The Next Tech Revolution 155
L-Wave writes "Here is an interesting article on cincinnati.com about the next revolution in technology. "The Internet revolution was about people connecting with people. The next revolution will be about things connecting with things." The story mentions having "tags" on every possible items from glasses to grocery, and each one identifying itself on a network...very cool stuff." We've run some earlier stories about the Auto-ID Center and RFID tags. This is an important topic - it will be a huge social issue once people realize that consumer goods will come with tags that allow them to be tracked individually.
revolution, smevoltuion (Score:1, Funny)
Re:revolution, smevoltuion (Score:1, Insightful)
Looking forward to it (Score:2)
I also want strong safeguards in place to stop people monitoring things they shouldn't be allowed to, and using the results for purpouses that people haven't agreed to.
CueCat Anyone? (Score:1)
Doesn't this even sort of sound like the CueCat? I just thought it was strange....
Kind of like (Score:1, Troll)
Wow, I should try to get a patent for that. I think I'll call it Divx. What's that you say? It's already been tried and was a colossal failure? Hm...
Re:Kind of like (Score:2, Offtopic)
Re:Kind of like (Score:2)
Read up on the history of the DivX codec, and you'll see it was originally called "DivX
Re:Kind of like (Score:1)
Interesting article (Score:3, Interesting)
it will be a huge social issue once people realize that consumer goods will come with tags that allow them to be tracked individually
Maybe I just don't get it. Keeping tabs on 300 million US citizens is well-nigh impossible - noone cares about the individual, and actually logging this much data is pretty much a moot point. Now imagine this extended to several hundred BILLION consumer goods. Do we really have anything approcahing the capability to DO anything with this much data, let alone something bad? I mean, it's sorta fun to think that the government/corporations/whoever really cares about me individually, and is devoting massive amounts of manpower and/or computer resources to tracking my shopping habits, but.. why would they bother?
Re:Interesting article (Score:1)
I actually had a funny response to this, but the damn 2 minute deal totally screwed me over and I forgot my good joke.. :-(
Re:Interesting article (Score:1)
Re:Interesting article (Score:5, Insightful)
You're assuming some sort of gigantic centralized government database. But there are other possibilities.
Merchants will tag their inventory to protect themselves from theft, then log the inventory's movement on premises. Once you leave the store with it, your presence is detected by the local street safety patrol's monitors tracking you by your driver's license, until you enter your next destination, say the local pub. Inside the pub, you pay -- cash -- for a quick stimulant, with the cash register reading the embedded chip (which marks the bill as genuine with a unique serial number) and noting (courtesy of a tie-in to the IRS database which tracks all currency movement for tax assessment purpose) that you received that bill as change at the local florist's.
Next stop is a quick drive to your mother's to drop off her Mother's Day flowers, while the local security firm you pay to track the whereabouts of your late-model sportster registers your every turn.
Of course, Ma Bell also monitors your every step via your GPS-enabled cellphone so it can conveniently bombard you with advertising from whatever local business you're happening by at the moment.
I mean, it's sorta fun to think that the government/corporations/whoever really cares about me individually, and is devoting massive amounts of manpower and/or computer resources to tracking my shopping habits, but.. why would they bother?
You get the picture. No, there won't be a single centralized database monitoring every aspect of your life, but rather a myriad of local databases tracking just that portion of your activities in which it has a vested interest. Tying it all together later would require nothing more than a simple court warrant and an Internet connection. Or, I'm sure, private investigators could provide the same service for a fee.
Re:Interesting article (Score:1)
Tying it all together later would require nothing more than a simple court warrant and an Internet connection.
Of course in these enlightened times you may not even need a warrant. And while government may not be interested in the average individual right now, it's nice (from government's perspective) to have the capability for when any given individual does something to become interesting...
Re:Interesting article (Score:2)
Me? I'm liking that system.
The money you spend, authenticated by its unique chip, drops the counterfiting rate substantialy. This stabilizes US currency and could have an overall beneficial effect in the long run (ok.. it's a long shot). As for tracking who had what monies where and what they were spent on... taxes get lots easier when there's never a recipt to keep. Everyone can do the long form and the short form in the same amount of time... lots of money spent... and saved.
speaking of self-serve grocery checkouts (Score:3, Interesting)
When you're finished you put the scanner in a terminal which prints your receipt. with this receipt you go to a special (selfscanning only) checkout to pay.
No lines, saves time
You can always see how musch you're spending
You can bag while you shop, saves time
:)
Stealing is pretty easy this way but i wouldn't there because there are random checks. And if you get caught there are evere punishments
It's a neat and cool system but i haven't seen it anywhere else? Has anybody else seen this system before?
Re:speaking of self-serve grocery checkouts (Score:2)
Re:speaking of self-serve grocery checkouts (Score:1)
Re:speaking of self-serve grocery checkouts (Score:2)
They have DHCP logs? So they must be connected in some kind of wireless network? That's so cool!
The ones used in my supermarket keep the price-database in memory (i think). The database gets uploaded everytime you store it in the terminal (i think)
Re:Interesting article (Score:1)
Re:Interesting article (Score:2)
Not impossible at all. Just about everyone in the US has *some* data stored about them somewhere on a computer. It's just not all centralized into one big database. You have your social security record. Everyone in the country has one (or is supposed to have one anyway).
Using that as a key, we can come up with some interesting data. If we look at your mortgage company's database, for instance, we can use that SSN to search for your mortgage records, which will will tell us where you live. Doing a search for that SSN in either the IRS database or your state Dept of Treasury's database, we can find out who your current and past employers are.
You get the picture. The data is there, its just not centralized and easily crossreferenced, but it is there. So yes, it IS possible to keep track of 300 million citizens.
Now imagine this extended to several hundred BILLION consumer goods.
As for your shopping habits, these would be, again, recorded by different individual corporations interested in different pieces of data. Not one big database. Manufacturers of consumer electronics devices, for instance, are probably NOT interested in what brand of tuna you buy. But they probably *are* interested in that digital camera you bought, or the cell phone you carry around.
