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Timothy Lord Discovers the Good Night Lamp at CES (Video)
Many reporters go to the CES, AKA Consumer Electronic Show (warning - link landing page plays annoying sound) in Las Vegas to see the newest 42.001" LCD TVs, which are 0.001" bigger than last year's 42" models. And there are many boring Windows 8 devices, many of which both run Windows and can display the number 8. These items, along with keynotes from tech gurus like Bill Clinton (We're not making this up!) may be amazing to some news outlets, but not to Slashdot or to Our Man Timothy, who seeks out the new, the bizarre, and the unusual and -- without taking a dime from them -- lets their instigators talk to him about their wares. But it's got to be good stuff, not run of the mill incremental advances. Like the Good Night Lamp(tm), which was invented by Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino, whose "work has been exhibited," says the goodnightlamp.com/team page, "at the Milan Furniture Fair, London Design Festival, The Victoria & Albert Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York." Now the Good Night Lamp people are showing off their product and trying to raise money through Kickstarter. But that's enough from us. We will now hand the microphone to Ms. Deschamps-Sonsino and let her tell you the rest.
Just what I need to have a blissful night sleep is a lamp that is controlled by someone else. Next up, let's put control of the toilet flush lever in someone else's hands while I'm showering.
Is the android-powered butt plug. No shit. It's got wifi and a web server so you can browse your ass and control the vibrations. There's also a web cam but I don't know why... there's no light and the camera will probably be covered with lube. (Hmm... sounds like a new instagram filter).
It's like the spirit of the "Jump to Conclusions" mat lives on
Judging from the tone and content of the "article" above, I'd guess that Timothy Lord discovered magic mushrooms at CES.
Kickstarter seems to be getting seriously diluted. Everybody is using it.
That's like saying the internet is diluted. The word you're looking for is *popular*.
Not that this is a particularly worthy project, though...
Nobody uses it anymore - too crowded!
Dark Reflection
I believe implementing the wizard's clock from Harry Potter would be a better, very similar, idea.
Good Night Lamp? Go The F*ck To Sleep!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
This may be good for elderly relatives living on their own. When they turn their lamp on in the morning, you know they are ok. If it doesn't turn on by a certain time, have the police (or a trusted neighbor) run a "welfare check" on them.
Please stop producing useless garbage in fancy plastic and metal coverings and give us high speed internet. And when I say high speed, I don't mean that watered down swill your ISP sells you. I mean "set my harddrive on fire downloading torrents" speed. I mean multiple 1080p streams of video over one pipe. I do not need an iWhatever, or a remote-controlled lamp... I need a network connection that doesn't suck so hard it's in danger of forming its own event horizon.
I don't care if it's wireless, or runs over copper or fiber, or if you have to shoot lasers through the sky. Get it done, people. We're about ten years late to the party as it is right now -- our infrastructure is rotten. Shannon's Law is kicking our butts, and we can only re-arrange bits of metal and plastic and input devices in clever new ways for so long before it's just old and busted.
The future is bandwidth. Get on it.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Internet connected lamp. When someone turns the big lamp on, little lamps turn on too. So to answer your question, it does nothing useful.
Someone invented the precursor to the IP phone. It's the IP telegraph. Now I just need to polish up on my Morse code.
That may be true, but I bet he really went for the booth babes.
1. Instead of selling/producing the large lamp. they should develop a module with embedded WiFi that goes between any lamp and the power circuit. That way you could use any lamp with the system.
2. Instead of selling separate little home lamps and, presumably, having multiple lamps, what they should do is develop a "Christmas Village" type product with multiple houses, street, etc. Each miniature house would then light up based on the status of the paired module.
3. Create virtual "Christmas Village" software/web page
For the "Christmas Village" piece, it could have different scenes: Winter, Suburbs, Big City, Summer cottages, etc. In fact, if they did it right, they could develop the village layout that allows for skins for each of the houses, landscape, etc. which could be changed based on the season, etc... For example, this would allow the user to set up a village with an office building, cottage, house, etc. You could add grass, asphalt, water, snow landscape skins, etc.
Personally, I think that it would be cool to see a miniature village light up when my sisters, parents, nephews, etc. are home. At least I would then know when to call them to wish them a happy birthday, etc.
In addition, why on earth do I need to know someone's status all the time? This seems like a product for helicopter parents and stalkers.
No kidding: http://goodnightlamp.com/who/
Off to college
It’s hard when your children leave the nest, so give them a Big Lamp and you won’t have to feel like you’re nagging them for news. They’ll want to keep in touch with their school friends too.
Ugh. When I moved out of the country to go to university, my folks just called me if they wanted to talk, usually on Sunday afternoon. Sometimes we'd talk for a couple of minutes, sometimes for an hour.
This is a product for people who can't be arsed to make an effort to communicate with people they allegedly love.
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
While it's not exactly the must-have tech toy of the century, I don't think its completely useless. Some suggestions:
a)Set up bomb triggered by photoelectric sensor.
b)Place lamp next to bomb.
c)Press button.
Someone's already mentioned the morse code use. Sure, the FBI is monitoring your tweets, but are they monitoring your, uhm, blinks?
It is worth noting that not everyone is always watching their IM, etc. A signal to people who are NOT online that your status has changed is not without its uses.
Add in some kind of color changing mechanism, so that you can sync colors, and you can send a large number of message. "Two blue blinks means the cops are on their way, clear out!", for example.
Heck, I HATE it when I am summoned from my home office for dinner by someone shouting down the stairs at me. It breaks my concentration hideously. Having a signaling device like this with no annoying vocal component would actually be useful to me. Others in my family aren't online all the time; they can't/won't just send me an email to let me know dinner is ready.
We live in the dying days of a great empire. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, that can change this -- not by individual or collective action. Thus, we should eat the bread and attend the circuses. Our descendants (well, your descendants, I'm not spawning) will envy us for having the kind of surplus resources that allows the creation of things like this. Enjoy it while you can; refusing to enjoy it won't change anything, except your happiness level.
"That's about all you need to know about Clinton and the Internet." /. headlines.
Sure, if you are a biased moron and got all your information from
The Clipper CHip was about creating secure communications. In 1993 he talked about it, and it's a good idea. Then the flaws of it were presented, and concerns rolled in and he stopped prompting. It was dead by 1996.
And a president singed an Veto proof bill? shocking. I like how you overlook his pressure to add, what became, section 230.
If you boil any presidency down to a few out of context things, you are being stupid.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on