Yeah, and in the end there are two kinds of killer apps in the console biz: one the game where the developers pull out the stops and really push the envelope by making the software outperform most of what's been produced for the hardware, and two the Tetris or Pokemon - technically no huge marvel but so compelling to play that it ends up being ubiquitous.
Still, there is something to say for raw power. In the end, Microsoft is now in the unenviable position of giving away $100 to every new customer while making the customer feel they've payed an excessive or at least significant amount for the console. On the other hand they're in the enviable position of having that thousand foot mountain of cash in the secret basement vault. In the end, to beat the dead horse a little bit more, it's gonna come down to the games, whether they can attract developers who will take advantage of the power that the box undeniably has. Still, I think they could well stumble on this one; they're outside their core competency. The computer and console world is full of tales of the technically superior flash in the pan
I think you're on to something friend. DVD and HDTV ready, broadband connected... I postulated years ago that the game console was really the only rational entry point for the killer set-top-box... Joy, I can just see it now, the ghostly floating icons all over my teevee picture... metatags2... the blue screens of death... a secret record of everything I watch accumulating quietly in some corner of the hard drive...
I wonder though, how long it will take them to develop this side of the product, and if there will be such a profusion of basically obsoleted 1/2Gig+ boxes out there as to make it a moot point - I've been predicting that in the end the teevee issue will fundamentally be a software rather than a hardware solution. That is, a box, and who cares what it looks like, who sells it or where it sits, is your primary home data input node, where your telephone, internet and teevee all collect, and the teevee is just another remote appliance rather than the central device.
Hmm, that's a good point... The subject of enjoyment I mean. And although there's a thin line between love and hate, I think perhaps another level of distinction IS required on the whole continuum of smack addict to person who plays Everquest for 10 hours straight to an Obsessive-Compulsive who washes their hands until they bleed...
I think the term addiction is being misused in this case. Addiction used to be a meaningful medical term. Some substances are addictive because they build a physiological tolerance, requiring greater use for the same effect, and which, if use is stopped, turns around into physiological withdrawal symptoms. What you're calling an addictive personality is really an obsessive-compulsive personality. The obsession is the inability to get away from the whatever mentally, the compulsion is to engage in the behavior the obsession leads to. It's significant because addiction means bad and it is used to vilify all sorts of things that are really value neutral. Plenty of OCD types clean obsessively but you don't see anyone talking about "Cleaning Addiction" or suggesting that cleaning is intrinsically bad. No functional difference between that behavior and playing Everquest all night.
Yeah yeah, it's all funny but it ticks me off that nobody is pointing out that The principle illustrated in Schroedingers "cat" thought experiment are NOT THE SAME as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In fact, it ticks me off that nobody knows what the Uncertainty Principle is really about and people constantly confuse it with the whole indeterminate quantum particle state and whether does in fact create quantum indeterminacy on the macro scale (if a tree falls in the forest...) issue. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle establishes a mathematically defined absolute uncertainty balanced between the momentum and position of a quantum scale particle. The corresponding thought experiment would be the gamma ray microscope.
If you read the article it is made absolutely clear from the first line that this is a general connectivity solution. The post I was responding to was saying I hope they do this for other instruments - but you're right on one thing, in rereading the original post, it doesn't really say anything about it being restricted to guitars. That part I guess was just me trying to be trendy.
I've actually got something very similar to this, it's a non-virtual wallet that I actually store in my pants. When I want to buy something on the internet my hand simply enters the pocket of my pants, removes the wallet, and then I take out a credit card and enter the information required. I have to say it works great and I have yet to be bothered by fraud.
Now if Microsoft tries to get into my pants, then I'll get seriously up in arms.
Of course it makes perfect sense as Microsoft is aiming it's MSN service directly at AOL... "a great alternative to AOL" as one commercial states. Becoming the defacto gatekeepers of the internet by tying up authentication is absolutely essential to Microsoft's.NET strategy - in the software as service model it is the equivalent of controlling the desktop OS.
This is better than no competition for Passport but not so good as if there were some aggressive and international lobbying and development of public, universal and non-proprietary authentication. This is like watching Fed Ex and UPS duke it out over who gets to run the U.S. Mail.
"if they can pull it off... that's the key. And that part is up to us. Basically, these people are acting like Cartels. They own all the product, they've got all the distribution channels tied up. But unlike diamonds or oil there is really no way to control who can produce and sell music. And as the internet brings us more producer-neutral commerce options like E-Bay and Amazon (Sam Goody may spurn your indy CD but Amazon will sell pretty much anything) and makes mass-distribution of information a much less costly proposition, the aspect of distribution becomes a shakier method of controlling the competition.
I think their actions are mistaken because the direction this basically goes is to make the product less and less valuable to the consumer while increasing the production costs (the more you have to tie up the information with attempts to control copying and make sure it shuts down if the rent doesn't get paid, the more you are adding production steps that cost you but don't add anything to the actual signal the consumer is interested in. That's just a bad business plan. The typewriter manufacturers may have laughed at the first Word Processors. Where's Smith Corona now? (hint - still there, with its stock prices in the relative toilet).
