Slashdot Mirror
Digital Lifestyle
Gingerman writes "The BBC is running a story about a full automated lifestyle centre in Wokingham UK. The centre has everything from the home to the office and includes shops too." It's
a little thin on details, but its a mix of practical things that could
be around the corner, and stuff that may be a little further down a 6 lane interstate.
Too bad that a big assumption of the project is that providers of information on the web want to provide it in a format that is useful to an automated agent, when in reality they seem to do all they can to stop you making useful tools like these automated agents. Despite the development of things like XML, JINI and WSDL - all technologies designed to minimise the amount of customisation needed between strangers - the people who have this type of info aren't exactly jumping on those technologies.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
Any digital lifestyle assistant that woke me up early for ANY reason would find itself in little peices on the floor. Better: "I know you had a rough one last night, so I called your boss and convinced him to give you a Work From Home day. Go back to sleep."
I'd love to have one of these places around
If you're not a Liberal in your 20's, then you have no heart.If you're still a Liberal in your 30's you have no brain.
/.ers will scurry from it like programmers from soap...*grin*
Now, if they invent a device that washes your clothes when they are thrown on the floor and you can buy it for 50plat EQ currency, then they will have a geekhit on their hands...
---"What did I say that sounded like 'Tell me about your day?'"---
"I'm waking you 30 minutes early because heavy rain has developed, delaying traffic to the airport. I changed your shuttle reservation to 5.30. Here's the light rock you requested."
...and no. I will not open the pod bay doors.
--Chag
These people spent 7,000,000 lbs sterling to build some sort of a Disney world-of-the-future demo. I'm just glad it wasn't my money.
They stab it with their steely knives,
But they just can't kill the beast.
The UK has such a high cost of living (in part due to the socialistic policies of Tony Blair) with a DSL connection costing $70/month (single user) its hard to see how the UK can compete with other high tech countries such as Singapore.
The tone of the article just reminds me so much of those 1950's visions of future houses that would be fully automated and have robots to clean the dishes and wash the cats. There's just about one thing articles like this are good for, and thats for cheap laughs in about 50 years time.
Cisco (well of course msft has to have the hand in it too) and a few other companies have been workin on the "smart home" somethin kind of the likes of this just on a residential scale where everything is centraly controlled and networked. Which is just fine and dandy with me i like to think that when i make my chunk o change (by learning what not to do by the dotcommers) i'll be able to control my a/c, preheat the oven, start my car, etc. etc. all with those useless shopping buttons on my keyboard... **grin**
How about one that morphs your reflection to say "You Da Man!" everytime you walk by?
Seriously, though, is this sort of "Home Of The Future" really newsworthy any more? It smells of desperate PR trolling by HP. I mean, really:
HP is confident that some of these technologies will be available in the next year or two.
"You could see a time when a screen the size of a laptop computer screen could be embedded into the breakfast bar of your kitchen," said Mr Burwood.
"And on a Saturday afternoon, all it does is monitor the football results for you."
And this can't be done now, because...
I'm reminded of an old Danny Dunn book where he and his pals get stuck in one of these Homes o' the Future because its security system crashes and they get out only because one of the kids overrides the system by, I kid you not, speaking in ultrasonic frequencies.
I looked into the abyss, and the abyss looked into me--and we both winked.
Is it just me or about every five years or so (starting in about 1950). We get this rash of articles showing all these great Automated, effort saving buzzword enabled business/home.
But food from the vending machine still sucks.
Coffee makers get better every year but Starbucks still have Baristas
etc
etc
etc
The point is very little of this tech will hit mainstream in the next five years (if ever) increases in technology will be evolutionary and done one piece at a time, not revolutionary and all encompassing.
Or maybe I just need my morning coffee
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
Can you imagine if your lifestyle agent got a virus?
Suddenly you come home and find 8000 pieces of French Toast on the floor (all cut neatly into quadrangles), your cat has been painted green and yellow, and you are now the proud owner of every pay-per-view movie every listed!
No thanks, I'll just check the weather online instead.
------
Today's Top Deals
What a great future! Crime just got easier!!
The last place i want to read my email is in a local mall kiosk.
security through obscurity = modding down anti-linux posts so maybe noone will see them
There are times when I want nothing more than to get away from anything computer related. I enjoy fly fishing for example. Just a rod,reel, and hopefully, some fish. I work on computers all damned day, and when I go home, the LAST thing I want is to have to interact with yet another computer. The tech is really cool, and I like the idea of seperating each into areas, work, home, etc...but what happens if you want to get away from it all? If this is their vision of the future, (and what else can it be?) then I hope they allow for those of us that don't *WANT* to be tied into the system all the time. Ok, now mod at your discretion.
