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What one piece of technology would most improve your working life?
Chances are it wouldn't be a glove. But car workers in Germany are now using smart gloves that not only save time but prevent accidents as well.
It is an example of how tech-enhanced humans are fighting back against the seemingly unstoppable rise of the robots.
At BMW's spare parts plant in Dingolfing, for example, which employs around 17,500 people, hand-held barcode readers have been replaced by gloves that scan objects when you put your thumb and forefinger together. The data is sent wirelessly to a central computer.
The hi-tech gloves allow workers to keep hold of items with both hands while scanning more quickly. While this may only save a few seconds each time, BMW reckons it adds up to 4,000 work minutes, or 66 hours, a day.
It's not just gloves; the article gives several examples of cool technology that help workers.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @05:37PM
Need a better HTTP-friendly GUI standard. The GUI idioms that we settled on around the early 1990's are perfectly fine, familiar, and road tested. Yet the HTML/CSS/JS stacks are a big friggen mess. It turned what SHOULD be simple into rocket science, in large part because they don't work consistently on different browser brands and versions. (I'm focusing on work-related CRUD-ish applications, not eye-candy for e-stores etc. The eye-candy-e-stores can stick with existing stuff.)
I used to crank out apps in the mid 90's using desktop-oriented IDE's. Crank crank crank. It felt good and I felt productive and efficient: I could focus on the business (domain) logic instead of UI twiddling. Now I have to spend way too much time on UI twiddling. We DE-VOLVED and developers and app budgets are slaves to UI's, wasting billions and billions in the world economy (cue Sagan voice).
I would suggest making the browser be a "dumb" coordinate-based vector plotter. The server's render libraries would control the flow of elements. The device can send sizing preferences to the server, which then controls any screen-size-related adjustments. That way we have only one render engine to perfect instead of 50 (client brands and versions). Testers' WYSIWYG. It's much harder to mess up dumb coordinate-based vectors than the client-side-flow-control shit we use now.
X-Windows allegedly kind of does this, but it doesn't have latency-friendly input elements. Every keystroke has to be sent back to the server before the character is rendered. Instead, we need buffered input boxes and widgets that only typically send content when Submit pressed. Some have suggested using an HTTP-ified variation of PostScript or PDF as the basis for a better standard.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @06:05PM
Maybe something like RIPTerm [wikipedia.org]. I guess it was technically called RIPscrip. RIPTerm must have been the DOS program that rendered it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by VLM on Wednesday December 21 2016, @07:54PM
A lot of people make a lot of money off the existing obfuscation. Then there's the (shudder) people who think they're valuable "creatives" because they drop a deuce of a page that impresses no one other than other web designers. Thats about 75% of the modern design market right there, people doing nothing but trying to impress other people in the field. It would be as if back end programmers spent 75% of their time playing code golf.
I caught a lot of hell a long time ago for pointing out that most shitty web pages would be both smaller and easier to design if they were giant GIF imagemaps. I enjoy catching that kind of hell, so its all good.
An alternative is we're piling enough BS on the backend that we're close to being better off spawning VNC sessions for a VNC client to talk to. Traditionally VNC servers have been crazy X11 emulator shim thingies but they certainly don't have to be, they could be "displaying" most anything.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 21 2016, @08:51PM
Faddism and eye-candy gimmicks are indeed difficult to fight against. Managers don't stop to consider and/or don't understand the waste caused by falling for eye-candy. And big companies don't sell new products unless the old versions look unfashionable.
Indeed. Direct incremental bit-map transfer almost seems the simpler route. However, it does suffer from latency problems similar to X-Windows in terms of keyboard response and panel scrolling. Maybe some kind of compromise can be worked out where input areas are mostly buffered locally, and panels and/or the whole app can be scroll-buffered at the client. Thus it could be mostly bit-map xfer, with some tweaks. Ponder...
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Wednesday December 21 2016, @11:38PM
> giant GIF imagemaps
Your idea will never catch on, because some browsers let the user turn off GIF animation.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22 2016, @12:17AM
It's nearly 2017, we've moved past GIFs. The proper form of animation is a looping video. Make your site an entire video and use JS to determine where the use clicks at what point in the video then generate the proper link and follow it to the next video.
(Score: 1) by butthurt on Thursday December 22 2016, @12:56AM
Are you certain it can't be interrupted or, worse yet, silenced? If it can't, you may have come up with the disruptive technology that will power Web 3.0!
(Score: 2) by driven on Thursday December 22 2016, @01:17AM
I'm not sure whether to mod this funny or insightful. My hat is off to you.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday December 23 2016, @05:31PM
I'm not sure which I was aiming for, either. Those are the best posts sometimes. When the topic is cynical enough that humor is indistinguishable from insight...