Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Home Of Tomorrow Has No Bathroom
Starman9x writes "Over at the The Toronto Star
reporter
Rachel Ross
got a tour of
Microsoft's home of the future.
She writes with an appropriate amount of humor, given all the easy targets Microsoft has set up. While the writeup is light and witty, there is an unspoken Orwellian undertone to it -- after all, do we really want Microsoft to have that much control over things?"
I guess that's for consistency...windows leaves all kinds of shit all over your system, so why not your house as well?
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
"A large number of people think (the solution to) productivity has been solved," explains Thomas Gruver, group manager for the Center for Information Work.
Man, those Microsofters really do live in a different world. On what planet do they find people who think that they've got that productivity problem taken care of?
I write in my journal
"The house of the future has no bathroom.
And I really have to go."
Sorry, please install Service Pack 1b for the crapper.
Have a nice day.
its not a bathroom, but a recycle bin. it can go for awhile without emptying, just until you fill up a certain percentage of the house that you allow. actually, each partition of the house has one, though reliability can be flakey at times, oddly sucking away at all the other resources of the house (electrical, water, etc..). though for the most part works, but keeps you forever wondering why they call it a recycle bin
Jesus saves souls and redeems them for valuable cash prizes
Ready...
Set...
GO!
I guess we'll be takin the crash dumps in da kitchen.
Be honest, how many times have you hit refresh since the article was posted?
No shit!
Now where am I gonna put all my bathroom reading material?
All cool till you have several generations of people who grew up with this stuff and know no other way of life and all of a sudden a big wind storm and the power is *OUT*.
:)
Generators would be even more necessary than now
Fuzdout
..My sig ran away. Has anyone seen my sig?
It's a demo house. Would you want people trying out your toliet? And what about the customized toliet "reading material" hmmm, I think not.
Oh, and why was comment creation disabled for half an hour? New slashcode feature.
The TV also has a message about grandma. According to the television, she is having a "normal day." Heath explains that the message is part of a larger system envisioned for senior care. Sensors in a retirement home, she explains, would monitor her activities to make sure everything's okay.
Oh yeah, I would love to sit down to watch CSI, and be greeted with Mom fell and broke her hip, has bed sores, and vomited during bingo.
ugh..I think I'll pass on something like that.
Can you imagine trying to read a recipe overlaid upon the ingredients you are trying to cook with? Maybe display it on the wall or something, but to imagine your worksurface limited in such a fashion and call it convienience is simply absurd.
Apple: The house would be see-through.
Sun: The house would look like absolute shit asthetically, but it'd be stable, and never be able to be knocked down.
Novell: I don't know, but there'll be a lot of guys in black ties and white shirts ringing the doorbell.
Conversation between 2 burglars :
"Which house shall we pick?"
"I've already chosen one. It's running Windows Home Edition"
"But those have biometric scanning"
"Yeah. A buffer overflow will take care of that"
"I don't think so." (busy trying to hack into the wireless LAN)..."seems they've patched it"
"Rats! I didn't want to do this. The home owners don't deserve it, but here goes...send in Slammer..."
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
Some have already been tested in senior centers. It's still in the early stages of development, but such a system isn't entirely a fantasy
Speak for yourself, lady, but my fantasy isn't monitoring seniors all day.
Ugh. Microsoft house. Other than the obvious "Security comments" and pissNshit
...demonstrates how a resident might enter using a retinal scanner instead of a
jokes, lets get down to some seriousness. And by the way, what's with ChrisD NOT allowing comments on creation??
---Visitors to the house can leave a message via the touch-screen monitor built
into the exterior wall or record a message if no one's home.
What?? We already have voice intercomms, and some have a rudimentary X-10-like
cam in there. Other than being a node on a network, what's soo special? Hell,
I've even speced up a security network using Linux and such tools.
key. Any such biometric screening device could be used...
Retinal, yeah, but what about "Any biometric device"? If it's a hand print,
gelatin (thanks to the japanese guy who 'found' it out). And to beat ANY
biometric crap, all you need is the following:
Eyes : Spoons
Hands : Saw, axe...
Face shape: Axe and cutting block... (eww)
Point is that biometric doesnt matter. A key would probably stop that unnessary
dismemberment.
