The Screens in These Speakers Weren't Meant for Touching [Speakers]

By Michael Zhao Oct 8, 2011 8:00 PM 35,814 29

By this point you've probably been hardwired to think "touchscreen" at the very sight of a black rectangle. But German high-end speaker company, Göbel knows better than to slap a screen onto their flagship Epoque Reference speakers for novelty's sake.

The black rectangles on these speakers are actually the latest version of Göbel's signature bending wave drivers. Although previous models were crafted from thin wooden membranes, this latest iteration uses nine layers of laser-cut carbon fiber in addition to the wooden core. Of course neither carbon-fiber nor wood can produce sound on their own accord so the actual tunes are produced by four aluminum longthrow chassis drivers and eight passive radiators that reside within the driver unit. Oh, and the twelve woofers that flank them. It's all wrapped up in an acoustically-optimized composite board housing with interior aluminum baffles and support beams. The entire package weighs about 420 pounds!

Göbel is promoting the Evoques with a tour across Europe's most renowned hifi dealers offering customers a chance to listen before they order. Oh and yeah, if you have to ask, you can't afford them. [Göbel via 6moons, Born Rich]

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How Incredible Gigantic Gigapixel Photos Were Meant to Be Navigated [Video]

Navigating through a giant, massively detailed photo should be freaking amazing, not confined to a tiny control panel like it too-often is. The Gigalinc project from the University of Lincoln takes all the coolness of humongous photos and lets you control it with Kinect gestures. Awesome.

The project ran this weekend at the University of Lincoln in the UK, so you won't be able to get your hands on it or anything like it for a bit. But this is the kind of stuff we really hope we see more of out of gesture control. [Gigalinc via Petapixel]

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This Is What Google Really Meant By "Don't Be Evil" [Google]

Google has been throwing its weight around and pissing a lot of people off.

It allegedly leaned on Motorola not to use a competing location-detecting service from Skyhook. Then it turned around and dropped $12.5 billion on Motorola to get into the phone market, competing directly against partners like Samsung and LG.

It changes its search algorithms with no warning, sending certain businesses plunging in the rankings.
It charged into Facebook's territory a couple months ago with Google+ and is playing hardball with tactics like taking a much smaller cut of in-game sales to draw developers to its platform.

It looks a lot like Microsoft in its heyday.

Every time Google makes one of these moves, it's easy (and fun!) to point the finger at the motto which appeared in its IPO prospectus: "Don't be evil."

But as computer researcher and social activist Aaron Swartz points out, Google had a very specific definition of evil.

It had nothing to do with market tactics like stabbing former partners in the back or playing hardball with weaker competitors.

It was all about users.

Google gave three examples: it would only show relevant ads, would never show pop-ups or other annoying "tricky" ads, and would never sell search results.

In other words, it would never make a product worse for users just to make a quick buck.

So look back at Google's actions from the last year and they're mostly in line with this credo.

• Tightening the restrictions and source code releases on Android, and buying a hardware maker to create "reference" phones (free of the crapware that carriers install, for instance) makes Android better for users.

• Changing its search algorithm to get rid of crummy results makes Google search better for users.

• Adding a social network gives Google access to data that users are sharing with each other, which makes Google search better for users. Taking less money so developers will create games for it makes Google+ better for users.

Sometimes the line gets blurry, particularly with acquisitions — buying travel information provider ITA looked a lot like Google was trying to own a supplier of critical data to a competitor, Microsoft's Bing. (Did Google really need to OWN it to provide better travel search results?)

But if avoiding evil means pleasing customers, that's just smart business.

And that's why Google is winning.

Google anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts also points out that there's a big difference between "don't be evil" and "do no evil." When writers misquote Google as saying "do no evil," they usually have a bone to pick.

Republished with permission from The Business Insider

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