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Spray-On Computers
Jack William Bell writes "Edinburgh University has funding for a program to create spray on computers. The basic idea is to make thousands of tiny 'silicon specks' or 'smart sand' (a step larger than smart dust) which work together via wireless networking to provide 'ubiquitous computing.' No, the idea itself isn't new. But it is interesting to see someone actually working on it. The initial application is a spray you apply to the chest of heart patients, creating a sensor array to report their health back to the hospital."
that geeks start coding in graffiti?
[Insert Spray-On Hair-Club-For-Men Joke Here]
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_
Then the patient could really be in trouble if some one accidentally sent "dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda"
boy I sure would not give out my root password.
OH THE SHAME I fell off the wagon and use sigs again!
Most of the geeks I work with can't even figure out how to spray on deodorant.
Does this mean that we can sniff the fumes?
The idea of spraying silicon chips directly onto patients should be approached with caution.
Welcome to 1984! This is worse than RFID!
Great! So I guess in the future, I can look forward to have my daily /. page
generated by a squadron of albino spray-on paint.
Sometimes I wonder if this effect i planned by the IT industry. With quantum and DNA computing on the way, we will see in a few decades computers which are extremely powerful but also also extremely cheap. Obiviously the profit margins of the industry will drop below vaccuum energy levels. Therefore they have to find a way to make people more and more computers besides the incredible power of a single machine. The easiest way to do this is the make computers more powerful but less efficient.
I would even conjecture that this idea is behind the introduction of XML, web services and grid computing. Normal computer operations are overlayed with bloated protocols and documents to decrease to efficiency of modern servers and workstations forcing people into new upgrade cycles.
Ever wondered by why XML is not binary based ? Computers don't care if humans can read their data. Or why bloated XML is used for web services where simple binary based RPC would do the same job ? Or ever the perversion of putting it on top of HTTP, introducing new security holes by making trditional firewalls useless ?
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
I want some high-tech painball loads of this stuff, so I can get a tactical advantage feeding the enemy's location into a little heads-up-display...
Okay, I'll just stick with Unreal Tournament for now. Proper exercise can be a unimplemented goal, can't it...?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
How much for a dimebag?
I don't know about you, but I don't really see the point of using an aerosol can to make computers. Yeah, I get the medical thing (and I think it's a good idea) but why do you have to spray it on? Why not simply apply it with some tweezers and glue? Is it funner to shake up a can, say "Close your eyes!" and press down on the little button?
With this you could take a pen and spray it and it becomes an interface in its own right.
Umm... okay... So everyone has a can of "Kwik-n-Ez Spray-on computers" sitting on their desk and then they say, "I want to interface with my computer!" shake up the can and spray their pen. "There! I typed a command, now I'd better throw the pen out and when I need to interface again I'll shake it up and spray!"
1.3 million pound grant eh?
/usr/bin/complain >
do these devices have enough compute horsepower to handle encryption? do you really want your heart status to be "broadcast out"? can they autonegotiate proper encryption for correct data exchange? all these smart dust, smart pebbles, etc. plans (especially those intended for military purposes) - it looks like major security needs to be built in, but at least so far the track record has been pretty bad (WEP).
I am afraid this is just another grant hunt. There is no battery that would be suitable for this project.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those. Oh. Wait.
Ever wondered by why XML is not binary based ? Computers don't care if humans can read their data.
Oh, but humans do. If you're developing such systems it's many times easier to debug human-readable text instead of binary stuff. You can also see what's going on more easily. See below.
Or why bloated XML is used for web services where simple binary based RPC would do the same job ?
Because being plain text allows for easier access, modification and searching by humans AND computers. No more locking in to proprietary binary formats. Would you like each manufacturer to have their own binary RPC protocol, all of them being incompatible with all others?
Or ever the perversion of putting it on top of HTTP, introducing new security holes by making trditional firewalls useless ?
It needs to have something as bearer, so why not use something tried and tested. What would you have suggested? A completely new protocol? What a waste of time and resources. Besides, a firewall alone does not quarantee your safety. It's not like if you allow web traffic, suddenly everyone and their dog is able to r00t your box. You allow port 80 but you disable RPC stuff in the server and that's it.
Have I been trolled?
I haven't read most of the comments thus far posted, but I was wondering just how smart these little guys will be. For instance, how will they know who their peers are? i.e. you use them to monitor a patient's heart. but you have 3 cardiac patients in the same room. will each spray bottle have a "signature" on each little speck, or maybe specks in close proximity to each other will somehow learn that they are part of a larger group...? the latter seems like too much to expect from something that size.
