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The Real Hitchhiker's Guide?
An anonymous reader writes "The UK's biggest selling newspaper, the Daily Telegraph, has a news story about a UK company that has developed the real version of the Hitch-hiker's Guide to the galaxy. It is a kind of portable media player that allows you to travel the world's surface and receive media tailored to who you are, where you are and what you are looking at."
Comment removed based on user account deletion
What, you mean wikipedia?
We have had GPS, PDAs and satellite phones for years, they just need to be tied together to make a 'guide'. More important is the *data* and no one company could possibly generate or manage the quantity required.
The closest things to the guide we will ever see have been around for a while already - h2g2, wikipedia and the internet as a whole.
Beep beep.
No, the The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is here. I recommend the Infocom version if you want to play games.
... can it collapse possibilities in alternate universes, destroying the world in every parallel universe simulatenously and preventing the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything from being discovered?
What do you mean, it's just a portable media player? Pish. I'm waiting for version 2.0.
I've heard of projects doing this for at least two years now. This is actually more simple, because it doesn't take any input from the user (other than GPS coordinates). There are similar projects that use natural language techniques to customize what information the user receives.
Of course, the limiting factor here (I believe), is that all of this information has to be inputted by somebody - that's why this model only works in this specific place.
it gives detailed information throughout the whole milky way?
...First off, I don't think the Telegraph is even the biggest selling conservative/rightwing paper in the UK (never mind the UK as a whole). I think someone's PR machine is trying to be resourceful.
Secondly, Mr Adams and the BBC had already started an earth version of h2g2 quite a while back.
How many times do I have to press refresh!!
Eccentrica Gallumbits, the triple-breasted whore of Eroticon 6, is filing for bankruptcy after facing a tax audit for 25% of her last financial year's earnings.
Argh.
who you are, where you are and what you are looking at.
Sounds like a less annoying replacement for my social worker.
Does it say "Don't Panic" In Bright Friendly Letters on the back?
Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former. -Albert Einstein
I find this amusing, seeing as Douglas Adams had the idea for "The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" as he was hitchiking through Europe - accompanied by a book called "The Hitchiker's Guide to Europe."
--Ender
Loose things are easy to lose. You're getting your hair cut. They're going there to see their aunt.
I believe that they market themselves as the largest-selling "quality" daily. Presumably, that excludes the red tops.
According to the National Readership Survey, they are sixth. All the higher-placed papers are tabloids.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
If it only works here on Earth....It would be relatively easy to make. Whereever you go, it would just repeat, "Mostly harmless."
I'm sure that you could make a real HHGG substitute with a Palm LifeDrive (or indeed anything with a few gigabytes of storage, a screen, and input) and a dump of Wikipedia. It could even have a conduit to synchronise your offline changes with the master on the internet.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
Kinda cute, yet when you leave the Earth you'll be a little stuck as it uses GPS to work out where it is.
threadeds blog
You mean something like Alan Kay's Dynabook?
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
http://www.emplive.org/
The experience Music Project is an interactive music museum in Seattle. When you go in, you get a satchel with a device in it, which links to a nice pair of headphones, and a handheld PDA/scanner which displays interactive media as you tour.
When I was there several years ago, I took off my headphones in a gallery full of people looking at rock memorabelia... and found myself taken from a movin' - groovin' world of blues and rock, to the quietest museum hall I've ever been in, and it was packed.
View the EMP's Tech Fact Sheet
Where does it say ".. to the Galaxy", in any of that, or maybe don't you speak English natively?
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
1) Explore the galaxy
2) Get overwhelmed by it
3) Write a guide to it
4) Post a story to Slashdot publicising this amazing guide.
How can you publicise step 4, when you've yet to cover steps 1-3? Don't these people read Slashdot?
Hal Spacejock: Science Fiction with Nuts
Who you are, where you are and when you last had lunch with Zaphod Beeblebrox?
Whereever you go, it would just repeat, "Mostly harmless."
Unless of course, you're in Redmond, where it would shout: "DANGER, WILL ROBINSON! DANGER!"
I've already got a h2g2: basically my palmpilot loaded with stuff coupled with my cellphone. Hell, actually my cellphone is more of a h2g2 all by itself, seeing as I do google searches on it.