If I'm wrong it will make me sad but it scarcely matters (to me personally) - More and more I am sourcing my music from people far out of the beaten path. I can live without the Brittney Spears and Smashmouths of the world with little pain. For me the revolution is already here.
Hopefully this technology will be implemented in more things that guitars, which I'm certain it will.
I'm not sure how the impression got out there that this is about guitars. It's a connectivity solution - digital wireless cables, basically. Plug WHATEVER into a port, plug the central doohickey into the mixing bord, viola, they're connected. The innovation is not putting an ethernet port into a guitar (which as the article states is not even being done yet), but adding software to the ethernet protocol with the aim to minimize latency and synche everything to a master clock so that it can be used for music - making sure it all matches up and that the signal hits the mixer soon enough after the player hits the string/key/drum so that there is not a perceivable delay.
Oh, wait, I actually do know how the impression got out there. Silly me, as always it involves Slashdot editors that barely read the articles they post and Slashdot readers who feel justified in commenting on them without reading them at all.
That simply isn't accurate. First off, calling a digital amp "technically superior" is just stupid. Beyond the conveniences of versatility, portability, power consumption etc., the only measure of the "superiority" of an amp is that a particular guitarist likes the way they sound playing through it. Every amp has it's own sound, tube amp technology is very mature and stable, so naturally even today there are a lot more decent sounding tube amps than pure solid state - just as a lot of early digital transcriptions of music for CDs sound like garbage compared to the same album on LP.
More to the point, there is plenty of solid state amplification going on in guitars, both 100% and partial (all modern tube amps have solid state components), see for just one example Line 6.
Finally, this is jsut a totally different issue. It isn't about amplification. This is about getting signals -any signals, not just guitars -to the mixing board. That's it. In the end of course how well the software maintains and presents the signal will determine if it is adopted. They say it is "cleaner" - in my book this often means they've cut off the top and bottom of the signal, eliminating a lot of signal with the noise and making for a flatter, less rich sound. And this is what's wrong with the assumption that digital is necessarily better than analog. People say, a CD samples at a higher rate than the ear can perceive, therefore anyone who says the digital signal is lacking is an idiot. No: but how the format and processing of the signal and how it is presented by playback equipment can have a serious effect on how much and exactly what is included and excluded from the raw input. Do it very well and you have a faithful reproduction, but with most of the annoying artifact noise removed. Do it poorly and you have the first CD release of Pink Floyd's Meddle. My brother made me a cassette from a 5+ year-old second-hand LP and it sounded better. Noisier, but better. This is why many early digital amps failed. Their signal was flat, thin, dull, the early attempts to model tube effects were crude.
"It's a very immature business (where) most of the important mistakes haven't been made yet," said Aram Sinnreich, an analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix.
Oh, I don't know - they seem to be doing a damn fine job of trying to stuff all those mistakes in. For years now a few of us have been saying on Slashdot that what the publishing concerns are gunning for is a pay to play world where you never own an actual product and never get to control any aspect of your temporary rental of the products you pay for - except for deciding when you press "play" (provided your subscription is up to date, natch).
Basically, the existance of technologies that by nature should make the ownership of a copy of a particular piece of intellectual property much cheaper and much more useful than it has been is being exploited as an excuse to make the act of paying for the right to access intellectual property more expensive and much less useful.
Go to a record store and buy a regular CD - any artist or label you want, if they have it in stock. Rip it to your hard drive. The thing is basically immortal now, barring accident or theft. Rip it to MP3s, make your own mixes, use your personal server to stream your own web station you can listen to at work. Make compilation CDs for the drive or vacation. You never pay to access that content again. Sick of it? Sell it, recover a tenth of your purchase price.
Or: Buy a subscription to a service. Limited access to a limited catalog. You can bet there are all sorts of restrictions on reformatting, how many machines the thing can reside on, etc. Andpay to maintain it. And pay to maintain it. And pay to maintain it. The longer you ae a member the more diffuse it becomes - you are paying a smaller and smaller amount for the maintenance of each song. But you NEVER get to stop paying.
There is only one group of copnsumers these services could be appropriate for - people who spend more than $10.00 per month on CD singles. For the rest of us (I've never bought a single in my life) it isn't even relevant. But it is a warning shot. They're gonna try to use the DMCA to completely eliminate ownership of a registered copy of copyrighted material, an act which, given the results of the recent 2600 case, pretty much allows them to eviscerate the concept of fair use. Alternatives (like emusic.com) are the ONLY solution. People who care NEED to start supporting artists who choose not to join the publishing giant slave-parade. Information may not want to be free but it doesn't have to be expensive.
Cheer up - the publishing industries', particularly the music industries' time of maximum vulnerability is upon them. Keep your eyes peeled troops and get ready to support the good guys.
