141–150 of 262 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hm, we might have a market here for extending power cords that live in a compartment next to your doorbell.
Or perhaps a treadmill in front of the door which generates electricity, connected to a tesla coil, to support wireless charging of your phone, to send a message over the Internet, to unlock the door :)
> I wouldn't be surprised if by playing some clever tricks with the accelerometer you could even replace the bathroom scale. Galileo might take issue with that: http://www.jimloy.com/physics/galileo.htm
Using an accelerometer would likely be a worse user experience than just stepping on a scale, but a system where the iPad actually measures your body fat could be easier to use.
However, it will likely not be very accurate. Perhaps if one were to set a reference weight at the start, and it just measures delta using the touch screen?
Using the accel, a possibility is to see how close a person can swing the iPad towards his body. I assume that this would change dependent on the amount of fat around his arms.
A common place people gather fat is on their thighs - thin people often have space between the legs and heavier people not as much. Also a possibility, even if a not very clever one.
This is absolutely right. My company been working on a medical device accessory for the iPhone and the possibilities the "tablet" form factor are amazing. Lower Cost Structure - In our industry (diabetes) you give away hardware to get ongoing disposable revenue. This hardware is expensive to produce and develop. Plus you spend a lot of effort on areas that don't add much value e.g. reinventing the wheel re: display d…
Incidentally, I know the Wikipedia article has been deleted, but I'm assuming someone will fix that. (Is this the current world record for deletionism, or have there been more egregious examples?)
The wikipedia article on ephemeralization is somewhat more complete and what is linked from the page on Fuller. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ephemeralization
Other internet sources seem to indicate that ephemeralization is the term he used.
Tablets are obviously great, but does anyone think they'll really replace cameras or GPSes? It seems to me that tablets will cut the bottom out of these markets (those with casual interest in photography or GPS or computing won't need to buy a dedicated device) but they'll never approach the quality of an SLR or a dedicated GPS. Or am I just being short-sighted?
The iPhone is already the biggest camera in number of pics on Flickr. I think the camera ( non slr) switch has largely already happened..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Doesn't the fact that the iPad is itself a closed...errr, integrated...system counter your argument? I'm all for open standards, API's and community cooperation of course. I just don't think that Apple is necessarily the antithesis. The fundamental difference between Apple's position today to Microsoft's monoculture of the previous decade lies in their motivations. Apple wants to make great stuff. Microsoft wanted to…
Microsoft's control was superficial, and that's how they like it. They don't want to control what you put on your computer, they just want you to pay them the same reasonable price. Apple on the other hand clearly does care what you put on your iOS device, and in ways that go beyond a desire for good UX to a desire to control what is acceptable for society: http://www.ncregister.com/blog/apple-finds-christianity-offe…
MS did try to push people into software as a service (but they failed at it). They support DVD region encoding. They have introduced DRM music services. They struck agreements to hamper attempts to sell dual-boot systems. I didn't experience this but understand that at one point windows media player would happily scan existing content on the drive and helpfully encomber it with DRM. Sharepoint takes data in from all sorts of sources but it's much harder to get it out again.
MS have also EOL'd products that dominate major market segments despite users who would have paid plenty for stability: original VB, excel before UI change, every NT release.
These are the actions of a company trying to increase its control on users, attempting to control what they do on their computer.
By way of comparison, traditional unix vendors would be more helpful of big-pocketed companies who wanted to pay to continue to use old software. They could have reversed a firewall and other patches into NT4 that would have hardened it and kept it going if they'd wanted to - these are the teams that reverse-engineered photoshop and hundreds of games and then hotpatched new code over their memory segments when they loaded so that they could get DOS and W3.1 software to run fine on Windows 95 for the release. Interesting alternate history. What if MS had tried to keep NT4sp3 tight and stable and kept drivers coming, and brought it forward conservatively.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or perhaps a treadmill in front of the door which generates electricity, connected to a tesla coil, to support wireless charging of your phone, to send a message over the Internet, to unlock the door :)
:-) Or these things might ship with passive RF chips that don't require power.
> I wouldn't be surprised if by playing some clever tricks with the accelerometer you could even replace the bathroom scale. Galileo might take issue with that: http://www.jimloy.com/physics/galileo.htm