-- Waht? Tehr's a preveiw buottn?
it tells you where you can get a pan galactic gargle blaster. All the diodes in my left side are aching - maybe one of these will numb the pain...
The newspaper that thinks that, if there is fog in the English Channel, the Continent of Europe is cut off from civilisation.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Wrong! The Sun is the best selling paper in the UK.
I want cool wireframe flythroughs like they had in the TV series .. I wonder how long the hardware of the day took to render those :-)
One of these devices with realtime 3D graphics technology would be great - imagine the visualisation possibilities for a film director.
Also, why just historical data? Businesses could broadcast stuff too. You'd never need to get lost in a shopping centre/department store again.Um, on the second link?
Haven't we had this story two weeks ago:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07
Or is today's story that the Daily Telegraph has run a story about this gadget?
cogito ergo sig...
Read the article please. Galaxy is mentioned twice but not once in the context where they mean planet. First it's used in the title of the book, second "All of which leaves one question: never mind the rest of the galaxy, what does this mean for conventional guidebooks here on earth?". I don't see them getting planet and galaxy confused.
And anyway The Telegraph is a load of drivel.
The devices at the EMP are glorified radios. Stand in the right place and you get to listen to the program. When I visited, the reception wasn't that great. I gave up on the darn thing.
The British device has all the content on it. There's still a radio involved but it just provides location information so the correct content can be played. Radio-wise this is a much simpler problem and I expect it to be much more reliable.
In fact the radio part becomes very very inexpensive. You could build the transmitters for about ten bucks. The tour company could put these up everywhere; nail them to telephone poles and power them with solar cells. This could revolutionize tourism. You would just rent the player and go for a walking tour of the city. It could even have useful information like: "Don't go there if you don't want to be mugged."
I realize that devices that do the same thing have already been tried but it looks like these guys got it right. Sort of like; everything else is Hurd and this is Linux.
Not meaning to troll but I'm sure node has been posted at lease four times in the past year...
And as soon as that company gets bought out by Clear Channel:
It is a kind of portable media player that allows you to travel the world's surface and receive advertisements tailored to who you are, where you are and what you are looking at.
The company website gives more information, Node "The solution for location based media"
There are pictures of the Node Explorer hardware.
The new trick here is that the content is tied to GPS coordinates, something you can't get (very often) from wikipedia.
Also, wikepedia is an encyclopedia, not a tour guide. When I stop at a research lab I want interesting factoids about what important discoveries have been made there and some bios on the scientists, not a detailed description of the process of photosynthesis.
Wikipedia is also mostly text, and I got the impression that this toy was heavy on the video and images. I'd much rather a narrative with video and images or audio than just what amounts to one of those books on tape.
Wikipedia is a great source for information, but it's not necessarily an interesting/entertaining read, and that's what this little toy they're working on is all about. It's not an information tool, it's an entertainment tool.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
The Daily Telegraph is not the UK's biggest selling news paper by a long shot/a.
Who needs a guide anyway? We all know it's 42.
And localization was never a feature. In fact localization is just another word for push ads.
Where I come from, "localization" means "accessibility to people who read another language instead of English". It's necessary at least until the Babel Fish becomes more practical.
To contribute advances in our fundamental knowledge and understanding of people's relationships with urban space and with public pervasive technologies; to develop a set of well-founded, empirically tested and practically applicable principles, tools and techniques for the design and implementation of city-scale, long-term pervasive systems. These developments will involve advances in knowledge, theory and practice in the areas of designing space, context awareness, service discovery, trust, security and privacy.
Look , it's not big and it's not clever
but it's definitely bullshit
1) Make wikipedia entries searcheable by proximity to global coordinates. The data is probably very quickly entered by the community and the search function does not sound difficult to me.
2) Owners of private wireless access points make them open for everyone ... but all unknown or unidentified users/MAC addresses will _only_ be able to access wikipedia. Nothing else, everything is redirected. This is naturally the more difficult point.
Has anybody experience with configurations like this? I am interested ...
Is nothing more than a handheld with a WiFi connection to the internet.