---All of the home's basic functionality is available in a pocket
PC-turned-light-switch...
Yeah, and we can trust the wireless protocols? We cant even trust the 802.11
encryption people, let alone MS for security. Who's to know that you could walk
near and hijack a house computer system?
---It's like Web TV and a personal video recorder combined (add~~ read email
wherever)
Why would you want a tether like a PDA to haul around the house to control basic stuff? The last thing is to be harassed by email for this and that when my girlfriends over. Hell, I WANT CONTROL OVER EMAIL only when I'm sitting at my computer. I could give a shit less. And if it's really important, they'll call.
And about that TV setup... Soo it's like MythTV?
---would monitor her activities to make sure everything's okay.
And how would we prevent that those same sensors wouldnt be in a non-invalid
house? Any audio/video sensor (read nearly everything) is that kind of sensor.
If I'd have that kind of hardware, it'd be on a NON-INTERNET'ED network, with no physical connections to any network, with exception to the phone line. And that would be only for emergency phone calls (like fire sensors in roof have been set off...).
Another thing is this auto-cooking shit. I wouldnt expect any computer can give
reasonable instructions on how to cook. Cooking's an art, mastered by those with
experience. How can some 2 bit computer deal with recipe substitutions cause you dont have that one good it demands? Or will it DEMAND KRAFT CHEESE when you
bought that slab of american for 1.4$ per pound? Computers should follow MY
rules, not the other way around.
---All of the computer displays in the future house will be hooked up to a
central computer that coordinates their activities. This is critical for
broad-based features such as homework lock-down, which parents can use to
disable TV, music and other home entertainment until the schoolwork is done.
Uhhh, cant that already be done with X-Windows and cron jobs?
And of course, you gotta have that SoHo stuff for those never-off-the-clock
business users. That's a slashdot article in all its own. Still, all this GPS
here, Voice analysis there and add yet more buzzwords.
Point: There's tons of stuff in any house that you dont want ANYTHING taking
control of, with the exception of the person there. I sure dont want some
windows security system that goes in lock-down mode whenever the cat jumps
around knocking some book down, or have it call the fire department on a bad
computer cooking stint. And what about errors? There's tons of bugs in this
kind, no, ANY kind of system on this magnitude. I wouldnt trust ANY OS, even
Linux to take care and log every little transaction in and out of my house. And
the last thing I want is a transaction log that some law enforcement agency can
download if they have the certain e-signature allowing such search and seizure.
The supreme court has shown that they dont care for our rights.
Oh well, this has turned from a objection by point to a obnoxious rant. This is
just stuff that I worry about when "shit from the future" happens to be
partially true. It makes me think that there's actually a way to stop it.
But, the sad fact of the matter is that the "world has changed" since I was a young idealistic college freshman, and mircosoft, rightly or wrongly, has taken a position that differs from my "ideals" -- I'm the type that likes to tinker under the hood of the program, and I don't see Microsoft making all that easy to "tinker" when "the house of the future" does come around.
Starman9x
p.s. (of a sort) there are several mentions of "Disney" in the article, as in the dark-ride/automated event type rides, but she missed the most obvious "Disney" parallel -- The Smart House"
Heh. Actually, AppleHome would be see-through and striped, and come in all the colors of the rainbow or a cool titanium finish that would scratch and dent. =] You could only have 1 or 2 Rooms in it (5.25 bays), but the Rooms would do everything (Superdrive/combodrive) You'd only be permitted to run AppleHomeOS on it, until someone came out with LinuxHomeOS For the AppleHome. AppleHome users would account for only 10% of the population, but would be MUCH more vocal about their love of the AppleHome than MS users.
And if you used something in Beta, you'd erase your bedroom (iTunes, Safari)
It would definitely have better aesthetics than Microsoft-Home, though. Eeek.
-Sara
Imagine walking home... it's been a long day.
As you enter, you are greeted by a warm Muzac entry sound. "Welcome Home" It chimes in an even, an unoffensive voice.
As you walk in, you are followed by wall mounted screens delivering custome tailored advertising. Who knew I could grow another 6" safely and without any effort?
