Slashdot Mirror
Assorted CES Gizmos
Frank Buckheimer writes "The CES 2003 show in Las Vegas will give us some pretty nice introductions of some brand new products." Other submitters sent in news about a "Mini PC" the size of a paperback book, and a spiffy digital sound projector. mbstone writes "Bill Gates announced a line of MS wristwatches that receive email, stock quotes, sports scores, etc. by FM radio. Gates claims it's a 'whole new product concept that was completely incubated by Microsoft Research,' but it's really just a reprise of the Seiko MessageWatch -- mine became just a watch, sans atomic time, as of 12/31/99 when Seiko called it quits. Once bitten, twice shy. Has anybody proposed an open standard for such gadgets so that new wristwatch-data-service providers can enter the market when the old provider leaves?"
It probaby has some sort of scary homing device on it...
-Henry
--- #@$DF@#2%@^%3^&*$%FRHG%%[NO CARRIER]
I think you just did...
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
I hate paper documents... besides being wasteful of trees, any notes you take normally have to be typed up and recorded for quality purposes (like ISO). Give me a mini-PC or tablet PC anyday.. I'll even sometimes lug around a laptop.
In regards to the MS watch? Who needs that when you carry around a cell phone with the same thing or a PDA with the same thing.
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Free your mind.
If I understand the concept correctly, these watches are only receiving data, not sending. So basically, it's a mini-pager. Is this revolutionary?
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You may like my a cappella music
If you think that being able to receive stock quotes and sports scores on your watch is cool, then pleas, kill yourself.
Bill Gates announced a line of MS wristwatches that receive email, stock quotes, sports scores, etc.
Microsoft: Now we know where you wanted to go today!
or perhaps:
Microsoft: At least the BSOD's are smaller now.
Although the article says that the sound projector sounds great, I severely doubt it.....
Each of the 254 little speakers works off a helix of plastic that expands or contracts on an electrical signal. Because the speakers are small, they do not do bass frequencies - which means you'd need a seperate bass speaker, and for home cinema, a subwoofer also, or some combined bass / subwoofer device.
The original idea of 1ltd for the digital speaker didn't include 5.1 channel support. It was just going to be a digital hi-fi speaker, but now they're using extra computer processing to send beams of sound which you're supposed to bounce off the walls of the room to make it sound like there's speaker behind you. This is a recipe for disaster because bounced sound sounds bad, and not all rooms have walls suitable for bouncing sound. And rooms with walls that are suitable, will actually sound bad, beacause of the resonances bouncy rooms set up.
This technology will fail.
-- oldthinkers unbellyfeel ingsoc
The CES is in town. Prepare to work double shifts! Young men will venture forth from basements across the country, paying big bucks in order to be deflowered by you. Dress like a 'booth babe' and score big!
Older nerds will scrape your gullet with their rough beards, then tearfully confess that they're married, and this is the first time they've cheated on their homely wives. Laugh in their face, then go get some more geeks!
Sell, sell, sell, ladies! This is your time! And don't fall for that "I can get you out of here, and set you up with your own adult website line." The first bitch that gives me that shit will hear it from the side of my cane.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Once bitten, twice shy.
:D
dude i wouldnt worry about you hitting another y2k
slashdot: where everyone yells sarcastic metaphors to themselves to understand the issue
> Vulcan hopes it will attract mobile computer-users willing to
> pay for wirelessly transmitted movie trailers and other content
Is there no point at which shame kicks in? Who where these people raised by? While I do realize that some people will pay $10 for a movie they don't intend to see just to see an anticipated trailer preceding it, $1500 for trailers seems just a tad over the top. Like there is nothing else well-heeled geeks could do with a wireless computer except watch trailers--TRAILERS, mind you, not movies. Because we certainly couldn't bring ourselves to invite global piracy and the resulting collapse of society by offering actual movies online.
> That's gotta be a mistake.
Well, on the 5.8" screen the 6 looked like a 4, so they got fooled. Squinty strangely didn't help.
