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Clear Speakers, Segway Clone Top CES Coverage
jlouderb writes "Phew. We just finished five days of wall to wall coverage of this year's Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Highlights include "invisible" speakers, a Segway clone for around $1,000, details on Intel's LCoS plans, a humanoid robot from Sony and more HDTV recorders, new home networking schemes and flat panel TVs than you can shake a stick at. If you weren't one of the 100,000 or so who made it to Vegas, check out what you missed at PCMag.com."
Coincidentally, there are no known photographs of these "invisible" speakers.
Toshiba's .85 inch, 2-4GB hard drive
Throwing your voice just got a hell of a lot easier. I foresee excellent office pranks.
"Nice game of Solitaire you've got going there."
The coolest voice ever.
As someone pointed out, wouldn't it be much cheaper if they just added a third wheel on a spring? No need for all these fancy balancing systems...
Not a big shock since the Segway's balancing system is patented.
How can a public company that's based on profits and such in this day and age spend so much resources on those bloody robots without every really selling any of them? This could be my misconception though, but I have never heard of anybody really buying them.
It seems every few months we have a new video of the latest, greatest robot dancing. Maybe I should be happy about all of this because it's R&D and any of that is needed in today's marketplace because so many companies have ditched it. In any case, I rather have them research rockets or other space machinary to get to Mars a little quicker. (I realize robotics has an impact on space exploration but sheesh, what's the use if we can't get anywhere first.)
I'm really ranting now but the hot dance moves on the Super Humanoid Robot 5000 really makes me want to cap myself.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
Does anyone here own or know anyone who owns a segway?
Wasn't it the biggest let down when you heard that this new type of mobile that would "revolutionize" transportation forever... turned out to be a bulky, overpriced scooter?
Hey- the wheels are next to each other. Neat. Now why would I want to buy one?
It was a great idea, but not any more than meal-in-a-pill was a good idea, or the anthropomorphic robot of the 1950's. Neat, but who really wants one (not counting rich people with money to burn)? So does it really deserve to be copied? Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery... but... it's a scooter!
Esoteric reference.
Best line, John Wang, president of Global Manufacture Group: "You bought it, you figure it out."
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
...than those invisible straight razors from a few years back. What were they thinking?
Is this for real?
Sliding the suckers out probably isn't necessary on a laptop anyway, because you'll be sitting so close to it. However what with the rash of large-display laptops coming out these days, it might be nice to have this feature, so that you can have portable cinema that a couple of people can sit down in front of.
Alternatively, and perhaps more realistically outside of Japanese test markets, you could have a stereo flat panel speaker built into the display for your front channel, and then plug speakers into the headphone jack and configure the sound to use them for the rear channel audio. This is probably a much better idea, but this is one of those stream-of-conciousness posts.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Microsoft wants to do more than make sure there are Windows-powered devices in every office, home, cell phone, and car.
Then came the Big Three: speeches by Dell's Michael Dell, HP's Carly Fiorina, and Intel's Paul Otellini. All three PC companies now are fully ensconced in the world of consumer electronics, none more so than HP, which has wholeheartedly endorsed DRM as the wave of the future. And when someone endorses DRM these days, Hollywood pays tribute. Ben Affleck, Doctor Dre, Alicia Keys, and The Edge on the same stage? Entertainment Tonight should have been there.
Well, that's not good for the future -- it looks like companies are determined to push digital rights management, and with Microsoft making aggressive attempts at expanding its software as usual, will they team up and begin making moves to implement the P word sometime this year?
Of course, Linux doesn't have a standard for DRM, with Macrovision being the only one in portation, but given recent events (deCSS), Linux is thankfully not the friendliest platform for such things. Perhaps more people will switch over to Linux once they learn their days of free downloading may be over if they stick with Microsoft?
We can only hope so.
