Word: xbox
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...crap out on the post-boomers. The Tonight Show is still a lucrative platform, but it's not the singular cultural voice it was when Jay took over. Conan competes for attention with Jimmy Kimmel, David Letterman, Stephen Colbert and more - plus whatever happens to be on TiVo, Xbox or the Internet. (See pictures of the life and times of Jay Leno...
...Pajitnov continues to design games today-his similarly colorful puzzler Hexic was packaged with Microsoft's Xbox 360 Premium Bundle at the console's launch. But Tetris remains his magnum opus. As prices for video-game development run into the tens of millions of dollars, Tetris' simple formula still beats them all. "It's awesome when you look at the industry and everyone spending millions on graphics and music and more and here we are with Tetris just kicking ass," Rogers told the AFP. "It is an enviable position...
...what actually happened to American innovation during that period? We came up with America Online, Netscape, Amazon, Google, Blogger, Wikipedia, Craigslist, TiVo, Netflix, eBay, the iPod and iPhone, Xbox, Facebook and Twitter itself. Sure, we didn't build the Prius or the Wii, but if you measure global innovation in terms of actual lifestyle-changing hit products and not just grad students, the U.S. has been lapping the field for the past 20 years...
...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...
...What they came up with is a kind of self-contained module that you add onto your Xbox 360. It has a video camera in it that tracks where your body is and what you're doing with it. It also has a monochrome camera (it works with infrared) that reads depth - how far away your body and its component parts are - and a highly specialized microphone that can pick up voice commands. Along with all this hardware, it's got a ton of software that tells the Xbox how to find your body's various joints (it tracks...