Sent from your iPad.
...is how connected people really want to be. It's one thing for Joe Suit to want access to his email anywhere he goes. It's another thing for Bluecollar Bob. All he may use email for is notes to mom, and may never have a demand for access elsewhere beyond home.
Also, there are internet terminals at our mall and if I'm there with my wife and make any indication that I want to check anything, I get "The Look."
Me: Sorry boss, I missed the meeting because it was pissing down with rain so there was lots of traffic and I missed my flight.
PHB: Don't worry, we're getting all our staff one of those automatic alarming-woman thing's so you won't miss it next time.
Me: D'oh!
It's five o'clock in the morning. The alarm beeps to life and a soft female voice with an American accent comes over the speakers:
"I'm waking you 30 minutes early so you can change into your grey suit before the Copyright Police arrive to detain you. I've alerted them to the unauthorized copies of several Universal film properties I detected on your portable drive after you docked it last night, as required by the Intellectual Property Theft Act of 2009. Would you like me to play you some light rock as you get dressed? Current prices are $4.99 per half hour."
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
re: the other poster who mentioned the Disney-like tones of this futuristic vision, I last saw Disney's Epcot center in 1996, and boy was it dated then... I certainly hope they've reconsidered some of the stuff in their 'world of the future' displays.
I'd have a personalized plate on my car, but "toxic bachelor" won't fit into 7 letters.
I am happy to see a project such as this come to life for the public to see. Even if some of the technology seems a bit far off, or even usless today, it is usefull for all of us to see new and inventive ways to use technology. After all todays bad idea could be tomorrows Microsoft.
man
No manual entry for
Wake up in the morning at 4am by the voice...
"Hey Doodz Youz been ownd by Leet Haxor"
Then my refridgator would be like
"Yo Fatty come get some cause I got your milk and cookies right here"
The idea of this would be great but I wish the article could have gone more into depth. For the above would not make me look forward to the future.
-THIS SPACE FOR RENT!
Fast forward to 2002. The company has scaled back their operations considerably. New market research data shows that there is almost nobody who would want to pay to live in a fully automated apartment. Hopeless companies no longer have stock valuations based more in ignorance than in profit potential. The Era of High Tech Toys has passed us by. I'm not sure what HP, "home of the earnings warning," is thinking, but something tells me that their cool new automated homes are not going to pave the way back to profitability.
~wally
I'm not so sure that this is a good thing. Although I'm for devices (soda machines, information kiosks, etc) interconnecting with other devices (PDA's, laptops, etc), I really don't think the internet as it stands now is a good "hub" as the article would suggest.
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
http://www.cooltown.hp.com/
Here is the open source codebase for some of it.
http://www.cooltown.hp.com/dev/
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Oh bother.
HP has a website about the technology behind these devices and of all things it sounds like at least some of it is open source. Check it out.
For instance, my two year Mac G4 running OS X...
* Comes with built-in speech recognition and a large bundle of applescripts to automate a large number of tasks via voice commands. Plus, it is fully applescriptable (of course).
* Comes with built-in Macintalk, and will read out aloud any text in a number of voices, and even in Spanish, if you select one of the Spanish voices. My favorite is Victoria, who actually has a pretty seductive voice.
* Runs IBM's ViaVoice for OS X for dictation/word processing
* Has a $40 Digital Media Remote for OS X from Keyspan that can control any application from across the room via out-of-the box mappings and is fully extendable via Applescript
* Features industry-standard DVI connectors for hooking up to monitors such as the 50" NEC 50MP3
* Features 2 FireWire ports for hooking up to the newest audio receivers/amplifiers out there
I'm reminded by these posts of the Simpsons Halloween episode where they get the automated house... seriously though, isn't there a point where some of this technology simply just isn't needed? It seems to me like some of this stuff is just inventing for the sake of having toys, not inventing in order to meet some necesity. Take the self-setting alarm clock, for instance... I'll take my alarm clock with an extra large snooze button any day over a machine that wakes me up (even) earlier than I have to.
Goddammit, people! I don't know who exactly you were but in the case you're reading /. I'll tell you this: This will not do. You're not supposed to have sex at work!
The owls are not what they seem
Quote: "I'm waking you 30 minutes early"
Anything that does that is clearly the Spawn of Satan's Spawn.
"The important thing with this is that the web becomes the hub," explains Mr Burwood.
...as well as other web-centric ideals. Is this it then? The all-encompassing "Internet" has finally been superceded by the ever-evolving, designed-for-hypertext "web". Or I could just be too pedantic.
