* Posts by Dave 126

10622 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Jul 2010

Apple Fools: Times the House of Jobs went horribly awry

Dave 126

Re: The $150M rescue by Gates

>This was obvious at the time, but for some reason, not to journalists.

Hehehe! I remember reading at the time, in a dead-tree edition of Wired, "Twenty Things Apple Must Do To Survive" or somesuch title. Jobs then did the opposite of damn-near everything Wired recommended, and the bottom line has vindicated him.

( Recently Wired.com has blocked articles unless I turn off my adblocker - I stopped visiting Wired, which is a shame cos it's good for a laugh from time to time. Curiously, I didn't have a complete adblocker extension running - I see all the Reg ads - but I do have Ghostery installed. )

Dave 126

Re: The sad part is....

And yet Woz ended up with so much money that he was giving it away.

There are various ways of looking at morality, but if you start throwing figures at the question then we might be inclined to look at it in a pragmatic fashion.

If someone steals my wallet containing £20 but after a few years gives me a suitcase full of cash, I'm not sure that I would be too negative towards them. I guess it depends on the context, such as if I was going to use that £20 to take a lovely lady on a date.

Dave 126

Re: So many gaffes

It's just a MK I thing.

- First Ipod: FireWire only, Mac only. 'Only' 5GB. Three times the price of a MD player.

- First iPhone - no 3G

- First iPad - didn't receive nearly as many OS updates as the MK II product.

It isn't just an Apple thing. Sony, internally, saw product range lifespans as being like a day, from sunrise to sunset. Mk I was 'build it any way you can'. MK II was the 'iconic' version being more refined, and bought by more people than just the first adopters. Sony would then produce themes and variations. And yes, Steve Jobs had a friendly relationship with the tops executives at Sony. In turn, the father of the Playstation and VAIO was a fan of Essingler's Mac design languag, and Sony's design team would use Macs. (Source: Digital Dreams. The Work of the Sony Design Centre - ISBN: Google it yourself)

What we forget in the UK is that Apple only sold the iPhone through one network, and insisted that they didn't take the piss on data charges.

Dave 126

>I'd much rather thank Acorn for that since - as you mention in the article - it was their baby.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARM_Holdings#Founding

The company was founded in November 1990 as Advanced RISC Machines Ltd and structured as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple Computer (now Apple Inc.) and VLSI Technology. The new company intended to further the development of the Acorn RISC Machine processor, which was originally used in the Acorn Archimedes and had been selected by Apple for their Newton project. Its first profitable year was 1993.

And as the article notes, Acorn weren't the only RISC designers in town at the time, but were cheaper than the competition.

Dave 126

Re: So many gaffes

> What about refusing to let developers build apps for the iPhone for the first year or two?

What about it? It didn't hurt the adoption of the iPhone by the people Apple wanted to buy it. Remember that the 1st gen iPhone was not great compared to the second version with 3G - the first iPhone had too many compromises, but it acted as a good statement of intent.

>Or that crap "music phone" from Motorola that ran "iTunes" in some f'ed up Java mobile environment?

Again, what damage did it do Apple? Not many people bought them, and if anything it might have been useful to Apple in muddying the waters around the 'Apple phone' rumours. This was at a time when most phones from Sony Ericcson, Samsung and Nokia didn't even provide a 3.5mm headphone socket, cos you were supposed to use whatever headset the phone shipped with. Urgh. Samsung were competing on the 'worlds thinnest' slider and candy bar, Motorola were competing on fancy materials, SE were using their Walkman and Cybershot branding, Nokia seemed a bit confused...

Dave 126

Clones

Jobs killed off the Mac clone program, but he was willing to make an exception for Sony VAIOs. Sony, however, had already invested too much time Windows VAIOs to switch to OSX.

http://nobi.com/en/Steve%20Jobs%20and%20Japan/entry-1212.html

Done making the big stuff better? The path to Apple's mid-life crisis

Dave 126

Re: Following's not what Apple was good at

>And another example is the amazing Magic Trackpads and the new interface it brings to the desktop.

