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?'"---
--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.
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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.
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.
http://www.cooltown.hp.com/
Here is the open source codebase for some of it.
http://www.cooltown.hp.com/dev/
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Oh bother.
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.