Technology and the whole using it thing
The Slipped Disk
Technology is only as good as those that are using it. I know, old quote
and almost common sense. But I think that people often fail to see what
really neat stuff is already availiable for use.
Storage technology is coming down to a really cheap price, along with
motion detectors, WORM drives, optical scanners, and so on. All this stuff
is here! And all it takes is the right guy to come along and correlate it.
I'm not even talking economic profit here. I'm talking PERSONAL profit,
used by one guy for the benefit of himself. If I really had the time, I
could devise a top-down system of remote control in my apartment, and
live with that, but I might have a trouble with mass production. Especially
if I wanted to add features like wiring by serial interface into a constantly
on PC that kept track of every time something went on or off, and stored it
for easy retrieval, so I could tell it to turn things on and off according to
specific days that I had stored up over time. Tell the thing to turn off
stuff in REAL TIME according to July 3rd, when I wasn't here but my
roommate was, so I could find out what things he did. Switches, transistors,
motion detectors all hooked into currently availiable technology that could
increase my awareness of my living space in a way that I otherwise wouldn't
know about...
Am I making any sense?
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Jason Scott (j...@uuwest.UUCP) "You made my day
Just a regular kinda computer guy now you have to sleep in it"
(914)-238-4221 The BIS Hotline - They Might Be Giants
Hi, Boyd.
Jim Winer @ AT&T, Middletown, NJ
>
> Am I making any sense?
No.
Jim Winer ..!lzfme!jwi (Usually unable to reply to email outside AT&T)
Those persons who advocate censorship offend my religion.
Upuaut: a wolf-headed Egyptian deity | Voodoo: the art of sticking ideas
assigned as Guidance System | into people and watching
for the Barque of Ra. | them bleed.
The opinions expressed here are not necessarily
Daniel F. Boyd
>
> Storage technology is coming down to a really cheap price, along with
>motion detectors, WORM drives, optical scanners, and so on. All this stuff
>is here! And all it takes is the right guy to come along and correlate it.
>
> I'm not even talking economic profit here. I'm talking PERSONAL profit,
>used by one guy for the benefit of himself.
THIS is the sentiment that makes a killer app out of a new
hardware development. The next killer app, I am pretty
sure, will come from the cheap CD-ROM drive. Unfortunately
for me, I can't figure out what it will be yet.
Well, let's try. Who really drives killer apps?
Businesses. Word processing, VisiCalc, dBase, desktop
publishing, all of these were useful for small businesses
first. And what did these inventions replace? They tended
to reduce unskilled staffs (instead of six typists who just
know how to type, you need two people who know how to
process documents.) Instead of an accountant and three
clerks you need the accountant himself. Instead of three
file clerks to look up things in the filing cabinets, you
need Bob the dBase hacker.
Where does a CD-ROM drive fit in? Well, CD-ROMS won't
become really practical until there are more people with the
capability to record them. There's less than 50 plants in
the world, and I am thinking in terms of the local school
district being able to make a CD-ROM, (or any other
organiation of similar size/funding). So what do we get?
Hmm, lets assume The Next Generation PCs have hires graphics
displays with coprocessors.
Ok, we see 3-d moving things but better, faster,
more colors, and maybe good digitized sound. What do we
get?
Electronic publishing? When everybody's desktop has
a CD-ROM drive on it, we get:
Weekly issues of the current law decisions all over
the place. Same thing for current criminal information
(suspect red haired found wiretapping, time and date etc.).
Factsheet Five on CD-ROM?
No, something doesn't sound right here, this doesn't
grab me enough.
Look at it again. Businesses get a huge bandwidth
in daily/weekly/monthly increments, leading right onto your
desktop. I know HP put HP-UX docs on a CD-ROM and sell them
for less than the paper version...but it's not wierd enough.
What am I missing?
>Hi, Boyd.
Hi. This is all your fault, you know. You got me into
this... thank you.
--
Daniel F. Boyd | "If it wasn't for disappointments,
Student Consultant, SUNY Binghamton | I wouldn't have any appointments."
con...@bingvaxu.cc.binghamton.edu | -- They Might Be Giants
Eric S. Tiedemann
> Factsheet Five on CD-ROM?
Get your head out of the past! FS5 is already available in machinable form
(from the FS5 BBS: (518) 479-3879), and it doesn't bulk all that much--about
250K.
> What am I missing?
Um..the *complete* death of print? People *refusing* to read things not in
machinable form. People keeping machinable copies of *everything* they read?
The SW to make that library tractable?
Eric
e...@cs.nyu.edu
PENNnet Oper/Planning
> Storage technology is coming down to a really cheap price, along with
>motion detectors, WORM drives, optical scanners, and so on. All this stuff
>is here! And all it takes is the right guy to come along and correlate it.
>
> I'm not even talking economic profit here. I'm talking PERSONAL profit,
>used by one guy for the benefit of himself.
Isn't that what NeXT is all about?
There's "nothing new" in NeXT EXCEPT the package!
NeXT has already caused DEC to dramatically drop it's workstation
prices in response - and the NeXT box still isn't generally available.
If you have had an opportunity to work with a NeXT, and you have
any sort of imagination, the potential for increasing/modifying
"personal productivity" is enormous. That package has moved the term
"home computer" closer to the reality of a "refrigerator".
Your "Home ComSole" - a box that runs continually and can actually do
things for you ALL THE TIME, not just when you are sitting in front of
the keyboard.
Yeah, it's going to take some more folks to build a few boards, and
to wire the servos up. But its potential is dramatically more than any
other "pc". All of those things that David Ahl proslitized about
when the first 6502s came out is much closer to realization.
Of course we still need some more business types to do some more
"packaging", but I think we are going to see some very interesting
spin-offs from the Freedom Station development work.
--
William H. Magill Manager, PENNnet Operations Planning
Data Communications and Computing Services (DCCS) University of Pennsylvania
Internet: mag...@dccs.upenn.edu mag...@eniac.seas.upenn.edu
mag...@upenn.edu
David J Rostcheck
build a radio that would only play music you liked, using a NeXT
(because it's fast and supports optical storage). By reading and
writing to the optical drive, you can "buy time" for the computer
to analyze data... It's a Rube Goldberg kind of idea, but I just brought
it up because its an illustration of a primitive way of using advanced
hardware to control your environment...
--
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Geniuses and supergeniuses always make their own rules on sex as on everything
else; they do not accept the monkey customs of their lessers.
- Robert Heinlein in Friday
Eliot Handelman
>This brings up an idea that some friends and I had this year on how to
>build a radio that would only play music you liked, using a NeXT
>to analyze data... It's a Rube Goldberg kind of idea, but I just brought
>it up because its an illustration of a primitive way of using advanced
>hardware to control your environment...
Yes, now if only there were a way to analyze digitized sound files from
the point of view of your preferences. The technology for determining
the PITCH of a digitized sound is still in its infancy. It's far from a
primitive problem.