You hang up your coat and you are chimed by a tone, that says "Thankyou for using MS coat rack" Ding!
You go to the kitchen to put away groceries, but before you get there a 6 foot holographic paper clip stops you. "Your grand mother is not eating her food. Do you wish to feed her"
"No it's ok, I'll talk to her later Mr. Clippy"
"Are you SURE you dont' want me to feed her. It's not healthy for her not to eat"
"She's made it 80 years on her own Sir, she knows when to eat"
"Older peopler need to eat, human, or they could starve!"
"Fine, what ever. Give her some food"
You can hear sounds of mechanical arms wurring in the distance, and an old woman screaming... ugh just another bug.
You go to put away the food, but as you insert some fruit and turn around, you see it spit out of the fridge. "What now?!"
"This fruit is not compatible with this refridgerator"
"It's a banana you talking box of ice, just take it"
"MS Fridge 3.1 does not recognize this typen of fruit. Are you sure you want to store it in MS Fridge?"
"YES!! I want to store it in MS Fridge!!"
"Open the door manualy to continue."
You put away the rest of the food, with only a few more discussions regarding the unlicensed eggs, which aparently were not grown at McMSoft Farms, and therefor do not have the correct nutritional value. And the fit the cubbard through over you buying flower... It insists that MS Breads are a more efficient use of your leasiur time.
As you go to the TV, you realize that you won't be watching TV tonight since all that's on is the BSD show.
Sudenly out of nowhere a lazer shoots you inthe pocket and burns a hole, destroying a tape you had in your pocket. "Hey!! what was that?"
"You were carrying ilegaly coppied music. I have corrected the issue for you."
"It was a mix tape from a friend!!"
"All copyrighted materials must have digitial copy right signitures, or they may be stolen. You don't want to steal do you?"
"It's from his band you nit! Never mind, I'l just go take a shower"
You dissrobe (hoping the computer isn't watching this time) and turn on the shower.... ICE cold.
"Computer turn up the heat, please"
"The heat is on"
"No it's not, it's freezing"
"The watter is hot at 37 degreees"
"In Celcius!!"
"Error: Unknown variable.... Reporting bug.... Bug fix will be available when you upgrade to MS House XP: The Next Generation"
You scream into the night as you run naked into the woods, trying to escape the MS Tree 3000's (better greener foilage). You find your self a nice cave and grow hemp in the field. Not because you like hemp, but because you heard it causes memmory loss, and you want to forget.
I would rather be ashes than dust!
Microsoft couldn't improve the bathroom of tomorrow? Come on! Where's the innovation?
My ideas....
- Auto-sensor for build up of noxious odors.
- Wireless connect in bathroom, naturally.
- A scale that keeps track of who is on it so it knows when to lie.
- A soap container that doesn't leave a white-yellow wax pond.
- An XBox to hold my toothbrush (doubles as a hair dryer).
- A medicine cabinet mirror that Photoshop touches up your appearance before you go out. Even better, a mirror that dims to match the ambience of a bar you are going to so that you can see exactly how pretty you are before your true looks are discovered.
- Temperature sensing based on biometrics.
- Flat panel for pornographic - er - custom content viewing.
- Any old style RIAA literature to shit on.
- A toilet that doubles as a bidette (sp?) - with override.
I would take the trip to Redmond to see that one.
As it is, I hope they have newspaper on the ground.
T.
This space for rent.
With a Microsoft-Home: if you threw a party, once the nineth person entered, the house would shut down util you upgraded your licence.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
These digital homes of the future will only be as smart as the owner. People will yell and scream and curse at their house just like they do to their printer. The main server that runs the whole party will require pretty good knowledge of computers. Unless of course, you are rich and have a 24 hour geek squad a phone call away. Technical difficulties will arise, upgrades will need to be done, and to do it yourself (economically) will require *wanting* to know the guts of the system. Not to mention, a bit of knowledge about whatever language is making everything tick. The interesting thing about these "future" homes is that they are just a concept right now. They will become widely built and used only if simplicity is pursued by the people designing and building them. Whoever comes up with a very simple GUI for some "master controls" that doesn't require every single appliance, light, alarm, and garage door opener to be compliant to only one protocol, or worse, MADE BY MS, will be a very rich person. Of course, the average /.'er could handle the 'super house' (and most likely would not let any other person put their muckers on the design and implementation of it), but the average 'i have 40 gigabytes of ram!' person won't be able to.