That is a good example of how to bring some ideas from a touch OS (iOS) to a desktop OS. Bringing gestures to OSX didn't stop anyone from using OSX in the traditional way with a conventional mouse - if they so wanted.

I use Windows on my PC with a 'Hyperglide' Logitech mouse, and it works well for me. However, I find it very frustrating trying to use a cheap Windows laptop's trackpad to scroll. The Logitech software also emulates what on OSX is called 'Expose' - a press of one of the mouses many buttons, and all my open windows are presented in a grid. I've grown very used to it.

Dave 126

Re: @404

Maybe a detached hand, al a 'Thing' from the Addams Family is the 'next big thing'. It could type for you, fetch items, and in times of privacy perform more intimate functions...

Blighty starts pumping out 12-sided quids

Dave 126

Re: ISIS security features?

Homer: What's this Bear Tax?! Let the bears pay the Bear Tax, I pay the the Homer Tax!

Lisa: Er dad, that's Home Owner Tax

Dave 126

Re: April Fool

>Isn't ground breaking technology usually call a shovel?

I'd call it a spade. A shovel is used for, er, shovelling material that is already loose like sand, snow or gravel, whereas a spade will cut into mud, clay, turf and the like.

Harder substrates - rocks - will call for picks, bars, explosives and other handy tools.

Holding out for a Jobs: Tim Cook still auditioning for position of Apple god

Dave 126

Re: Nobody needs a smartwatch

I don't need any of the current smart-watches, but I might consider one in the future if it offers some basic functions without any of the current downsides.

The Apple Watch does too much for my tastes, and its most interesting feature - ApplePay - doesn't require the power-hungry colour screen. It is not ApplePay itself I find interesting, but the concept of a device I can potentially use in place of physical keys, cash-cards and passwords (I prefer to carry cash, but its reassuring to have a backup).

The simple functions that I would like on a watch include being able to 'page' my phone (for when it drops down gaps in sofas), receive notifications, and use the watch to control media playback on another device. These features can be implemented on watches that boast a battery life of over a year - as Casio and Citizen have demonstrated.

My other criteria are more my personal taste: a small watch, simple dial, waterproof, stainless steel, sapphire crystal, rotating bezel. A bezel could function as both rotary input (volume control etc), and also as Direction Pad (up down left right - or Fwd, Back, Pause etc) without one's fingers obscuring the display.

Dave 126

Re: Holding out for a Jobs: Tim Cook still auditioning for position of Apple god

They may be seen as being slow to innovate, but really there is no point in 'innovating' for innovation's sake - iPods, iPhones and iPads were all refinements of existing products. Indeed, I get the impression that Apple didn't really want to release a watch until batteries and SoCs improve, but felt they had to stake their claim on a nascent market.

Again, it should be self-evident why anyone who thinks they know what the Next Big Thing is keeping it themselves. Our home computers are fast enough, and have been for some time. Our mobile devices are almost as fast as our computers. There are some new forms of man/machine interaction around - LeapMotion, RealSense, Kinect, Project Mango - but none that yet feel like a must have.

Dave 126

Re: Cook is not seeking to be a deity

Agreed, Cook isn't trying to make himself in Job's image. Whilst jobs didn't get involved in social issues, Cook has been outspoken on issues like gay rights. Cook's Apple is already different to Job's Apple.

Dave 126

Re: The Apple II was certainly practical

>I fell for hype and bought one. I soon got a better computer.

I would have thought that most people who bought a computer in that era soon bought a better computer! :)

Heck, it's only in the last few years that I haven't felt the need (have seen no huge benefit to my using of productivity software) to upgrade. For most of the last twenty-five years, none of my current computers has quite seemed quick enough, but the five year old model I'm using now is alright!

Dave 126

Re: All about money

>Steve Jobs wasn't interested in the user experience. He was interested in the perceived value of his products.

The two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the easiest way to up the perceived value of your products is to make sure they have some value to begin with.

