Comments on: YOUR WORLD OF TOMORROW + Roomba

By: Toronto

Toronto — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 02:59:47 +0000

Larry – the building I park my bike outside has heated stairs near the racks.

Yesterday, we had a snowstorm here, and after I walked up the stairs, I had to walk through some snow. Hot water on your soles followed by icy snow is a good recipe for instant iced shoes.

But they do do a good job of keeping the stairs free from lawsuits.

By: David Moisan

David Moisan — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 02:41:17 +0000

Nuvistors were actually produced; you can find them in old UHF tuners and test equipment.

By: Larry

Larry — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 22:59:27 +0000

every thing in this article exists in one form or another today.

Myles- There are Intelligent Ovens on the market that will prepare food for you in a way. You put your roast in before you leave for work, the oven enters refrigeration mode to keep it fresh all day, and then at a preset time, the oven kicks in and cooks the meal. If it finishes cooking before you’re home, the range goes into a warming mode for up to two hours. If you’re really late, it will then go back into refrigeration mode to keep the food from going bad. It wont actually prepare the roast but its pretty close to the idea in this article.

hwertz- The heated walks/drives are being put in a lot of new construction. To put it simply they run a PVC tube back and forth and then pour cement over it. the tube then leads to a water heater which circulates warm/hot liquid (like glycol) I found this link for a company that installs them http://www.warmquest.com/products-snow-melting.php

By: hwertz

hwertz — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 06:49:58 +0000

““Some day,” says Sarnoff, “we hope to make available a cheap but effective electronic tool to render the print on a page as a language of signals in earphones. When that day comes, the blind will also ‘read.’ ”

Like the human voice?”

This is a Kurzweil reader.

He came up with the first design in 1975, it was washing machine sized and cost about $50,000. It would scan a page and read it as text.

I’ve seen two newer models at the surplus I worked at…
One was a Kurzweil Personal Reader model 7315, this had a large scanner, wired to a “lunchbox”, with a third part being this like 20 button control panel that would clip onto the unit. The lunchbox had a Sun SPARC of some type (it would have been around 25mhz), and a DECTalk. It scanned FAST, but then it’d take about 45 seconds for the SPARC to do OCR (optical character recognition) on the page before it started talking. Once it was talking you could put on the next page and it’d read it. These were about $10,000 new in 1988 or so.

The other was like a chunky scanner, the seperate computer had been integrated into the scanner body.. these are from the 1990s sometimes, and were maybe $4,000 new. This one did the OCR in about 15 seconds.. I think it was still a SPARC+DECTalk, but maybe a 90mhz SPARC or so instead of the 25.

(These both came in just about 2005 or so, it took a few weeks for word to get out we had them then they went to a good use for some blind people.)

The last seperate Kurzweil they sold was 2006 vintage, handheld, and about $1,000, and far less for software that just runs on a PC.

Now as long as you’ve got 50MB it can run on a PDA or phone, modern phones are 200-266mhz for a normal one, and like 400-600mhz for PDAs and fancy phones.

===========
This HECK sounds like it could certainly be done now. You know, if I wouldn’t be killed by the power bill, those heated sidewalks would be great about now… I’m supposed to get 1/2″ of ice and 6″ snow overnight, it’d save some chipping

By: foobah

foobah — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 04:51:27 +0000

This HECK is straight from The Jetsons cartoon (or is this where the creators of The Jetsons got their animated ideas?)

But no “Rosie” the Robot maid. Instead, a limited Roomba substitute.

By: Mike

Mike — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:59:36 +0000

slim…. 60 cents a gallon gasoline!

By: Charlene

Charlene — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 20:35:45 +0000

“Some day,” says Sarnoff, “we hope to make available a cheap but effective electronic tool to render the print on a page as a language of signals in earphones. When that day comes, the blind will also ‘read.’ ”

Like the human voice?

By: Chuck

Chuck — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:53:09 +0000

I like the “Make $1000 a Month” ad on the last page for the carbon tetrachloride fire extinguisher. One could probably take that $1000 and hedge the bet by investing in the newly-discovered kidney dialysis machine…

By: slim

slim — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:05:54 +0000

Check out page 188 and the last paragraph on 1960 cars.
“America is a big country with big car needs”
“Unless we have a depression of major size”

By: Myles

Myles — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:14:05 +0000

I’m interested in how the mechanical maid (roomba) was supposed to work. From the picture it looks like there was a prototype. I have a roomba and it is only useful because there is onboard computer giving it some sense.

Those dinners prepared by HECK sound awful as I am pretty sure they are just heating up frozen or reconstituted food. It is hard to see how a lot of these devices could work, like sorting dishes, without computer assistance.

How many guys want to stick their face in a shaver? It would make for a good horror movie though when it goes wrong.