More importantly, Microsoft doesn't have a single view of the future. The tours present possible scenarios, not a blueprint for product development.
This is the most important part of the article. Not everyone will want *everything* that MS's digital home showscases... but customizability (is that a word?) of these future homes will be the key. Opting for the econopackage presented by your home builder would be a bad idea. A home owner would end up without enough features that they could make good use of, and too many things that they don't need, or worse, don't know how to work.
It will be interesting to see how these become mainstream.
You have paid for a total of 0 pages and so far 0 have been used up (0 today).
All of the computer displays in the future house will be hooked up to a central computer that coordinates their activities. This is critical for broad-based features such as homework lock-down, which parents can use to disable TV, music and other home entertainment until the schoolwork is done.
"That feature's not popular with teens," Heath says.
You know kids would just find a way around that, to hijack the main computer for their own sinister uses while blaming it on gator or something.
While the reporter certainly played up this aspect of the tour, the impression I get is that there's no aspect of MS's corporate culture that isn't touched by a hyper-competitive worldview. The fact that this shows up in the marketing of their "office of the future" would indicate that they feel this is something that anyone might identify with... which feels like a corporate-level unconscious manifestation, similar to automatic writing / free association.
(smile already, I'm only part-serious.)
What I can't decide whether this section of the tour is an amazing instance of idealized projection by MS's marketing staff, or an example of how a good marketing team can identify with situations completely unfamiliar to them (i.e. being genuinely threatened by a competitor).
(yes, that was sarcasm...)
Sure, I'm overstating the situation, and sure, their target audience for this tour is really high-level execs who - to some extent - are paid to view the world this way.
Still, it's a pretty sad when even in the magical future the CEO schedules press conferences without having a clue as to what he's going to say; maybe MS should look into building futuristic, non-stupid executives.
Oh well... here's hoping those fictional robots go on a fictional killing spree!
My wife and I are nerds and have designed automation into our home. We have systems for security, lighting control, media equipment control and HVAC all talking to each other via serial and Ethernet. We are programming everything ourselves, because we can and because we think we'll do a better job than anyone we could hire.
We've been in the house for six months and haven't finished the lighting controls. It takes a while to figure out how you want things to work. Everything works reasonably well and some things are really cool.
However, anything more complex than having a button that turns out all of the lights when you're ready to shutdown for the evening gets surprisingly subtle.
For example, we programmed the system to automatically turn on the hall lights when we get home. The rule is simple enough, if this door opens, and it's between sunset and sunrise, turn on this light. But then, we have a warm winter and get a lot of bugs on the entry and when I take out the garbage, I turn off the light so the bugs don't swarm into the house, then open the door and the light comes back on!
We easily fixed this, but what happens to tomorrow's consumers who buy a mass-produced system that tries to be a LOT more clever than what I just described and it goes wrong? These are the people who couldn't figure out to set the time on their VCR, who don't know how to turn off Word's autoformatting "features" and instead have to learn how to work around them. How are they going to live in a home that is complex beyond their comprehension and that does things they don't want and can't fix?
The answer is they won't. This high-tech home automation for the masses is a fantasy. Software is going to have to get orders of magnitude better before it's even thinkable.
But that's to be expected. Speech recognition is one of the technology challenges currently facing software developers. If the system worked right now they'd move it to Microsoft's house of today, a nearby showroom officially known as the Consumer Experience Center where the company shows off current technology.
Perhaps if the system worked right now, they'd call it Macintosh OS X.
Seriously, Mac speech recognition has (quietly) gotten pretty good, just recently. For nearly ten years it's been one of those things that I play with occasionally and think, "When they get this right, it's gonna be cool."
It's now very cool. With an hour or so of set up, a few nights ago, I can now surf the web (among many other tasks) completely hands free. I say, "Drudge" and Safari opens drudgereport.com. I say, "move page down" and it scrolls. I say, "Weather" and weather.com is loaded. I say, "Switch to..." and it switches to whatever app I want, already running or not.