I'm the first to admit its a neat idea if the Segway werent eclipsed by the venerable bicycle in nearly every respect. For the price of a Segway you can buy a nearly weightless (15 lbs) carbon fiber bike that Lance Armstrong would be proud to ride, and with a few weeks of practice, any reasonably healthy person could out pace and out distance any Segway.
For $1000 youre still talking about a nice shiny new "bike shop" bike that would run the clone into the dirt. Heck, even a $150 Wal Mart special would have no trouble in that regard.
Please call 1-800-SUICIDE, 1-800-784-2433 to seek immediate help with you suicidal thoughts and feelings. Depression is a treatable condition. Suicide is not a treatble condition.
If you're trolling, fuck off immediately and stop causing people consternation. If you aren't, please click the above link and find a suicide hotline near you. Operators are standing by.
Incidentally, I wonder what's up with that page's colors. Black and purple? Gah, how depressing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The "Segway Clone" is only a clone in the respect that it looks vaguely similar to one. All of the technological advances that make the Segway unique are missing.
The entire point of the Segway is the gyroscopic balancing.
I'm reminded of that "RoboSweep" that billed itself a "Roomba Clone".
If I got dumped for an Aeron, I'd be bummed.
Spin off technologies used in industry the general public is unaware of.
Long range goals (something American companies often neglect). Someday everyone will have robotic aids and servants. It won't happen overnight, nor necessarily in our life time, but its an easy prediction to make for something almost certain to happen within the next hundred years.
Letter To Iran
Boo hoo. Just kill yourself. I like your wife, so as soon as you're gone I can move in. Hahahah. BTW we've been having sex while you're at work. Hahah. k thx bye.
Plz fix, kthx
He's a well known troll. Check his posting history, especially the part where he's a distinguished expert in a different field in every post.
Does anyone else remember when slashdot used to be about nerds submitting articles that they had found on the web and thought were interesting? Now it seems there are a plethora of "self submitted" articles, and I think the quality has gone down. Take, for example, this one. It wasn't enough for someone else to say "hey, look, I found this article on pcmag.com showing off all this CES stuff." No, it had to be someone trying to drive up traffic to their site. Hell, even the username is a link to pcmag.
Or the one the other day about the color alterations on the mars photos. Now, I'm almost willing to forgive this one, since it is pretty interesting, but on the other hand, the guy could have gotten the answer to his dilemma just by going to NASA's site.
Remember when slashdot was about the wierd and wacky stuff on the internet? Like the lego porn page, or the telephone sex page (the one where telephones are having sex), the unix admin porn page, the site that you can telnet into and it does star wars (the movie) in ascii, and other things like this.
I think I miss this the most about slashdot.
-- Who is the bigger fool? The fool or the fool who follows him? --
What did you expect of a photo of invisible speakers? The web page is displaying perfectly in Firebird 0.7. It's a white screen with no image.
Thanks.
Do the editors/submitters ever RTFA before posting? It is not even remotely like a Segway. It has 4 wheels and uses conventional "twist the handlebars" steering. Rather than classifying this as an "underpriced segway" it should have been classified as an "overpriced scooter".
It's a great idaea, just because you're too much of a dumb shit to use one. Just stick with your mother's bus ticket, and the rest of us will just pass you by.
trust me, I've been to the brink of suicide and back. I've lost a friend to suicide. I've known sucidal people.
You do not want to do it, trust me on this. You have a lot of life left in you, do not throw it away.
While things appear hopeless, you can do something about it.
Get a book on parenting, learn to budget things. You don't have to buy your children toys all the time, try getting creative and give them a cardboard box to play with and crayons to draw on that box. Won't cost you much and keeps them happy.
Get a private detective to follow your wife around and get pictures. If you have proof of her cheating on you, get a divorse or confront her with the pictures.
You have writer's block, most likely caused by your depression. You need to take your mind off of things and do something fun. Or get an assistant to co-write the books with you and share credit. Share ideas with the assistant that you have, and observations you've made, and research results. You obvously have the knowledge and education, but seem to not have the writing skills.
