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Journal by cafebabe
(This is the 45th of many promised articles which explain an idea in isolation. It is hoped that ideas may be adapted, linked together and implemented.)
The budget option for the ideal watch is the Casio F91-W terrorist watch with an additional mode for two factor authentication. It is possible to replace the F91-W motherboard with a custom design. This provides a standard strap, case, battery compartment, splash-proof buttons and screen. I doubt that a custom F91-W would be noticed in typical airport security theater. Regardless, make sure you get the Casio F91-W with blue trim to ensure special airport screening.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
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Learning French is trivial: the word for horse is cheval, and everything else
follows in the same way.
-- Alan J. Perlis
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday October 31 2017, @11:01PM (1 child)
Against all logic, smartwatches are a category of devices with both Samsung and Apple involved, among other big names. They have slung billions at it.
We know that people will spend lots of money on watches... as a status symbol. There was an attempt to sell a $10k-17k Apple Watch, which was eventually ratcheted down to around $1,250 [arstechnica.com].
I see smartwatches going one of two ways. The first way is the Fitbit route. Except you do a lot more than tracking heart rate and footsteps. You have to give it the abilities of a tricorder [wikipedia.org]. Hopefully that means a set of wrist-facing sensors capable of determining what is in the bloodstream without the need to prick the user like a diabetic device. And whatever the device does, it must somehow determine with a good degree of accuracy what the user is consuming in terms of nutrients and calories. Without the user needing to do any work other than wearing it. I don't know if that is possible by zapping the arm with gamma rays or whatever, but it is what has to be done to make the fitness tracker truly useful for the mass market. Google's Verily [wikipedia.org] might be working on this type of thing in the long run (as opposed to Calico [wikipedia.org]).
The other way is the holographic smartwatch. It has been shown that some decent hardware can be stuffed into the smartwatch form factor. You can even fit a quad core in there [phonedog.com], although it's going to be a weak ARM. But no matter how tiny you can get the hardware, you are still limited to an unnaturally large screen [techworm.net] or a screen that is too tiny for video or text. The answer could be a hologram-projecting display (Star Wars level) combined with sensors so that you can interact with it and the projected display is always oriented in front of your face (even if you are lazy with your arm placement). The only other way I can think of would be to combine it with contacts or glasses that accept display input wirelessly (not sure if Bluetooth [bluetooth.com] is capable of it).
Smartwatches could eventually have 16 or more cores... they already use low power cores due to battery constraints and lack of cooling, so a stacked chip would not have the same heat issues. Even without that, the latest smartwatches seem to use 14nm processors. 10nm is around, 7nm is in the bag. 5nm is proven [theverge.com], and it looks like there is some confidence in 3nm [fudzilla.com]. 2nm is being looked at [custompcreview.com]. And yes, I have heard the "X nm is a lie" spiel. But Moore's law is not dead yet.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by cafebabe on Wednesday November 01 2017, @12:36PM
I'm astounded that we have dual-core light-bulbs and quad-core watches. I'm waiting for the first 16 core watch with RAID. However, I'm least certain about the specification of a good watch. Beyond an anolog watch with jewel bearings, I thought that a watch for two factor authentication would be useful. Or, at least, in a convenient location when typing its output.
From the details of a Apple watch tear-down, it was apparent that a single unit minus screen can be made for US$50 or less. That would be a Communicator Badge. So, I think of functionality that can be achieved starting from no screen.
Although I was dismissive (and wrong) about tablets, I've also been dismissive about smart watches. In fiction, smart watches have been used by characters like Dick Tracey and Michael Knight. That's a lone guy with limited back-up. Whereas, StarFleet Communicators were replaced with Communicator Badges. Tie that to a home or office server with the most basic speech recognition and it could control home automation or work in a voice conference bridge.
If you must have a screen, perhaps a triple screen (or more) would be useful. There was a design for a triple screen laptop. Something smaller might be feasible.
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