Message 19/73
Date: 13-May-02 @ 07:03 PM -
RE: Roland - emulate or innovate?
Hey Brett,
That was pretty racist and ignorant of you.
The Japanese beat the entire US auto industry _cold_ in the '70s and '80s by, er, making cars that, what, oh yeah: work. Quality control is still light years ahead on any Japanese car over the American equivalent, step inside one of each and if you can't tell diff. in quality you should, well, er, just go buy a Ford Exploder.
In the musical instrument/synthesis arena, Roland was doing high-quality modular synthesis while the rest of the world was still digging peat out of the bog to cook dinner with. Roland had stable oscillators long before that long-sought-for goal ever came to light elsewhere. Korg had many innovations as well. Yamaha, ditto. Can you say DX7? Where were all those brilliant American dim bulbs when the Japanese saw fit to license the work being done at Stanford?
And oh, er, forgot to mention, the Japanese are light-years ahead of us in supercomputing now.
As well as the fact that the Japanese have brought SIMD to the mass-market while the brilliant Americans are still struggling with segmented-memory Neolithic X86 architecture (PS2 vs. Xbox).
Jeez! what an ignorant comment you made there!
Try reading, you may find you enjoy it, even just as a part-time hobby.
rt