You are not letting us down, you are; however, letting yourself down. You need to learn to forgive yourself, and deal with the issues in your life. Fight for it, I know you can.
Remember, Slashdot does not have a -1 disagree moderation, and no, troll, flamebait, and overrated are not substitutes.
There has been 50% increase of Java ServerSide site this year than last year. Among most popular servlet engine was
Tomcat which is developed by Apache
Apache's J2EE Jeranamo Server is coming out end of this year.
I don't think this is the first transparent speaker ever to come to market. I say this because I spent a fair portion of my childhood in front of a pair of Stax speakers -- the 6' high variety, two panels apiece. One of our audiophile friends had a pair of the 3' high speakers with only one panel each.
You could indeed see through these; there was only a layer of something like a coarse cheesecloth in front of them, and a metal grill of sorts behind, protecting what I understood was a pair of sandwiched plastic layers that looked like celophane. Our cats would eye the whole arrangement from time to time and flex their claws. They learned to stay away from them eventually.
This particular pair was a factory-rejected "showroom model", coming at a significant discount: the engineers had the bright idea of putting two LEDs on the bottom of the speakers to indicate whether you were overdriving the speakers. Green was loud but acceptable, and Red meant that you'd probably already committed one or more of the precious panels to the garbage. Unfortunately, their reviewers, who like to listen in dark rooms at high volume, found the presense of a bright green LED "distracting". The company purportedly removed it from subsequent models.
The panels were apparently very low-yield -- something like only 11 pairs a year were manufactured, and it's seems pretty obvious from Stax's headphone-centric website that they're no longer making them. We did manage to get a replacement panel from them once, about 2 years after we purchased the speakers, but I'm pretty sure that won't happen again. The speakers had another problem recently with capacitors in their power supply leaking -- just recently we found a second batch when the second speaker's started going bad, but I don't believe they've been installed yet. A bit of a shame, really.
As a side note, these speakers completely spoiled me -- nothing which I've had since sounds nearly as clear. With a good recording, you could close your eyes and completely lose yourself. These taught me to appreciate vinyl far more than I would have otherwise; with some listening and comparison, I could even understand why my father had gone with a tube amp rather than a solid state one...
TROLLIN'!
Ever since I got my TiVo my Proscan HD decoder just collects dust....
I did use it a little last month when I tried out HDNet, but sadily I'm addicted to TiVo (dual tuner no less) and promptly cancelled HDNet and turned the Proscan off.
-mb
Boo-hoo...
Welcome to the real world. What did you think, kids were easy, books wrote themselves, life was going to be a party? Life is as tough as it can be because after 3bn years of evolution you're either a tough, fighting SOB, or you're waste.
Go ahead, try to kill yourself. It is not as easy as it sounds, takes some practice and a lot more courage than you might imagine. Probably the best way is to get really, really drunk, then go for a car drive on a mountain road. Put the music real loud and just imagine your wife and the chair. That should do it.
Six billion people, sorry but you're not exactly special. Move over and make space for someone who can make better use of their Sundays.
Why screw around with this lame four-wheeled "scooter", when you can make your very own segway clone???
http://www.tlb.org/scooter.html
Great article, great concepts, why the weird endorsement of PCmag.com, a corporate autofellatatic cluster of sycophants if one has ever existed? "Windows XP has a pleasant and accomodating interface..." die!
http://www.pcmag.com/slideshow/0,3018,p=2&a=115870 &po=11&i=1,00.asp
Whoever modded this down, you suck. The guy's trying to help someone and you mod him offtopic? The parent poster seems to be an obvious troll, but with suicide it's not worth taking chances.
LCD flat panel displays :)
If you look at the PC magazine picture there is an new menu option called "My Home". This is a third party application for home automation, I saw this at the house and thought this was the coolest thing of all. From this app you can control the lights, create mood scenes, play the media center music through the whole house and control each rooms audio level. There is some awsome security stuff where you can watch all of your security cameras, arm your house and even watch the security zones fire off as you walk through the house. It was alot of fun turning on and off the lights in each room and they even had a cadillac out in the backyard where you can control the house from there too.
