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The 'Pervasive Computing' Community
Roland Piquepaille writes "Most of us are using computers, but also PDAs and cell phones. And this trend is accelerating in our increasingly networked wireless world. We might use hundreds of computing devices by the end of this decade. Still, we are slaves to our machines. With every new device, we have to learn new commands, languages or interfaces. The Cambridge-MIT Institute (CMI), a strategic alliance between the University of Cambridge in the UK and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S., has enough of it and wants to give back control to the users. So it launched its 'Pervasive Computing' initiative with the intention to tackle this challenge. In particular, the group wants to develop new technologies to make easier for us to interact with all these computers. This overview contains more details and references about this initiative."
Still, we are slaves to our machines...
No, we are slaves to the programers who program the software that runs on our machines.
Who really doesn't see a problem with the current setup?
Varietous interfaces and commands makes things fun, plus it increases one's aptitude.
I say out with pervasive computing.
clifgriffin > blog
As technology becomes more and more pervasive in our lives we are growing up with a generation of people who don't know what it's like to live without computer assistance. They also are primarily exposed to computers as these large devices that do a whole bunch of things but have a terrible interface. They don't understand that computers can be small, unobtrusive, and do their jobs without the user having any idea they are there.
Automobile control systems are one type of the latter while microwave oven controllers are a type of the former. The car control system works great and for the most part the user can be completely oblivious to its existence. However, the microwave oven control pad is getting more and more complicated every day with too many settings, too many choices, too much interface getting in the way of the user.
When working on your next consumer device (those of you working on that kind of thing), think about making it invisible. That is the key to making it indispensable.
I have been pwned because my
From the overview:
There are still significant challenges to face before all these devices can improve our quality of life, such as designing better interfaces with these ever smaller computers. So the CMI has decided to tackle these challenges and is running several projects such as improved security, more robust networks and power-efficient computer architectures.
IMHO The worst challenges are of commercial nature, not technical. Given enough time and funds, CMI can sure set usability standards for pervasive computing, but manufacturers are likely to ignore or "extend" them to promote their own platform over the competition.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
variety is the spice of computing, of course some os's are terrible but it makes the others look better.
The council seems more focused on developing new hardware that can overcome these issues. But I think the main problem for what we have now are the rogue software programs that take away that control from us (e.g spyware, open relay SMTP servers that send spam).
Mod me a Luddite troll if you wish, but it seems to me that this is an appropriate time to step back and ask ourselves why we need all this computing power at our fingertips everywhere we go. I tried really hard to get into the PDA thing as well as having had to use laptop computers for my job over the years, however I've found that the best computing toolset I could carry for the any business trips was... a good pen and a pad of paper along with a decent solar-powered scientific calculator. Never ran out of power at incoonvenient times, never had to be rebooted because it locked up, never started beeping uncontrollably in the middle of a meeting, and it had an friendly interface able to tackle any task from word processing to number-crunching. My doodling during boring meetings even looked attentive and productive rather than looking like someone playing a video game...
Still, we are slaves to our machines. With every new device, we have to learn new commands, languages or interfaces. - No, some people are slaves of proprietary so-called operating systems. Other people use operating systems and programms which get improved, but don't change the userface with every new version. For example, if you are a Linux user (or addicted to UniXes in general), you will feel at home instantly, whether you use it on a cluster, a server, a desktop, a laptop or notebook, a PDA, a mobile (cell) phone, a wearable or whatever .
Anyone who has tried to work collaboratively on word-processing documents has quickly discovered that it doesn't work, UNLESS a) the collaborative document is almost free of anything above character-level formatting, or b) the collaborators are willing to learn and submit themselves to working within a very complete, rigid, predefined stylesheet that is not changed during the course of the collaboration.
In the real world, different people achieve the same printed appearance by very different semantic routes, and, as a result, it is almost impossible for person A to edit person B's document, or to cut and paste large portions of material, without messing up the formatting.
I of course am thinking about Microsoft Word here but that's just because it's dominant. The same problems occur with virtually any "modern" WYSIWYG word processors. (Although I will say that Word's automatically numbered lists and paragraphs are still a mystery to me and I have been completely unable to form any mental model that explains their innately perverse behavior).
Yes, I have no doubt that there are left-brained people who successfully work collaboratively with markup languages such as TeX, but in the world of casual "computer-literate" users I still frequently encounter paragraphs in which the first line indentation is achieved by typing five spaces.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Explain to me again why it's bad if you have an RFID tag in your pocket that "the man" might track, but OK if you have a persistent wireless internet connection in your pocket, that's uniquely identified to you so that the access can be billed?
Oh, yeah; because the latter can run Linux. NM.
This "problem" is not limited to computers.
You have to learn how to use your lawn mower, drive your car, play your guitar, use your dishwasher....
You cannot expect to get a new appliance without learning how to use it.