Felix Dennis had the same model of microwave in each of his homes around the world. This was because he couldn't be arsed with relearning how to heat some food. Being wealthy, he could afford to remove such minor annoyances from his life. Some microwaves are easy to use, some are just unaccountably awkward.

Jobs did care about the user experience - in the products he used himself (as Mercedes Benz and Sony will testify), as well as those his company sold. If you are going to differentiate your products, it makes sense to differentiate them in area you care and think about. If you are overly sensitive to shit, careless product design, then use it as an asset. This is no less true just because Jobs also wanted to makes lots of money (though his first billion came about by accident, because he financially supported the animation side of Pixar when really he wanted their hardware to be adopted by hospitals).

Of course, the PCs I steered my dad towards buying in the nineties were for gaming, where the more MHz and MBs the better the user experience (in this case, the user experience was shooting hellspawn in Doom at a decent framerate)- you'd want them to be as high as possible for the £. So most PCs were sold on those numbers, and money was saved everywhere else - there was simply no motive for a company to invest money in smoothing off the rough edges. Were these 486-era PCs user friendly? Hell no. And whilst I learnt some skills and aptitudes as a teenager which have since been useful to me, I would had sympathy for someone who just wanted to write and print a letter, for example. I also used Acorn Archimedes and Macs from LC IIs to PowerPC models in school, consoles from Sega and Nintendo, and there was plenty to appreciate in them.

There has been plenty that Apple has done that isn't mere fairy dust, and offer tangible benefits to the user experience. Would Jobs then (maybe over-) sell it? Yeah, that was his job. That should be the job of anyone in his position.

Good design costs time and money, and for a company to make that investment it has to see a return.

I've never owned a Mac, iPod, iPhone or iPad, so perhaps I'm more familiar (and the breeds contempt) with the occasional problems and rough edges of competing products - DOS and Windows PCs, iRivers, Androids. I've encountered so many clumsy and arbitrary design choices I've lost track. Like many people here, I have the experience to skip over many of these issues, but for many laypeople they appear more like hurdles.

Android's unpatched dead device jungle is good for security

Dave 126

Re: MS manage it

>MS manage to patch Windows on an even more diverse range of hardware.

Desktop PCs have a BIOS, and were always designed to run a choice of OS. That was, and remains, the norm - PCs made up of different bits of hardware. You can get Windows running, then go looking for dedicated hardware drivers.

NT OS/2 ( then NT 3.1 > 4 >2K >XP > poo > 7. I stopped at 7 ) was designed to run across different architectures, too (MS were feeling threatened by network-capable OSs and RISC chips).

Dave 126

Re: MS manage it

>I dont understand why Google cant send out updates themselves?

It's because of the nature of Android and the hardware it runs on. There is no equivalent to a BIOS on Android hardware, and each version of Android has be crafted for an individual device and its components.

For a new version of Android, Google release the code to the chipset manufacturers, eg Qualcomn. They in turn, if they decide to support the new version of Android on a particular SoC, release a binary blob, a 'Board Support Package' to the handset OEMs, such as Samsung. The OEMs, if they can be arsed, then build the new version, test it, send it to any relevant carrier partners (yep, carriers are still faffing around with phones) and regulatory authorities for testing. Rinse, repeat etc.

If Google were to create Android today from scratch they would do it differently, as they have with ChromeOS. As it was at the time, Google were racing to deliver a competitor to iOS.

Google have implemented a bit of a half-way house - they have brought more services and APIs into their Google Play Services, which can be updated just like any other app.

Dave 126

Re: The problem is actually different

>Modern "smartphones" are designed for a business case that is incompatible with security. They are built to sell apps.

iPhones are built to sell apps and high-margin hardware. Android is built to sell advertisements.

Apple make their money from hardware, and a 30% cut of app store sales, and a cut of 'virtual magazines', music, videos and other content. Google make their money from advertising. Plenty of studies have shown that iOS users are far more likely to buy apps compared to Android users - which is really what you would expect: People who pay £600 for a phone instead of £300 tend to be those with spare money, thus are more likely to spend money on an app without adverts.