All while iTunes is playing.
Any keyboard shortcut can be defined in one app or system-wide to be triggered by any spoken word or phrase you choose.
Combine it with Applescript and.... shell scripts and... this is VERY cool.
Mac users, if you haven't tried Speech stuff on your Mac recently, try it again with 10.2.
I recently demonstrated it to a neighbor who only knows Windows and his response was, "So how much would it cost me to get a Mac that can do that?"
Microsoft, once again, is WAY behind the curve.
I thought Microsoft's animated *assistant* appears after you drop a hot load on the sofa.
"It appears that you have moved your bowels in a most inappropriate way. Would you like to add the turd to the clipboard for later use?"
If you think
In the Apple House: You would always be better than your neighbors.
In the Sun House: You would always be smarter than your neighbors.
In the Novel House: Neighbors?
In the Linux House: You have to rebuild it from scratch every few months but at least you got 45,312 people who will help you out (or at least call you a newbe until you read up enough to build it your self)
In the Minux House: You wouldn't have one big house to hold everything but instead many smaller separate houses, one for each purpose.
-Jason
All the more reason to opt for a Linux-house or BSD-house. Everything's made with open technology, so when you don't like something you just have to poke around at it until it changes. You have your choice of how you want your house to look, and you can tweak it quite a bit. Plus, since it's open you don't have to go to the locksmith's when you want to change the keys. Just grind your own.
/me exits
Applehouse and MSHouse are a tad bit too restrictive for my tastes. I'll stick it out and wait for GPLHouse, even if it won't always support the latest and greatest new House-ware.
And, of course, RedHouse will make every House-UI look alike, which will confuse you to death when you expect something to act one way, but it acts a different way... Until you realize you're in Gnome-House and not KDE-House.
Gentoo-house would be interesting.... Quite interesting. But somehow I think that most of the population would end up making a mistake and locking themselves out of it.
And bloody hell, the Everything-Drake Mandrake house with Toilet-drake, espressomachine-drake, chair-drake... Ok. I admit it, even the Linux-Houses will have their issues.
This is corny.
-Sara
The visitors just didn't know how to use the three seashells. :)
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
I swear, I laughed out loud!
This EULA grants you the following limited use rights...
Microsoft does not need^H^H^H^Hdeserve this much control.
/. troll becuase "Hotfix Q1873672 has been out for your microwave for 3 months!!1 It's your own fault you can't walk upright anymore!!". Hmm.. must be time to patch the house again.
It's bad enough the world has to deal with things like the SQL Slammer, but there's no way in hell I'm going to risk waking up one morning to the Toaster Twister and Coffee Cruncher, visit the bathroom to great the Rectal Reamer, and find out my mailbox says STOP ERROR 0x00000e24 - INACCESSABLE BOOT DEVICE.
Only to be topped off by being yelled at by some
NO SIR.
I'm against picketing, but I don't know how to show it.
...in which the current dumb-user-centric model has ascended to the point that it begins to conquer volition and personal descision making. The computer tells you what ingrediants to pick in the kitchen, it worrys about how many guests you have, and then tells you a recipie apropos to them... perhaps, soon enough, an earpiece will tell you what to say to them...
This level of automation is only apropriate to the mentally handicapped or infirm! Computers are wonderfull things, if you want to understand them and tell them to solve a problem... but if ms's ideal vision of the future is a world in which you are incapable of deciding on your own what to do, a world of insurgent 'user friendliness' to the point that the computers are directing our behavior [in a socially usefull and constructive way, no doubt] instead of using them as tools... it's ugly, and it's the ultimate fulfillment of user-friendliness. I just can't wait for the 'so I'm a women now' birds and the bees wizards to instruct parents and children on that special path of adolescance [only $99.95 for this special upgrade pack!]
Scary.
---
the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Scenario One:
Heath : Computer, why did you select the quantity for four. Its just me in here..
Computer : Sweetheart, I thought I should cook for the three gentlemen hiding in the attic with guns too..
Scenario Two:
Heath : Please select quantity as two for myself and my boyfriend.
Computer : Your boyfriend was here with the blonde from the coffeeshop. Believe me sweetie, he ate.. Oh how he ate!!
