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DataStickies: USB drives as sticky notes

datastickies.com

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Re: DataStickies: USB drives as sticky notes

#81

Post by bjackman »

noblethrasher wrote: post #76
bjackman wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there's anything misleading here, but there's still something irritating about it. These people spend loads of time and money designing futuristic stuff and giving each other awards for it. In the meantime, we mere mortal engineers are wallowing in the pits of reality, solving actual problems like the plebs we were born to be. I know it sounds horribly bitter, but I really do sympathise with the negativ…

"I don't think there's anything misleading here, but there's still something irritating about it. These authors spend loads of time and money writing stories about the future, and giving each other awards for it . In the meantime, we mere mortal engineers are wallowing in the pits of reality, solving actual problems like the plebs we were born to be. I know it sounds horribly bitter, but I really do sympathise with t…

But when I read Sci-Fi, I'm consuming:

- The author's creativity and intelligence in extrapolating the technology's wider implications

- A good story, including character development

- Often some incredibly clever prose

- Possibly, as a very secondary thing, elements of "Hey, imagine if AI was complex enough to form human relationships!" (for example)

Here, I'm being offered the content of "Hey imagine if USB sticks were really cheap and you could just stick them on your computer like a post it!", but with the tone of "I created this thing: look how clever it is, here I am receiving an award for my ingenuity.

Re: DataStickies: USB drives as sticky notes

#82

Post by egypturnash »

As someone who tries to keep a clean desk, and actively dislikes having post-it's on her monitor bezel, this design exercise gives me the heebie-jeebies.

I actively leverage my dislike of visual clutter on my desk by putting things I don't want to do, but have to, on a post-it on the edge of my monitor. That photo of a bunch of these things cluttering up a monitor is just one big NOPE.

Personally I feel like the form factor of the USB drive is getting close to the bare minimum size as a physical token to put files on. They're small enough to embed in a wide array of whimsically-shaped objects.

Hell, take this magical "optical data transfer surface" and cover your desk in it; build these in small modules that an end user can put into ANYTHING. Put one in the bottom of that action figure you have on the desk, that cool traditional craft piece an ex sent back from their trip to Foreign Parts, whatever - if you want to replace USB drives, I feel like there's a much wider array of things sitting on your desk to put data into than post-its.

Re: DataStickies: USB drives as sticky notes

#83

Post by polshaw »

bjackman wrote: post #74
zem wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i do not understand the negativity in here. literally the very first line of their copy is > dataSTICKIES: A design concept conceptualised as graphene-based flash drives that replace USB data drives. i see this as an appealing visualisation of "if technology gave us storage materials of this form, how might we design a product based around it?", in much the same way that science fiction extrapolates tech advances and…

I don't think there's anything misleading here, but there's still something irritating about it. These people spend loads of time and money designing futuristic stuff and giving each other awards for it. In the meantime, we mere mortal engineers are wallowing in the pits of reality, solving actual problems like the plebs we were born to be. I know it sounds horribly bitter, but I really do sympathise with the negativ…

Allow me to articulate my issue with it. It pushes the impression that these are the creative geniuses that are pushing things forward. Someone else just has to do the 'little detail' of making it work. The engineers that spend their careers making this kind of stuff have usually thought of these ideas before, but they did not put up a flashy web page for people to fawn over-- because they actually realised the issues and inviabilities involved.

This idea is by no means the worst- that award goes to the 'modular' mobile phone designed to reduce waste, that anyone with the slightest bit of knowledge of mass production or high-speed circuitry would instantly write off as laughable. With flexible circuitry, this is actually not that far from being possible. The main issue is the data transfer.. you could spend a lot of time and money getting something to work poorly, or you could just obtain the same practical functionality infinitely better and easier by making them act as physical shortcuts to cloud (or local) storage-- why would you want your data strewn across many slow, small stickies that you could easily lose instead!? And this links back to my original point that the engineers have already thought of it-- because you have just reinvented NFC.

Re: DataStickies: USB drives as sticky notes

#84

Post by Kliment »

bryans wrote: post #80
hardwaresofton wrote: post #59

Why are so many people naysaying this? We have NFC, we have super slim (and super thin) consumer-accessible memory cards. The magnetism bit might be a little tricky (getting the object to stick to the data reading surface), but why is this so far-fetched? What they say aside (it seems that they are designers, not really engineers) -- saying this could never exist is an over-step

I agree. I really don't understand the negativity here, and it reminds me of the immature and close-minded lambasting that the 3Doodler received. It's very disappointing to see the HN community act this way. The majority of the negativity seems to stem from it not being an existing product, which is a silly thing to be indignant about, especially considering the first two words on the page clearly state "design conce…

I believe I had a legitimate complaint about the 3doodler back then: the assholes were trying to patent it even though publically documented and dated prior art from years before they claimed to have started working on it existed. Said prior art had been around on various 3d printing and tech blogs and yet these disgusting people tried to rob the world of this toy by trying to patent it. This is not a matter of "this is a bad idea" it's a matter of them going "we made up this shit, everyone bow to us and there'll be hell to pay if anyone makes it without paying us ransom" even though it's not original.

Re: DataStickies: USB drives as sticky notes

#85

Post by Mithaldu »

zem wrote: post #53
cperciva wrote: post #14

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Apparently adverts for products which don't exist and never will exist are also nearly indistinguishable from adverts for advanced technology.

i do not understand the negativity in here. literally the very first line of their copy is > dataSTICKIES: A design concept conceptualised as graphene-based flash drives that replace USB data drives. i see this as an appealing visualisation of "if technology gave us storage materials of this form, how might we design a product based around it?", in much the same way that science fiction extrapolates tech advances and…

Now, when i first looked at this i had been awake 24 hours so may have not noticed those things due to sleep deprivation. However i seem to distinctly remember not any of the clarifying language about concepts and envisioning being there 12 hours ago, so i think they saw the negative feedback and updated their website.

Re: DataStickies: USB drives as sticky notes

#86

Post by Ellipsis753 »

hnha wrote: post #79
Ellipsis753 wrote: post #78

Wow, this honestly seems like a terrible idea. Not only do I really not want to get glue everywhere (and also have them loose stickiness over time) but also they look very breakable? I don't understand why I would need that many flash drives either? Generally even now I only use one USB stick for my general stuff. I don't think I could write everything that was on my usb stick on a label like that. They complain that…

phones have seriously limited space. 16 or 32 gigabytes won't even hold one uncompressed movie that you need for work. With everything moving to remote servers, streaming etc, I don't see that changing sadly.

True but it's still more possible than this. You can actually buy SD cards with much more than 32 gigabytes. They are pretty rare though.

Re: DataStickies: USB drives as sticky notes

#89

Post by shittyanalogy »

vonskippy wrote: post #43

Ummm...hate to break the bad news, but floppy disks (and the rest of the removable storage ilk) was killed off years ago by the Cloud. Better luck next idea.

A quick transfer of data to someone where there are:

    Too many files to be cloud managed
    Business secrets you don't want on the cloud
    Files too big to quickly transfer

Re: DataStickies: USB drives as sticky notes

#90

Post by shittyanalogy »

Interesting concept, take it to the next level:

    Have a stack of "stickies" stuck to your monitor.
    Drag files to the "drive" or "stack of stickies".
    Files automatically go to the top "sticky" on the stack.
    Peel off top sticky and use.
    Drive IT at your office insane with all the frivolous unchecked data transfer. ;)
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