What distresses me more is the banality which this vision of the future holds. "And on a Saturday afternoon, all it does is monitor the football results for you." Oh woohoo and other saracasm. Sure, there's plenty of talk here about how IT can make everything "easier" (and I'll believe it when I can put my hands through its sides), yet nothing about how we can reach out and achieve new experiences, interact with people and ideas that we never thought we'd even dream about...
"Underlying all the elements of CoolTown is the potential of the internet to affect people's lives."
Time to fulfil the potential, not mould it into the pap of society that seems to extrude from every firewalled port at the moment.
I'm thinking pumice here. Nothing like waking up to a quick exfoliating rub.
At my last job I had to deal with a standard MCSE windows admin (ever notice how invariably people that actually admit to having an MCSE are horrible admins? for another time...) who did not own a computer at his home dispite making near $100,000. I was astounded at 1am when I called him due to server outage, and he had no machine to check on anything. Furthermore his memory wasn't good enough to point me through the problem (I was phone monkey at the time).
When I asked why he didn't have a machine, he replied: "I work with the accursed things all day, why would I want to deal with them when I'm home?"
Now that I'm an admin, with my 5 machines at home (though only 1 windows machine despite being a win2k admin) I still have no clue what he meant. After all, why would you spend 40+ hours a week, and 24/7 on call dealing with something you couldn't thoroughly enjoy?
We see one of these things every few years, and only a fraction of the tech makes it into reality. Cooltown doesn't even seem to have any thing new in it, just the same old ideas rehassed over again. Hometime used to build a house of tomarrow every couple of years on their show. It would be much more interesting if someone built a modle home that had actual, realistic, tech built into it. Not a house that would warm the gararge 30 min before you got home (Billy Boys), but something that was helpful like an intigrated network for voice/data/whatever, smart lighting that turned on when you entered the room (and saves energy by turning itself off), that sort of stuff. Build a house that is technologicaly advanced and doesn't cost $1mil.
This is all very cool stuff (for those of us who could benefit from this kind of technology). I am really looking forward to this kind of thing. I know I spend way too much time doing things that could be [more] automated or completely eliminated. But there are two barriers that will keep it from happening in the near future.
In order for this kind of lifestyle to be possible, many large (and small) companies across a wide variety of industries must adopt and integrate the technology to make this happen. Adoption of new technologies is slow enough by itself. How many of us work in companies where Win98 and NT4 are the default desktop OS's, despite the availability of new, better versions? And this is a technology that's well understood and relatively painless to upgrade. (Yes, I said relatively painless, not without pain.)
Integration between two or more companies takes much longer than adoption within a single organization. Remember the B2B craze? After all the fallout, there's not much of it left.
Companies exist to make money, not adopt and implement new technologies. New means risky, unproven, and that risk makes executives and shareholders nervous. And some of the things involved in creating this "digital lifestyle" are a hard sell, from a profitability standpoint. How do you convince the board or executive team that it makes good business sense to invest in developing a service that lets people know when their bus is going to arrive at the bus stop? So they change at a slow pace to reduce the perceived risk.
This is some amazing work, frankly I'm surprised at how much can be done just with today's technology! I'm really looking forward to the time when it can make a significant difference in the quality of my life.
-Thomas
I really don't see a need for this, and can't help thinking of the old scifi story about the day "the machine died".
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
If so when you get the usual connectivity problems you'll get:
You are in for a crappy day, as I have not been able to get on line for 4 hours so have no idea what your schedule is, could not order your braekfast and could not re arrange your flights as requested...have a nice day.
Wokingham is only 20 miles from or so from Basingstoke where the now infamous Cloud 9 ISP was (is?) based
<Columbo>So I got to thinking...</Columbo>
The so called DDOS attack was in actual fact the side-effects of 120 CoolTown refridgerators and 45 toasters downloading stock quotes. Case closed
All the furniture they show in the photos looks like it comes from IKEA, http://www.ikea.com.
cool furniture
decent prices
I think, however, that it deservers an entry for the people who abuse the bathroom by having sex or doing something else non-poop related stuff in there. I'm not sure whether using bathroom for scat sex would be appropriate, though.
Perhaps The Turd Report could help us with this one?
The owls are not what they seem
In a way this type of technology is already being used. My TIVO is searching the cable listings trying to find shows, actors, and directors that I like.
One tip: never give a thumbs up to an (ahem) adult show...the moment TIVO records something like that on it's own is the moment you are in the dog house with the wife/girlfriend.
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
"I'm waking you 30 minutes early because heavy rain has developed, delaying traffic to the airport. I changed your shuttle reservation to 5.30. Here's the light rock you requested."
...Oh yeah, wasn't this from an episode of The Prisoner? Man you have to love British Broadcasting
i can fill my empty life with useful appliances that will fulfill my every whim and desire...this is exactly what i need to make me a better/happy person!!!
dude.