Rapid Nirvana
methinks the computerized home of the future is more about technology "fading into the background", making things more convenient but in an unobtrusive way; not the technology being the centerpiece of a "gee whiz" kind of house that would appeal most to a 14-year-old.
but maybe its just the dissonance between a "showcase house of the future", where tech is the centerpiece, and the tech we all really will want and/or need.
In Japan all the new houses have toilet bowls operated by remote control. You can adjust the seat heating and fine tune the flush and there are nozzles that squirt your butt for fun and hygiene. They are about as standardized and easy to use as VCR remotes and the instructions are in Japanese, providing a powerful incentive to learn the language. Seems like the perfect niche for Windows WC or whatever.
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
MARVIN: "It is..."
ARTHUR: "What?"
MARVIN: "Ghastly. The noise. Absoulutely ghastly. Just don't even talk about it. Look at this door. All the doors in this spacecraft have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done."
DOOR: "Hummmmmmmmmmmmmmm"
MARVIN: Hateful, isn't it? Come on, I've been ordered to take you up to the bridge. Here I am, brain the size of a planet, and they tell me to take you up to the bridge. Call that job satisfaction? Cause I don't."
FORD: "Excuse me, which government owns this ship?"
MARVIN: "You watch this door. It's about to open again. I can tell by the intolerable air of smugness it suddenly generates. Come on."
DOOR: "Hummmmmmmmmmmm....glad to be of service."
MARVIN: "Thank you the marketing division of the Syrius Cybernetics Corporation."
DOOR: "Hummmmmmmmmmmm....you're welcome."
With the greatest respect and admiration for Douglas Adams. RIP.
So.. Am I the only one that realized if I had spare cash laying around I could already implement everything in that "house of tommorow"?
Shoot Pixels, Not People!
Can you imagine what would happen when Slammer hits that thing?
-- james
>>Back in the future, Heath is showing us around the teen bedroom of the future.... The teen, Heath says, will have the biggest and best computer monitor in the house.
Well, not in MY house! Not unless "the teen" gets off his or her ass and gets a job to pay for it!
Chuckles aside, I don't really feel comfortable with the idea of an automated house. Concerns about Microsoft and having their software running my home aside(I would never buy a Microsoft house), the prospect of having thigns adjusted when someone enters is potentially annoying. What if lights turn on or off or adjust level of illumination while you're doing something. What if someone prefers to have metal blasting when they come in and you happen to be next to the speakers when they open the door.
Sure, small problems but there is more. One of the common themes in science fiction is the one where human technology has risen in scope and scale, reducing the need of people to work or move. It should be obvious, by comparing the different strata of technology across the world, that the ease created by technology creates a general laziness within a population. As nice as conveniences could be, I can only see many of them creating more sloth and laziness amongst the population.
Not to mention the prospect of a wired, net active house being co-opted by hackers. Don't be so naive as to think that security would be so seriously improved as to make hacking impossible. Technology increases on all fronts. I wouldn't relish the prospect of hackers gaining control of environmental functions and other parts of a wired in house. Imagine the water periodically going frosty as you shower. Chilling thought, eh?
I will admit that some things, such as biometric access and a little digital notepad on the door are interesting and much more useful than harmful. But everything has a point of excess, where too much of a good thing sours it. We should be careful about having too much tech.
Kalen D'arrie
"It looks like you are about to urinate. Would you like any assistance?"
and when you're
"The application "Toilet" has an error at 0x0124FB0. The septic tank can not be "written". This Program will now terminate."
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Actually more likely to be:
Sun: The house structure would be strong and stable, but bits would occasionally fall off, like doorhandles and drawers. You would also need great gobs of cupboard space for all that coffee.
HP: Foundations would be a bit unstable, but the walls would be 10 inches thick, doors 4 inches thick. You would have to rip up the foundations every time you wanted to add another room.
Linux: You would have so many rooms with so many decour choices that you'd get lost. You'd have the chance, though, to really DIY. Of course this would mean that the house would never get finished.
AIX: Would need extensive modifications to kitchen cupboards just to install a toaster. Would require you to press the garage door opener to be able to have a shower.