Dave 126

Re: Image not representative

Each coloured block represents a handset/OS. MotoG is shown several times, but the MotoG name was given to each of a succession of phones.

The colour represents the OS. The size of the block represent market share.

Hi! Up here! I'm your Amazon drone. Do you mind if I land now?

Dave 126

Re: Propellors.

>Like on this one, for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tupolev_Tu-114

Re the noise cancelling: wouldn't it be much easier to use loudspeakers?

Part of the patent is the idea of that if we can't eliminate all the noise, we can at least modulate the noise to convey a message or otherwise sound less annoyingly like a mosquito. In the fans can produce a noise similar to 'Watch out!', less powerful, lighter speakers can be used to fill out the rest of the frequencies (in effect they are adding to the propeller sound, not fighting against it.)

I don't like noisy PCs. A few years ago I had the idea if the CPU cooler couldn't be made silent, then it could at least be made to sound more relaxing. The idea was that if it sounded like a purring cat instead of like an out-of-breath asthmatic, I would be more relaxed for the same amount of airflow. (Since CPUs today generally have a lower TDP than they used to, I haven't bothered persuing it).

The concept is very plausible. You only have to look at YouTube videos of people making music with stepper motors to see so.

Dave 126

I don't know - drones are already used used to deliver small items to prisoners! The unregulated free market (drug dealing) doesn't lie etc etc

/tongue in cheek

Dave 126

Re: Prior Art

>"on the web" seems enough to validate many an existing piece of IP so ..

The patent examiners need documentation, so yeah, the web can be as good as print if its date can be verified.

Facebook throws BlackBerry an HTML bone

Dave 126

>

This strikes me of being more of a perception issue than a technical one.

Yep.

There are of course larger issues at play in this whole web Vs app question, such as data in silos and funding of web content in the age of adblockers (and thus the common blurring between editorial and advertising content).

Dave 126

>The only thing is that you don't get audio notifications of when you get a message

You can of course have Facebook send you an email when someone sends you a Facebook message. Depending upon your email client and provider, you can have such email use a different notification noise to other emails.

Furious English villagers force council climbdown over Satan's stone booty

Dave 126

Re: To be fair...

>Surround it with a traffic island, with the usual high-visibility signage. Job done.

That was my first thought, but modern street furniture is fairly ugly. The contrast twixt rock n road could be increased in a more attractive way - by painting the surrounding tarmac perhaps.

I like the look of small French towns. Instead of using yellow lines to denote where your can't park, they simply use cobbled areas to mark where you can park. Motoruists are credited with the common sense. The result is so much more attractive, and restful (your eyes aren't constantly taking in a "Oi, No!" signal).

Dave 126

Re: Move the bloody thing

That's a bit strong.

It caused no injury. Given its location, no car should be travelling fast enough to injure the occupants of the vehicle should they hit it. If people didn't have ridiculous, expensive colour-matched bumpers on their cars, the cost of repair would be far lower too.

Being purely pragmatic, it would be cheaper to paint the tarmac - or even fit solar LED road studs - around the boulder than it would to move it.

Dave 126

Re: The compensation culture at work!

The boulder is grey, the tarmac around it is grey... simple solution would be to paint (or apply that high grip coloured epoxy finish to) the surrounding tarmac, in order to enhance contrast. No need to paint the boulder, or to erect a fence.

For sure, the motorist erred, but one should design systems with human fallibility in mind.

I haven't found mention of what time of day or in what weather conditions the motorist hit it. There are a good number of motorists who don't use their daylight running lamps (use them in anything less than perfect visibility, and that includes on sunny days when in the shade of trees etc), or are late in turning on their headlamps towards dusk.

(Picture is on the BBC link in the article)

IBM's 'neurosynaptic chip' to power nuke-watching exascale rig

Dave 126

Informative comment from another site:

bluemellophone

3/30/16 11:49am

Alright, Ph.D. computer vision researcher here.

