The point is not that the connector is cheap, an extra piece, ...

Imagine you board the plane, you forgot your earbuds or worse, lost your expensive headphones. It happened to me, just as a flight attendant to give you those cheap ones they have and quality will be horrible, but I'll have something to listen to.

Or rather, I _had_ something to listen to, since my connector was taped to my headphone jack of headphones (I would just leave it there) and I can't connect those freebies now. How this is consumer oriented I don't get.

To me, trips in the backseat of the car with my parents were filled with:

- Talking
- Fighting with my sister
- Being punished for fighting with my sister
- Looking outside, letting my fantasy have free reign over my train of thoughts

It's why now I don't feel bored very often. When getting bored, I phase out the rest and entertain my brain either with work, planning for the future (dreaming as you'd call it) or just playing out various scenarios in my head on how things could or would go.

I believe it's an important skill to learn a child.

Also, the ability of a child to entertain itself correlates very well with intelligence, which is something you can at least partly train. Don't have children yet, but when I do, they'll get to play on 'our' iPad, but with all restrictions I had when a child. I could play, but didn't get to choose for myself when. To me it's parenting 101, you don't let a child decide for itself.

Also a big fan of the method mentioned above. I'm a programmer, but I dig Chemistry and Biology. The main reason for this is that the teachers made it 'fun'.

The best moments in class were the experiments that involved him saying 'Hmm, this should be more than enough to have a reaction by now' and 'Oh a little more sure can't hurt' leading to spectacular reactions. If this was intended or not is besides the point, he entertained the class and taught us something while doing it.

Simple experiments like eloctrolysis to make water and generate a 'plop' sound are fun. Having the teacher give you free reign to experiment as you want to (we scaled up, broke the glass bottle container) only adds to the fun.

I pity the people who think science isn't fun. For them it might be, but I sure hope the scientists don't feel the same way. And I'm sure any scientist who has achieved greatness had great fun while at it.

On the regard, I have a question for Brianna Wu:

How does it feel to be so irrelevant in your field that you have to piggy back your way to "fame" (or rather infamy) on the misplaced anger of a bunch of teenagers with nothing better to do?

Dear slashdot owners,
the site has jumped the shark a while ago, but this is driving the final nail in the coffin of "relevance". Just close it down and be done with it. Turn it into ITBiz 2.0 and make it completely irrelevant. There are so many people you could interview who actually have something to say in their field of expertise, instead of this person who only got in the spotlight after a bunch of angry kids sent her a bunch of fake death threats. While I can understand this has a significant impact on your life and work, if it is the crowning achievement of your career in your rise to infamy then what could you possibly have to say that is remotely interesting to the audience of slashdot?

Just pull the plug already. I'll help. I'll log out now, and never come back. I haven't said it out loud, but you simply don't cater to my interests anymore. I scroll by the articles, sigh, and get back to what I was doing. But in the end, you're just wasting my time lately.

So long slashdot, it was fun the past 16 or so years... The last few not so much. Goodbye!

Or you can just use OSC as a protocol and do that right now with a handful of DAWs and VSTs. I've been using OSC on Android for about 2 years now with TouchOSC. I use Renoise and Ableton mostly, and those work well enough with that.

On that matter, let's be honest, a touch screen isn't the greatest replacement for buttons, sliders and knobs really. I almost always prefer using a piece of kit as compared to a touchscreen, with the exception of X/Y pads for controlling things like filters where you control cutoff frequency and resonance or bandwidth (for bandpass, etc). It's nice to be able to look at the filter graph where you're fiddling with it, instead of on screen while your poking at an x/y pad on a controller. I also often use TouchOSC when I run out of sliders or knobs while I'm testing/playing with something, but touchscreens are often too "fiddly" compared to a real controller.

I guess that Google is hoping that Korg & co will start porting their iPad/iPhone apps to Android, but quite frankly I don't see that happening anytime soon. Korg for instance has released an iphone app for uploading samples to their volca sampler, but hasn't done so for Android (and this doesn't even use a MIDI interface, just the headphone jack to communicate with the sampler over QAM). They've put the source code for the conversion and "protocol" online on github, so you can just build it on whatever and do your thing if you know how to, but quite frankly that goes to show they're just not interested in supporting Android at all.

There's also the fact that most people interested in this sort of thing have already gotten an iPad and have bought apps and what not, to do exactly that. After I sink money into a tool like a DAW or VST I tend to keep using it until I know it inside out, gotten out of it what I wanted to and got tired of it, which can take a very very long time. Many DAWs and VSTs come at fairly high price tags so a lot of people tend to stick to with what they've got, simply because throwing more money at the problem doesn't necessarily make better music. While this isn't the case for those iPad and iPhone apps, nobody is going to be jumping ship from a platform they've got several apps on, and the people who wanted to do this have already invested in the tablet and apps.