Sure, we don't have a "Sub-etha-net" yet, but if the world ever gets to the point where some kind of wireless is possible no matter where you are, then this kind of device coupled with something like Wikipedia could easily lead to at least a "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Earth".
It seems to me that, a good chunk of this for the part most could be done today given enough volunteers to fill in the data. If we ever get to the point where satellite recievers/transmitters will fit into a small enough device, then it will work pretty much anywhere (in the world) at any time.
Now, if I could just figure out how to pick up 15 years of back-pay for writing the words "Mostly Harmless". The first one took the most time, but the second one came to me over lunch. ;D
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
I much prefer Project Galactic Guide to such things as h2g2 and the vogon.com project. It has lots of "non-real" articles, but quite a few are fun _and_ informative. We need some new submissions, so anybody interested should get writing!
Klingon programs don't timeshare, they battle for supremacy.
someone could create the guide tomorrow, right? I mean, I guess it wouldn't have the GPS, or a live feed.. ..but photo/color iPod can hold like 60 gig right there.
http://www.apple.com/ipod/color/
and the entire wiki database is only 4.2 gig
while the english parts, just 1.5 gig
http://en.wikipedia.org/wikistats/EN/TablesDatabas eSize.htm
of course, that may say more about what's missing in the wikipedia than how easy it would be to cart it around in your hand. but a good start, no?
(at least the wikipedia and THHGTTG seem to have the same feel -- both have got the cavalier roving (roving in a cybersense) researchers whose information at best may be considered unreliable..
But at least the wiki-entry for "Earth" is longer than "mostly harmless". It's neat that the wikipedia article actually mentions that phrase though.)
(:
Shortwave radio has been around for years.
Good job with spelling receive... I before E except after C.
every bit of funtionality and more is present in that. And this is just begining. If it wasn't for the Hitchhiker's Guide ref, would we even be discussing this?
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
The UK's biggest selling newspaper, the Daily Telegraph
That is not even close to being the truth.
Try You will be bombarded with ads for crazy frog ringtones , personal loans and other crap wherever you go.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
On screen, I see myself as a little red dot moving slowly over the grass. Depending on where I wander, an entirely different heritage or cultural story is presented through a combination of pictures, sound effects and narrative, all related to where I'm standing and what I'm looking at.
How, exactly, is this anything like the Hitchhiker's Guide? I mean, it's cool to have a device that will give you interesting information about whatever's near where you're standing now, as long as you're within a certain area. But that's not even close to what Douglas Adams described in his books, or even to what's in the movie.
Geez, this isn't news. The BBC's H2G2 site (they took over from the failed dot-com project) and links to their h2g2 mobile page. A much more elegant solution than a dedicated device, I think:
"h2g2 On the Move is a version of h2g2 specifically designed with smartphones and PDAs in mind so that the Edited Guide can be accessed from anywhere within range of a mobile/cellphone transmitter."
Try wikitravel.org instead.
Deleted
Make Magazine (http://www.makezine.com/) has a short how-to this month on using a Sharp Zaurus as something similar to the device described here. They use a text-only snapshot of wikipedia and convert it into some propietary dictionary format. The database end up only being 300-400 mb, not bad considering how cheap flash media is getting these days.
UK's biggest selling daily newspaper is the Sun.
:)
The Telegraph is the highest selling British "broadsheet" newspaper, with an average daily circulation of 920,000.
In comparison the Sun sells about 3,200,000 copies daily which is quite impressive and I think makes it the biggest selling newspaper in Europe. It is a "tabloid" newspaper owned by News Corporation.
Page three girls have their tops off every day, hence the name
A hungry bear does not dance!
Too bad MS already holds the patent to this.
:/
Customer: "What's this fish shaped accessory for?" Salesman: "Oh, that goes inside your ear......"
The article submitter quite obviously meant a real newspaper, as in, a paper which actually has news in it, so The Sun should not legally qualify as such, and neither should The Daily Mail. The Daily Telegraph is the United Kingdom's best-selling newspaper, 220,000 issues more than The Times.
The Sun is bullshit for ignorant people, nothing more, nothing less.
You should try it on another planet before complaining. If it can't tell you where to get the best pangalactic gargleblaster on Comodoar LXIV, you may be able to get a refund.