First off, TrueNorth is a great project. Our university has been able to get its hands on a few of these chips for testing - the folks working on these chips are about a 10 second walk down the hall from my lab. TrueNorth has turned the now-somewhat-routine computer vision research problem of image classification on its side by approaching it from a different angle: the hardware. This is great because nobody else is really doing this on a large scale except for IBM. TrueNorth could lead to some neat new insights on how to make our current solutions more computationally and memory efficient. In some aspects, it already has. That’s not to say that TrueNorth is limited to only computer vision applications, but it is why I’m curious about its recent developments.

That being said, TrueNorth has by no means the same level of reliability, accuracy, or scalability of the technologies behind Google’s self-driving cars or Facebook’s face detection or Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect. The latest research (http://arxiv.org/abs/1603.08270, http://arxiv.org/abs/1602.02830) indicates that TrueNorth has a difficult time implementing a particular operation called a convolution. Convolutions are important because it allows for a computer to take a large, complex image — of say, a cat — and boil it down to its most important conceptual components — like fur, cat ears, tail. There is evidence that our brains work in a similar way to deconstruct an image into its abstract concepts so that our brains can process what we see. This is a problem for TrueNorth because the cool, sexy computer vision applications making the recent headlines are pretty much all based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). Specifically, TrueNorth implements a form of CNN known as a BinaryNet by Courbariaux et al. but with some pretty severe technical drawbacks.

Long story short, TrueNorth may someday make its way onto phones for select tasks, but take the GIF at the top of the story with a grain of salt. The development of this platform is in its infancy. Another platform to watch is Nvidia’s Jetson line, which has an architecture more akin with ongoing research in the field and thus can inherit state-of-the-art ideas easier. I’m interested to see where TrueNorth ends up in 5 years, but I’m not holding my breath for the field to adopt it en masse.

- http://gizmodo.com/this-supercomputer-mimics-a-human-brain-using-just-2-5-1767958119

Dave 126

Re: 2.5 watts ? Really ?

>So are we really talking about a mere 2.5 watts ? Not even enough to boil water, I'd wager.

How much water?

Monster crowdfunding total raised for Sinclair ZX Spectrum Vega+

Dave 126

Lemmings on the Speccy? Oh no! :)

Played it to death on the PC, jealous of Amiga friends who had the music and sound effects. Never played a version without a mouse. Just found this site, which has Lemmings level editors and fan conversions for HP and TI calculators, amongst other platforms:

http://www.lemmingsuniverse.net/downloads.html

Dave 126

Re: Nostalgia crisis

Dune 2 is available for free on the Google Play Store - it plays very well on an Android tablet. Well worth revisiting.

Oculus Rift review-gasm round-up: The QT on VR

Dave 126

Re: 'Stereoscopic tellys'.......sorry, sorry about that, i mean, '3D TV's

You are a twit.

Dave 126

Re: Article in brief

>I'm quitting the beer except for events and holidays, so gaming becomes all the more important.

And fair play to you too, AC. You don't need beer to be a good and interesting person. A change is as good as a rest, as they say.

Dave 126

Re: Halfway house to VR:

>One small problem: you have to turn your head to "look sideways" but you have to keep looking at the same spot (your monitor)

You are quite right, DropBear, I had that thought too. Then I remembered that these PC gamers often have two or three monitors side-by-side, or a very wide monitor with a 'cinema' aspect ratio (extra monitors are fairly inexpensive compared to enthusiast-level GPUs and fancy flight-sim controllers). Also, the IR trackers don't track eyeballs, so there is some margin. Plus, the movement of the gamer's head doesn't have to be translated in a linear fashion to the virtual avatar's head movement.

Like I said, I haven't tried IR head-tracking, but if I became a gaming enthusiast the low cost of entry means I might give it a go.

EDIT: I now see Gordon 10 has confirmed that the head tracking doesn't have to be linear. Hmmm, I wonder if people have tried using it for productivity software and having a very wide virtual desktop... :)

Dave 126

Re: Come on real time mocap

>VR will get amazing once real time motion capture

Hmmm, just wondering what the current latency of the MS Kinect's skeletal tracking mode is. Certainly it can do all you mention, with the possible exception of the very low latency required for VR.

