Re: Couple of FYI's (Another FYI)

["paul gordon" <paul_gordon@xxxxxxx>]

Another thing which may be of interest to some is the ongoing item in the
Times' IT supplement "Interface" which is included with the Times
every
Wednesday. The first installment of the item was in last Wednesday's
edition, with further installments each week.

The item is a series of reports about one person's experience with what
they
call "The house of the future" (media-speak!). The person they
have chosen
as their guinea-pig is one of their jobbing journo's, who is NOT a
technology journolist (but who is reasonably IT - literate). This lucky
woman has had thousands of pounds worth of technology stuffed into her
house
(all at the papers' expense!), and been left to get on with it.

The purpose of the piece is to evaluate the real-world worth and
practicality of all the house-tech, and an assesment of whether it's really
worth the bother (for the masses), or whether it's all just geek-toys for
propeller-heads only, with ongoing reports of the
problems/sucesses/failures
etc...

Also, totally off-topic, but something which impressed me much was
something
I saw on a german satellite channel the other evening, featuring the most
intelligent security system I have ever seen!!
It featured CCTV cam's with machine vision, AI, neural nets, and heuristic
programming to produce a computer-based system which could intelligently
recognise what's happening in the viewed image. - It could recognise and
differentiate between pedestrians, cars, cycles etc. It could determine
whether they were moving or stationary, whether a person is walking or
running, (and in which direction), how many people/cars etc. are present,
and could even learn to recognise "suspicious" behavior (like a
person
trying to open lots of different car doors for example). It could even
remember individual people/cars etc and recognise them in future, taking
appropriate action as necessary.

How long before we have THAT as a Home Automation project?!?!?

Ho-Hum

Paul G.


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