Yeah, actually if you go look at the Segway website they really seem to be pushing a European image for their vision of this thing's integration into transportation (in the images they use). This thing might actually have a better chance in the UK and Europe.
who bothes with a comment like this? sure, this is boring... if there isn't a snowball's chance you'll ever think up anything valuable enough to warrant developing even a passing understanding of what happens in this world when valuable and necessary intellectual property is a subject of disputed ownership.
I'm pretty sure you can set you account up so that Slashdot only shows you stupid bullshit that doesn't matter.
what's irritating is the hype. and yeah, yeah, the inventor says he didn't want that... which considering the train of events, with the leaks and the big tech names and the book deal, seems suspect to me. nevertheless, the rhetoric was the supertech marvel world changing brave new world machine. well, what it is is a funky little rolling platform... and the performance I saw on good morning america did little to impress me. you're dreaming if you think this thing can do any serious power turns or off-roading. it's awfully slow and awfully heavy and just insanely expensive for what it is. a bike can completely replace a car for the dedicated commuter - my brother did this for years (in Minneapolis!) - and EVERYTHING in the USA is set up for the car/park/walk a mile paradigm - so is there really even a potential market for adding this third transportation phase? I'll say what a million other people have said - at 20 pounds and say $500 I would . The product , just in and of itself, is all very nice and nifty - enhanced stability, intuitive interface - but the premise that giving people the ability to triple their walking speed at about 1/3 the median cost of a fairly decent car is a stretch. I suspect it is going to be a very hard road out of the economy of scale valley for Ginger. you notice the thing has its defenders and detractors, but I have yet to see anyone go tot he extent of saying: I'm going to buy one. plunk down my $3000 and roll on home. will you?
This thing isn't even a scooter. It is FAR too slow for anything other than walking distance, FAR too heavy for true convenience, and FAR too expensive for anyone except rich dips. Which in a sense is a comfort, because it will provide some moral relief, when I'm cleaning the clock of the first idiot that runs into me with one of these silly little doodads, to know that they have (had) $3,000 in disposable income.
Let me stress this point: Sidewalks are for walkers. They are not for bicycles, or gingers, or pogo sticks. The only motorized vehicles I should see on the sidewalk are those used by the mobility disabled.
But more to the point, it is just purely offensive to put forth as some sort of miracle product a device that clearly can only significantly replace human-powered transit. Okay, so it reportedly has some sort of nifty, intuitive interface. There is absolutely nothing else significant about this invention.
No, man, working for Microsoft ROCKS! I LOVE this company! I LOVE THIS COMPANY! Who told you to sit down?! Did I mention how awesome Microsoft embedded systems are? They ROCK!
It would be nice if Slashdot had a memory, maybe we wouldn't have to have this damn "Hindenburg" conversation every time there's a story about fuel cells.
So once again:
1) A fuel cell does not necessarily mean a molecular-hydrogen based fuel cell. The Hydrogen - Oxygen to Water reaction is the most common but there are a huge range of potential molecular fuels.
2) Even a molecular hydrogen based fuel cell need not rely on compressed gaseous hydrogen. There is tons of fruitful research going on to store hydrogen in solid substrates.
3) Compressed hydrogen in tanks is not particularly dangerous compared to, say, liquid fuels. Mixture with oxygen tends to be a limiting factor in accidental combustion, and hydrogen disperses very quickly.
4) Hydrogen was almost certainly not the cause of the Hindenburg explosion. Anyalysis of evidence makes a compelling case that the disaster was caused by the "doping" material used to treat the dirigible hull fabric, a combination of iron oxide, cellulose acetate and aluminum powder. A good brief article on the subject can be found at http://engineer.ea.ucla.edu/releases/blimp.htm
5) Hydrogen as a fuel is not completely safe. Airplanes are not completely safe. Is it safe? No. Is it insurmountably and unacceptably more unsafe than conventional fuel vehicles? No. If it were, thousands of corporations would not be spending billions of dollars developing it. We call it common sense, people.
More to the point, I'll worry about selling content blocking software to China - which is the LEAST of any Chinese person's worries as far as personal liberties are concerned - in about a thousand years, after I'm done worrying about the incredibly vast grey markets that dump millions of small arms into unstable civil conflicts, the sale of carcinogenic, toxic and persistent chemicals pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers which we choose to ban in our own country, for purposes of health safety, to third world nations, the exportation of toxic wastes, the encouragement of benighted economies to choose the quick fix of rapid industrial development to the extent that they destroy their ability to feed themselves...
What does Mr. Katz suggest be done? Shall we declare cultural war on these countries and work openly to subvert their governments? Shall we make adoption of American cultural standards a requirement for participating in our "global" economy? No, of course not. We should take the usual liberal path (and this comes from an anti-conservative, mainly Green and Democratic voter, who is nevertheless sick to the teeth of ALL the empty rhetoric that defines our national dialog): wring our hands when we arent't sitting on them, point and shake our fingers at those who are merely playing by the world's rules as they currently exist, take the moral high ground and DO NOTHING. Shit or get off the pot, Mr. Katz: everybody knows it's a bad old world. If you don't have any more to add to the discussion than that then please just keep it to yourself.