DOS: Would be a one room house with a ceiling height of 6' 40". (Why would you need it to be taller?)
Windows: Would have to keep going out to the power board and turning the power off and on. You could only use M-rated applicances in the house. The house voltage would be 189V, (reguardless of country). And you wouldn't be able to look out of the windows half the time because of a blue haze.
Can't readily think of any others.
-- main(s){printf(s="main(s){printf(s=%c%s%c,34,s,34
If the thing went bad do you really want to be looking through Unix Core dumps from it to debug it? :-}
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Where do you want to go today?
Not here at home that's for sure.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
In Microsoft House, toilet uses YOU.
This message has been scanned for memes and dangerous content by MindScanner, and is believed to be unclean.
If the toilet crashes, does the shit hit the fan? Literally? How can you tell a BBOD (Blue Bowl of Death) from regular Tidy Bowl? Finally, a home for Microsoft's crappy software. Way too many one-liners with this story.
The first problem is that you wouldn't be able to close the door. Anyone could walk in and build on a new addition (though they'd have to post the floorplans for it outside so all can see).
Actually, Gentoo house is a forest. Compile the lumber yourself.
I wonder how far into the absurd we can descend with this thread.
--- I wish I could hear the soundtrack to my life. That way I'd know when to duck.
Do you really want Steve Ballmer hunched over a monitor somewhere and sweating while watching you lather up in the shower?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
More to the point of the topic... I remember reading an article by Andy Ihnatko a while back, wherein he described a home-automation project using X10, AppleScript, a Mac and a series of cheap microphones scattered throughout the house.
See, the big problem with most speech recognition systems is the problem of speaking within earshot. A mic up close to you will do a pretty good job of pickup obviously, and make the computer's job much faster and more accurate. But if you're already sitting in front of the computer, the speech recognition isn't much good for things other than the supplemental ("Insert Time and Date"). You already have the keyboard and mouse in front of you, which are much faster than many speech commands.
If you want to walk around your house and issue spoken commands, it's much more feasible to just buy a bunch of cheap PZM and omni microphones from Radio Scrap and put them everywhere. You don't even need that many; just think of the places you tend to 'park' (couch, standing by sink in kitchen, front hall, etc.) and aim appropriately. Doesn't take a lot of bleeding-edge stuff, but the design of how it works is much, much tricker, as one other poster pointed out.
If Jesus wants me it knows where to find me.
Major innovations which will change the way we live... because people will be willing to pay for them incrementally:
What the average schmoe will be absolutely unable to afford:
The bigger better jobs will go to home offices, maybe... just maybe... as thoroughly extravegant and self-loving as the Microsoft vision.
So where does that leave the average person?
In a one-room apartment with artificial windows (not wonderful wrap-around ones, unless you splurge), a fold-out bed, a washer and drier quiet enough to sleep next to (because that's what you'll be doing), a minimal kitchen (because real-estate and time is more precious than the cost of the new and improved forms of fast food)
All the while, you will dream of leaving the factory/fast food franchise/service industry to move towards some job you can perform from a home office outside the city.
But that's just one vision.
No one comes to my door without calling my cell phone first to find out if I'm home. Any one who is coming to my door without calling is some sort of door-to-door marketer/religious person, and I don't want them to leave a message. This seems like an invitation for those cards you get on the windshield of your car when you park downtown, only on your front door.
The important thing is that unlike a traditional key, a biometric system would identify each resident as they entered and prepare the house accordingly.
For Heath, this means that as she enters the house, the shades go up, the lights go on and Elvis starts singing.
I (shades down/lights at medium/soft jazz), my girlfriend (shades up/lights on/pop), my best friend (shades down/lights on full/metal), his girlfriend (shades up/lights on low/classical), and my parents (shades down/lights up full/NPR) all walk in at once... house explodes.
More realistically, though - what music I want/how bright I want the lights/etc. depends on my mood, how I'm feeling, and how my day was. It's not always going to be the same, in fact it's rarely going to be the same from day to day. Therefore, I would need to specify every time I walked in - which is no different than I have now.
And why check your e-mail in the front hall, when you can do it from the comfort of your living room on your TV? The television in this house is a whole lot smarter than the average boob tube. It's like Web TV and a personal video recorder combined.
