SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the next-up-will-be-a-Bluetooth-8-Track-player dept.
The cassette player finally goes Bluetooth
This month marks the 40th anniversary of Sony's first Walkman, the portable music player that would forever change the way we consume music. And while the audio cassette long ago fell out of favor for the CD and later digital music, the format's certainly not forgotten. It may not have the same audiophile cache as the vinyl LP, but a a small and passionate contingent of music listeners are keeping the fire burning.
NINM Lab's latest project occupies that same sort of fuzzy technological limbo as past products like the I'm Fine single use camera. It's also got a name to match: It's OK. In this age of political unrest and global disasters, maybe that's exactly the message we need right now. As for a bluetooth cassette player, it's probably true that nobody needs such a thing, hyper specific products are one of the nice byproducts of late capitalism.
A Bluetooth 5.0 cassette player? Aight.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday July 05 2019, @01:14PM
By this logic, the light bulb was not an "invention." People had fires and candles and oil lamps and even gas lamps: they knew and wanted light sources. And electricity had been used for various applications in the 1800s already. So, there was clearly a market, and the combination was obvious. An electric light bulb "would have come out one way or another."
Except it took tens of thousands of hours of human experimentation to produce one that was efficient and useful for the average person.
Speaking of car analogies, your logic reminds me of Ford's argument when they stole the practical implementation of the intermittent windshield wiper from Robert Kearns [wikipedia.org]. When he sued them, they later claimed his invention was just a few simple electronic components -- capacitors, resistors, etc., strung together -- i.e., that there was no "invention," just a bunch of previous stuff thrown together. They too basically claimed the intermittent wiper "would have come out one way or the other, eventually" too -- especially as Ford and other companies had entire teams of engineers working on solving the problem at the time, but Kearns actually came up with a simple and effective solution.
Thomas Edison is credited with the quotation: "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." I don't know whether he actually said that (as Edison is credited with all sorts of stuff he likely never said, and I haven't researched this one), but his point is clear. It's easy to say, "It's obvious to combine X and Y, and it will come out one way or the other eventually." Except the implementation of combining X and Y is often difficult and requires a lot of effort and insight.
Or, to put it another way, it's incredibly easy to spitball an idea -- "We should have flying cars! I mean, everyone likes cars, and airplanes are convenient, so why not combine them?!" It's often much harder to make a practical implementation. In effect, your post is cheering on people like patent trolls -- who often come up with some vague idea and patent it, only later to want to charge money to folks who actually make the product practical, since they had the "idea" first. (I'm not saying you'd necessarily approve of patent trolling -- just saying that's the sort of person your post seems to value.)
To me, a true inventor is someone who has both and idea and solves the engineering problems necessary to make the idea practical. Coming up with ideas is easy. Making something work in the real world, even when combining existing technologies, is where the true creativity often lies.