MasHD Blog

London-based tech start-up ROLI has introduced a new musical instrument line that should get musicians and audiophiles salivating. The “Seaboard” is a continuous-touch keyboard with curved “keywaves” (instead of keys) that flow into one another like waves on the sea (thus the name.) This overcomes the step-function limitations of a traditional keyboard, letting musicians bend and select pitches with absolute precision, analogous in principle to a fretless stringed instrument like a violin. The only other on-board control is a “Sounddial” resembling an iPod click wheel that allows for continuous preset indexing and fine-tuning. To all you who are concerned about the instrument’s ability to produce tones in pitch: by playing on the tops of the keywaves, you can play it like a normal piano. The keys, which use subtractive — rather than reactive — synthesis, are instantaneously touch-sensitive. As with any new instrument, the Seaboard takes practice. (ROLI has released a few online demos...

If you’re a Windows user you probably wondered why Microsoft and Bill Gates made some of the decisions they did with the operating system. One of the strange, and at times annoying, decisions that Microsoft and Gates made early on in Windows development was to force users to use the Ctrl+Alt+Del key sequence. That key sequence was originally designed to reboot the computer as a way to log into Windows. Gates recently spoke at a fund-raising campaign at Harvard for the Harvard Campaign where David Rubenstein asked him an interesting question. Rubenstein said: Why, when I want to turn on my software and computer, do I need to have three fingers on Control, Alt, Delete? Who’s idea was that? Gates went on to explain the thought process that went behind the keystroke combination during the early days of the Windows operating system. Gates noted that something needed to be done using the keyboard to signal to a “very low level of the software” to bring in the operating system as the us...