Another Super Gizmo
Dang. Fabric input devices. This leads to having computer input on your clothes. Imagine your phone in your pocket, a plug in your ear, and the dial pad on your sleeve. Imagine, hehe, clothes that changed color with certain motions and you have disco lights 2010. How about a notepad for grocery lists or x-mas lists, or phone numbers all stored in the fabric of your shirt?
Funny though. I say this, and yes, it sounds fantastic, and it's techno-seductive, but there is a big BUT. Just today I saw a headline for a paperless ARMY. IBM will try and clear out the paper from the army. Yeah, sure. The BUT in all this is that paper doesn't break, it doesn't lose data, it doesn't crash, it can be written on with anything at any time. Low tech solutions require no power. They can be read by anyone with knowledge of the language and do not require a specific version of some specific software.
So yes, while all these fancy gizmos are way cool, we have a long way to go. Maybe one day we will have gizmos that have solid state memory (computer memory that takes no power to maintain, so like a light switch, when you flip the switch, you don't have to stand there expending energy to hold the switch up) and that has an extremely low failure rate. And maybe our computer data will be as easy to understand as human languages, and the data can be altered at a whim.
But until then, it's going to be rough.
Funny though. I say this, and yes, it sounds fantastic, and it's techno-seductive, but there is a big BUT. Just today I saw a headline for a paperless ARMY. IBM will try and clear out the paper from the army. Yeah, sure. The BUT in all this is that paper doesn't break, it doesn't lose data, it doesn't crash, it can be written on with anything at any time. Low tech solutions require no power. They can be read by anyone with knowledge of the language and do not require a specific version of some specific software.
So yes, while all these fancy gizmos are way cool, we have a long way to go. Maybe one day we will have gizmos that have solid state memory (computer memory that takes no power to maintain, so like a light switch, when you flip the switch, you don't have to stand there expending energy to hold the switch up) and that has an extremely low failure rate. And maybe our computer data will be as easy to understand as human languages, and the data can be altered at a whim.
But until then, it's going to be rough.
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