"the last thing my toaster needs is an IP address"
We're working on a solution to your problem.
As soon as we can develop robots that buy Britney Spears CDs and eat McDonald's, we can finally get rid of all you inconvienent people.
I mean, come on, people are just too damn erasciable to be proper consumers. Not good for a lucrative and stable bottom line.
That should take care your Arab problem, mr. Trollercoaster.
hugs & kisses
the military-industrial-entertainment complex
Laundry chute for the dirty clothes - sends the pile straight into the sequenced washer/dryer which activates based on weight and uses a similarly scaled amount of detergent.
Dirty dishes? Plastic cookware and dinnerware can take the impact. Imagine the fun of practicing your "I bet I can leave the stuff on the table" trick when pulling out the tablecloth after dinner. Chuck the dirty dishes in the chute and maybe press a start button.
Morris not smelling so fresh today? Toss him in the cat chute for a quick spin. Nevermind the clawmarks - there is an auto nail trimmer after the blowdry.
Disclaimer - I am a cat owner and was kidding; lighten up!
56,343 dead after yet another Outlook Worm.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I've had this to an extent for the past 2 years.
it's a program called Mister house. LINK
connected with off the shelf hardware and a bit of knowlege (it isn't for the cranially challenged) you can have this. The speech synthesis from the festival program is excellent and overall the one dedicated server required to run it is a Pentium 200 with 64 meg of ram and a 2 gig hard drive... nothing special.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Any computer that tries to wake me up that early better be prepared to be visited by a very large axe.
Maybe I'm weird but,
I like the idea of life not being so convenient that I get tired of breathing for myself and die. I think as we progress, we are really setting ourselves up for hell when we finally get out there and start colonizing this galaxy. Either that or we'll get so collectively complacent and tamed thanks to the built in electronic convenience, that we'll never bother leaving the planet. Then we'll die slow painful deaths when the solar flare of the Gods or other unplanned disaster renders our technology dead. I think more people need to spend more time walking around trails. Knowing the names of the trees you are looking at. Maybe even (please don't flame me) shooting a firearm of some kind. I try to do these types of things every once in a while so I have at least a passing familiarity with nature.
The most important thing any republican needs to know.
... a mirror in a baroque gilt frame which dissolves into a to do list and urgent video e-mails.
It's bad enough looking in the mirror and seeing my own mug, much less a "to-do list" staring back. And what's an "urgent video e-mail?" Urgent to whom? My boss? Spammers? Stalkers?
I live in Plano, TX and all the online grocery stores that used to operate in this area have gone the way of the rest of the dotcoms. However, before the downfall, I had started designing a system that would automate my grocery shopping by tracking what I had in stock and based on the rate I consume things. On a weekly basis I would plan my menus so the program knew what was needed and would order whatever wasn't available. Go to http://206.54.177.105 and click on Inventory to see the current status. Items are entered and removed from the inventory by using a retail barcode scanner.
Since the online grocery stores are now gone, I can't really get any use of out it and the best I can do now is to print out shopping lists, so I've kinda put the project on the back burner. But had those companies prevailed I believe this setup would have made a nice addition to any home automation system by making shopping an almost transparent process.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Really. However, we haven't been able to get the paperless office idea ironed out yet...much less a paperless existance.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Please open the shower doors Haily.
I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that.
I too enjoy a digital lifestyle.
I waking up in the morning to my digital clock radio and reading the time from my digital clock, setting the shower temperature on digital thermostat. Catching the news on my digital tv and checking the time on my digital watch. I speed to work, listerning to my digital radio ignoring the digital my cars speedometer and reading the digital speed warning signs on the road-side. I read the digital display on the lift to get to my floor where I use a digital pass to enter my office, where I read the digital display on the digital coffee machine, before checking my appointment on my digital PDA to use a digital computer and listerning to music om my digital music player, and taking phone calls on my digital mobile.
And all before lunch.
I like to thing I'm pretty normal person in the digital age.
You trolls make me angry! diedieidieidiedie. Why don't you just let us alone?
I think you mean "leave us alone," you ignorant twit.
No, we have low income tax. When you account for all the stealth taxes introduced by recent governments, the burden is very much higher. If you don't believe me, go look at what VAT was 20 years ago, and how much of the price of your petrol is tax.
A more relevant issue, given the subject matter at hand, is whether the UK government are going to introduce some sort of "bandwidth tax" on our telecomms bill. At first thought, this sounds like a Bad Thing(TM). On the other hand, if they used it to take a little from those who hog the bandwidth the most just now and use it to fund improved bandwidth for everyone... Ah, but that would rely on a fair use of tax, and as anyone who drives a car in the UK knows, I'm dreaming. :-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.