Dave 126

Re: Lovely.

>[0] Side-note: Speaking of squinting ... what kind of ocular havoc will this cause with long-term use? I'm pretty certain that's a serious question ...

The military might have some data on that, because the Rift works on the same principle as Night Vision Goggles - that is, the image is presented to you as being around 1.3 metres from your eyes - which is where their focus falls without any muscles being used.

Contrast this with reading a book, or watching a television a few metres away - both activities require the eye to be actively focused with muscles.

Dave 126

Re: Having tried the Rift

Indeed, most of the reviews are very positive about the hardware, and the concerns voiced are those largely common to most MKI products. Most reviews also say to wait and see, because:

- You can't buy one yet anyway, and won't until the pre-orders have been fulfilled in a couple of months

- No available game yet makes a killer case for VR

- The Rift's handheld motion controllers won't be available til later in the year

- Competing products will be around by the end of the year or sooner (HTC, Sony, Samsung)

- It can only get cheaper

-It's going to be summer time soon, so you should be playing outside!

(okay, the last point is mine)

Dave 126

Halfway house to VR:

It was in a review of Elite dangerous that I first heard of IR Head Tracking for gaming.

Basically you play on a monitor as per usual, but using some IR lights on your head, and a modified web-cam, you can 'look' around your cockpit. If you're already wearing a gaming headset (or headphones) for audio, then it won't add any significant bulk to your head, and the cost of entry is low, especially if you roll your own:

http://www.maximumpc.com/how-to-build-your-own-ir-head-tracker/

I haven't tried such a system myself, but one of these days I might just build a gaming PC, play Elite and surrender my social life!

Whatever happened to ... Nest?

Dave 126

Re: I use me as the themostat

Well great. Any study of control systems would tell you that the simple on/off isn't the most efficient, or even best at maintaining a constant temperature. The only plus to such a system is that it is simple, and simple to understand.

Sorry, I thought that this was an IT site.

Dave 126

Re: Nest

>Labour or lack of DIY skill is why useless, insecure "wireless" burglar alarms and cameras are sold instead of cheaper and secure wired ones.

I'm more inclined to blame house builders - it would cost next to faff-all to run some CAT5 cable - or just general purpose conduits - between rooms in a house before the plasterboard is put up, yet I have yet to see it in a new build.

I've seen the interiors of several houses that were built after domestic broadband became the norm, yet none have such built-in cabling or conduits.

Dave 126

Re: Flawed concepts and surveillance hardware put me off

The Nest maybe overkill, but modern thermo-control systems definitely do save money. I'm thinking of the ones where you tell it at what time in the morning you want your house to be at X degrees, and it then achieves it in the mots economical way.

Dave 126

Re: There should be a law...

http://www.hooli.xyz/#inspiration

"HooliXYZ is Hooli’s experimental division. The dream kitchen. The moonshot factory. The laboratory of possibility. The midwife of magic. The womb of wonders.

"This group is led by beloved and universally distinguished Sole Head Dreamer Nelson “Big Head” Bighetti, who was co-founder, principal innovator and chief visionary of Pied Piper. He is just three credits shy of an undergraduate degree in computer science from the University of Oklahoma. He owns a boat."

R&D white coats at HP Inc will make corporate ID into wearable tech

Dave 126

Re: Can't be passed to another person?

To clarify, I meant iPhone-type fingerprint scanners can be fooled with readily accessible materials and techniques. I didn't mean all fingerprint scanners, and I didn't make that clear, sorry.

Spoof scanner, starting with photograph:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/touchid-hack-was-no-challenge-at-all-hacker-tells-ars/

Spoofing scanner starting with an actual fingerprint:

https://blog.lookout.com/blog/2013/09/23/why-i-hacked-apples-touchid-and-still-think-it-is-awesome/

Gain access to an iPhone with a $5 wrench:

https://xkcd.com/538/

Dave 126

Re: Not really sure what's being said here

>There seem to be two entirely different points being made, neither of which appear particularly useful.

