Xbox One: The Review

"...I wouldn't consider buying anything in the future, because..."

Did you miss it? You can just say "...because surveillance". [1] :P

I often wonder about half the things running on my phone and since removing some might make it useless I leave it be (not my domain so probably simplified a lot).

I really fail to see how listening in all the time is for convenience though. If that 'feature' was disabled the device would still be just as convenient.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6765099

Is anyone else really bothered by these pullout quotes? They are repeating basically 25% of the content on any given page. I'm reading the article, you don't have to lure me in like in a magazine. If you want to summarize, can't you just do it at the top of the page?

Actually the review seemed kind of negative on balance. Indeed, the PS4 review they did was also kind of hot and cold.

I would say that people, and their reasons for objecting to surveillance or having privacy concerns far are more complicated and varied than you are imagining. Some of the people who have expressed concerns may be:

Citizens concerned about government officials overstepping constitutional bounds and lying about it, but not particularly concerned about the practical consequences of the surveillance.

Activists for whom NSA surveillance confirms that government is not on the side of the people, but whose sense of history leads them to the conclusion that if massive FBI files, Jim Crow laws, and lynching did not stop the Civil Rights movement, metadata is unlikely to prevent the arc of history bending towards justice.

“Airbus nationalists” in Europe who are, in their heart, more concerned about the fact the EU seems to be incapable of developing a Facebook, Google, Twitter, ect. They may ape the language of their fellow citizens whose privacy concerns are based on Nazi/Stasi/etc. historical experience, but actually view cloud computing as industrial policy struggle. Video game manufacture is likely not their strategic priority.

People with specific consequentialist privacy concerns. For example, someone who hates Facebook because it has caused something embarrassing to be shared without their truly informed consent. They may be indifferent to the notion that embarrassing information is hidden on a government database, and they may actually welcome and value that Google algorithms leverage their g-mail and search history to serve up more relevant ads.

People who once cared, but are so sick of monomaniacs hijacking every HN discussion that they are looking forward to buying an Xbox One simply as a sign of contempt. They likely also once were vaguely sympathetic to Google Reader users, but now see the product discontinuation as just punishment of tiresome and entitled whiners.

You may feel that all of these types of people are wrongheaded, but change often happens because large groups of loosely affiliated people band together, and rarely because zealots double down and fail to see why anyone might consider a different point of view.

Then they should have done a video in my somewhat less well lit living room, with a couch that's the same color as my wife's shirt, and a stereotypical wedding pix in the background and peculiar shadows.

If its higher performance, well, show it!

The real killer is the concept. The highest performance way to do "up down enter" on a menu is obviously a controller not an arm and camera.

Kinect doesn't have to work very well for my daughter to have fun with her dance games. But for a UI to a menu, it does kinda actually have to work all the time, which is a meta-UI issue. If it was just a dancin' jumpin' peripheral, which its "good enough" for, then I'd be very happy, but no its gotta be implemented as the worlds cruddiest most aggravating menu navigation system, which makes it an epic fail.

My carpenters hammer is a great tool for nail installation, but an epic fail at screw installation and forcing everyone to use hammers to install screws is just going to piss people off.