Re: a few short notes

On Feb 1, 2004, at 1:34 PM, Paul Smith wrote:

> My toaster with 8kb ROM and 512 bytes RAM wants to email me to say my 
> toast is browning nicely. Not a problem with SMTP, big problem with 
> SSL, certificates, XML etc. ;-)
>

but if we dumb it down enough to allow a toaster to send you that 
e-mail, do we solve the problems e-mail has today? I doubt it.

But -- instead, the toaster simply sends a message to your home's 
server, which evaluates it and turns it into an email that forwards to 
you. There's no reason why your toaster HAS to have that functionality, 
because there's going to be a digital hub it interfaces to, it won't 
interface to the internet directly. Simple machines don't need the 
complexity of doign the entire job themselves, and shouldn't be 
designed to do that anyway. they'll be slaves of a master machine that 
oversees their work.

(I don't do computational work on my iPod, either, nor do I think an 
iPod ought to be a computer...)