'Seem' appears to be the operative word - I found it quite a hard article to parse, with quotes interspersed by the Reg's comments, and I couldn't find a link to a source, or even a mention of the event or whatever at which these HP guys were speaking.

However, I personally didn't get the impression that they were advocating 'off duty' work ID badges. There was mention of replacing cards "with something we wear anyway" - suggesting something like a watch that generates RSA codes, or a bracelet with a RFID tag. Possibly. I for one would like a link to the source material to see if the HP quotes make more sense in a different context.

Orbital Mind: "Ah, you're closest. Could you inform the ambassador that he's talking to his brooch?"

- Iain M Banks, Look to Windward, in which someone at a party has left their clip-on terminal at home.

Dave 126

Re: Not really sure what's being said here

>"But seriously, current generation fingerprint scanners can be fooled with a photograph"

>>Most of them can't because they don't actually look at fingerprints at all, but rather the pattern of blood vessels underneath.

@Cuddles - you are quite right, I am sure that 'proper' fingerprint scanners can't be easily fooled. My comment was based on the iPhone-level of fingerprint scanner which demonstrably can be fooled with the method I referred to - probably because a trade-off was made against its security in order to make it small. Because we were talking about the possibility of a fingerprint scanner on a badge, I thought that the small scanners made for phones was a fairer comparison than scanners made for door panels etc.

I also expected below-the-skin scanners to make their way into phones in due course (the mouse/mousetrap game).

Dave 126

Re: @Dave 126

Hospitals are a good place to look at when thinking about ID. Like the military, uniforms are used to denote the role of the employee.

Also, hospitals are areas where vetted employees and members of public the mix. And hospitals have restricted areas (drug stores etc) and systems.

We also see special examples of traditional 'wearable technology': nurses wear fob watches, in order to make it easier for them to wash their wrists.

Dave 126

Re: Can't be passed to another person?

>Fingerprints are allegedly easily fooled by a picture.

My fingerprints can tell the difference between a real face and a photograph very easily, thanks! Do you suffer from vibration white finger? ;)

But seriously, current generation fingerprint scanners can be fooled with a photograph, but you do need a laser printer, acetate sheet, PCB photo-resist and a few hours. Plus a good clear photograph. However, the mouse/mousetrap game is such that next gen scanners will incorporate further hurdles - thermometers, perhaps.

Dave 126

Re: @Dave 126

Me too - it was just wasn't reinforced very often. On the other hand, some people did love filling in Abnormal Occurrence Notifications. To be fair, we did have turnstile gates to get access to site in the first place.

Other workplaces used badges to unlock doors, but people would often hold the door open for others - good manners again!

And then there were the workplaces with badge-entry doors, but if you yanked the door hard enough it would open for anyone. The Royal Mail postman knew this trick, which meant he didn't have to wait for a few minutes to be let in!

Dave 126

Re: So they want everyone on the planet to wear a badge ?

Whaaat? Where did they say that?!

All they are talking about is a badge or ID card that can authenticate it's proper holder, so that it is of limited use to anyone who finds or steals it. ID badges are common place in workplaces. Since ID badges are generally the same size as a credit card, any technology that works in an ID badge could potentially be ported to a consumer item like a credit card if there is a demand for it.

A credit card that requires input from its owner to be used? That would answer some fears consumers have about lost or stolen credit cards. Many people are already using the same concept - they can buy things using an object they carry (a mobile phone, via NFC or PayPal or whatever) but to do so requires their fingerprint or passcode to be entered first.

Dave 126

Re: "replace the badge with something you are already going to wear today"

Err, HP didn't mention garments.

FYI, the term 'wearable' in technology is generally taken to mean items that are worn similarly to jewellery (badges around the neck like necklaces or pinned to a shirt like a brooch, items worn around the wrist like a watch), or items such as spectacles or earphones. Whilst the term 'wearable' can encompass items of clothing, that is not its primary meaning in this context (and practically, electronics and washing machines are not natural allies)