And speaking of things you can mount. Here's yet another highlight.
The speakers are made of LEXAN plastic which is the same material that those Nalgene bottles are made of.
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
It has two wheels so it is a scooter! And it is expensive and imperfect, therefore all other two-wheeled machines are superior!!!!!!!!! Didn't you get the memo?
Can anyone post qrio.zip? I dont feel like registering.
Yeah I'm lazy
Anyway, looks like a pretty spiffy robot, would love to see it run.
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
I think the rest of Slashdot will agree with me that the two chicks in this picture were the hottest of those shown in PC Mag's collection of pictures. The mood-ring chick easily takes second place.
Funny yes
http://www.rootstrikers.org/
The best PR quote ever has got to be:
"Although local governments have placed restrictions on riding Segways in crowded city streets, Wang said the same restrictions shouldn't apply to the Electric Chariot. "It's not a Segway," he said. "But we're going to say to the consumer, 'You bought it, you figure it out.'""
This Segway imitiation is a joke; it's playing on the segway image with absolutly none of the same technology. This thing is more related to an senior-citizen mobility soloution, except you stand up. And it even has a name to match!
I have a Panasonic Panasonic SJ-MJ57 Minidisc player that comes with clear speakers, even cool blue LEDs that light them up. The downside is that the sound is pretty bad.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
As someone pointed out, wouldn't it be much cheaper if they just added a third wheel on a spring? No need for all these fancy balancing systems...
I was at a convention last Nov where a fellow had hacked up his own Segway-like device. Very stable. Very zippy. Very controllable.
Segway talks a lot about how hard the balance problem is, going on about the number of processors they threw at the problem. This guy said it was actually pretty simple. Yes you do need a rate gyro and an accellerometer. But they're not all THAT expensive and the control loop is pretty basic.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
How to render the Segway obsolete.
In the future, Americans will never leave our cars.
--
make install -not war
Think about your target market for a cooking robot. It is going to be a bunch of single men who don't want to cook and don't have any idea of what to buy. Suppose they forget to buy enough hot dogs one day. I think that is what the result would be...
"Bob, I made you a nice refreshing tobasco, relish and ketchup sandwich... I even through a little soy sauce on there to make it something special!"
It ain't gonna work like you think it would!
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
Then, when she comes home late and her breath smells like semen, and the kids play with their new toys instead of paying attention to you, you'll know that you have provided for them. Of course, the bills still won't be completely paid and you'll be a cuckold, and you might start thinking that you're not really a man.
Well, that's ok, because you're not. Embrace the truth: you're white trash scum.
Once you realize that, then you're ready for the next step to your salvation: stop paying the bills. Instead of paying the kids' bills and buying your wife some lacy underwear for her lover's enjoyment, go spend your $700/month McDonalds money on cheap bar floozies. Drink a lot, and while you're in a stupor, make awkward pathetic passes at the girls half your age at the bar.
The State will eventually take your kids away and the wife will leave, so those problems solve themselves. All your problems will be solved, and you won't even be dead yet.
After the second or third month of your new life, your mortgage will probably be foreclosed or you'll be evicted from your apartment. Now it's time to live on the street for a while. Maybe sneak some "food" out from your job at McDonalds. Then, when things are finally at their darkest and you can't afford a hooker (or even enough beer at the bar in order to work up the nerve to make an ass of yourselve in front of the 20-year-old girls), then it will be time for the last evening of your life.
Spend your last few dollars on a fifth of booze, drink it all at once, and go lie down in a cold alley and take a nice nap. Forever.
Then the next day, the wife and kids will realize that they should have treated you better. That'll show 'em! You will have won!
It wasn't redundant when I first posted it! Someone just copied my post higher in the comments.