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."
/.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
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.
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
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.
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.
Ohhhhhhhhhh god...
That is all.
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.
> My favorite is Victoria, who actually has a pretty seductive voice.
:)
.. I'm a big Mac man. =)
I concurr! In fact, I'm having a hard time dating women who don't resemble futuristic lamps or quiet translucent cubes these days!
(Not a troll
"Old man yells at systemd"
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?
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"
"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
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.
... 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
Try the Aware Home at Georgia Tech. I'm told the sheer volume of stray RF emissions from the place will do things like keep your car alarm remote from working.
Dyolf Knip
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.
Well, it might make the figure on the piece of paper closer to the one in Europe, but the value of that figure is an entirely different question.
On the contrary; the vast majority of Britains want to be given the choice, but the government is still holding up on the (probably inevitable) referendum. We're not choosing anything, because we're not being allowed to.
Then again, democracy only works given an informed population. Looking at the number of people in the UK who don't really understand even the basic economics of the move, and the number of arguments they make which are based purely on personal "I like/hate the pound" sentiment, I'm not sure I want that referendum, either...
<rant> That is all a separate issue, however, from "rip-off Britain". The rip-offs aren't because of economics, they're because of wholesale monopoly abuse by the car industry, banks, and other groups with sufficient political clout to keep the gratuitously anti-consumer rules in place in the interests of maintaining their profits. </rant>
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.