Slashdot Mirror
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."
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!
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
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?
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? --
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...
I saw one, in all palces, Arkansas. A radio station biought it and usedit at promo events. It also had ads on it. The gal who was driving it was hot.
Maddox had this idea long before this clone
Conserve Oil, Recycle, Boycott Walmart
I saw a security person (I assume a higher up) using one to get around campus at the University of Colorado, Boulder. Not sure if it was purchased or a test or what, but still caught me by surprise.
I do think Segways have a use in positions such as, say, warehouse manager and other jobs where people are walking around all day.
Still, I'd rather walk and get the exercise. Oh well.
This statement is solely an opinion. Kindly take it as such in all cases.
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!