should have at least a basic understanding of what it is they're in charge of.
That'd be because second amendment folks are driven by a big lobby group, which is funded by the gun industry. There's profits to protect.
In this case, the profit is in "security consulting", and selling the government big contracts for monitoring equipment. So there's no lobby group which is strangely well financed by corporate interests to stir up dissent.
No, it's not like the people that bitch about Windows 8. Windows 8 has real, serious UI deficiencies that make it worse than Windows 7 at a great many things.
This idea that change is always good is just as much bullshit as the idea that change is always bad. Microsoft botched the UI in Windows 8.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, because there's never been a bug that manifested in some weird situation after everything had been live and working for months. Nope!
Because it sucks at gaming.
Find me a game aimed at core gamers that uses Kinect in any significant way and isn't worse for it. There isn't one. There is games like Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, which flat out didn't work half the time because Kinect can't pick up subtle movements reliably.
Then there's the space requirements, the "no kids running in front of it while I'm playing" requirements, and the other realities that get in the way.
It's a cool piece of tech. It's lousy as a control scheme.
And when the Oracle .net driver goes to shit, who you gonna call?
Hint: Microsoft and Oracle will blame each other and it'll take six months to get a fix. My day job is dealing with both of them, and it does happen sometimes. I don't care for node.js much at all, but the idea that it's somehow inherently more dangerous than stuff from big companies is just nonsense.
The feds are over reliant on contractors for everything. Contractors are there to just milk as much money as they can out of the system. They do a pretty good job.
Because, RTFA?
"The total cost to the taxpayer of this incident was $2.7 million: $823,000 went to the security contractor for its investigation and advice, $1,061,000 for the acquisition of temporary infrastructure (requisitioned from the Census Bureau), $4,300 to destroy $170,500 in IT equipment, and $688,000 paid to contractors to assist in development a long-term response. Full recovery took close to a year."
Implementation, probably. You've got a sizable group that can't watch this type of 3D at all due to how their eyes work, that obviously aren't buyers. But then you've got anybody watching TV *with* those people, who also can't watch 3D stuff because the person they're with won't be able to see it.
You've got the people who can watch it but get headaches (like me). You've got the people who don't want to wear stupid glasses (or deal with the viewing angles of stereoscopic stuff).
The biggest hurdle facing it is that TV has to be a huge mass market to be successful. 3D is doing better at the movies, but fewer people are going to the movies (compensated by higher prices), and the movie version seems to work better.
Believe it or not, I actually think this is better.
Let's be honest here, the reveal and everything since has been a fiasco. Mattrick was the guy in charge, and he blew it in "they'll teach this in business schools" fashion. They made a lot of mistakes with the Xbox One, Sony took their lunch money, and pre-orders have been disappointing.
Ballmer can't really do worse, though I don't expect he'll do a ton better. So much damage has already been done to the brand name that trying to sell it as the most expensive system on the market isn't going to fly. People don't hear the name "Xbox One" and think "worth a premium price". They hear it and think "that's the thing my friends on Facebook said sucked, why would I pay more for that?"
Ballmer might also be open to the drastic step necessary to right the ship - make a version without the Kinect and charge $100 less for it. Pricing problem solved, and early adopter core gamers don't give a rats ass about Kinect anyway.
The stock has moved around within a given range without really growing out of it for what, ten years now?
Besides, this short term thinking is what makes companies fail in the long run. Ballmer's job has been to grow into new markets. The company did that with the Xbox 360 (and then tried to piss it all away with the Xbox One), but hasn't exactly been tearing up the phone or tablet spaces.
The board should be asking "is this the right guy to grow the company in 5 years?" and not "is this the right guy to meet expectations for Q2?"
So then what's the story? The US government has been making noise about banning Chinese gear for a while. Reciprocation is entirely fair.
Yeah, nothing says "stabbed in the back" quite like someone telling people what their own government is doing to them.
It's funny, not that long ago one of the main principles of America was that you shouldn't blindly trust the government. And now the government is saying "our secret stuff is fine, you can trust us" and people are buying it.
Unlike the good guys in America, which spies on its citizens and charges them with espionage for speaking out against the government.
When it comes to curtalizing citizen activity, at least the Chinese are honest about it. The shameless hypocrisy coming from the US government is insulting.
The only relevant things about Google's enterprise performance should be how seriously they treat those offerings. That they're playing around with driverless cars on the side really doesn't matter in the slightest.
If it does, then obviously people should be equally concerned that Microsoft is more focused on trying to sell phones and Xboxes than it is on what their enterprise customers are actually using (since they're sure as hell not using Windows 8).
Minecraft got a special sweetheart deal from Microsoft that throws most of the indie restrictions out the window. They also don't have to pay to post patches, unlike others (who pay tens of thousands of dollars, something no other platform is doing to indies anymore).
Microsoft's idea of "supporting indie games" is to find ones that got mainstream already and exempt them from the rules. Which is a sure sign that the rules are crap, but you know. This is Microsoft we're talking about.
They bring a set of hands to take a cut, and Microsoft is looking out for their CEO friends at EA and Activision.
For indie games, publishers add nothing. They're of no value whatsoever.
Except that indie games can publish on the Wii U and PS4 without a publisher.
So no, that's just how it is in Microsoftland. Unless you're making a game for the Windows Store, which also doesn't need a publisher.
Or if you're Minecraft, which doesn't need a publisher because Microsoft threw their own rules out the window to get it.
That's one great set of rules MS has, where they're so good they keep getting rid of them.
Yay, let's significantly increase the cost of making light bulbs (instead of simply making an attachment that screws into the socket and then takes a normal bulb), so we can increase the power requirements to run the light bulbs, so we can add yet more signals and interference to an already overcrowded wifi spectrum, so that we can make our light bulbs hackable... all in an effort to do what? Avoid having to flick a switch?
About the only thing they're not doing is wrong is suckering people out of money on kickstarter.
If it's really dead like Cobol, I could spend the rest of my life doing nothing but supporting stuff using it, and make a pretty good career out of it.
That's a kind of death I can live with.
Except for the ones that use Oracle. Or any of the other databases out there.
"Business" is a pretty broad category using a very wide range of database products.
New != Good either. Gnome 3 is not an improvement over what was there before, it's change for the sake of change.
Telling people they have to learn something new because your designers were bored is never going to go over well.
That's funny, Microsoft is doing the exact same bloody thing and they're not making Linux.
It's the new trend from designers - "everything that currently exists sucks, what I think would be neat is clearly the ultimate design!"
... that should be "adopting <absurdly expensive corporate software>"
Sigh, mornings.
This is what tends to lead to meetings where the head of IT comes in and tells everyone that they're adopting because the sales rep showed him a powerpoint presentation of how it would magically fix everything.
People acting as managers in a field should have at least a basic understanding of what it is they're in charge of.
... unless the NSA wants it, of course. MIcrosoft is more than happy to cooperate with our friends in the government.
For our protection.
That'd be because second amendment folks are driven by a big lobby group, which is funded by the gun industry. There's profits to protect.
In this case, the profit is in "security consulting", and selling the government big contracts for monitoring equipment. So there's no lobby group which is strangely well financed by corporate interests to stir up dissent.
No, it's not like the people that bitch about Windows 8. Windows 8 has real, serious UI deficiencies that make it worse than Windows 7 at a great many things.
This idea that change is always good is just as much bullshit as the idea that change is always bad. Microsoft botched the UI in Windows 8.