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...apparent attempt to restrict any discussion of the issue. Web monitors report that some 6,000 chat rooms and message boards in China have been blocked by censors known collectively as the "Great Firewall." In addition, social-networking services like Twitter, the photo-sharing site Flickr and even Microsoft's new would-be Google-rival search engine, Bing, have all been blocked - a first for China. (Read a TIME story from 1989 on Tiananmen...
...result is ... impressive. You start getting impressed when you walk in front of the thing and it immediately recognizes your face and logs you in. Very Star Trek. A few months ago Microsoft demoed Project Natal for Steven Spielberg, who in addition to directing movies designs video games, including Medal of Honor and the Wii title Boom Blox. He's one of the few movie people who really gets games as an insider, and Microsoft was looking for his blessing. He gave it. "The technology recognized me as a full person," he says. "It identified me, my legs, my arms...
...problem with the Sony EyeToy and its ilk was that they were lame. They didn't track your motions very well, or precisely, and there were no good games for them. That's not surprising, because building a system of this kind is a very hard technological problem. But Microsoft's Xbox division has a somewhat different corporate culture than the rest of the company - it's nimbler and friendlier to innovation - and Kipman and his colleagues are extremely clever. Which is good, because they were going to have to innovate like hell to make this work...
...software that tells the Xbox how to find your body's various joints (it tracks 48 of them), how to keep track of multiple players at the same time, how to tell your Hawaiian shirt apart from the colorful wallpaper behind you, and so on. Microsoft even did an acoustic study of living rooms, so Project Natal can tell when you're talking, when your buddies are talking and when somebody in the game is talking, so it knows whom to take voice commands from...
...Until the early 1980s—before the introduction of personal computers—Harvard exclusively provided centralized computing to students and faculty. Richard P. Draves ’85, now a research area manager at Microsoft, remembers, “There were these rooms of terminals in the basement of the Science Center.” The central machine was a VAX 11/780. “It was not a very fast processor,” Draves recalls, “and [at any given time] it was being shared among about 50 students...