>insert rant here about our blame oriented >culture...)
I'm not so annoyed by the need to blame (hey, if someone steals my credit info and causes me ten kinds of hassle I WANT somebody to blame) as the stupid assignment of blame, which I'm tempted to say is a side-effect of our litigation-crazy culture - if you're suing someone you want as many targets as possible to increase the restitution pool, if you're being sued you want to spread the blame around to reduce your own liability. In this case, it's easy to assign blame - a person comitting Fraud is number one to blame, the people responsible for making your credit info so insecure take second place. I might even go so far as to say that, considering what it costs them and hence their shareholders, employees, and customers, the credit card companies could probably be more proactive in at least getting anyone that takes credit cards for commerce to agree to a minimum data protection protocol, and provide them with information on how to ensure that.
Who shouldn't be blamed is Google. Search engines make e-commerce and damn near everything else on the internet possible and practical. For Search Engines to be possible they cannot be burdened with being culpable for the data they uncover - it's just a quagmire that makes effective searching impossible. Hell, the businesses whose business it is to block specific content can only do so to a degree. The fact that Google will stay away from anything it's told to is all they need to provide. The failure to even restrict well-behaved crawlers demonstrates that the person putting the data out there has either no idea how the internet works at all or no concern for their customers' data. Either way they shouldn't be in e-commerce. If I ran the credit card companies (he ranted grumpily from his armchair) I would cancel the merchants account of anyone compromising data that badly. It would save everybody but fraudulent bastards money in the long run.
It's sort of like the twisted logic behind the DMCA... copyright holders need to encrypt to protect their intellectual property... but their encryption schemes fail if faced with any serious attempt to circumvent them... so let's make circumvention tools illegal.
Locks fail so you make lockpicks illegal. Ah, but crowbars can still break the lock so lets make crowbars illegal. It's all stupid: you can lock the door of your home with a luggage lock, if a thief breaks it to get in, the cops my laugh at you but if the thief gets caught it's still "breaking and entering." You don't need to outlaw screwdrivers because they can break a "technical" lock.
Credit card fraud is illegal. There are a million ways to get numbers. If search engines find them by merely being thorough, then anyone that wants them will be able to find them that much more easily. Should dumpster manufacturers bear the onus of creating "dive proof" dumpsters? Maybe carbon paper manufacturers need to make self-destructing carbons so you can't fish old-fashioned credit card receipt carbons out of the trash.
Mistake number one is calling this "AI." I think the bar for that title is a tad higher, no? Mistake number two is calling this news. People have been diddling with useless biofeedback toys for decades; big deal. You can also buy goggles that give you a reveletory visual experience while you listen to Led Zeppelin. Self-assembling nanoelectronic components are being synthesized, the fundamental thermodynamic nature of DNA is being parsed, and we get this. Does Slashdot need a science editor? Now, maybe they could hook the thing up to 911 so paramedics would be rushed to the scene when another stupid raver took 5X the sensible dosage of yohimbe and collapsed. THAT would be news
A great point: I suspect the original questioner, being a college senior (I think) probably is young and single - (s)he doesn't mention particular financial obligations as an issue. I certainly agree that an individual's role in supporting their family supercedes their need for job satisfaction in the short term. However, I would disagree that personal satisfaction "doesn't mean jackshit," even in that context. If you don't think that working a job you hate is going to have a real, negative impact on your family you're fooling yourself.
How many parents out there are working themselves to death, trying to make up in upward mobility and financial accomplishment what they lack in satisfaction, while their kids get raised by the public education system, their friends, and the teevee? The kid that is materially well-endowed but spiritually, emotionally and socially bankrupt is practically an American cliche.
Whatever you might say I believe we all do have choices - if that makes me a "friggin' moron" so be it. But by that I don't mean anyone can do whatever they want, or that seeking happiness absolves anyone from personal responsibility. But I do think far too many people follow thier path of least resistance under the excuse that they don't have any choices. I think we always have choices, but sometimes they might be very difficult. A husband and wife might choose to allow one spouse to go back to school, even though it means the family has to seriously tighten its financial belt, for example.
My dad was a minister. He chose to go through 8 years of higher education to earn less than a lot of secretaries do. The choice he made meant we were never well off financially, though we were always secure. I never had cable teevee, a VCR, or a video game system growing up. The car I bought in high school cost $200. I never had fancy clothes, a personal computer, or a lot of toys or gadgets. I put myself through college, I've always worked (many hateful but necessary jobs) and I've been financially independent since I left home after high school. Not that my parents wouldn't have been willing to take care of me, they simply couldn't. Although I don't follow exactly the same beliefs as my dad, I am very glad that I grew up with the example of someone choosing their beliefs and personal conviction over financial gain. Don't get me wrong - my dad was totally serious about his obligation to his family. Nevertheless, often it isn't a simple choice between being miserable or abandoning personal obligations. It's about making real and difficult choices, and deciding what's truly important.