So a list of Heath's favourite programs is displayed on screen.
The show will pick up where she left off the last time she sat down to watch TV.
Great... so, last night, I was watching pr0n - today I invite my girlfriend over to watch a movie and it pulls up... whoops.
A text message comes up on screen from a friend - it's all part of the Disneyland-style demo designed to give a sense of how the house might work. She tells the friend she's busy right now, but quickly sends off directions to their next meeting together.
A text messages comes up on screen from my mistress... while I'm watching TV with my wife. Whoops.
Or, an obscene text message from my teenage daughter's boyfriend appears while I'm watching TV with her... causing me to ground her for a month. I can see obvious problems there.
In essence, though computers are faster than I am, they really are not smarter than I am - they can't anticipate my moods/decisions nor can they cope with infinite possibilities and circumstances, including ones they have never encountered before. I want tools that do what I tell them to, not anticipate what they (or some anonymous programmer) thinks I might want.
-T
I am turning my home into a low budget high tech house (sic) and I have thought about running wires and mounting a pc (or 2) in there. One would be for reading the news while on the throne. Which would allow for the removal of the magazine stack / rack.
The other would be water proof and play music in the shower. I would use shorten instead of mp3, but that is me.
All the more reason to opt for a Linux-house or BSD-house. Everything's made with open technology, so when you don't like something you just have to poke around at it until it changes. You have your choice of how you want your house to look, and you can tweak it quite a bit. Just grind your own.
And your house will arrive in the form of piles of bricks and sacks of cement, with a single photocopied sheet of paper titled "HOWTO: Build a house"!
..Microsoft will sell these at a loss, and the Linux Community will snatch them up and get Linux running on them.
I do't think most peopel want a house like this. We have the technology to do much of this now, hell we have had the technology for keyless entry for years, but we still use keys. How many people have to(or can) conduct business from home? 1% of the population? In this community it is probably higher, but overall its pretty damn low.
SOme of the stuff is cool, but I would only consider it if I controlled how the computers work.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
you have to frequently reboot the oven... that would spoil the Thanksgiving dinner... :(
Linux's home of tomorrow does have a bathroom... you just need the permissions to use it.
The last thing I want to hear when I get home from a hard days work....D000d! 3y3 h4xx0R3d Ur h0wS3!!
Dr. Mike Mozer is a professor of Computer Science (specializing in artificial Neural Networks (ANNs)). He has renovated an old school house near Boulder, Colorado and given it multiple sensors, and controls, and hooked all of this up to an adaptive learning system. For example his house has motion sensors and can control the lights, so when you walk into the bathroom the lights come on automatically.
He never had to program this particular function, but because the house "saw" that everytime there was movement in the bathroom the lights were turned on, it learned to turn the lights on itself. Similarly, a microphone in the living room can determine that the TV has been turned on, and dim the lights to the correct level. I believe the house also predicts what fans and AC/heating to turn on based upon time of day, temperature outside, time of year, day of week, etc. And the best part is you don't have to figure out the optimal logic yourself, but the house learns it from watching your behaviour.
You can find more information about this experiment here The best part is that much of the work was done by graduate students, and much of the funding came from grants.
Computers don't make mistakes. What they do, they do on purpose.
I've been there and it _was_ pretty cool.
Two things that I didn't see in the article.
One of the ideas is that every product sold will have an RF tag. supposedly in a couple of years the tags are going to be down to a penny or two. The tags id whatever you bring into your house and add it too the "house inventory". one thing that scared me was when she mentioned that the house could check your insurance policy and if you weren't covered by you current policy they could contact you to upsell. uhhh, obviously designed w/ the business rather than the customer in mind.
another thing about the door. the door is magnetically locked. you bio scan in and it lets you in. there was no keyhole that I saw. what happens when the power goes out? either you are locked in or the door is open. neither is acceptable.
the house was pretty cool though. it had a great digital art sculpture. some random piece of artfully bent plastic. when you get close it illuminates from inside with pictures and videos from your media library. if you see a picture you like, say your trip to greece, you touch the picture and then all the pictures are from that trip or media group. Tres chic. a great way to display all that digital media we have been collecting.