My fridge doesn't think its cool, and both my microwave and my stove do not think its hot.
Robots demanding equal API rights? It's just a matter of time
Somewhere around the world right now as many as 1.2 million people are currently publishing APIs for external use - and that’s just us humans. God help us when the self-aware robots and cyborgs get in on the act and start pushing API openness for their autonomic systems. As tech-aware readers (and an increasingly high number …
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 16:41 GMT Charles Manning
Re: When was a toaster not
It depends what you mean by "mechanical". Do you mean something closer to the original "machine" roots of the word, or a broader definition closer to that of mechanical engineering which involves heat transfer etc.
If you mean the former, then the original (pre-pop-up) toasters were just forks that you used to hold the bread over the fire, or later those diffusion toasters that live on as camping toasters these days. They were not machines and thus were not mechanical by the first definition.
A modern pop-up toaster is obviously a machine and mechanical by any definition of the word.
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 12:54 GMT Irongut
no, just no
"robotic drones, industrial turbines, automobiles and toasters... should be able to plug downward into consumer level social media streams and upward into enterprise level performance monitoring solutions to fully inter-function."
Why the fuck would they need to do any of that? I can understand drones and turbines requiring constant performance monitoring, maybe even cars, but in what way will a turbine function better if it can read the inane tweets of the great unwashed?
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 13:36 GMT Steve the Cynic
Re: no, just no
"but in what way will a turbine function better if it can read the inane tweets of the great unwashed?"
More to the point, perhaps, are some questions that arise from my interpretation, i.e. that the devices can feed *to* social media:
* Why is it necessary for an industrial turbine to tweet?
* What would the said turbine post to facebook?
* Do we have to fit the turbine with a camera so it can post pictures of the plant operators?
* Will the turbines start to post depressive existential poetry?
* If they do, are we allowed to attack them with heavy weaponry?
And don't forget the interesting possibilities offered by consumer-grade toasters that can post upward into enterprise level monitoring systems...
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Wednesday 19th February 2014 16:32 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: no, just no
@Turbine2: Offline *again* due to bearing failure. FML.
Turbine1 likes this!
On a slightly more serious note, I have colleagues who have built workflow / document-management systems that tweet. It's basically an alternative to RSS for system announcements that's more convenient for some users, because they're already running Twitter clients and don't need to mess with an RSS reader.
Of course this has limited applicability, given the lack of security, etc.
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 13:19 GMT Dan 55
The case for a well-defined API for 'calling the kettle black'
That only works for maximum one kettle and if there's no kettle on the LAN it might go out to the WAN and call someone else's kettle black.
I'll leave it someone else to critique the hard-coded name, choice of port, and 'youare/RRGGBB'.
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 18:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Meh
I don't know about cool, but in today's world, with multiple devices (phones, tablets, laptops, desktops) all accessing data, APIs are extremely useful.
Lets say you want to create a web application to manage some data. In the olden days (a few years ago), you'd create a website say a page for editing/adding a record, that'd post the data back to itself (either via the browser of AJAX), that page would handle the processing and dump out some output to say well done it worked.
Now this model is fine if only the website is manipulating the data, but what if you want an Android/iOS app too? Parsing HTML is a big no no, so the solution is to build the website as effectively a UI and use Javascript to talk to a separate API for data manipulation, completely separating the website and data manipulation code. Then any other phone/tablet/desktop application can use the same API with it's own interface.
In the case of desktop Java applications, they can use the same client code base as an Android application to interface with the API thus reducing workload too.
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Wednesday 19th February 2014 13:45 GMT John Styles
Re: Meh
Don't understand. Not being born yesterday I am aware what an API is and why I might want to call them, I am just interested from a sociological point of view why people have started talking about them as though they were something new and exciting. It is as though fish, after years of swimming in water suddenly started getting excited about it.
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Wednesday 19th February 2014 16:48 GMT Michael Wojcik
Re: Meh
Lets say you want to create a web application to manage some data. In the olden days (a few years ago), you'd create a website say a page for editing/adding a record, that'd post the data back to itself (either via the browser of AJAX), that page would handle the processing and dump out some output to say well done it worked.