Quite frankly, I'd rather invest the price of a new phone into a real piece of kit that isn't a phone. On second thought, I've got what I need right now, and I'll just work with that and not mess around with tablets and phones for anything else than TouchOSC occasionally allowing me to mess around with more parameters than I have sliders and knobs for. Plenty of sound I can squeeze out of my current setup in ways I haven't begun to try yet.

"When in Rome, do as Romans do" works for simple examples, but some customs go far beyond what I feel is acceptable.

I'm glad you brought up Japan as an example, because it allows me to take the analogy a step further. One such example is during a long stay in Japan, one of the people I was working with offered to take me to a restaurant where they would serve whale meat as one of the dishes. While I have no love for organizations such as Greenpeace, one has to be ignorant of the state of the world not to realize the precarious state of whales in the oceans. You now have two options really: accept the invitation and take part of the economy that thrives on making a species extinct, or decline and risk in offending your host and business partner.

Now, you can argue that neither accepting or declining will change the fact that the whale is dead and the meat will either be eaten or discarded anyway, and I could not argue with you on that point because obviously the whale will not be killed solely on my account. On the other hand, taking part in eating the whale meat could be interpreted as being okay with Japans policy on whale hunting "for scientific purposes", and on top of that you become (an albeit insignificantly small) part of the "demand" side of the economics justifying the sustained whale hunt. Does your choice in such matters change anything? Unlikely, and hardly the point, but it is a matter of principle.

There are plenty of examples of behavior in other cultures that I find from my own point of view at best "unwise" and at worst "unacceptable". While most people will agree that taking off your shoes inside someone's home is neither, and is just a custom you should just respect, I do not feel obligated to take part in things I find unacceptable by my own standards and morals.

I've spent quite some time there, and there are many things I find "unwise" or "unacceptable" with my own cultural background, and their own vision on some of these matters is often very divided, but each subject generates the same response which borders on apathy "It can't be helped" or "It is the way it is" from either camp. Now, it's not up to me to decide what views a culture should adopt or what is morally right or wrong, and that's probably for the best, but I personally refuse to take part in something that I find fundamentally wrong.

That said, there are many aspects of other cultures that could enrich our own cultures, and I don't think looking over our cultural borders every now and then and meeting eachother half way is a bad idea.

Not really. My dad was the one who set me on this career track the day he came home with a Amstrad CPC 646 when I was 6. It came with one game on casette (my dad bought that extra), a book on BASIC in English (which was not my native language), and an insatiable curiousity (although that might have been there at the time). I was lost in the book at the point where it explained how to draw a circle on the screen, but I pounded in the code and started playing with the variables in and before those weird sin() and cos() functions.

And yes, I played videogames. I saved up months worth of allowance (money to buy candy, hey, I was 6) for that dinky little joystick, but I spent more time playing around with it than actually playing videogames on it.

When I was 12 I saved up for a "real" computer. An 8086 with 640KB of memory, and after I got used to working with DOS, floppies and a hard drive with a giant 20MB of space, I bought books on programming for the PC. Yes, I also played videogames, but it was the programming that fascinated me. Making that computer do things for me, albeit very useless but that wasn't the issue, it was doing things I had told it to do. I learned how the machine worked, what memory addresses were special, what interrupts were, ... It was a fantastic journey.

By the time I was 17 a friend of mine introduced me to Linux, and it didn't take long for me to make the switch. A program crashing wouldn't take down the whole operating system anymore, and best of all, it was free (gratis), came with a compiler (again free), and it came with everything you ever wanted in documentation, and if that failed, there was the source code. I played games... I had to dual boot for it, but I played games and even organized a small LAN party with friends in the basement and learned the basics of networking as I went along. When the internet became a thing in my country I could e-mail people around half the globe about a bug in a program, send a patch file, download the source code to something I wanted to try, and learned something new every day.

I'm sad for a lot of the programmers graduating today. The fact that the phone in my pocket has thousands of times the resources of that old 8086 of mine means that inefficient code comes at a smaller cost for small programs. And sure, it doesn't matter in small programs, but when they start writing real code it shows and often in painful ways. Instead of learning how to program, they've learned how to play games. Aside from the graphics card, there's no real need for adding something to a desktop machine anymore, and even if it were it's all pretty much (actually working) plug and play these days. There's no incentive for people who play games anymore to tinker with a machine and learn how it works.

As time has progressed I've seen less and less interns passionate about computing, and more and more people who say "I went in IT because I'm good with the Internet, like chatting and playing games.". Oh, there's a big buzz around the usual hot topics, like "social", "big data", "cloud", "internet of things" and whatnot, and I'm not claiming that's a bad thing, after all times have changed and everyone adapts new models and technology, but still... There's few who are interested in the machine, and how to really make it do things. When a kid tells you a database with 2GB of data in it is "big data" and we should be putting that shit in "the cloud" I start wondering about the future. There are exceptions, but far and few in between.

And yes, as the gray hairs on my head have started to become quite numerous, I still play videogames. But I still spend most of my time with the machine doing other fun things.