[conspire] HP Melt Down

[Paul Zander]

Personally I find the concept of the Internet Fridge with RFID reader and automatic-shopping-list-generator rather spooky. I already have to deal with grocery stores telling me how much I will save if I use their coupons or membership program.  Their calculations are obviously based on my buying products that they want to promote, not what I choose to buy. For all sorts of reasons, next week I might to decide to eat something different from what I had last week. That choice will be influenced by the seasons and what the other food purveyor are offering.

I hope it will be a long time before some electronic gizmo can replace a walk through the garden to decide that the zucchini is ripe or a walk through the produce store to decide that the peaches on sale are not ripe.

On the other hand, for a long time, I have been hoping for a clothes dryer that, would send me a message when the permanent press was done.  The machine obviously has a detector, but I am often too far away to hear the buzzer.

Or how about a toaster that has a photo-sensor that stops with the desired amount of actual toasting instead of the primitive temperature sensor?

--- On Tue, 8/23/11, Don Marti <dmarti at zgp.org> wrote:

> From: Don Marti <dmarti at zgp.org>
> Subject: Re: [conspire] HP Melt Down
> To: conspire at linuxmafia.com
> Date: Tuesday, August 23, 2011, 5:56 AM
> begin Rick Moen quotation of Mon, Aug
> 22, 2011 at 09:43:42PM -0700:
> 
> > Unfortunately, I get the strong impression that webOS
> was always
> > highly proprietary at key levels, meaning that it was
> _always_ hostage
> > to the proprietary software game of here today, gone
> tomorrow.
> > Moreover, it has for quite a few years been pitched as
> a 'cloud'
> > solution, e.g., intended to be tied to proprietary
> hosted services, and
> > pretty nearly completely useless without them.
> 
> I was just reading _Martha Stewart Living_, and
> Samsung is trying the "Internet Refrigerator" thing
> again.  Apparently it's still a product category:
>   http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/internet_fridges.php
> 
> The thing is, though, that it's a bad idea to encase
> a long-lifespan device with a short-lifespan device
> (like a twenty-year tube TV with a built-in one-year
> VCR, remember those?  And how many generations of
> cell
> phones have you gone through while your HP printer
> was still cranking along saying PC LOAD LETTER?).
> Instead, what I wanted a WebOS device for was just
> a Web Browser on The Kitchen Wall (WBOTKW).
> 
> Or something like this, even...
>   https://wiki.mozilla.org/B2G
> 
> Of course, WBOTKW is a generic, low-margin product,
> since it isn't a point of sale device for some
> vendor's app store.  So the people who run major IT
> companies won't be interested in making them.
> 
> -- 
> Don Marti             
>       
> http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
> dmarti at zgp.org
> 
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