Re:Interesting article (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Interesting article (Score:2)
Re:Interesting article (Score:1)
In case it gets slashdotted (Score:1, Informative)
The Internet revolution was about people connecting with people. The next revolution will be about things connecting with things. And it's taking shape in pockets around the globe. For the first time, big companies such as Wal-Mart, Gillette and Procter & Gamble are joining to give the technology serious momentum.
In a twist, this next technological chapter won't emerge out of ever-more- powerful computers and faster Internet connections. This shift comes from the opposite direction. It will ride on pieces of plastic the size of postage stamps, costing a nickel or less. Each plastic tag will contain a computer chip, which can store a small amount of information, and a minuscule antenna that lets the chip communicate with a network.
In time, when billions of tags are out there and communicating, the technology will infiltrate business and everyday life to a greater extent than today's personal computers, cell phones or e-mail. In decades to come, its impact might be as fundamental as the invention of the light bulb.
Those tags will someday be on everything -- egg cartons, eyeglasses, books, toys, trucks, money and so on. All those items will be able to wirelessly connect to networks or the Internet, sending information to computers, home appliances or other electronic devices.
Grocery items will tell the store what needs to be restocked and which items are past their expiration dates. The groceries will check themselves out in a split second as you push a full cart past a reader. A wine lover could look on a computer screen and see what's in her wine cellar. Prescription drug bottles could work together to send you a warning if the combination of pills you're about to swallow would be toxic.
"Any single one of these (tags) is like a one-celled organism," said Glover Ferguson, chief scientist at consulting firm Accenture. "They're just smart enough to say their own name." Like cells, their power will come from billions of them working together, he said.
"We're really talking about the next 50 years of computing," said Kevin Ashton, executive director of the Auto-ID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Auto-ID is the program backed by Wal-Mart and the other companies, and the center is trying to create a standard, like Internet protocol, for the tags' communication. That would enable any tag to connect to any network, much as any PC can work on any network.
The technology doesn't really have a handy name. The tags are known as radio frequency identification tags, or RFID. The Auto-ID center calls the core of its standard "ePC," which stands for Electronic Product Code.
Perhaps an appropriate umbrella name might be tinyband. Today's hefty computers and super-fast fiber-optic networks communicate on broadband technology. Tomorrow's little nickel tags will work on tinyband technology and as little as 96 characters of information.
Traffic control via RFIDs
RFID has been around awhile. During World War II, the military used a high-powered, bulky version of it to identify friendly aircraft. Starting in the 1970s, the federal government stuck RFID tags on nuclear materials to better track them. In the 1980s, commercial warehouses used it to locate loaded pallets.
These days RFID shows up in a few familiar places. The technology is in ExxonMobil's Speedpass -- a key fob that works like a credit card, wirelessly identifying you to a gas pump. On highways across the United States, wireless toll booth systems such as E-ZPass work on RFID.
Singapore relies on the technology to control traffic. Its system, called Electronic Road Pricing, or ERP, charges different prices to drive on different roads at different times. Driving on one main artery between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m. costs $3 (in Singapore dollars -- about $1.60 in U.S. currency) but is free from 2 p.m. to 5:30 p.m. The pricing encourages drivers to stay off busy roads at busy times. Every car must have an RFID tag, and it communicates with readers along every major road. The road readers identify each car and send the information to a central computer, which adds up the car owners' bills.
Lost glasses? Tag to the rescue
Widespread consumer use of tinyband will take time -- perhaps a decade or more. That's what happens with new technology. Computers didn't move from businesses to homes until more than 30 years after the technology was born.
Some chastise tinyband proponents for promising too much too soon. "You have to manage realistic expectations," said Cliff Horwitz, CEO of SAMSys, which is making a universal reader that can talk to tags from any manufacturer. For the foreseeable future, "MIT has a pretty extreme and unrealistic view of the world."
Others, though, can't contain their excitement. The real fun will start once the price of a tag gets down to around a penny. Then adding a tag would be no more expensive than stamping a bar code on a product. Bar codes today are on nearly every item made for consumers and business. Imagine that every one of those things will have a small amount of intelligence and ability to communicate. The world around us would almost come alive.
Arno Penzias -- a Nobel prize-winning scientist, one-time head of Bell Labs and an investor in Alien Technology -- has a favorite microcosmic scenario:
You lose your eyeglasses. They've fallen under the family room couch.
The tag on the eyeglasses connects with a reader in the family room -- readers would be all around a house. The reader is also getting signals from everything else in the room.
Tags work a little like radar. A reader sends out a signal looking for tags. The signal excites the tag -- the tag itself has no power --and causes it to return a signal containing its information. This request and return of a signal happens more than 100 times a second for each tag.
The reader pipes its information across a wireless network and dumps it into the home computer. The computer looks at the data and deduces that the signal from the glasses takes the same amount of time to hit the reader as the signal from the couch.
You sit at the computer and type in a search box: "Where are my eyeglasses?" The computer spits back: "Under the couch."
"In a few years, high-end consumers will likely start using tag readers to locate items in the house," Penzias said.
Aside from technology challenges, tinyband will increasingly test society's acceptance. Privacy will certainly be an issue. For instance, insurance companies might want to use the technology to know where you take your car, so they can charge more if you regularly park in high-crime neighborhoods.
Privacy "is an issue. There will have to be a social discourse about what we want and don't want, " said Accenture's Ferguson. "But the technology isn't going away: You can't un-invent it."
Re:In case it gets slashdotted (Score:1)
I confidently predict (Score:2, Funny)
I predict another revolution...... (Score:1)
Re:I predict another revolution...... (Score:1)
Re:I predict another revolution...... (Score:3, Insightful)
Trust me, there aren't any. Taiwanese, for example, love the idea of cameras monitoring one's every move. For Taiwanese, security trumps privacy any day of the week.
If it's tolerated in America, where privacy is so highly valued, it's tolerated everywhere else, too.
