Auntie Beeb reports that the loos at Heathrow Terminal 2 are being fitted with sensors to detect how many people are using particular toilets, and when.
Feel free to snicker or chortle right about now.
OK, so what does this mean? The overly harsh take would be "Yeah, that's about all this whole 'internet of things' things is going to amount to." A more optimistic take would be "Heathrow is one of the world's busiest airports. If they see a benefit to this, there must be something to it." While I've seen any number of "there must be something to it" endorsements fail to pan out -- too much of this is a good sign of an impending bubble -- I tend to lean toward the second opinion.
Yes, I'm not thrilled with the term "Internet of Things", but I think that this is more because what we're seeing is a gradual trend of (some) ordinary things being put on the internet, and not a brand new phase or some sort of new internet. Lots of things have been on the internet, some for longer than others. Weather sensors. Webcams. Taxi cabs. Temperature and voltage sensors for computers in datacenters. As time goes on, the portion of internet data generated via human intervention will probably decrease, and the amount generated by various ... things ... will probably increase.
This isn't the hardcore IoT vision, though. All the examples I gave are things that naturally actively generate data. Even Taxi Cabs have always needed to communicate their location and status. Fitting them with GPS and putting them on the net just makes that process more accurate and efficient.
The full IoT vision involves tagging everything with some sort of net-friendly identifying device, say an RFID, which can then be scanned. If every book on your bookcase, every fork in your silverware drawer, every pair of pants in your closet and so on is tagged, then you just need to wave a scanner around in order to upload an exact inventory.
Perhaps more realistically, if newly manufactured objects carry RFIDs -- and some do -- then gradually people will come to have more and more net-visible things around them. What we choose to do with that data is another matter, as are a number of privacy concerns (what's to keep someone from walking by your house with a scanner and seeing what's in it?).
In that sense, the Heathrow loos are more like weather sensors and taxi cabs and less in line with the "tag ALL the things" concept. Interesting though they may be, they don't say much one way or the other about how the larger IoT vision will play out.
Showing posts with label BBC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BBC. Show all posts
Thursday, June 19, 2014
Monday, November 26, 2012
More Silly UX
Searching for "Humphrys Entwistle interview" (OK, full disclosure. I actually searched for "Humphreys ...") to see one of the BBC's own interviewers "shred" its director general on air, I ran across this page from the Grauniad. It's a fine example of why web pages should not try to re-invent features, in this case displaying text, that are already widely implemented.
The text transcript of the interview, set in a typewriter font presumably so you can pretend that the Grauniad's staff of crack transcribers just typed it up fresh for you, was a little small for me to read comfortably. Not to worry, though. There's a zoom slider.
Slide the slider and the whole document gets bigger within the fixed-sized window on the page. On the plus side, the text is now easily legible. On the not-so-much side, half of it is now hidden. Not to worry, though. There's a horizontal scroll bar so you can scoot back and forth for every single line in order to read what's there.
Sorry, no, thanks. Life is too short for horizontal scroll bars on text. You'd think an organization with its roots in printing text in narrow, readable columns would get that. I can't think of any situations where, if the idea is just to get the content of the text across, the right answer is anything other than formatting it into whatever column is available. If the reader wants larger text, then make the words bigger and wrap the text -- like you would anyway -- with fewer words per line.
Or you could spend a fair bit of effort implementing a clever-looking but near-useless solution to a simple non-problem.
The text transcript of the interview, set in a typewriter font presumably so you can pretend that the Grauniad's staff of crack transcribers just typed it up fresh for you, was a little small for me to read comfortably. Not to worry, though. There's a zoom slider.
Slide the slider and the whole document gets bigger within the fixed-sized window on the page. On the plus side, the text is now easily legible. On the not-so-much side, half of it is now hidden. Not to worry, though. There's a horizontal scroll bar so you can scoot back and forth for every single line in order to read what's there.
Sorry, no, thanks. Life is too short for horizontal scroll bars on text. You'd think an organization with its roots in printing text in narrow, readable columns would get that. I can't think of any situations where, if the idea is just to get the content of the text across, the right answer is anything other than formatting it into whatever column is available. If the reader wants larger text, then make the words bigger and wrap the text -- like you would anyway -- with fewer words per line.
Or you could spend a fair bit of effort implementing a clever-looking but near-useless solution to a simple non-problem.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
The BBC's Broadband World
I just ran across this piece while browsing headlines. I haven't watched the videos but the chart below the map, showing average advertised speeds, seems just as interesting. In effect, you have
- Japan, with close to 100Mbps
- South Korea, with about 90Mbps
- France, with around 50Mbps
- Everyone else, with 20Mbps or less
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
The video flood
Shockingly, I'm not the only person pondering the impact of video on the internet. Under the provocative headline Does online video threaten the net?, Auntie Beeb, in a somewhat indecisive mood, concludes yes, possibly, well, no probably not.
One interesting point, lurking but not prominent in the piece, is that the projected buildout to video-friendly bandwidth will most likely benefit the larger players and shake out smaller ones who are too busy undercutting each other to accumulate the kind of capital needed to make major upgrades to the backbone and other infrastructure.
All of this assumes that the net will be the way to go for video. It may well be. Cisco is confident that the bandwidth will be there, and Cisco knows a bit about the topic.
On the other hand, I'm not quite ready to say it's a foregone conclusion. Quite possible, sure. Likely, even. But given the inherent efficiency of broadcasting broadcast video, maybe not inevitable. Back on the one hand, though, if internet video works and it doesn't cost too much, why not?
One thing that jumped out at me was the projection that by 2011, 30% of bandwidth would be video and 43% would be peer-to-peer file sharing of video. I'd be interested to know the assumptions behind those figures. To what extent do people use peer-to-peer because the only alternative is to shell out for a DVD or hope the movie you like is available on demand on cable?
I was also intrigued by the BBC's iPlayer service, but I wasn't able to try it since it only works if you can convince their server you're in Britain. An international version is promised. That's got to be about £icensing.
One interesting point, lurking but not prominent in the piece, is that the projected buildout to video-friendly bandwidth will most likely benefit the larger players and shake out smaller ones who are too busy undercutting each other to accumulate the kind of capital needed to make major upgrades to the backbone and other infrastructure.
All of this assumes that the net will be the way to go for video. It may well be. Cisco is confident that the bandwidth will be there, and Cisco knows a bit about the topic.
On the other hand, I'm not quite ready to say it's a foregone conclusion. Quite possible, sure. Likely, even. But given the inherent efficiency of broadcasting broadcast video, maybe not inevitable. Back on the one hand, though, if internet video works and it doesn't cost too much, why not?
One thing that jumped out at me was the projection that by 2011, 30% of bandwidth would be video and 43% would be peer-to-peer file sharing of video. I'd be interested to know the assumptions behind those figures. To what extent do people use peer-to-peer because the only alternative is to shell out for a DVD or hope the movie you like is available on demand on cable?
I was also intrigued by the BBC's iPlayer service, but I wasn't able to try it since it only works if you can convince their server you're in Britain. An international version is promised. That's got to be about £icensing.
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