Talk:Hardware requirements

Proposal: let's improve terminal device to NOT assume any friendly retail and NOT say anything about video ad production and focus mostly on audio options and headset presentation, treating display as a "nice to have", and friendly retail as a "nice to have", and anything beyond barcodes as a "maybe later". Then when we're done with that actual list of simple capabilities, we can redirect hardware requirements over there, and rename Hardware Requirements "Nokia proposal". Fair?

Maybe. I'm not commenting on this since I do not think that audio access which you've been toting as a must-have as feasible means of delievering the consumerium buying signal and besides thinking that Consumerium will increase e-waste is a stupid viewpoint.

Our Lowest Troll is provably, totally, obviously wrong on both counts. Read the references to e-waste again. ONE CHIP does as much damage at the extraction point as A WHOLE CAR. So anything that requires more chips or screens is causing a problem. And radio is the ideal medium for all serious uses, if it works at all, as you can remain mobile and handsfee while using it, and billions of receivers are already out there. As for feasibility, well, the performance requirements page is about this. Consider the time spent to shift visual attention - whereas usually in a supermarket aisle all you are listening to is muzak - which most people would be very glad to not hear.

The emergence of the whole Consumerium:Itself was sparked by information on Bluetooth, which has not been adapted as quickly as I have hoped. This is propably due to the problems in 1.0 devices that have been overcome mostly in 1.1.

Well, that's nice, but very often, a proposed digital technology does spark such plans that prove to be much easier to implement without it. This is VERY common. Once upon a time, people had many services planned for PCS base station handoff. Go look up what happened to that!

The whole concept of Consumerium would not be possible without powerful information processing and accessing machines or infrastructural capital. You can't take the concept of Consumerium and throw it back in time say to 1917. Consumerium would just not be feasible with pens and papers and telegraph --Juxo 14:00, 10 Mar 2004 (EET)

No, nor with wide-area radio, nor without large scale databases. Obviously the Consumerium server is putting some heavy load on the planet due mostly to the web browsers used to update the Research Wiki. But access to all useful features of the Signal Wiki of Consumerium is quite feasible with some very small low-materials-use devices at the user end, like headsets, scanner rings, and perhaps a wrist device (worn device on the wrist), and no display screen at all. It is wrong to assume that high-tech cell phones with lots of video features are going to continue to spread. They are a fad. Every attempt to create a market for video based communication has failed, since about 1970, and that's for good reason. It is far more intrusive than strictly audio talk, and you can do far fewer things *while* doing it.

So, the fact remains, there is a range from minimal terminal devices that are actually ubiquitous like an FM radio, to support for existing common devices like ordinary non-video non-scanning cell phones, to support for the freaky beta-tester stuff no one has, no one needs, and only you seem to want. Which is fine, you can get it as part of the Nokia proposal to do a pilot with all these high-tech features, which will work probably only in Toronto, Canada and in Helsinki, Finland and nowhere else on Earth. Thankfully.