The first tech revolution was about what? (Score:1)
would this be a good thing? (Score:2, Funny)
Dinner: Ahhh too hot... cool it down a bit..
Mic: Shaddap before I make you wish you didn't open your mouth...
Dinner: Why I oughta....
This would be rather amusing, no? :)
All the cool things have already been invented (Score:1)
Re:All the cool things have already been invented (Score:3, Insightful)
We are done making cool invention(s).
is a defeatist view of the world and the creativity of humans. A century ago, people could not envision the computer as it is today, wireless communications as they are today.... To utter such ridiculous statements is akin to saying you don't think that humanmind has lost the ability to go beyond the known and delve into the unknown (then making it known and a new conundrum...). How depressing.Re:All the cool things have already been invented (Score:1)
Re:All the cool things have already been invented (Score:2)
Wasn't there a similar proclamation made around a hundred years ago regarding discoveries? Someone (Lord Kelvin, if memory serves) stated that all the important scientific discoveries had been made and that any further work would involve mere refinements. I think he was proven wrong.
You don't think that as long as there are problems to solve someone will come up with novel ways of solving them? (Jeez, if you do, how jaded can you get?) Some of these solutions could be `cooler' than anything you listed -- which incidently only covered communications and transportation. There's (ahem) just a few more fields that might attract an inventor's attention.
Just think of the things that have been discovered in the past 50 years that no one's found practical uses for yet. Superconductivity hasn't really made it out of the labs. When it does it could be as significant as electric power or (every Slashdot addict's favorite invention) the semiconductor.
IMO, that would be akin (to borrow an analogy from Philip Greenspun) to: a bunch of curious schoolkids, after having broken into a Boeing 747, flipping all the switches to see what happens. I'd be more than a little worried if the biotech industry starts moving in this direction. (Oops! We didn't think tweaking that gene would do that! Sorry.)
Hello, we have been there for years (Score:2, Insightful)
There's couple of articles on the same area in here [teraflops.com].
I thought of this (Score:3, Interesting)
The concept is simple- putting tags on everything which just gives them a unique id. Then you create a bridge between the internet and the physical world.
Examples:
1) Your car HUD can warn you of drivers who have been "modded down" when you see them on the road.
2) In the store, you can look up reviews of consumer electronics items by scanning the item.
3) Email people you walk past on the street if they have made their email public- also dating services can tell you if you are compatible, if they are single etc.
4) Scan tags on famous landmarks and get taken to pages of info on them.
5) Each shop and cafe you walk past has a tag so you can go to its home page and check its prices and offers.
6) Returning stolen items to their owners (if you make the tags non-removeable).
I'm sure you can think of many more applications...
graspee
Re:I thought of this (Score:2)
Maybe I'm just more cynical, but there is always a way to exploit any new technology, and that trend is only getting worse, much worse.
Re:I thought of this (Score:1)
I wish I had patented it. I had this idea about 2 years' ago, and to be fair probably a lot of other people did too.
Mark Weiser coined the term ubiquitous computing in 1988, and defined it to be a use of computing devices, such that they were an integral and hidden part of our environment. Ubiquitos computing [xerox.com].
Re:I thought of this (Score:2)
My teacher had thought of the idea of using a "card hopper" that could scan the barcode. My wild imagination said, hell, who needs barcodes. Use little micro RF transmitters, each transmitting a unique signal. Read them all at once.
Anyway, my imagination was quite wild and the next logical step was hey, if you could do this for students, you could do this for ANYTHING. So when people started talking ID chips for people and then now ID chips for products, I wasn't the least bit surprised. What I was more surprised about is that no one thought of this sooner.
We've heard/read it all before. (Score:1)
Tags and chips in everyday items. Smart clothes and shoes. "Yawn!"
There has to be an exciting NEED to do these things before they'll take off. Remember: just because something is technologically possible, that doesn't mean it will be taken up by the public.
Home invasion will never be the same... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Home invasion will never be the same... (Score:3, Informative)
The best passive tags (those that don't require their own power source) are expensive, (~$4 ea) and have a maximum range of about 15ft if you jack up the power on the antenna.
With an array of antennas (the usual configuration for warehouses, etc) on the more common tags (~$.50 in six figure quantitites), the nominal range is about seven feet (with two antennas, (one on each side) you can build a path wide enough to drive a forklift thru and scan everything on the pallet.
Here's the kicker, for you anarchist types: I havent found a tag yet (and we deal with about six different types of tag technology) that will still read when wrapped in aluminum foil.
And, for the record, we aren't talking about the anti-theft tags commonly used at retail shops- these are the tags that actually have enough memory (8b-8K) to do something useful. (Although it would probably work for them too, haven't tried it ;p)
Don't even bother! (Score:1)
You are 90% boring here on Slashdot. Sorry to say - but I really don't like CO2 level in 2100 predictions, or how the car will negotiate with another for parking place in 2040.
But then again
- Thomas
Example a little pointless, perhaps? (Score:1)
You sit at the computer and type in a search box: "Where are my eyeglasses?" The computer spits back: "Under the couch."
Which is too bad if the reason you wanted your glasses in the first place was to read the screen. What we really need is a Star Trek-style voice interface to go with this stuff. Of course, then the deaf are going to have trouble looking for their hearing aids...
It was a bad idea then and now, still. (Score:2)
OR you could read the instructions
OR she could, i don't know, go down into her cellar? How far could it be?
God forbid you acutally talk to your DOCTOR about all those pills your taking.
I guess what I'm trying to say is, just cause it's new (and fangled, no less), doesn't mean it has to be shoved into every thing. Do your lightbulbs REALLY need webservers? Does your microwave REALLY need to be able to check your email? It seems like everytime they get soembody to say something like this, they all come up with the most ludicrous ideas for how to use this tech. For instance, why didn't he suggest meshing these things with pressure sensors and putting them into your tires. Then have you car tell you that you have a low tire and whatnot. I am going to shut up now, because lack of sleep and this cold are making ramble.
Re:It was a bad idea then and now, still. (Score:1)
I suggested doing this by pattern recognition from the store's CCTV fifteen years ago (with schematics and algorithms). Avoids the need for tagging, and also recognises the customer - and charges him/her whether its in the trolley or up the jumper, makes no difference! My employers were not interested in implementing it.
Yes I did know the Jamaican woman who was caught trying to smuggle a frozen turkey out the store by holding it between her thighs - but had to drop it because the checkout queue was too long!
Re:It was a bad idea then and now, still. (Score:2)
Re:It was a bad idea then and now, still. (Score:2, Interesting)
>OR you could read the instructions
The real potential here is not to empower the lazy, but rather to actually get frozen food to cook right in a microwave oven. For instance, if manufacturers of microwave ovens and manufacturers of frozen foods (TV dinners) actually coordinated on a program like this, each dinner might cook differntly in every microwave... simply, it would cook in whatever manner was required to do the best job.
>>A wine lover could look on a computer screen and see what's in her wine cellar
>OR she could, i don't know, go down into her cellar? How far could it be?
The hidden power here isn't for the lady with the wine cellar as much as it is for say someone who has recently moved... and has 200 boxes sitting in his/her garage. Imagine being able to move-in and actually find where you put that hammer....
>>Prescription drug bottles could work together to send you a warning if the combination of pills you're about to swallow would be toxic.
>God forbid you acutally talk to your DOCTOR about all those pills your taking.
>The eyeglass thing is a red herring too. Been wearing glasses since 3rd grade, everytime I 'lose' them, they turn out to be on my face.
Think outside of the box here. This could be a real boon to the elderly. Whether or not the advances come in the form as described in the article or in some other ways (such as an elderly person being able to just call out to the room "where are my glasses" or "where is my medicine bottle"), being able to find items "lost" in your house is potentially very useful for those with failing memories.
Re:It was a bad idea then and now, still. (Score:2, Interesting)
Have you ever read the directions for microwave oven food preparation? You're usually given a range of time to cook the food and then a disclaimer telling you that microwave oven cooking times may vary. This is because ovens have different amount of power. A frozen dinner would tell the oven exactly how much energy it needs to be cooked properly and the oven would adjust its power accordingly.
It's very easy to walk down to the cellar and look at all the bottles of wine you have. I don't disagree with you there but a person who keeps 2 or 3 cases of wine in the cellar wouldn't use RFIDs. A wine collector with several hundred bottles of wine of different vintages, from different wineries would benefit from RFIDs immensely. A visual inspection of all the bottles might miss the one you actually want. Besides, taking the bottles out of their racks gives a person a chance to drop it. If you've ever watched Northern Exposure you know the kind of collector that would benefit from this scenario.
At this point you're depending on the knowledge of one person. No matter how skilled a doctor is, there is no way she can know every lethal combination of prescribed medications. Doctors know the interactions of certain drugs, typically the ones they most commonly prescribe. Once you're prescribed a medication that isn't very common, you're putting your trust in the doctor's ability to look up the information properly in the reference books she has available. While this works most of the time, there are instances when it doesn't. RFIDs in prescription drugs wouldn't be used to replace the doctor but to augment her ability to give you the correct information about the medications you're about to ingest.
No, you've missed the point (Score:1, Insightful)
The variation in cooking power between microwaves wouldn't be fixed by sticking some kind of identifier on meals - they already have these, they're called barcodes. You're assuming every microwave is going to be programmed with some kind of lookup table telling it how to cook each item, which is all fine and dandy until I want to cook a product that was produced after the microwave and which it therefore knows nothing about.
If the wine lover really wants to know whats in here cellar she could knock up an Access database in ten minutes. Wine tends not to wander off once you've put it one place.
As for the prescription drugs - how exactly are RFIDs supposed to identify interactions? Firstly you need some kind of external reader unless you're planning on putting medicines in computerised bottles - remember these tags don't have any processing power. Second, you're assuming that there even is a universal database of drug interactions (its all potential interactions which depend a lot on the individual).
Re:No, you've missed the point (Score:1)
"The variation in cooking power between microwaves wouldn't be fixed by sticking some kind of identifier on meals - they already have these, they're called barcodes. You're assuming every microwave is going to be programmed with some kind of lookup table telling it how to cook each item, which is all fine and dandy until I want to cook a product that was produced after the microwave and which it therefore knows nothing about"
How about something that requires no new technology, lookup tables, or any of the rest of that happy horseshit: Another poster pointed out that if you knew how much energy to pump into a given food item, you could cook it uniformly -if- you knew how much your microwave put out and adjusted the cooking time accordingly. So you do this: [1] Convince microwave oven makers to add an "joules" button to the ones already there. This button would inform the microwave that whatever was punched in of the keyboard represented total cooking energy rather than cooking time. The microwave would "know" how much power it can put out and would do the simple math needed to arrive at cooking time. (energy / power = time). [2] Convince the food makers to label thier products with the amount of cooking energy needed to properly and consistently cook the food. [3] (The hard part) Convincing the consumers that this is a good idea. The average American consumer is a drooling fucking moron anyway, so it might take a major education campaign on the part of the nuker and food makers to convince him that keying in "12300 joules" is no harder than keying in "5:00 minutes".
Re:It was a bad idea then and now, still. (Score:2)
Re:It was a bad idea then and now, still. (Score:2)
What about OTC drugs? Or how about drugs prescribed by a different doctor? You're right, your doctor should always know ALL drugs that you're taking, and you should educate yourself as well, since who knows whether your doctor really knows what he's talking about or not. A compuerized database would go along way towards that education. Pharmacies already have such databases, & you generally get a printout of information when you get a prescription. But these tags would make it trivial to let anyone get this information by simply gathering there various drugs together.
I think you've missed the real point about these tags. They don't exist for you and me. They exist for corporations & the government. Articles such as this one suggest whiz-bang features that will probably never see the light of day, solely to build customer acceptance. Even if you discount the potentially invasive uses for these tags, they still are pretty evil. There main reasons for existing is to cut expenses & increase sales. If you run a grocery store, and 90% of your customers check themselves out, you can get rid of 90% of your checkers. Or say you're in the grocery store & you put a gallon of milk in your cart. Suddenly, you're bombarded from all sides with cereal ads. Personally, I don't want to see any more ads then I'm already forced to see.
Re:It was a bad idea then and now, still. (Score:1)
It looks to me like he got the point but didn't buy it. Or maybe I'm optimistic, because I'm not buying it either.
Have you ever read the directions for microwave oven food preparation? You're usually given a range of time to cook the food and then a disclaimer telling you that microwave oven cooking times may vary. This is because ovens have different amount of power. A frozen dinner would tell the oven exactly how much energy it needs to be cooked properly and the oven would adjust its power accordingly.
Let me guess. The oven will automagically shut off when the popcorn kernels are popping 3-5 seconds apart.
Who knows, maybe people might even try *gasp* cooking! There's actually food that you can prepare in your own home that isn't a pizza or popcorn or Hot Pocket. And you don't always have to get your grease fix from the yellow pages.
At this point you're depending on the knowledge of one person. No matter how skilled a doctor is, there is no way she can know every lethal combination of prescribed medications. Doctors know the interactions of certain drugs, typically the ones they most commonly prescribe. Once you're prescribed a medication that isn't very common, you're putting your trust in the doctor's ability to look up the information properly in the reference books she has available.
Some people will let their household appliances do their thinking for them. Others will listen to atavistic songs like Hank Jr's "Country Boy Can Survive" (or actually being the people that Hank was singing about) and end up 0wning all the rest of you. "We make our own whiskey and our own smoke too. Ain't too many things these old boys can do. We can skin a buck, or run a trotline, because a country boy can survive."
Sorry, where's the demand? (Score:3, Interesting)
My can of deodorant has no intrinsic desire to socialise with it's own kind. Whence, then, comes the impetus to enable it to do so?
If a consumer good is valuable enough to justify this kind of outlay (in a commercial setting) then it is expensive enough to have car-salesman types wander the floor pressuring people to buy it. Unless these built-in chips talk and engage in high pressure sales tactics (here's a cool one, "please, buy me, or I will be tortured horribly and dumped on the scrap heap!") I don't see the percentages.
As regards things that talk to things after you've bought them; there are merits of doing this with every consumer device that already has a computer chip built into it. However, this is far less of a revolution than when we put computer chips into our cars in the first place, but we weren't thinking about "revolutions" back then so it was just progress.
In order to qualify as a revolution, it has to substantively alter the way we, human beings, live. Internetwork protocol has done this, at least in my case. However, while communicating with city traffic control may vastly alter driving from your car's point of view, it'll make only a slight difference to you, the driver. It's a nice trick but hardly a revolution.
The revolution will come when people talk to machines directly, through TSA (today's sinister accronym, my favorite is DNI, or direct neural interface.)
The next struggle against the intervention-of-big-things-in-our-little-lives will come not when built in chips start monitering our shopping habits - b/c IF YOU DIDN'T BUY IT WITH A CREDIT CARD BIG BROTHER DOESN'T CARE - but when the government tries to restrict my right to have robotic claws, replace my eyes with digital cameras, etc.
Re:Sorry, where's the demand? (Score:1)
Re:Sorry, where's the demand? (Score:2)
Re:Sorry, where's the demand? (Score:2)
In other news, I just took a lego referee and a lego coffee machine and built a wicked lego coffee cyborg out of them. Heheh. Oh the joy.
graspee
My thoughts on the matter. (Score:4, Funny)
that had slashdot crying it was too smart
what they didn't know
was the price would be low
when you hacked the WinCE at it's heart
Re:My thoughts on the matter. (Score:1)
I live in Cincinnati... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I live in Cincinnati... (Score:1)
I used to live in Cincy...MOD UP! (Score:3, Informative)
I don't doubt this. Relevent tech jobs in that frickin' town are sparse. It's a town of salesfolk and chemical engineers, most of which work for GE and P&G. You're either a good bullshitter or you're trying to make a better diaper.
Too complicated (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Too complicated (Score:3, Interesting)
No? Imagine the toaster that can brown your toast to perfection, with no user intervention required. White, whole wheat, rye, thin-sliced, thick-sliced, wheat-thins, leavened or unleavened. The toaster automatically senses what you put in, remembers YOUR idea of perfection (no more arguing with the wife over who left the toaster set to "dark"; it was probably you anyway), and suddenly "burnt to a crisp" becomes something that used to happen to your grandparents.
Now take another step back. Anyone who's ever tried to put together a gourmet meal in his own kitchen can tell you by far the hardest part is the timing -- getting the pheasant under glass, the beef souffle, the Stove Top stuffing -- AND the toast -- all finished at the same time. Now imagine a wired kitchen. Pop the turkey roast in the oven, the frozen veggies in the nuker, the whole wheat in the toaster, and tell your kitchen you want all the accessories to be ready at the same time as the bird. The oven, monitoring the turkey, informs the nuker when there's seven minutes to go so the nuker knows when to start defrosting. At the 45 second mark the toaster kicks in, and 45 seconds later you have a turkey roasted to perfection, veggies steaming hot, and golden brown toast all waiting together. And the whole time you were watching WWF re-runs in the living room. Course, that's not to mention that your oven knows seventy three different ways to roast duck, a hundred and seven ways to bake a cake, and three hundred and twelve ways to broil salmon, all courtesy of your DSL Internet connection. Throw in a two-job, on-the-go family with no time to spend deciphering recipe books, and calling this kind of self-orchestrating, fully-automated kitchen "marketable" would be the understatement of the millenium.
they would suffer from the vcr problem of being too complicated to use/control/program and most people would be stuck with the factory settings that they might not like.
Just the opposite. Imagine a VCR networked with a time server, and that flashing "12:00" goes the way of burned toast (see above). Imagine a VCR that connects to an online database of TV schedules, and you'll never accidentally tape the wrong channel -- or the right channel at the wrong time -- again. Want more? Imagine a VCR that knows you never miss Babylon Five and considerately tapes tonight's episode for you even though you forgot to tell it to do so. Imagine a VCR that automatically adjusts to last minute schedule changes. Imagine a networked VCR that, connecting to an online database, can not only confirm that yes you did see that actress in another movie just last week, but even show you the scene. Imagine stumbling into the middle of an interesting movie on HBO and wishing you'd caught the whole thing. Pas de problem for your VCR -- just tell it to record the next occurance; you don't even need to know when it is. The VCR will inform you when the task is accomplished -- or tell you exactly which local video stores stock it if you just can't wait. Imagine a VCR that monitors your viewing habits so that it can flag upcoming events of potential interest.
Yeah -- I'd buy that VCR.
When Things Start to Think (Score:2)
Having said that, there's an article in the most recent issue of MIT Tech Review that talks about a company in Philadelphia that has done exactly that. Created a tag that has network abilities, and a teeny bit of storage, all smaller than a dime and at the cost of "pennies."
d
Re:When Things Start to Think (Score:1)
Demand? (Score:1, Insightful)
The the success of ePCs will depend on two things; firstly, that the wireless infrastructure is in place. The tags might cost a couple cents, but if the network isn't already in place, few people will will be interested, as not everyone wants to build their own wireless networks.
Secondly, industry will have to sell ePCs as cost-effective products that effeciently take care of specific tasks. That is, someone will have to make the tag that can fit in a pair of glasses. Tags that will be able to withstand freezing or heating, water, or any number of conditions.
Assuming that there are enough companies making the tags, and assuming that a signficant portion of the world is covered by free "tinyband" wirless networks, the possibilities are limitless.
If implanting a tag costs 1 cent, or even 5, then thousands of companies will become interested in adding these tags to their products. If the tags are easily programmable, then the manufacturing cost will be minimal, and thus worth the risk.
Some applications are almost inevitable; e.g. traffic control, shopping store uses, warehouse uses, etc., etc. RFID is already popular in these places, and tags are the next logical step. There will always be someone trying to improve RFID, and ePC tags are the most natural progression.
Other applications may be more difficult to bring into wide-spread use. For example, your shopping store might tag your groceries so that they can be instantly rung up at the cashier's counter. However, the canned soup company will probably be more reluctant to add a (second) tag to their product; this would require a high degree of specialization. This would first require that a large number of appliances can make use of specialized instructions embedded in various different tags. Only then would the soup company embed cooking instructions in an RFID tag.
Why not just read the instructions on the label? Well, if the soup company can make their soup cook itself, simply by sticking on a tag that costs a few cents, then the almost certainly WILL do that. You might still prefer to read the instructions, but that's a rather stupid view of things. It's in the soup company's best interest to add as much value to their product as possible. The few cents it will cost to produce a tag is well worth the value it will add to a product.
The only problem is that a large-scale infrastructure has to be in place first. This is where well thought-out standards will come into play. It will only work if the majority of tags are interoperable with the majority of scanning devices. That is, the cooking instructions in the soup tag should work with any model microwave.
This means that everyone from Campbell Soup to Nike to Safeway will have to start worrying about network communication protocols, as well as "APIs" for highly specialized tasks. For example, an API for embedding cooking instructions in a can of soup would be vastly different from the API for embedding chemical and medicinal data in a bottle of prescription pills. And yet, somehow, all these different applications have to interoperate on a single, seamless network, and the devices that use these tags will have to do the same.
I don't know how anyone will get all the soup makers and microwave manufacturers of the world to use the same cooking instruction API, delivered over a single communication protocol.
Chances are competition will lead to a vast array of incompatable tags and networks. Then billions will be spent on trying to glue all the incompatabilities together. It's so massive an undertaking that the smallest amount of fragmentation in standards could lead to widespread effects.
For example, if you have a type X microwave, and it can only read type Y cooking instruction tags, then you might be forced to always buy food with type Y tags (if you want the food to cook itself).
Thus, soup manufacturers would suddenly LOOSE market share, and this is not acceptable. Hence, standardization is key to widespread acceptance.
As for privacy concerns - I can't even imagine to think of the issues that will start to arise. Imagine a theif breaking into a house, and scanning all the RDIF tags, to figure out what products are in the building. Then he cross references the product data to price lists, and, like magic, he knows the estimated value and location of every product contained in the house. All he has to do is go pick up the most expensive products in the house - and that shouldn't be too hard, since the location of the tags are known.
Or imagine the same theif walking around the streets, scanning everything in sight, looking for valuable things to mug off of people.
I'm no expert on security, but I would imagine that RDIF is quite insecure and difficult to protect. How would any sort of authenticatation system work? You obviously don't want to embed an encrypted password in every stupid little product that you own. In fact, chances are that you won't be able to make any changes to the tags once they are manufactured and embedded into the product.
Essentially, it could be that someone could just stand outside your house, and get a list of all the things that you have inside, by scanning radio freqencies. You would have to protect your entire house from this sort of eavesdropping. The problems arising from this technology are numerous and difficult to overcome. Security is a huge issue, and if it can be addressed early on, this might even work someday.
Re:Demand? (Score:1)
I think this solves a lot of your problems withthe technology; unfortunately, it creates a few more. For instance, since you're obviously going to need a subscription to one or more database updates, there's the distinct possibility that someone will figure out how to spam these things. The question then is, can it be made universally affordable with advertising support? I rather hope not, but I guess I might feel differently if I wanted one and couldn't afford it.
More RF (Score:1)
OO, etc (Score:2)
Pardon me if it seems that the languag is getting just a little too recursive here, or something.
Say good by to privacy (Score:1)
Ya, your kids, your dog, your wife, pretty soon they will be shoving a chip up your nose when you are born.
Tags for everything (Score:2)
I dont want my glasses talking to my blender. (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, yes. Network everything. That'll solve a whole host of problems, like.......uhh... See, I always wished that my...uh......errr..
