Xbox Kinect Is The New Killer Interface
I’ve had a Kinect for a few weeks now and I’m very pleased with my purchase. The experience of controller-less navigation through the UI menus and playing of games is a very welcome addition to interacting with a computer.
The Xbox 360 overall has turned out to be a great platform. With Xbox Live I can download a bunch of game demos for free and buy full games downloaded and stored on the Xbox memory so I can play these games/demos without a disk. Also, the Xbox 360 is rumored to become a home online media hub to compete with Google TV, Apple TV, Boxee etc. If this does happen, then the total of Kinect + Xbox Games + Xbox Online Media sounds like a sure winner to me, offering more than the competition.
Kinect is also in direct competition to the Nintendo Wii, and it has a lot of advantages over it. As an owner of both, I’ve been able to compare them from my own experience. While the Wii does offer some great family friendly fun with it’s simple standard games, I can see Xbox Kinect is going to take over where the Wii leaves off. Read more »
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Net Neutrality Pros And Cons: A Potentially Sticky Issue [OPINION]
Photo:eirikso
[This article ponders just a small bit of the pros and cons concerning Net Neutrality. Understand that I'm absolutely pro Net Neutrality as a policy, but I'm a bit divided on whether or not government should impose regulations to protect Net Neutrality. In the end, it seems like government regulations may be absolutely necessary to protect Net Neutrality, but whether the government will decide to regulate is another issue. Considering all this, Net Neutrality could be a potentially sticky issue for some time to come.]
My simple definition of Net Neutrality is…
“ISPs don’t touch the bits and bytes flowing through their pipes”
In other words, ISPs (Internet Service Providers) remain neutral concerning what internet traffic flows through their networks (or their “pipes”). ISPs just provide dumb pipes for the traffic to flow through. They remain neutral by not actively doing anything to the traffic, like filtering it or blocking it in any way. This is the way the internet has operated since it’s beginning (for the most part).
An example where an ISP acted in a non neutral way is when Comcast actively blocked BitTorrent traffic on its networks. In many ways, this is a fairly small thing they did. All paying customers of Comcast who did not use BitTorrent didn’t notice a thing. Comcast+BitTorrent users on the other hand, we’re stuck and would have been forced to switch ISPs in order to continue using BitTorrent, had the FCC not intervened.
Read more »
Distributed Social Networks: The Digital Home [CONCEPT]
Photo: Stuck in Customs
A few days ago an analogy regarding social networks and their future crossed my mind. The analogy is “The Digital Home” as a distributed social network platform.
The idea is that big social networks are kind of like massive communes where you have your own room (for instance my room on twitter is http://twitter.com/wrightlabs). Read more »
SPARQL Query In Code: REST, PHP And JSON [TUTORIAL]
SPARQL allows you to query a semantic web (i.e. RDF) data source. This post will cover some basics of SPARQL but it will mainly focus on how to run a SPARQL query in code, against a SPARQL endpoint live on the web. The code I’m using is PHP and JSON but the overall steps are the same using any language.
(Here is the tutorial demo and the full source code for this tutorial.)
The overall steps are…
1. Constructing our SPARQL query
2. Preparing our REST URL
3. Make the HTTP request to the URL
4. Parsing the response
5. Use/Display the results
Read more »
Semantifying Social Networks, Socializing The Semantic Web
(DISCLAIMER: My recollection of what was said and what was meant may be flawed. For the best record, find the sources mentioned and listen for yourself)
During the Semantic Web Meetup discussion about social networks Joe Devon made a prediction that all the current major social networks (Facebook and Twitter) will go the way of MySpace. This is because when the semantic web has matured, everyone will have control of their own (profile) data and that data will be more freely movable around the web due to common open standards. This discussion reminded of a similar discussion (Semantifying Social Networks) I listened to via a recording from the SemTech 2009 Conference. In this discussion the same vision of everyone controlling their own data and (by choice) sharing it securely via open standards was the ideal. Read more »