You remind me a lot of myself many many moons ago. I was so busy getting a degree in the physical sciences that I ignored my dissatisfaction with the topic. My lowest grades were in my major. Like you, I told myself that I'd stick it out for the job and the money.
It took me a long time to learn a simple fact: you can find a subject really interesting and enjoyable but not want to do it as a career. If your decisions are rooted in what is most marketable and some now years-old idea of yor adult identity as an uber-geek, then you better kiss happiness in your working life goodbye because you can't start with pragmatism and try to force your happiness into what's left. You have to start with your happiness and then find a way to make it pragmatic.
No matter what you do there will be drudge work - if you're doing what you really love it won't bother you as much as the drudge of computer science obviously does. When you're excited enough about the outcome, the necessary toil becomes a mere obstacle, something to be overcome.
You are so close to graduating it probably makes little sense to try to change your major, unless you're close to a second in something you really like (you must be getting 4:0s in something to bring that GPA up). Have you considered graduate school? If you find something that suits you better (hint: you enjoy doing it), it doesn't really matter that much what your undergrad degree was. You might even be able to design something that combines the aspects of CS you love with a topic that will sustain you through the unavoidable drudgery component. If you have the time and opportunity, one possibility is to try to design a directed study as an experiment to finish out your CS degree. Combine a programming project with some sort of back-up area of study that you might consider as a career alternative. Maybe being in the drivers seat, coding for something you really have an interest in will reawaken your interest in CS - or else it might provide a bridge to a new focus of study. But take it from someone who's been there - don't ignore your dissatisfaction, because it won't go away and you won't get used to it. These people that say "welcome to the real world" have just settled. That's a choice we all have to make. It's never too late to change, but the sooner you decide to stick to your guns and choose to follow your heart, the sooner you will start working towards being happy instead of being miserable but addicted to an illusion of security.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, there is something to say for raw power. In the end, Microsoft is now in the unenviable position of giving away $100 to every new customer while making the customer feel they've payed an excessive or at least significant amount for the console. On the other hand they're in the enviable position of having that thousand foot mountain of cash in the secret basement vault. In the end, to beat the dead horse a little bit more, it's gonna come down to the games, whether they can attract developers who will take advantage of the power that the box undeniably has. Still, I think they could well stumble on this one; they're outside their core competency. The computer and console world is full of tales of the technically superior flash in the pan
I wonder though, how long it will take them to develop this side of the product, and if there will be such a profusion of basically obsoleted 1/2Gig+ boxes out there as to make it a moot point - I've been predicting that in the end the teevee issue will fundamentally be a software rather than a hardware solution. That is, a box, and who cares what it looks like, who sells it or where it sits, is your primary home data input node, where your telephone, internet and teevee all collect, and the teevee is just another remote appliance rather than the central device.
Hmm, that's a good point... The subject of enjoyment I mean. And although there's a thin line between love and hate, I think perhaps another level of distinction IS required on the whole continuum of smack addict to person who plays Everquest for 10 hours straight to an Obsessive-Compulsive who washes their hands until they bleed...
I think the term addiction is being misused in this case. Addiction used to be a meaningful medical term. Some substances are addictive because they build a physiological tolerance, requiring greater use for the same effect, and which, if use is stopped, turns around into physiological withdrawal symptoms. What you're calling an addictive personality is really an obsessive-compulsive personality. The obsession is the inability to get away from the whatever mentally, the compulsion is to engage in the behavior the obsession leads to. It's significant because addiction means bad and it is used to vilify all sorts of things that are really value neutral. Plenty of OCD types clean obsessively but you don't see anyone talking about "Cleaning Addiction" or suggesting that cleaning is intrinsically bad. No functional difference between that behavior and playing Everquest all night.
Yeah yeah, it's all funny but it ticks me off that nobody is pointing out that The principle illustrated in Schroedingers "cat" thought experiment are NOT THE SAME as the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. In fact, it ticks me off that nobody knows what the Uncertainty Principle is really about and people constantly confuse it with the whole indeterminate quantum particle state and whether does in fact create quantum indeterminacy on the macro scale (if a tree falls in the forest...) issue. Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle establishes a mathematically defined absolute uncertainty balanced between the momentum and position of a quantum scale particle. The corresponding thought experiment would be the gamma ray microscope.
you're funny but that other guy's comment was lame
If you read the article it is made absolutely clear from the first line that this is a general connectivity solution. The post I was responding to was saying I hope they do this for other instruments - but you're right on one thing, in rereading the original post, it doesn't really say anything about it being restricted to guitars. That part I guess was just me trying to be trendy.
Now if Microsoft tries to get into my pants, then I'll get seriously up in arms.