The data will be beamed over FM radio airwaves to the gadgets, wherever they are. Consumers will pay $120 to $300 for the watches and perhaps $99 more a year for the data service.
Once the frequency is know, anyone with a shortwave will be able to pick-up the information. Of course MS could have it sent digitized and encrypted, but how long until that gets hacked? Could this be the precursor to DRM for radio?
Seriously, this seems another indication that when it comes to consumer products, Microsoft has no clue what people want. The X-Box is still #3 and losing them money, and Bob was an unmitigated disaster. Do they really think that Joe Six-Pack wants and needs something like this?
It's looking more and more like their strategy is simply to try everything, until they eventually succeed (in taking over the world). For a normal company, this would be quick suicide -- but MS has Lots And Lots Of Money.
Gah.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
"A man with one watch always knows what time it is. A man with two is never sure."
Just imagine a Beowulf cluster of MS watches.
Not that it'll matter anyway:
"Excuse me, but could you tell me the time?"
"Well, I'd like to. Really I would. But the EULA on my watch says that its output is a trade secret and covered under DMCA copyright protection. At the very least if I told you I'd have to kill you."
The Dick Tracy watch didn't turn out quite the way we imagined when we were kids, did it?
KFG
Several other tech companies have tried this and failed. Will MS learn from history?
1.) The Apple/John Sculley watch --- Your own watch fires you every hour.
2.) The IBM watch -- They had a $35M marketing budget, and forgot to ship the watches to their distributors.
3.) The Xerox watch -- The Xerox executives decided that people don't want watches, they want photocopiers. Project scrapped.
4.) The Compaq watch -- "Sorry, we discontinued that watch. It's your problem now."
5.) Dude, I'm getting a watch!
I'm very skeptical of these kinds of devices. For example, how many people really want stock quotes on their watches? Is there real value in that? How is a stock ticker on a watch significantly better than a stock ticker on a PDA or cell phone? Also, beyond the cool factor, how important is atomic time to Joe Sixpack? Let's face it, if it isn't significantly better, then only technogeeks will care about it. It'll die a quick death. But wait, there's more. The other factor is this. Even if the product is significantly better in terms of functionality, if the usability sucks then uptake of the product in the market could be minimal. IMHO there are many strikes against these products becoming mainstream products any time soon.
1. More on usability: webword.com (Disclaimer: This is one of my web sites.)
2. Bell Labs Reports on Progress Towards "Dick Tracy" Watch
3. Check Out a Watch Dick Tracy Would Envy
4. IBM stuffs Linux into "Dick Tracy's watch"
5. A User Interface Toolkit for a Small Screen Device
6. Is Timing Ripe for Wrist PDAs?
How to Download YouTube Videos
You see, on the mini PC you'll be able to see trailers on the full and glorious 5.8" screen with sound coming over a crappy little piezo speaker.
Try matching *that* technology on your desktop or home theater.
It's a brave new world.
KFG
Vulcan hopes it will attract mobile computer-users willing to pay for wirelessly transmitted movie trailers and other content.
Who is actually going to pay for advertisements? Do the companies really think they'll be making money from trying to convince people to go see their movies so they can make money? Not a business strategy I'd invest in.
Find me in ~/.sig
The Microsoft Watch - it watches you!!!
Never attribute to stupidity what can be construed as a monopoly preservation tactic.
Well the try everything approach worked for Edison. He did coin the phrase "Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration." Though then Tesla came around and royally pissed him off. As everything Tesla tried worked.
"Not knowing when the dawn will come, I open every door." - Emily Dickinson
From the businessweek interview: ...
Q: How does the Spot stack up in terms of other innovations that have come out of Microsoft Research?
A: Well, Microsoft Research has contributed so many innovations to so many products that I will get myself in trouble very quickly if I start ranking or comparing.
Why is it that each time you ask MS what innovations they have done, you get no real answer?
Funny interview anyway. For once, slashdotters should read the article.
I'll do it for cheesy poofs.