This is a good idea, but hardly revolutionary. The technology behind this is all preexisting; a tablet PC with a GPS and a wireless NIC card. Any number of manufactures could put this together (or end users who spend a little bit on extras).
Like most "new and exciting" applications, it's not the hardware (or even the software) that makes it, it's the content. If these folks think for one moment they're going to make it big by selling tablets that use a (I assume) proprietary tour guide standard which provides content for a few hundred spots, they're sorely mistaken. Organizations aren't going to develop content unless a sufficient number of people buy these things, and people aren't going to buy these things unless there's lots of content.
On the other hand, if they develop and license a standard that's platform independent and easy to produce content for, they may be on to something. Things like the online Hg2g or Wikipedia show that, as a general rule, people love to share information. Keep the standard open (let any manufacturer imbed it into cell phones, tablet PCs, etc. for a small licensing fee), and people will develop content for it.
Without the ease and openness to allow anyone to produce content, and the versatility to operate this on any platform, it's really nothing more then a novelty.
The Internet is generally stupid
Personally, I'd list the Telegraph as bullshit for ignorant people as well.
Hitchiking through Wales is easy, just find any number of hooded yobs driving at breakneck speed on joyrides in shitty old MGs. You get the added benifit of being given access to the black market in the locale as well.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Indeed, geo-coded data services will be the key. Wikipedia, Wikitravel and Wikicompany look like the first steps to creating these services.
All these Wiki projects already have some geo-coded articles, eg: Air Wales and its maps
...to invest in the growing towel market, 'cuz when the guide is a reality, towel futures should SOAR. :)
Is it wildly inaccurate?
So it's nothing at all like a Hitch hiker's guide to the galaxy.
The people who post these fuckin stories are dipshits. Jesus christ.
Wikipedia on a PDA
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
More and more hitchhikers are getting robbed of their electronic equipment.
Really. It's called research, people.
-- Watch the REAL Jon Katz.
if !(On_Earth)
{
cout << "You are in a Dark Lonley Place...";
cout << "To submit to the guide...";
}
Now it covers the entire galaxy.
Try the Sun - about 5 times as many readers.
/. mod system means that no-one will read this comment because it wasn't posted within the first few minutes of the article being posted, I don't suppose that matters
If your after the biggest selling broadsheet (=quality), try The Times (about 2x as many readers as The Telegraph).
I can't find circulation figures on the net at the moment, but since the absurd
Well, you can, in fact, read up about these things at Wikipedia: Hotels, Bars, Pubs, Cafes, Elementary schools, Malls, Shops, Streets, and Bus stops.
Too true. Slashdot moderation system is in need of serious reform
(Can't comment on newspaper sales; I'm in Canada...)
Wow. Now, all I need is for this to be available in the right time and place for my next holiday. Imagine how much less painful things would be if you could take a full historic tour of any given place without putting up with the rest of the tour group. Being an introvert really sucks when you want to cover a lot of a given area in a small amount of time. :-)
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
If "localization" (or "L10n" for short) means "translation of UI text" only in "weirdland", then many of us use a web browser made in weirdland.
How do you know it's constricted to Earth? It simply says that it will give you information about where you are. Since it's humans that can't seem to get very far beyond Earth it's a bit premature to say this device can't give info if you happened to be somewhere else in the galaxy dontchathink? Besides, as long as we're being grammar nazis, The "Real" h2g2 gave info on a lot more places than just one galaxy. Let's all go tell Doug Adams' estate that we(the mighty /.) have decided they should change the title of his book because honestly, how can we believe a word in it if the title is a lie!?
Strange that this article should end up on Slashdot: it was a Slashdot inspired story in the first place. I pointed out the original Slashdot article about the device to my father (Nicholas Roe), knowing that as a travel journalist he would be interested. And here we are, a fortnight later, and it's on Slashdot itself. the strange circular world of online journalism.
You forgot...
cout "You are eaten by a space grue";
}
It'll happen eventually, just you wait. I'm looking forward to the day where the internet has a layer that correlates to the layout of the real world.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
"and receive media tailored to who you are, where you are and what you are looking at"
Let me take a guess, this media would consist of shitloads of ads?
"You are near another Starbucks! You are near a Dunkin Doughnuts!"
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning