An interesting paper out of the MIT media lab in October 1999. Basically, the paper says we can get the best of both worlds by combining ubiquitous computing (computers embedded in everything and watching everything we do) with wearable computing (carrying around your computers with you).
The paper covers privacy, personalization, resource management, context-aware behavior etc. It also presents the "Hive" framework for Java agents.
From this 26 April 2001 article written by Tom Nadeau:
The assumption behind the model is that there are innovators who are not consumers, and consumers who are not innovators. That is, it is assumed that consumers will never be information-producing agents themselves.
What does this mean to the structure of society? It means that major corporations that form the first link in the innovation chain are using legal restrictions to claim every link in the sequential-innovation process — and these corporations have the gall to claim that they are only protecting an elite few "innovators" without whom the rest of us would be impoverished imbeciles.
That is the new big lie of the information era. We ALL have the tools for innovation and creativity right now, on our desktops and within our portable computers. We ALL have the capacity to be producers of ideas, not merely consumers of them.
As seen in this Slashdot post in a thread on cloning by "eries":
"It [fork] reminds me of a great sci-fi story I read once, about a man who comes across a fascinating booth at a circus. The vendor at the booth tells man that the booth is a matter-replicator; anyone who walks through the booth is duplicated. The original person walks out of the booth unharmed, but the duplicate person walks out onto the surface of Mars as a slave of the Martian construction crews. The vendor then tells the man that he'll be given a million dollars if he allows himself to be replicated, and he agrees. He happily walks through the machine, looking forward to collecting the million dollars… and walks out onto the surface of Mars. Meanwhile, back on Earth, his duplicate is walking off with a stash of cash. The question is this: If you came across the booth, what would you do?"
Careful what you wish for.
There's a thread running on Slashdot regarding retinal scanning displays triggered by a New York Times article.
I'd also like to see these coupled with video cameras and face recognition software. Then I could see people's names hovering over their heads. That would be the killer app for me!
But Slashdot reader "rw2" took the idea one step further in this comment:
Combine this with stereoscopic imagers and eye tracking. Now the box can map in a virtual environment everything you are seeing in 3d. The next steps are obvious. My favorite is new 'skins' for the things (read, people) around you.
Don Lyle made this observation in the 26 March 2001 issue of the Rapidly Changing Face of Computing:
The instruction book that comes with a watch doesn't contain a single paragraph about how to tell time — just instructions on how to figure out all of the ancillary bells and whistles that "designers" have crammed into the shell…
Well, that got Mick O'Malley thinking in the 23 April 2001 issue:
I think it's an incredibly clear example of how technology disappears. Here we have an instance where the primary function of a device is so intuitive, so expected, so assumed-as-a-self-evident-truth, that it is completely ignored in the entire sale, packaging and distribution process. Amazing! The primary function is simply built in as a foundation on which to build other functionality.
You can just picture the marketing execs sitting around a whiteboard saying "ok, so we need to tell the time, good, now where do we go from there …. we've got the basic reason for having this type of device, now let
Mark Weiser and John Brown of Xerox PARC wrote this article in October 1996 about a new approach to technology they dub "calm technology".
The article starts off with an introduction to the four phases of computing: mainframe, PC, internet/distributed, and ubiquitous computing (UC). If you're not familiar, UC is the idea that computers will become so prevalent, they will disappear into the background just like electricity has. The authors summarize it like this: The UC era will have lots of computers sharing us.
But the interesting parts are their ideas on "calm technology" and their ideas on periphery and center:
Maichael Lesk speculates in this 1997 article:
How much information is there in the world? This paper makes various estimates and compares the answers with the estimates of disk and tape sales, and size of all human memory. There may be a few thousand petabytes of information all told; and the production of tape and disk will reach that level by the year 2000. So in only a few years:
- we will be able save everything — no information will have to be thrown out
- the typical piece of information will never be looked at by a human being.
Later in the article, he estimates that the average human being can store (remember) around 200 MB of data.
telespree is making a very basic cellular phone that doesn't even have a keypad. Just an on/off button. When you turn it on it, you're connected to an automated voice-activated system. You say something like "dial 5 5 5 1 2 1 2" to dial a phone number.
I wonder how well it works if you're in a noisy environment? What if you don't want people around you to know the phone number of the friend you're dialing?
The system is designed to be essentially disposable so that they can be sold from vending machines, convenience stores, etc.
Patrick C. pointed me to the American National Standard for Telecommunications Telecom Glossary 2000. If you file the "Files"
link at in the bottom frame, you can download a local copy, and also a
Palm-friendly version (friendly as in formatted, not as in size — it's
over 1MB).
Apparently the NSA is working on Security-Enhanced Linux (SELinux). This came up in a Slashdot article about PGP working with NSA on secure linux.