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Top 10 Strangest Gadgets of the Future
Anonymous Cow writes "This week, the editors of TechEBlog have compiled a list of the 'Top 10 Strangest Gadgets of the Future,' from solar powered LEDs to memory LCD screens, it's all there." Urinal gaming stations! How did no one implement this sooner?
Airports? Maybe. Schools? Are you kidding? With the way educational budgets are shrinking, the schools of the future will be lucky if they have anything more than a trench dug outside where the science lab used to be.
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Neither are the shoes that light up when you step down - they've had them in Wallyworld for $14.99 for a couple of years
And half the stuff isn't even at the prototype stage, like the origami screen - its just a "wouldn't this be neet".
Unless you're going to wind it up every day, you're still going to need the power suply to be on constantly to run the internal clock.
The way to save energy would be to have the battery run the internal clock, then once a second update the display - but we already have those types of watches - they have things called "hands" that move once a second. $6.99, batteries included :-)
Uh, with ANY watch the displays what the time "used to be as opposed to what it actually is.
Do you really need a watch that displays the time down to the nanosecond? I didn't think so. The display would change every second, and the display would not require power between updates. Let's take the worst case you're probably about to bring up: chronograph. The stopwatch feature of most watches resolves to the nearest hundredth of a second. This still isn't a problem; see, your LCD watch probably has a 15ms-20ms response time, so you really don't get an accurate reading until you stop the count, and honestly, you can't even read beyond the tenth of the second while the display is updating because a) the LCD for the hundredths place is really just a blur due to response time and b) persistance of vision. A watch would be an ideal application for e-ink or static display technologies. heck, It would be great for my watch because I keep only the date displayed on the LCD (it's a combination analog/digital flight computer) and turn the rest off because I like the blacked-out look (it's less geeky/more dressy, as far as chunky watches go anyhow).
It's no worse than a quartz watch with a sweep hand; the hands don't update all the time; every few seconds for the minute hand (if it steps several times between each minute) or once a minute (if it steps a full minute), and once a second for the second hand (disregard Rolex's sweep second hand here; we're talking quartz watches, not mechanical). Every second the watch displays what the time WAS. Even if the watch could display down to the nanosecond, it would still be displaying a snapshot of the time a nanosecond (or so) prior. Even if you had an atomic clock with the highest possible resolution, it would be reporting what the time was not what it is. Welcome to the confines of four dimensions!
BTW why the hell am I responding to a troll?
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The main problem with e-Books is not the screen. It's the publishers that are so scared everyone will pirate their goods they boost their profit margins - setting the price for the electronic-only book at just about the same as the printed version thus ignoring the savings in production and transport - and cripple them with DRM that would piss off even a RIAA lawyer who had to use one.
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