The power of Christ compiles you.
A Random Blog
...nobody will complain that geeks don't wear deodorant.
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
Shouldn't they first build a nice working supercluster of AT-sized or rack machines communicating via WiFi/BlueTooth/whatever, then try to build a single spraynetathingie that can handle house a CPU, a power souce and a wireless hookup, and only then go about making fancy declarations?
On another note, they can use that tech the japanese made declarations about a week ago about using glucose to generate power for these things...
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First of all, DNA computers will probably never be practical. Not because of the equipment involved, but because their is a hard limit on the amount of dna that can be involved in a single computation.
Also, you are correct that it is not feasable for a network to achieve linear time speed-up in the number of processors. Theta(n/log(n)) would be great, though, and sufficient for most applications.
http://yetanotherpoliticalrant.blogspot.com
and then convert it into electricity. that's how your neurons work.
1. the site is not slasdotted
2. the "repost" has the following: "micael's retardnesses "
Well that's what I'm hoping.
I'm sure a lot of the grant money is for working out how to encapsulate the sillicon chips with teflon or titanium (or other stuff like exotic carbon) in strategic arrangements so that their outsides are biocompatible and conductive in just the right places, so that one day Bones can wave some strange glowey thing over you, say "Well, i'm just a simple country doctor," and bring you back from the dead.
On the other hand poisonous smart sand would make a fantastic weapon. Make it be able to hop or crawl by giving it little piezoelectric actuators and you could make an ordinary looking patch of sand suddenly come to life when activated by an enemy soldier's touch, swarming over his body and forcing itself under his gas mask seals and into his eyes, nose, ears and mouth. And then it could hide out in the body, waiting for the next victim.
lastly, a listening device the size of a grain of sand could be put into your bedroom and you'd never find it. (hands up who regularly even vaccuumes their room? I always forget. I don't even know how to spell the verb properly.) They say that the goal is to computerise objects by simply spraying smart sand onto it: What if somebody decided to (without your knowledge) computerise your pillow stuffing? Do you know how many Americans pray out their deepest darkest secrets on their knees by their bedsides each night?
If these walls could talk...
initally, for the very first working batch, it will be worth more than all the grant money expended creating it, otherwise nobody sane would research this idea.
eventually, the dime bag would be worth more if you filled it with dimes.
that's the way all legal technologies go...
(for instance: me sitting on my back porch, typing on a $200 second hand laptop with a $30 wi-fi card)
Yeah, complexity grows exponentially, but only if a cell is allowed to comunicate with any other, that's not the 'right' way to do it.
Local communications, seeking global behaviour (biological-like way) seems to be a better way.
Imagine a pretty, smart geek chick like Ceren Ercen wearing only SPRAY-ON COMPUTERS... running Gentoo... and a Beowulf cluster of them at that!!! ... ))drool((
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
SPRAY-ON computers the size of a grain of sand... They plan to spray the nano computers...
I wish people would stop using the word 'nano' to mean very small. It's 10^-9m. A hell of a lot smaller than a grain of sand.
Does this mean that geeks start coding in graffiti?
I already do that on my Handspring Visor.
"We are the Spray-On-Borg, raise your arms and lower your shorts, we will add your biologically distinctive odour to our own, you will be deodourised"
Go permanent? In your dreams and my worst nightmares.
I actually picked up Michael Crichton's Prey while I was in Edinburgh last weekend. It follows a similar kind of technology. Pretty cool, and quite a tie-in for me personally!
about something 'like' this a few days ago. basically i was thinking about everything has processing power and you just hook into it when needed (somewhat distributed). but i wont be holding my breath.
I know you are psychotic, but please make an effort.
Does this mean we never have to take a bath?
Would you get a spontaneous Beowulf cluter?
Is this sand so smart it knows you don't want it in your swimmers or your clothes when you go to the beach? :)
Microsoft today announced the release of a new spray on Windows CE. Surprisingly, Sun and RedHat had little to comment about the new MS Product. However, in an unexpected news conference, a RAID spokesman (the makers of the famouse RAID bug spray) announced an intent to sue MS for leveraging their monopoly in the desktop computer OS market to achieve dominance in the bug spray market.
When asked for details, the RAID spokesman said, "Microsoft has tried to utilize their monopoly in other markets; why not here? Everyone knows that MS is a software company that produces more bugs than code. It is our belief they will begin to refer to this as "bug spray" and confuse the consumers with their usual FUD.
An OFF, a competitor of RAID, spokesman was not available for comment.
for a book. I think i'll call it something like "Prey" and the spray on computer can evolove!
I also covered this subject some days ago in my blog. It is important to note that the medical applications of this technology should be ready within four years and these spray-on nanocomputers should be at work in hospitals, schools and shops in less than ten years. But this isn't the only application envisioned by the scientists. Professor Arvid, who leads the project, thinks our current computer interfaces, typically a keyboard or a mouse, will completely be replaced by these nanocomputers.
Sounds like these guys just heard about the Berkeley motes and related projects but haven't done the homework to realize just how far out of reach their vision lies.
That obviously hasn't stopped them from selling snake oil to clueless grant administrators, journalists, and slashdotters.
Give the technical details for a communication fabric that scales to meet these grandiose claims, otherwise it's clear the work is crap.
Mod this down.
Just in case you missed it, here's a little line toward the end:
"The money will allow the scientists to see the technology working to cre ***micael's retardnesses*** within four years."
The stars were added for emphasis.
Prof Arvid said the spray-on computers could be in shops, hospitals and schools within ten years. Not only will it be IN schools, hospitals and shops, but it will be ON them as well. What was formerly a nuisance will become a valuable service to society! I'd like to see that beowulf.
"While in theory it all seems fun and games, th researchers usually overlook the major problem: communication. The amount of necessary communication to coordinate the data exchange between the sensors increases non-linearily with the number of autonomous systems. Thus the more systems we have the less efficient it will become. So "smart dust" is the fastest way to produce a minimum efficiency with a maximum of computers."
This is an existing and solved problem with application intercommunication. Everything talks to the middleware. None of the systems talk to each other, they all talk to some sort of co-ordinator. At the business level this is something like MQseries.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Just so we're clear -- the article is not about why you shouldn't change your son's diaper in front of your computer....
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I second you.
What are these lab guys willing to do? AI with DNA computers? How dumb! Can't they see nothing sophisticated or intelligent could be done with DNA?
...for spray-on deodorant. Or how about car paint that changes color according to your whim?
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Someone has been on too much whisky. That much money wouldn't keep a serious nanotechnology project in whores and cocaine for the marketing department.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Checking the archives here at good 'ol slashdot, I found this. The power of chee--- uh, blood. One would suppose that this would be a good sourse of power (at least for the medical applications).
Let the toner wars begin! (N.Stevenson reference)
How in the fsck is this informative?
This guy goes around accusing people of trolling when he is the troll himself.
Do us a favor and mod him down. Read the original post yourself if you don't belive me.
These guys go around accusing people of modifying copy and pasted articles. Its really pathetic. Mod down parent.
With this spray on technology being so small, will this have an effect on the reliability of the circuits this is going to be working in?
Also if this were to be used in whole circuits, wont this actually be more recycleably unfriendly as whole circuits would have to be replaced if they went dud? or would it be the other way around and be more beneficial as the waste material would be a lot smaller?
I would have thought that this would also make circuits less user-serviceable.
--Mods giveth, Mods taketh away--
I posted this a year or so ago.
I had a dream once. In this dream, you could get a PDA applied to the back of your hand. It was sort of applied on the surface. It would wear off after about a month.
Just think, PDA functionality for everyone, and you can't lose it.
Everyone wanted one. But you have to pay by the month, because the PDA would wear off. For people who couldn't afford the PDA, there was an alternative. Corporate sponsorship. You could get a free low-end PDA on your hand if you also agreed to let them apply a higher end color animated advertising banner to your forehead.
Especially among young people, which particular animated advertising banner you had on your forehead would become a status symbol. After all, only so many Brand-X sponsorships were available in a certian period of time. So it would have more sex appeal to have, say, an ad for a leading soft drink, than to have, say, an ad for an auto tire repair shop.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
XML's textual nature keeps XML documents "open". I did a Google search a while ago when trying to determine whether there was a standard scheme for putting binary data into XML, and came across somebody discussing parse times for XML. He'd written a program which parsed XML and saved the parsed version in a binary format, and found that it was actually faster to just parse the XML again than to reconstruct the information from his binary format.
On one hand, sure, perhaps his coding wasn't up to the level of those who'd written the XML parser, which might account for the slower loading.
On the other hand, there's a good chance that someone writing an XML parser intended for general inclusion within other programs is paying a lot more attention to doing things right (in terms of speed, security, etc.) than the person who writes a quick data-parsing routine.
Computers don't care if humans can read their data, sure. But, humans do. Parsing a simple, well-defined text format isn't computationally expensive, and makes the job easier for those who might have cause to view the data.
Finally, XML tags can and do carry important semantic information. It's much easier to write a program to parse an arbitrary unknown XML schema (say, GnuCash's file format) than to have to reverse-engineer an arbitrary unknown binary format (yes, I've done both). This is important because it helps to ensure that the data isn't quite as bound to the program -- parsing and conversion between schemas is generally much easier than, say, translating a WordPerfect document to MS Word format.
Hans Reiser has even decided to use text in his transaction-control syscalls:
Text parsing isn't as bad as people like to make it, as long as you aren't parsing a horribly ugly specification (like, say, C++ code).
Besides, how is carrying something on top of HTTP going to introduce new security holes? I haven't been able to decide where you are implying the issues might arise.
Somebody get that guy an ambulance!
pah :(
--Mods giveth, Mods taketh away--
Remember when those perfume ladies would hunt down unsuspecting victims and spray them with the scent du jour? Well, I can see a surge of this practice in the future, but will the spray contain just a scent? Or will it be a computerized leech?
If this stuff will be anything like that glitter that strippers wear that is IMPOSSIBLE to get off, sometimes miraculously surviving multiple showers, it's not coming near me! Just hook me up to the EKG the old-fashioned way-- shave a little patch on my chest and stick that pad on it.
Anyone ever play the game "Total Annihilation?"
If we can find a power source for each component, what's the likelihood of designing spray-on computers that can ultimately reform themselves into a larger, more workable design?
One previous poster made mention the possibility of making them move (I forget the method they suggested), and they are going to have communicative abilities, so it seems reasonable to assume that with a schematic in a main computer somewhere, and a capable enough transmitter, the "spray-on computer" can essentially form up to make a REAL computer!
The Penguin Producer
Try this. Get a VOM and take a probe in either hand and hold the contact between you fingertips. You'll discover resistance across your body, not high, and certainly not infinite. Your body is a low-grade conductor, not a high-grade insulator.
The power requirements of such small and simple sensors would likely be low. In early models, maybe you'd spray on and carry a battery pack on your hip wired to your skin and let your natural resistance/conductivity do the rest. Problem solved?
Yes, there was an element of irony, hence the "Obligatory rain on parade" line. I could actually give you an equally long rant, but as I agree with you, no point.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Had to; too easy. Ahhhh, motes.
Power your micro-puters with your body fat and lose weight fast - guaranteed!
+++ATH0
Just think: Smart potato guns.
isn't that the pixie dust for servers?
--- sig moved for great justice.
Great. Something else to mistake as a can of deodorant early in the morning.
Yes, the novel is not that realistic and I suspect that Neal Stephenson WUI (Writing Under Influence) :-)
I think that these "verbose protocols" generally allow one to use some kind of standard compression on their files, e.g., gzip or bzip2. So I doubt that you loose much by their having a verbose ascii expansion.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Obviously, they never saw the "Bags of Mostly Water" episode (or whatever the real name was) of ST:TNG. Smart sand can kill you.
Its interessting to reflect a bit on current technology when discussing "science fiction" like this.
Reseachers at Berkely have developed a single chip sensor node called the spec . Although this node lacks sensors, it clearly demonstrates the potential of the approach, even using existing technology and implements the basic platform for a sensor node in 5 mm (thats 2.379E-5 cubic furlongs for the metricly challenged). This node have very low power requirements and are capable of communication of more than 10 meter at 19kbps.
This year the ACM holds its first international conference on sensor systems, SenSys 2003. A number of problems will most likely be adressed by this conference, moving the sensor network research forward.
Personally I think the visions are quite viable. It is correct that power sources (esp. batteries) are a major trouble, but there are many sources to be investigated, and solutions will be found. The worst problem with sensor networks are probably privacy (you thought RFID's were bad? How about sensors that you can not see, that communicates encrypted on unknown random spread spectrums freqs?) - Vernor Vinge have written a couple of (science fiction) books, where sensor networks are used in ways that will be a bit scary to the average privacy-aware slashdot reader....
fifteen bucks for a can
put that spray in your hand
if that money doesn't show
then you owe me owe me oh,
my jungle love
We're on a mission from God.
$10.
Yeh, that's just what we need. Spray-on computers. I hope they come with some serious spray-on batteries since I'll probably need to output my data by freakin' candlelight.
