throwawayfinal's comments

I think it's absolutely unreasonable to imply that this was intentional. Besides the massive amount of complexity these systems have, there are plenty of "legitimate" places to hide backdoors, instead of in a performance architecture decision.

Keep in mind that whatever "evil agencies" would have asked for this would most likely find themselves vulnerable, and nobody would sign off on.

I do agree, however, the "security by obscurity approach is quite frankly crap". The fact that even large corporations (not the big 5) can't even get away from ME speaks volumes about why this is a bad idea. Facebook isn't the only company with important data.

I'm not sure how they could have come out of this cleanly other than waving a wand and not having it happen? They pretty clearly owned up.

Yeah, but those early WMP versions were just simple media players with really awful, clunky, slow syncing support.

Microsoft took about 5 years to catch up, no small part due to USB 2.0

They say the design of the product, not the components are free, if we're going to be pedantic.

I think it's more that if I spend $200 on headphones that proclaim to be good for fitness, I expect them to sound great as well and in general be worth the $200.

I don't think it's so much audio quality while running as it is being able to use headphones both for listening at quality AND for running.

It's looking more and more like it's a modified-but-largely-intact BSD kernel with a 3ds api (not abi?) compatible userspace. Time will probably prove me wrong.

Tech Knowledge is a self-admitted FCC/BigTelecom shill.

Gamecube was a success. It wasn't a wild success. It also was the hardware foundation for the Wii (seriously, the wii is a gamecube and an arm chip smashed together).

Wii U was probably profitable. Not a success like a company like Nintendo needs, a strategic misstep that didn't impact their fortunes significantly. Hardware-wise it was a very direct descendant of the Wii (and gamecube). Relatively low development cost. The games developed for it are being ported to the switch to great success.

Also, I'm not saying it's impossible or not worth doing (obviously, it's possible and worth doing), just that a few minutes of thinking and hacker news comments are going to hardly touch the breadth of difficulties required to get this to work even somewhat reliably.

For training:

Illegally grabbing thousands of hours of music to train a commercial model hardly qualifies as fair use. Any company you build upon that would be tainted.

For sustaining:

In addition, you'll need to keep an updated catalog of music to identify new songs against, and most uses of a service like shazam are to find names of songs people aren't familiar with, so that catalog needs to be very fresh.

That means you'll have to grab some sort of feed, and engage in large scale music piracy for commercial gain or have access to a library of songs from many disparate music providers, such as ascap.

Background noise:

there are literally hundreds of different background noise environments you need to train against. Dozens of common microphone configurations. Clipping, variations.

It's very much a problem where a proof of concept is neat but doesn't really get you anywhere.

The easy part? If you're apple, google, or microsoft, maybe.

They have the ability to issue tokenized numbers, that's something that not everyone can do.

TBH, I'm not deeply involved in payments, but what they're doing is extremely unique and I could totally appreciate a larger company (such as a paypal competitor like stripe) wanting a piece of what they're doing.

my theory is that their main asset wasn't their consumers, or even that data, but their ability to be a card processor and issuer (like the big banks). I don't think there's very many of them, and the effort required to build that is very time consuming and expensive.