301–310 of 369 posts
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Maybe; but Zuckerberg didn't buy the company, Facebook did.
Zuckerberg has complete control, with 57% of Facebook voting rights. http://venturebeat.com/2012/02/01/zuck-power-play/
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1. The face-reading parts would be inside and part of the virtual-reality junk. (And, helpfully, would also enhance eye-tracking.) 2. Modern graphics technology has all it needs to generate realistic expressions on characters. Modern video-game characters instead look creepy because they're replaying a small pre-made library of expressions that don't usually fit the situation very well. If the character's face just m…
And none of that requires virtual reality to do. You could have a video game with the characters matching your facial expressions. It would be just as pointless, but it could be done.
To be able to interact with the world while talking to someone (because that's the reason you're in a virtual world rather than on Skype), you need to be able to see things going on around the person while focusing on them. So, you either need a grid of nine monitors, or this thing[1].
And you still can't have a natural conversation with more than one person (or especially express any status-regulation emotions involving looking at one person in preference to another) because tilting your head means you can't see the "central vision" part of your screen-wall any more.
If only there was some way for tilting or moving your head to just show you more of the virtual people and world around you, in a naturally-mapped way, you know?
[1] http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/illumiroom/
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What's funny is that everyone would breathe a giant sigh of relief if, when asked about the deal, Zuckerberg just grinned boyishly and said, "It's a VR company run by Carmack, and I'm a multibillionaire. Of course I wanted to own it."
Maybe; but Zuckerberg didn't buy the company, Facebook did.
If you're gonna spend $2B to buy something you want, better if you can get someone else to foot the bill.
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Yeah, I'm surprised there hasn't been more discussion of that here, though obviously the slow nature of the rulemaking process causes people's interest to wane. Considering the fact that large acquisitions will continue in the future (even if we are in a bubble or unusually inflated period right now), and that even a micro-investment at the right time can lead to huge multiples, it'll be very interesting to see how t…
Well, also, the SEC made the crowdfunding regulations a bit ridiculous so they may not actually end up having a major impact on investment funding.
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I think what's stupid is participating in a Kickstarter campaign and then getting bent out of shape when the company doesn't do what you want. When you contribute -- note contribute , but invest -- to a Kickstarter campaign, you're buying into the perk you get and pretty much nothing else. I can understand being upset that the company didn't do what you hoped, but considering it an investment is a bit of an overestim…
I don't think that's stupid. Kickstarter contributions are investments, they just don't have financial payoffs. The payoff should be that, if successful, a certain desirable piece of technology or art is created. If a company shifts focus away from the aims and goals they used to attract Kickstarter funding, then they have essentially acted dishonestly. There is no legal recourse, so the best thing to do is complain…
Me, I think Kickstarter is to fault for being sold as a tool for contributors. You go to kickstarter.com, it's like a shopping mall of the future. For what Kickstarter say they are, they should be a plugin that companies get to put on their website or something, not something that gets marketed to consumers.
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When I said that it was silly to simply donate money to a commercial venture without gaining any stake in it, they called me a naysayer. Who's saying nay now?
Lot's of people agree with you. In crowdfunding circles, Kickstarter is considered a bubble that will burst hard when people realize they're funding companies in exchange for beads and trinkets. Sure there are plenty of projects for which the Kickstarter formula is perfectly valid. Funding companies isn't one of them, and that's where most of the money is. If that stops happening, Kickstarter's may not be enough to k…
You could invest in third world governments with interest rates that are too high for their S&P/Moody's/Fitch ratings. Look how revolutionary this idea.
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Heh, from Carmack's twitter 1m ago: https://twitter.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/448629403740692481 For the record, I am coding right now, just like I was last week. I expect the FB deal will avoid several embarrassing scaling crisis for VR. Glad to see Carmack is still being Carmack. EDIT: By the way, if anyone is wondering why people are having a negative reaction to this Facebook deal, I think one way to understand it…
nah, all the angst is because far too many nerds like to think they "own" up and coming cool technology even if they are not even involved beyond having read about it. When it goes to company that the clique no longer favors, usually after incredible success or the unwashed masses show up, then they act as if the world collapses. It happens so often many of us just laugh if not smirk the whole time we watch the famil…
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It feels like Notch is being given too much credibility here. At the end of the day he's a billionaire because he had a viral hit and was ready with a monetization strategy (and had amazingly cheap running costs). None of this really speaks to his business or technical acumen, and he hasn't exactly done very much lately.
Nonsense. He has credibility because he's proven to be effectual, innovative and principled. This is not the case of a guy getting lucky in the viral lottery and then running his mouth.
He has proven the exact opposite. He made a clone of an existing game, failed to deliver on almost everything he promised the people buying it, and then walked away from it leaving it to be never finished by someone else.
>This is not the case of a guy getting lucky in the viral lottery and then running his mouth.
Yes, that is exactly what it is.
What company isn't creepy these days? Google, Facebook and Amazon are a few companies of many that come to mind when I think of all the user data they hold, what they know and what they could use it for. Thems the breaks unfortunately. I admire Notch standing up for what he believes in, but I just can't see how Facebook is creepier than anything else or affects the acquisition of Oculus. It's not like the gaming devi…
Apple? Valve? Pretty much any company where their primary way of making money isn't dependent on collecting and feeding off their users data.
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What kind of credentials do you need other than "large data centers" the scale of Facebook? IM doesn't count - so what does?
And PHP... infinite cred for scaling PHP.
Now, that old LAMP Apache+mpm_worker setup, that one was bad.