... so when one source fails the others can make up for it.
... what makes the generator so damned expensive to begin with?
There's a fueled engine; this is a widely available commodity, since yard appliances like lawnmowers use them.
There's an electric motor wired as a generator; again, this is a commodity item.
Then there's some magic electronics that converts the output to 120V@60Hz; gee, electronics ... how expensive can that be?
... but if you go looking for a "door" on "bench legs", it's much cheaper.
It seems that in looking for an "electric generator", I'm looking for a terribly expensive item, and I may well have to shop around for an "propane engine connected to an electric motor connected to a voltage regulator".
Pardon my belligerence, but I just spent some time looking for electric generators. Electricity. Remember that? It's what makes your goddamn computer go in the first place. And for the life of me, I can't find a generator (especially one fueled by natural gas or propane) to save my life for less than 400 bucks.
Priorities! We are lacking priorities. As a result, we risk computing by candlelight. So I say: screw spray-on computers. We need multisourced power
While we're on the topic
Believe me, I've been seriously considering building my own generator. I've learned from long ago that the price of something depends on what you call it. If you want a work bench, you'll pay through the nose if you go looking for a "work bench"
SourceForge. Sheesh, what our society really needs is an GadgetForge to compensate for the tunnel vision of the economy that provides us with all we'd want, just as long as we want a narrow selection of items ("any color you want, as long as it's black").
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
beowolf clustor of....cardiac patients?
Am I the only one who wonders what happens to the spray on computers when the heart patient decides to take a shower??
You must be new here....
These designs don't need batteries. There are lots of other ways to do it.
The most promising and common is simply to make it micropowered, and run it off a capacitor. Another way is to use a coil and leach off RF or magnetic fields from 50/60Hz AC hum (very viable in a modern home or hospital). Another one is this bit of advanced magic for picking up higher-energy RF, called the "solar cell", which neatly sidesteps problems with antenna lengths.
The neatest, and most tricky to counter, is, of course, a built in generator which leaches energy from movement directly, by the movement of a tiny magnet inside a coil, with some charging logic. Store it in a thin-film capacitor for a while.
Another clever way, which would be good for small devices, would be a peizoelectric skin over a small air bubble, which would generate voltage from changes in air pressure, or sound.
So you don't even want a battery, most of the time.
Insert punchline here
They can have my computer when they pry my gun from my cold dead fingers.
Sure, it would be possible to catch the first few soldiers, but I'd bet it won't take too much power to EMP such a small device. Heck, a basic metal detector could probably emit a strong enough magnetic field to scramble those things good.
An archaeobacteria(sp?) capable of living under extremely powerful DNA-modifying radiation corrects mutations by error-checking between _four_ identical DNA strands at once, as I remember.
Not to mention the other slight problem that has been overlooked...where is this magic dust going to get it's power from in order to transmit these messages, the electrochemical energy created by the heart itself? Basic principles say that if you take energy from somewhere, that "somewhere" will have less energy, and the heart usually needs its electricity in order to keep working properly.
"Oh dear, it seems every lab rat goes into ventricular fibrillation or asystole just after we receive the first status report that says everything was fine..."
Of course I guess they could make it battery powered but then you might as well just use a boring old microchip...
There is always a difference between used and new prices. The same site you mentioned has a few generators for sale for ~$100/kW. However, none below $400. However, I am sure you can find some, if you are trying to find a used/surplus one. There are a few on Ebay as I am posting this. Good luck!
You are correct in that electric generators are a "mature" technology. I've always been of the opinion that there is no such thing as a "mature" technology, only a stagnant one, but until I come up with a cheaper electric motor design, I'm only talking out my ass. With current designs and copper prices, electric motors are about as cheap as they are going to get. However, they are still more expensive than IC engines for any human size+ power scale. Better magnets are going to help, but I think the diesel engine is still improving faster than the dynamo.
My point earlier was that just because something is made of electronics, does not mean that it will be cheap. There is no Moore's Law in power electronics. Ever buy a 30 kW diode? Not cheap. I work for a company that makes little electronic boxes that sell for $22,500. Nuclear Instrumentation is also not cheap, but for different reasons. Electronics have become much better at handling information in our modern age, but for many other things, they are slightly better versions of what we had in the sixties.
I think the reason people have become so complacent about electricity supplies is that we have had it so good for so long. People rely upon it because they can. Not buying a generator to keep the gas pumps running was a good financial bet for 20+ years, and probably will be for the next 20+ years.