(*cough*CUECAT*cough*..)..
The whole point of invention is to solve a problem. The fact that my toaster lacks a login prompt doesn't qualify as a "problem" to anyone. I don't want a programmable heat grid in my toaster so I can burn little designs into my English muffins. I just want a friggin English muffin that isn't burnt on the outsides and soggy in the middle. Solve that first. I don't want a friggin SQL database running on my fridge. I want one that doesn't make my ice cubes smell, and no amount of TCP/IP is going to fix that. To my knowledge, there is no "Ice Cube Scent Removal" RFC.
The problem with whiz-bang ideas like this is, like the CueCat, that they don't solve any problems. Infact, they try to solve a problem that never existed in the first place. So lets suppose I have my whole apartment wired. My aquariums have webcams, my dishwasher floods both my network and my kitchen floor, and my television watches me instead of me watching it. What have I gained, other than an ego-erection? Bragging rights over my nerdy friends? Or a LAN crowded with garbage traffic, none of which will ever be used or implemented in any form other than for novely and amusement.
Put that in your socket and sniff it.
Cheers,
If your glasses are talking to your blender (Score:2)
Re:I dont want my glasses talking to my blender. (Score:1)
Just becuase you aren't interested in a technology doesn't mean other people won't be. For you, there will always be simple-stupid appliances like the ones we use today. But as technology marches on it will actually be cheaper to do things the complex, high-tech way. Do you really think that those stupid inefficient hotwires are going to be the best way to toast bread forever?
I don't want a sql server on my refrigerator, either. I want it on the house server. I want the refrigerator to notice when I put a new container in it, and I want the trash can to notice when I throw an old container away. If you got really froggy you could design your own trash chute that sorted your litter for you as long as you dropped it separately, which is easy to do if it replaces your trash can. That alone would be cool enough.
You can go on living in the past if you want to. Me, I'm looking toward the future. Meanwhile, here we are in the present, and this is the time to start developing these technologies.
Re:I dont want my glasses talking to my blender. (Score:2)
Actually, you're wrong. It doesn't solve a problem FOR YOU. Advertisers, governments, and the like LOVE this stuff, though, because it allows them to very easily keep track of everything you do. Whether you tend to be paranoid or not, this kind of technology should -definitely- make you think.
Re:Ice Cube Scent Removal (Score:1)
The problem with smelly ice cubes in refrigeration is that most units have a single pump that operates both refrigeration and freezer compartments. this leads to transfer of smells between them. The only complete solution to this problem is to have seperate pumps. Some high end home and commercial units do just this.
The baking powder solution helps, but doesn't solve the problem...
RIAA can't avoid this (Score:2)
RIAA can't avoid this convergence, they can't avoid the connection between their incompatible audio system and the computer, and as everybody here knows if it is in the computer there's no way to avoid user to do whatever he wants.
So I think that RIAA must find (again) another way to avoid the so called mp3-piracy (IMHO the problem is the CD-R drives, but...)
How will we beat it? (Score:1)
There is no question that this is way way bad, so, I only want to know one thing. How do we defeat this thing? How do we prevent someone from driving by and inventorying our every possession?
I don't think we can jam it because the stupid neighbors would complain that they can't find their keys...
It would probably be tough to pull it off of every device...
Maybe a shielded box could be made in which you could place it and aim a high power RF signal at it to burn it out.
If the range is short enough, I could buy the land surrounding my home, but you could still fly over and pick it up.
OK, Where Are the Privacy Folks??? (Score:1)
I don't see enough noise on here. Talk about a massive violation of privacy. Why give a rip about what can be picked up about you at a website if someone can drive by your home and inventory your every possession?
Police want need a search warrant anymore to check what brand of shoe is in your closet or whether you have a blue blazer, etc.
It will be easier than ever to profile everyone in a neighborhood based on things like what books they read, how many violent video games they own, etc.
This stuff isn't worrying someone?
*yawn* (Score:2)
There's actually something called the 'Things that Think' Consortium working in this direction. Swatch is in it too; remember in the Barcelona Olympics how you could buy a special edition Swatch with an electronic tag in it, prepaid to allow you entrance to the events? Well, that was in 1992, a decade ago.
So in other words, what we have here hardly qualifies as news. Ubiquitous computing has been a work in progress for ages and will remain so for a few ages more; it's not vaporware, it just needs time.
But honestly, I fail to see why this qualifies as newsworthy, and a submission about successful experiments into getting monkeys to move a cursor with mind control isn't.
This kind of thing is what keeps me from subscribing, to be perfectly frank. Maybe when story submission/acceptance begins to follow more democratic guidelines like the moderation system.
Sounds like Cooltown (Score:2)
Will it help me find my glasses? (Score:3, Insightful)
It truth it really seems that acceptance of something like this will likely depend on how it's marketed. Help find old folks when they go drifting off from the nursing home, be used to determine that someone has fallen and can't get up. (6 hours without moving at the foot of the steps is a good sign) Imagine a lost or missing child, stolen artwork, etc. I can see viable, sensible uses for the technology, but at the same time have concerns over how it could be misused.
This already happens (Score:1)
Haven't you ever bought anything with a UPC?
Sure. (Score:1)
Is anyone actually putting serious effort into making this happen, or are people just making stuff up? It seems like every six months, somebody writes a very optimistic, excited article about their toothbrush talking to their television, but nobody is actually making it happen.
All products are tracked? (Score:1)
Things are too dumb to talk (Score:2)
Commercial kitchens, yes. (Whatever happened to the big McDonald's robotic kitchen project they announced a few years back?) Offices and factories, probably. (Any place that has property ID tags now is a good candidate.) Automated checkout at stores, maybe. Home automation, no. Home automation gear has been around for decades, and remains a niche product.
If you really want to do something in this area, develop a cheap device that can make an estimate of the number of people in a room, and use it to control heating, ventilating, and air conditioning. HVAC systems for classrooms, conference rooms, and such should have both a thermostat for temperature and a people counter for airflow. Fan speed should crank up as the number of people increases. It would probably even save money, because empty rooms can go down to minimum airflow.