This is better than no competition for Passport but not so good as if there were some aggressive and international lobbying and development of public, universal and non-proprietary authentication. This is like watching Fed Ex and UPS duke it out over who gets to run the U.S. Mail.
I think their actions are mistaken because the direction this basically goes is to make the product less and less valuable to the consumer while increasing the production costs (the more you have to tie up the information with attempts to control copying and make sure it shuts down if the rent doesn't get paid, the more you are adding production steps that cost you but don't add anything to the actual signal the consumer is interested in. That's just a bad business plan. The typewriter manufacturers may have laughed at the first Word Processors. Where's Smith Corona now? (hint - still there, with its stock prices in the relative toilet).
If I'm wrong it will make me sad but it scarcely matters (to me personally) - More and more I am sourcing my music from people far out of the beaten path. I can live without the Brittney Spears and Smashmouths of the world with little pain. For me the revolution is already here.
I'm not sure how the impression got out there that this is about guitars. It's a connectivity solution - digital wireless cables, basically. Plug WHATEVER into a port, plug the central doohickey into the mixing bord, viola, they're connected. The innovation is not putting an ethernet port into a guitar (which as the article states is not even being done yet), but adding software to the ethernet protocol with the aim to minimize latency and synche everything to a master clock so that it can be used for music - making sure it all matches up and that the signal hits the mixer soon enough after the player hits the string/key/drum so that there is not a perceivable delay.
Oh, wait, I actually do know how the impression got out there. Silly me, as always it involves Slashdot editors that barely read the articles they post and Slashdot readers who feel justified in commenting on them without reading them at all.
More to the point, there is plenty of solid state amplification going on in guitars, both 100% and partial (all modern tube amps have solid state components), see for just one example Line 6.
Finally, this is jsut a totally different issue. It isn't about amplification. This is about getting signals -any signals, not just guitars -to the mixing board. That's it. In the end of course how well the software maintains and presents the signal will determine if it is adopted. They say it is "cleaner" - in my book this often means they've cut off the top and bottom of the signal, eliminating a lot of signal with the noise and making for a flatter, less rich sound. And this is what's wrong with the assumption that digital is necessarily better than analog. People say, a CD samples at a higher rate than the ear can perceive, therefore anyone who says the digital signal is lacking is an idiot. No: but how the format and processing of the signal and how it is presented by playback equipment can have a serious effect on how much and exactly what is included and excluded from the raw input. Do it very well and you have a faithful reproduction, but with most of the annoying artifact noise removed. Do it poorly and you have the first CD release of Pink Floyd's Meddle. My brother made me a cassette from a 5+ year-old second-hand LP and it sounded better. Noisier, but better. This is why many early digital amps failed. Their signal was flat, thin, dull, the early attempts to model tube effects were crude.
"It's a very immature business (where) most of the important mistakes haven't been made yet," said Aram Sinnreich, an analyst at Jupiter Media Metrix.
Oh, I don't know - they seem to be doing a damn fine job of trying to stuff all those mistakes in. For years now a few of us have been saying on Slashdot that what the publishing concerns are gunning for is a pay to play world where you never own an actual product and never get to control any aspect of your temporary rental of the products you pay for - except for deciding when you press "play" (provided your subscription is up to date, natch).
Basically, the existance of technologies that by nature should make the ownership of a copy of a particular piece of intellectual property much cheaper and much more useful than it has been is being exploited as an excuse to make the act of paying for the right to access intellectual property more expensive and much less useful.
Go to a record store and buy a regular CD - any artist or label you want, if they have it in stock. Rip it to your hard drive. The thing is basically immortal now, barring accident or theft. Rip it to MP3s, make your own mixes, use your personal server to stream your own web station you can listen to at work. Make compilation CDs for the drive or vacation. You never pay to access that content again. Sick of it? Sell it, recover a tenth of your purchase price.
Or: Buy a subscription to a service. Limited access to a limited catalog. You can bet there are all sorts of restrictions on reformatting, how many machines the thing can reside on, etc. Andpay to maintain it. And pay to maintain it. And pay to maintain it. The longer you ae a member the more diffuse it becomes - you are paying a smaller and smaller amount for the maintenance of each song. But you NEVER get to stop paying.
There is only one group of copnsumers these services could be appropriate for - people who spend more than $10.00 per month on CD singles. For the rest of us (I've never bought a single in my life) it isn't even relevant. But it is a warning shot. They're gonna try to use the DMCA to completely eliminate ownership of a registered copy of copyrighted material, an act which, given the results of the recent 2600 case, pretty much allows them to eviscerate the concept of fair use. Alternatives (like emusic.com) are the ONLY solution. People who care NEED to start supporting artists who choose not to join the publishing giant slave-parade. Information may not want to be free but it doesn't have to be expensive.
Cheer up - the publishing industries', particularly the music industries' time of maximum vulnerability is upon them. Keep your eyes peeled troops and get ready to support the good guys.
Yeah, actually if you go look at the Segway website they really seem to be pushing a European image for their vision of this thing's integration into transportation (in the images they use). This thing might actually have a better chance in the UK and Europe.
I'm pretty sure you can set you account up so that Slashdot only shows you stupid bullshit that doesn't matter.
what's irritating is the hype. and yeah, yeah, the inventor says he didn't want that... which considering the train of events, with the leaks and the big tech names and the book deal, seems suspect to me. nevertheless, the rhetoric was the supertech marvel world changing brave new world machine. well, what it is is a funky little rolling platform... and the performance I saw on good morning america did little to impress me. you're dreaming if you think this thing can do any serious power turns or off-roading. it's awfully slow and awfully heavy and just insanely expensive for what it is. a bike can completely replace a car for the dedicated commuter - my brother did this for years (in Minneapolis!) - and EVERYTHING in the USA is set up for the car/park/walk a mile paradigm - so is there really even a potential market for adding this third transportation phase? I'll say what a million other people have said - at 20 pounds and say $500 I would . The product , just in and of itself, is all very nice and nifty - enhanced stability, intuitive interface - but the premise that giving people the ability to triple their walking speed at about 1/3 the median cost of a fairly decent car is a stretch. I suspect it is going to be a very hard road out of the economy of scale valley for Ginger. you notice the thing has its defenders and detractors, but I have yet to see anyone go tot he extent of saying: I'm going to buy one. plunk down my $3000 and roll on home. will you?
Let me stress this point: Sidewalks are for walkers. They are not for bicycles, or gingers, or pogo sticks. The only motorized vehicles I should see on the sidewalk are those used by the mobility disabled.
But more to the point, it is just purely offensive to put forth as some sort of miracle product a device that clearly can only significantly replace human-powered transit. Okay, so it reportedly has some sort of nifty, intuitive interface. There is absolutely nothing else significant about this invention.
No, man, working for Microsoft ROCKS! I LOVE this company! I LOVE THIS COMPANY! Who told you to sit down?! Did I mention how awesome Microsoft embedded systems are? They ROCK!
So once again:
1) A fuel cell does not necessarily mean a molecular-hydrogen based fuel cell. The Hydrogen - Oxygen to Water reaction is the most common but there are a huge range of potential molecular fuels.
2) Even a molecular hydrogen based fuel cell need not rely on compressed gaseous hydrogen. There is tons of fruitful research going on to store hydrogen in solid substrates.
3) Compressed hydrogen in tanks is not particularly dangerous compared to, say, liquid fuels. Mixture with oxygen tends to be a limiting factor in accidental combustion, and hydrogen disperses very quickly.
4) Hydrogen was almost certainly not the cause of the Hindenburg explosion. Anyalysis of evidence makes a compelling case that the disaster was caused by the "doping" material used to treat the dirigible hull fabric, a combination of iron oxide, cellulose acetate and aluminum powder. A good brief article on the subject can be found at http://engineer.ea.ucla.edu/releases/blimp.htm
5) Hydrogen as a fuel is not completely safe. Airplanes are not completely safe. Is it safe? No. Is it insurmountably and unacceptably more unsafe than conventional fuel vehicles? No. If it were, thousands of corporations would not be spending billions of dollars developing it. We call it common sense, people.
What does Mr. Katz suggest be done? Shall we declare cultural war on these countries and work openly to subvert their governments? Shall we make adoption of American cultural standards a requirement for participating in our "global" economy? No, of course not. We should take the usual liberal path (and this comes from an anti-conservative, mainly Green and Democratic voter, who is nevertheless sick to the teeth of ALL the empty rhetoric that defines our national dialog): wring our hands when we arent't sitting on them, point and shake our fingers at those who are merely playing by the world's rules as they currently exist, take the moral high ground and DO NOTHING. Shit or get off the pot, Mr. Katz: everybody knows it's a bad old world. If you don't have any more to add to the discussion than that then please just keep it to yourself.
I'm not so annoyed by the need to blame (hey, if someone steals my credit info and causes me ten kinds of hassle I WANT somebody to blame) as the stupid assignment of blame, which I'm tempted to say is a side-effect of our litigation-crazy culture - if you're suing someone you want as many targets as possible to increase the restitution pool, if you're being sued you want to spread the blame around to reduce your own liability. In this case, it's easy to assign blame - a person comitting Fraud is number one to blame, the people responsible for making your credit info so insecure take second place. I might even go so far as to say that, considering what it costs them and hence their shareholders, employees, and customers, the credit card companies could probably be more proactive in at least getting anyone that takes credit cards for commerce to agree to a minimum data protection protocol, and provide them with information on how to ensure that.
Who shouldn't be blamed is Google. Search engines make e-commerce and damn near everything else on the internet possible and practical. For Search Engines to be possible they cannot be burdened with being culpable for the data they uncover - it's just a quagmire that makes effective searching impossible. Hell, the businesses whose business it is to block specific content can only do so to a degree. The fact that Google will stay away from anything it's told to is all they need to provide. The failure to even restrict well-behaved crawlers demonstrates that the person putting the data out there has either no idea how the internet works at all or no concern for their customers' data. Either way they shouldn't be in e-commerce. If I ran the credit card companies (he ranted grumpily from his armchair) I would cancel the merchants account of anyone compromising data that badly. It would save everybody but fraudulent bastards money in the long run.
Locks fail so you make lockpicks illegal. Ah, but crowbars can still break the lock so lets make crowbars illegal. It's all stupid: you can lock the door of your home with a luggage lock, if a thief breaks it to get in, the cops my laugh at you but if the thief gets caught it's still "breaking and entering." You don't need to outlaw screwdrivers because they can break a "technical" lock.
Credit card fraud is illegal. There are a million ways to get numbers. If search engines find them by merely being thorough, then anyone that wants them will be able to find them that much more easily. Should dumpster manufacturers bear the onus of creating "dive proof" dumpsters? Maybe carbon paper manufacturers need to make self-destructing carbons so you can't fish old-fashioned credit card receipt carbons out of the trash.
Mistake number one is calling this "AI." I think the bar for that title is a tad higher, no? Mistake number two is calling this news. People have been diddling with useless biofeedback toys for decades; big deal. You can also buy goggles that give you a reveletory visual experience while you listen to Led Zeppelin. Self-assembling nanoelectronic components are being synthesized, the fundamental thermodynamic nature of DNA is being parsed, and we get this. Does Slashdot need a science editor? Now, maybe they could hook the thing up to 911 so paramedics would be rushed to the scene when another stupid raver took 5X the sensible dosage of yohimbe and collapsed. THAT would be news
How many parents out there are working themselves to death, trying to make up in upward mobility and financial accomplishment what they lack in satisfaction, while their kids get raised by the public education system, their friends, and the teevee? The kid that is materially well-endowed but spiritually, emotionally and socially bankrupt is practically an American cliche.
Whatever you might say I believe we all do have choices - if that makes me a "friggin' moron" so be it. But by that I don't mean anyone can do whatever they want, or that seeking happiness absolves anyone from personal responsibility. But I do think far too many people follow thier path of least resistance under the excuse that they don't have any choices. I think we always have choices, but sometimes they might be very difficult. A husband and wife might choose to allow one spouse to go back to school, even though it means the family has to seriously tighten its financial belt, for example.
My dad was a minister. He chose to go through 8 years of higher education to earn less than a lot of secretaries do. The choice he made meant we were never well off financially, though we were always secure. I never had cable teevee, a VCR, or a video game system growing up. The car I bought in high school cost $200. I never had fancy clothes, a personal computer, or a lot of toys or gadgets. I put myself through college, I've always worked (many hateful but necessary jobs) and I've been financially independent since I left home after high school. Not that my parents wouldn't have been willing to take care of me, they simply couldn't. Although I don't follow exactly the same beliefs as my dad, I am very glad that I grew up with the example of someone choosing their beliefs and personal conviction over financial gain. Don't get me wrong - my dad was totally serious about his obligation to his family. Nevertheless, often it isn't a simple choice between being miserable or abandoning personal obligations. It's about making real and difficult choices, and deciding what's truly important.
It took me a long time to learn a simple fact: you can find a subject really interesting and enjoyable but not want to do it as a career. If your decisions are rooted in what is most marketable and some now years-old idea of yor adult identity as an uber-geek, then you better kiss happiness in your working life goodbye because you can't start with pragmatism and try to force your happiness into what's left. You have to start with your happiness and then find a way to make it pragmatic.
No matter what you do there will be drudge work - if you're doing what you really love it won't bother you as much as the drudge of computer science obviously does. When you're excited enough about the outcome, the necessary toil becomes a mere obstacle, something to be overcome.
You are so close to graduating it probably makes little sense to try to change your major, unless you're close to a second in something you really like (you must be getting 4:0s in something to bring that GPA up). Have you considered graduate school? If you find something that suits you better (hint: you enjoy doing it), it doesn't really matter that much what your undergrad degree was. You might even be able to design something that combines the aspects of CS you love with a topic that will sustain you through the unavoidable drudgery component. If you have the time and opportunity, one possibility is to try to design a directed study as an experiment to finish out your CS degree. Combine a programming project with some sort of back-up area of study that you might consider as a career alternative. Maybe being in the drivers seat, coding for something you really have an interest in will reawaken your interest in CS - or else it might provide a bridge to a new focus of study. But take it from someone who's been there - don't ignore your dissatisfaction, because it won't go away and you won't get used to it. These people that say "welcome to the real world" have just settled. That's a choice we all have to make. It's never too late to change, but the sooner you decide to stick to your guns and choose to follow your heart, the sooner you will start working towards being happy instead of being miserable but addicted to an illusion of security.