The MS wristwatch takes a licking and keeps onIRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL *** Address 8012abce has base at 80100000 - tick.exe
I think we've hit a plateau culturally. This is the cutting-edge, next generation of technological advancements: a wristwatch? Where's the great leap of technology? Are we that stagnant?
And yet, I realize that this is somewhat inherent in our marketing trade shows. Since the early World's Fairs, we marveled at a picture of a future we could only dream of, now we marvel at item-rehash, and spins of the same-old-technology. It reminds me of the car shows, where a beautiful new designer car is rolled out under the bump-bump music, ballons, and half-naked girls, and yet, it's a car, whose technology innards were invented in the 1950s.
So whose to blame for all this crap? I blame patents (and their extension thereof). But what good is it to complain about something without at least looking at solutions. My solution is thus: patents should only extend as far as a multiple of the current technological turnover.
Let's assume a late victorian-era inventor who invents some new whirly-gig. The invention is no small feat: precise forging and machining of parts, new alloys, highly-specialized techniques; all not to be repeated anytime soon due to the flow of information, barriers to entry, etc. Let's say the whirly-gig is a product of immense mass-appeal. The market loves whirly-gigs! How long should our inventor be able to keep a right to that intellectual property? Let's say, just for grins, 20 years. Now let's say that during that 20 years, the whirly-gig is refined, better, faster, cheaper, smaller, more features, an instruction manual in chinese; all the things associated with progress. However, at the 20 year mark, a new inventor, inspired by the whirly-gig's mass appeal, and astitute to it's inner workings, takes part of this design, and makes a toodle-doo. The toodle-doo is the first truly global product. Germans, French, English, Australians, they all love it. It spawns new products, new trade, international cooperation. But what if the patent had been granted for 40 years? Well we could assume at some point that the whirly-gig would become so cheap and affordable that it would be like selling some sort of commodity product like pencils. At some point, the manufacturing costs would become burdensome for a product at the end of it's life cycle and we'd see for perhaps say the last eight years of the patent, the same old product again and again and again. Change the colors, add some bells and whistles, but beneath it all, just a plain old tired whirly-gig.
I believe in the patent process, I believe it's made us a great country, and yet I fear we are now in the business of protecting whirly-gigs for at least a generation more to come. When I see the latest slew of gadgets, I wonder to myself: 'Will our posterity sit in some future tradeshow and watch Bill jr. show off a neato-wristwatch?'
"This isn't a study in computer science, its a study in human behavior"
You are correct.
While it is possible to create reasonable amounts of bass using a sufficient number of small transducers, the 'real' advantage of big woofers is generally their long throw. A good woofer can have a clean displacement of several millimeters, while these small transducers cannot, without causing extreme distortion.
[The transducers don't use the helix method, as far as I can tell. They look like the same ones used in consumer audio systems by Harman and Creative Labs. The helix stuff is a different technology they're hyping.]
As for all of the 'beaming' claims, it's a load of nonsense. There may be vague lateral effects possible with this, but a phased array has to be much, much larger than the wavelengths its generating to create any substantial beam steering. Quite telling is that there isn't a shread of data available anywhere on their website or published reports.
Traditional "3D Audio" systems are a much better bet - far cheaper, and I'll bet they work as well as this (which isn't saying much).
1Limited is a VC backed company, and do not have any reasonable prospect of becoming profitable. Thus, they have to rely on hype to convince investors to keep propping them up.
Does anyone else find these offerings utterly tepid compared to Apple innovation the day before?
Bill gates announces a recylced idea for a Nerd watch that shows sport scores, headlines. The debut the smartScreen, a 1500$ screen-only that hooks to your compute by wi-fi but cant play movies or mp3s, then they announce that anyone who already bought was is out of luck since that they will be changing the specs to use 802.11a to get better bandwidth for movies. then an oversized so-called "video" ipod that also cant show DVD movies, for more bucks than a ipod.
The only thing I thought was interesting was that they decided to go with 802.11a and not 802.11g
I dont know much about these standards except what Jobs said. 802.11a is dead, because it is not backwards compatible with 802.11b hotspots whereas 802.11g is.