Nothing new (Score:1)
If the register can print a receipt that shows all your purchases and your debit/credit/check then they can already link your habits to your bank account.
Might as well as use a club card for a discount or pay in cash if you really care about your privacy.
(OMG they found out I eat the same food as the other 100 million people around me)
"Smart Carts" at Giant Foods (Score:2)
Miserably failed and they removed them...but it was a neat idea. Probably way before its time.
Re:"Smart Carts" at Giant Foods (Score:2)
The path to hell is paved with good intentions. (Score:2)
Imagine all the ways such technology can be used in wrong ways, for apparently the supporters of this either have blinders on or plans to abuse it.
Certainly we all have been hearing the word "privacy" one gawd aweful a-hell-of-a-lot especially in sales pitches where your privacy should be a default thing to respect by others and only invaded with your permission (not the other way around causing yo uto constantly be fighing for your privacy).
Imagine a criminal taking inventory of your home, in their effort to take from you....or even kill you.
Re:The path to hell is paved with good intentions. (Score:2)
As a matter of privacy you understand.....But how much would such a deactivate unity cost (not to mention your need to spend the time to deactivate tags on everything you buy in order to enforce your privacy).
1/9th of tech revolution (Score:2)
There are nine action constants, one of which is the ability to IDentify and cause a sequence of actions to take place upon such identification.
The other eight parts (also including the 8th) [using the metaphor of the
Matrix movie):
AI (Alternate Interface) Switch
You start or begin things and stop or end things.
PK (Place Keeper) Apoc
You need to know where you are in doing something, keep track of things,
especially if you need to set something aside to do other things before
you can go back to something and continue.
OI (Obtain Input) Tank
You get things to pass to other things (variables).
IP (InPut from) Mouse
You select where your getting something from and what to get
when you get things.
OP (OutPut to) Dozer
You select where your sending something to and what to send
when you send things.
SF (do StufF) Neo
You do things a step at a time, even when your doing more than
one thing at a time, each you do a step at a time. And the things
you do can be or include doing the nine things.
IQ (Index Queue) Morpheus
You look up what things mean, and use the meanings to (SF)
"do StufF". Often the meaning is from a Selected Abstraction Set.
ID (IDentify things) Trinity
Sometimes you gotta know what something is before you know what to do.
So you test things to see what they are. Once you know what something is,
you can (SF) "do StufF".
KE (Knowledge Enable) Cypher
When looking up or testing something (IQ and ID), you may only want a
certain part of it. This "KE" helps you narrow down what you want to
look up (IQ) or test (ID). When you look up a word in a dictionary,
you limit your search to the section starting with the first letter
of the Word.
These NINE things can easily be made available in the form
of computer functionality, easy for us to use.
And With This we can Automate The things We Do thru computers (not that
this is not what the programming industry does, but this is for the
general end user.)
Or in other words, once you have identified something, whatdo you want to
do with it or based on it's existing?
for more information see my home page.
Simple fix (Score:1)
I don't care what kind of RFID chip whatever item you buy may have in it. It's not going to be able to withstand a few hundred thousand volts, or a blort-load of high-energy microwaves.
More tracking... AT&T Research - BATs (Score:1)
AT&T are working on systems that track everything in an office so you desktop can follow you around, phone calls can be routed to the nearest phone to you, etc:
AT&T - Location Systems [att.com]
They have some videos to watch on the topic... a few years old, but still interesting:
AT&T - The Video Collection [att.com]
They have a nice away around objections to the system knowing where you are... if someone looks you up, you get their name and details...
It's is a pretty specialised system, though - I can't see it exactly being any use in your average family household...
I mean, who wants that kind of thing in their home?
glasses.... (Score:2)
they going to track what I see or what I drink?
Uhm..WOW (Score:1)
All over this thread is the argument: "Do we really NEED a smart toaster?"
I for one, do. I saw a demonstration of the Thalia appliances (From Sunbeam) and was very impressed with what they could do. For example, they pulled up a recipe (conceivably across the Internet) for a cake. The central kitchen computer automatically uploaded the recipe to each of the appliances used in it.. for example the oven was automatically preheated and the mixer was powered on and ready to go.
The mixer prompted you to enter the ingredients at the right time. It had a scale built into it, so you could just add the ingredients to the bowl without having to use measuring cups and the like... it told you "when".
When something needed to be mixed, the mixer handled it itself... literally just took over. The only user intervention in the process occured when they entered ingredients (in a much more efficient manner) and poured the contents of the mixed ingredients into the pan and stuck in the oven. The oven (didn't actually work when I saw this, but it was "planned") would eventually know how long to cook the cake...and shut itself off. For more complicated recipes it could properly vary temperatures..
The point is, by themselves these are cool advances. But it goes farther.. how many people do you know who have several clocks in their homes that are only showing the right time about 6 months of the year (depending on whether daylight savings time is in effect).. a "smart clock" will not only properly set itself, but can handle these changes for you.. uber cool. No more oversleeping the next day because your alarm clock didn't get set.
Controlling lights via the network has important security and aesthetic concerns. I've seen home-networked based lighting schemes that make it easy to set mood lighting (no more reliance on purely off-white light).. no more plug-in light timers either.. and that's a definite positive.
The prospect of being able to take inventory of my food items while i'm at the grocery store is exciting. How often do you get the store and go "damn, do I have milk?"
I could go on.. the point is, by themselves these advances are not neccesarily huge (and hardly revolutionary) but taken in aggregate they are very exciting (although I would argue that it is still somethign short of a revolution).
After all, we didn't NEED the washing machine.. and when it was introduced many people simply forged on with their hand washing ways (after all, they didn't need this modern hogwash).. I bet if your reading this either A) You have or use a washing machine or B) You don't wash your clothes:)
perverse use of OO (Score:2)
et cetera.
Simply abominable...