This is a rather bizarre alternative history. "Web" APIs (i.e., service APIs over HTTP) long predate AJAX; while there are many things wrong with SOAP, it is definitely a mechanism for providing APIs over HTTP.1 And the whole point of the first "A" in AJAX (Asynchronous) is that it doesn't involve refreshing the entire browser document, so sending back a complete HTML document would be a rather foolish choice, and indeed the "X" in AJAX stands for "XML" (though JSON is likely the more popular choice by now).
REST web services were of course defined by Fielding in 2000, and started to become popular around 2005, more or less contemporaneously with AJAX (which can be used with RESTful and non-RESTful services). The W3C was publishing documents about web services at least as far back as 2004, and they were in wide currency by 2008. I don't think I'd call that "a few years ago".
1SOAP was first specified in 1998. The AJAX acronym was coined by Garrett in 2005. It's true that the first asynchronous-HTTP browser component appeared in 1999, only marginally after SOAP; but it was primarily used for iframe-refreshing until the early 2000s, and the AJAX approach didn't become mainstream until Gmail in 2004.
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 13:17 GMT Anonymous Coward
Does anyone want toast?
I bet all my friends on Faceache and Twatter would love Talkie Toaster, a great conversationalist...
"Does anyone want toast?"
"Does anyone want toast?"
"Does anyone want toast?"
http://reddwarf.wikia.com/wiki/Talkie_Toaster
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRq_SAuQDec
Although I prefered the Series 1 look.
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 14:32 GMT Youngdog
There is absolutely no way this can ever go wrong
So your toaster gets an alert after a keyword search flags a tweet from your account that reads 'I bloody love breakfast me'. After camparing the post's date against its own sensor data it then contacts your Smart Meter to confirm there is no sensor/clock error and Toasty McToast-a-lot wasn't actually in use between 7:00am (the alarm clock setting) and 8:00am (activation time of the burgular alarm) on that day.
It then responds by reaching out to your Cool-IT 3000 and tells the fridge to add Peanut Butter, Strawberry Jam and Nutella to your weekly shop based on the 'People who ordered Brown Sliced also....' recommendation from the Ocado website.
Isn't technology marvelous?
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Tuesday 18th February 2014 20:29 GMT willi0000000
the day my appliances demand a connection to anything except power, water and drain is the day they become either somebody else's or i shoot them.
i don't mind putting a processor in an appliance, what i can't comprehend is the utility of letting it talk to everything else on the planet. my microwave goes "beep" when the cycle is done, do i need it telling it's manufacturer that it has just successfully cooked me another vegetable or warmed some leftover pie? (mmmmmm pie!) do i need to receive an e-mail telling me that the food i put in just two minutes ago is ready?
yes, i'm an old. [but, really!]
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Wednesday 19th February 2014 00:32 GMT veti
Related thought
"Money" - is a legally defined thing, which ultimately has to belong to people, or to people-made organisations (e.g. companies) that are themselves, ultimately, owned by people.
But "Bitcoin" - is a legally undefined thing that can be stored on just about anything that has an electronic memory.
There's nothing to stop robots "owning" Bitcoin.
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Wednesday 19th February 2014 04:19 GMT Denarius
so far, what is the use of the IOTs?
all I gather is that (a) more cruft replacing good enough kit, (b) massive increase of opportunity to be spied on by industry flogging stuff, perverts, burglars and feral cops with not enough to do. Oh, and self appointed messiah mobs wanting to brown out your house to allow some windmill to suck power pointing into non-existent wind.
As for APIs, first problem is what data is to transfered, to whom and for what ? Then and only should API specifications begin. However, thanks to IP chaos, any orderly process cant happen.
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Wednesday 26th February 2014 23:05 GMT Inachu
Rudeness.
Some future rude human programmer will look at these API's made by robots and will try to start to argue with them.
Soon ROBOTAUTOFORGE.com will accept any and all api's as long as the source is given and some lowly geek jealous human will be booting bad programs and will make the robots angry for deleting them. It will be the lowly fool who will suffer the wrath of the robots and the robots will make sure he never finds employment on earth ever again.
So now robot rights will use their code as free speech and if you dare delete their code then they will seek vengece 1000 fold.
Long live robots!
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Biting the hand that feeds IT