How is it possible that one company can lead the entire market year after year going back all the way to the taming of dynamic memory. While the other company can lead the bussiness world and innovate nothing.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's hard to say. The news clip doesn't say much.
My watch (see it here) can send and receive pages, although typing on it involves a whole lot of keystrokes(!).
I know I'm bordering on almost an ad here, but I think the watch is really a great deal. $50, includes one year of skytel service, and a voicemail box.
Once you get it, go to mobile.yahoo.com, and click on the alerts tab. It's pretty easy to customize it for weather, stock, news, and sports alerts. I normally don't like dinner interruptions, but 15 seconds to read the Illini score at half-time is well worth it. I suppose there are non-entertainment purposes for the pager too, but I haven't used them yet!
If you're a bargain shopper, you might want to wait. The regular price on these has been as low as $40 before, and I got mine for $32.50 using a coupon code (which is now expired). Watch your favorite bargain hunting page for new coupon codes.
Free unix account: freeshell.org
Has everyone forgotten the Toshiba Libretto? This new thing seems only marginally larger.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A39647
One of the most pointless inventions known to mankind (Although we still think that they are a pretty neat idea). Although we already had a perfectly good way of telling the time we thought that we ought to invent anouther one just because we can. If it had stopped their it would only have been mildly pointless but no. The people who made these watches decided that they sould have lights, oh and an altimeter, and air pressure function and oh it should do all this at 1000m under water and with a series of musical alarms whist telling you the time in 50 countries. What mankind failed to realise is that situations which REQUIRE knowing your altitude and the time in bangladesh and Paris whilst 100m underwater in the dark to the tune of the national anthem, are quite rare..
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http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A183476
For hundreds of years, clocks, pocket watches and most recently wrist watches have been elegantly ticking off the seconds with style, grace and perhaps most importantly an ever increasing degree of accuracy.
Analogue watches (especially the expensive ones with sweeping second hands) are testimony to human kinds mastery of materials, art and science.
Digital watches are not.
I have resisted the urge to mention that man thinks these ugly things
"a pretty neat idea" -
Ooops.
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Oh he goes on and on and on about digital watches. I wish I could find that quote about how Humans are the only species that things digital watches are a good idea.
Oh, sure. The manufacturing sector should suffer because you want to use the same technology for more than a few years. Where would our world economy be if we didn't replace (every few years) all our LPs with 8-track tapes, our 8-track tapes with cassettes, our cassettes with CDs, our CDs with music DVDs, etc. And that's just how music listeners help to maintain world economic growth. Get with the program!!! :-)
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
I love the irony of two slashdot articles in a row, where one talks about Apple's Rendezvous, and the next talks about Microsoft's new 'Spot' wristwatch thingy. Apple's product is useful, open-sourced, and can provide benefits beyond Mac owners, since devices can communicate without a Mac or any Apple products at all. Contrast this with the Microsoft announcement: a clunky, expensive watch that will cost at least $100 year in service fees.
Apple Press Release
Microsoft Watch Article
But there is something more going on here. Apple is returning to its roots, and to computing's roots, by giving away software in order to sell hardware. Microsoft sees the "free software" writing on the wall, and is desperately trying to sell hardware and services. Who's going to win?
Mike van Lammeren
It will challenge your head, your brain, and your mind.
Although I would often find streaming wireless movie trailers usefull (e.g. I'm at a restaurant with friends and we're deciding which movie to go see), I don't know of anybody who would actually *pay* for this service. After all, we are going to *pay* to see the actual movie, right? I also wouldn't put down $1200-$1500 that doesn't even work as well as a Sony Picturebook, just for the privelege of these wireless movie trailers.
Luckily, this is one of those *concept* electronic show ideas that will never see the light of day (in it's current form).
In Europe it is called RDS. Every (or almost every) car radio can pick up RDS. RDS is a one way digital broadcasting system used to disseminate information about traffic jams, and other news. Now some radio stations are using it to broadcast the name of the song that is currently playing.
Is it clever? Absolutely. Is it original? The only trick now is to get FM stations to broadcast more content.
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"