UK gov sinks £25k into Pi-powered cyberdesk A London furniture design outfit has trousered a £25k Innovate UK grant to prototype "the office desk of the future". "Open-making" champion Opendesk - which offers downloadable designs you can knock up yourself or hand to a local manufacturer* - is tasked with hewing a customisable cyberdesk from the living plywood. …
Should someone perhaps show them an 80's or 90's desk with the wire racking underneath to stand your tower PC on?
Or even a more modern desk where the gap between the underside of the desk and the top of the separate drawer unit under it is the perfect height to accept a closed laptop wired up to a monitor, keyboard, mouse etc on the desk surface...
Surely you're not suggesting that the arrogance of youth has led them to see the short term as the long term?
(I was hauling an old Apple monitor on a cart to Goodwill yesterday, one styled to match the PowerMac G3 Blue and White. People on the street were staring at it. Two came up and asked how old it was, although neither accepted my offer to just give it to them.)
Oh please! Some people don't recognise innovative and disruptive new business paradigms when it runs up the flagpole right in front of them!
I've ordered 6, but requested additional manacles so the minions don't get any funny ideas. The addition of commode chairs is of course simply a courtesy they provide to all their more discerning suckers^W customers.
Is plywood the new black?
The sad thing, the really, really sad thing is that I think these fools actually believe the bullshit they are spouting.
My current desk has been in use now for, oh it must be 15 years, and I have never felt the need to "update" it. The only thing I have to "update" are my desk chairs which seem to disintegrate after about 5 years.
Is it IP66 rated for the odd spilled coffee? and what's the receipt printer under the desk for, or is it a dispenser for calibrated bonzai bog roll...??
I'll stick with the apocryphal Jeff Bezos Mk1 door on a trestle design thankyou, after all He really is a rocket scientist. (Well done Blue Origin.)
Exactly. This is really haunting me - what is this thing for??? Who is going to change the printer rolls? Whatever happened to the paperless office? The Dutch are doing it, including the bog:
http://www.dutchdailynews.com/dutch-office-of-the-future-with-a-ban-on-toilet-paper/
http://www.dutchnews.nl/news/archives/2014/06/from_testing_toilet_paper_to_t/
https://www.decos.com/en/news/paperless-decos-now-also-has-paperless-toilets/
It'll be completely upgradeable, right up until someone starts to undercut them on the upgradeable parts, and it becomes necessary to change the shape of said parts so that they no longer fit into the upgradeable desk. Then they can convince your peers to laugh at your ownership of an Opendesk 1, whilst they're all using an Opendesk Air, or whatever.
And don't forget have it wirelessly (or by Bluletooth) connect to the chair so it instantly sets itself up to your preferred height, back angle, arm position and all the other stuff that various people who've sat in it whilst talking to the person at the next-door desk just had to change and adjust...
Of course this could also lead to endless fun and games if the security is as lacking in the set-up as it usually is in IoT rubbish and you can set up chair Mexican waves or rollercoaster rides across the office...
"Our 'smart desk' will never be outdated, as the embedded technology is upgradable"
Embedded surely implies a bed in this context. I know David Cameron's theory is that he makes all his best decisions standing up on a full bladder, but he makes provably piss-poor decisions. I do all my best thinking in bed. Embed a Pi in an actual bed and then I'll talk.*
"Co-working spaces are becoming ever more popular but hot-desking hasn't garnered quite so many fans."
Hot desking with fewer fans must imply a big water-cooled water-bed.
* I once found a speech-activated recorder misplaced under my bachelor pad bed for a year, and was eager to play-back the results to reveal the truth about my love-life.
"Cough.cough...cough..cough.....cough...groan...cough.cough.cough...'Get me a glass of water'..cough...cough..Tardis noise...cough"
How smart does a desk need to be exactly? mine has 4 legs of its own, space underneath it for my legs and the pc in its little trolley thing. It also has space on top for a keyboard and mouse and the monitors are on stands clamped to the back of the desk. Strangely, it is always at the right height for my chair and although a standing option would be nice, I can always make do with resting the keyboard on a stack of O'Reilly books. Bonus it will never need patching (unless I accidentally leave a soldering iron sitting on it!)
yes, yes, yes, bring those LED notification lights! And the app to select one of FOURTEEEN!!!! attractive colours suitable to the blah blah blah, with a paid-for variant including pulsating patterns (and penial massage, as long as you dish out for a compatible seating device).
Likewise, motion sensors, and eye-movement tracking. And don't forget the auto-chain.
Had click on in the background the other day and they where twittering on about a new hip crypto currency you earn by walking, what made me sit up and yell bollocks was they said it was from the guys that brought us the super successful $7 usb computer. That $7 usb computer BTW was a usb stick that boots android you still need a computer to use it, whats more that computer tends to be a fuc|<ing old Dell that the locals can't afford the electricity for and worse the class rooms are hot to start with never mind adding 10 - 20 dells kicking in a few Kw.
Let's assume a Pi can be used to RDP into a server thing and present some sort of 'flavoured' desktop for the Student when doing 'dull' stuff. Pi wants 5V@2A. Monitor wants 18V@2A. Break Out supply for experimentation on the IO port wants +/-15@1A and +5V@1A... 60 Watts per Student. Stick 10 Student Desks side by side and supply them with a 700W AC/DC 42VDC power supply, local conversion at desk, from one end of the desks in order to get rid of a shit load of dangerous mains cabling and its associated daisy chained 4 socket 'what the fuck is plugged in where' trip over this stuff and daisy chain the Ethernet. Sorted. Meh... no you cannot program it in Python.
Ah, brings back memories of the old Halsingborg to Helsingor (sorry- no accents on this stupid tablet!) ferry. We'd pile on around 7 in the morning and spend the whole day on a single ticket bouncing between Sweden and Denmark, drinking that lethal clear Swedish(?) beer at ferry bar prices (about a fifth of bar prices) until the last ferry run docked around 11PM.
On at least a couple of occasions we finished on the wrong side of the water, piling into taxis and drunkenly demanding we be taken to addresses the drivers had never heard of, and, on one occasion, being unceremoniously dumped outside a Danish police station where they ordered us all foid, bunged us, 6 to a cell, into custody for the night, and woke us up with a fabulous breakfast. All before giving us a stern talking to about alcohol (and ferry ticket!) abuse, then presenting us with an eyewatering bill fir their services.
Probably made me the man I am today.
Probably.
For starters, people disike "hot desking" because they a.) Don't have a personal space they can call their own, b.) Don't have anywhere to put the photo of the kids, favourite mug, small wooly toy animal, preferred brand of pencil, box of paper clips etc. c.) When they get to the desk that they feel comfortable and familiar sitting at some bugger will already be there.
Also, the manufacturers seem to be thinking in terms of keeping the desk design forever and the IT being modernised as a way of future proofing it. Which is nonsense. No one buys the same design of furniture year on year. Once it looks dated ( as in overfamiliar) the style/cost/novelty concious businesses will be looking for something different and this precious design will become the avocado bathroom of the furniture world.
Chief Upholder of New Technologies.
Not only is it suitably pointing towards 'buying the newest gadgets on company money' but you can also look bemused as people go red faced looking at your business card but are too embarrassed to say why.
Then say "oooooooh, CUPholder. Got it."
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