Free smart fridges! App stores in fountains! Plus more from Canonical man

What use is a smart fridge?

Only heathens put 'beer' in a fridge.

Welcome to our new Fridge Overlords

Sounds like this guy is a candidate for Trumps Cabinet. I'm sure he will find like minds there.

Naturally that fridge will be made in America and require servicing at twice the frequency of similar models built in Korea and Germany.

£2000 for a fridge???

I paid £100 for my fridge, 10 years ago, and it still hasn't broken down yet. What better service is there than that?

Butterfly net please?

Has Maarten checked if his 'medication as a service' is working recently?

Fridge-as-a-service

Then capitalism collapses and the real future begins.

Daft beyond words

I could ask my fridge for recommendations for a pizza place.

You can ask your phone that. Why would you go into the kitchen to ask your fridge? Since there would soon be tie-ups between fridge manufacturers (sorry, fridge app store manufacturers) and pizza chains, why would you trust your fridge to give you an unbiased recommendation? If you've just moved into an area and bought a fridge or brought your fridge with you (a location-aware fridge, naturally), how many times are you going to ask your fridge that all-important question before you've decided which is your favourite pizza place?

They don’t want it to break after 8 years

If you're the sort of person who pays two grand for a fridge it had bloody better not break after 8 years! I've had mine for 16 years and it only cost £170.

It worked for phones.

Those who are old enough, raise your hands if you thought, in 1993, that within a few decades phones would come with a camera or two as standard equipment.

However, that's a special case, IMHO. It just turned out that a hand-held portable device like a phone is a good candidate for a general-purpose handheld computing platform. Not so much a fridge or a thermostat or elevator.

Obviously the development pathway for IoT is badly borked. Manufacturers don't program with security in mind, nor do they provide security updates... or updates at all, in most cases. Doesn't excuse starry-eyed speculations about SNAPping everything everywhere. Oh well. Somebody has to see stars or else we're all just looking down at the sidewalk.

"The day that fridge breaks down you get £100 a day"

Cue a lot of fridges "accidentally" breaking down when the leaseholder needs a bit of cash.

All your pizzas are ours

Here's one I made earlier, it seems appropriate to repeat it here:

"Your freezer has just been switched to defrost and all the controls disabled for 24 hours.

Normal operation will be restored on payment of {$CURRENCY UNITS}25. We think you'll find this represents good value for money as our estimate of the value of the freezer's current contents is at least 4 times this.

You can use the following link to make your payment."

Wishfull thinking

I seriously hope "White" Goods makers either don't hear this guy or ignore him. Otherwise we are going to end up in the 18th C. tech wise, without any working white goods.

TVs are bad enough already. You can't even buy a real radio any longer except for a car, and Halfords seem to think car radios only do FM and DAB. Or stupid App controlled light bulbs that can make a bot net. Philips was once a world leader in Electronics, and in 1926 before getting into radio, they made proper light bulbs.

Are people determined to make everything that uses mains or batteries as unreliable and unsafe as Windows ME on the Internet in 2016?

“They will change how the fridge is built”

Eh, I predict a different outcome. In the future expect to hear these same schmucks utter: 'oh, we knew none this would ever wash'. But we had to pitch it because that's what the suits wanted.

So just like how 3D / Curved TV gimmicks are dying off... Smart TV + Smart Fridges will take a knock too, once consumers realize how Samsung / Philips Ad serving & slurping isn't in their best interests.

I think more consumers will just start to nursemaid their appliances to get through this ridiculous era of corporate servitude to Smart, AI, IoT etc...

"Devops for devices is possible."

It's the holy grail!

25 years? Hah! Try 25 months

“They will change how the fridge is built,” he continued, undaunted by your correspondent’s raised eyebrow. “They don’t want it to break after 8 years, it’ll cost £100/month. They’ll want it to last for 25 years.

It's a lot more likely that fridges etc. take the path of recent phones and computers: no user-serviceable parts inside, no hardware upgrade path. In two years, when your iFridge can no longer run the latest version of FridgeOS, you have to throw it out and cough up another 2 grand for a new one.

"Otherwise we’re reinventing the wheel,” continued Ectors."

Oh the irony. That's exactly what you're doing, smeghead!

Seriously, any journo who has to sit through a whole day of this deserves combat pay.

I hope evolutionary scientists are studying this

Its almost biological - a new environment opens up, and you get a mad goldrush to occupy and exploit any possible niche, irrespective of how marginal it appears, then competition, refinement, the dieing off of the unlucky and unsuccessful, and those that capture enough resources prosper, breed and try to secure their place into the future.

or some guy with a beard says how its all going to work.

"Now you can, all of a sudden, make those elevators and fountains do all the things you couldn’t do yesterday."

Let me just stop him there. Stop. There. Lifts doing things they couldn't do yesterday is the absolute last thing I want; can't speak for anyone else.

Oh, do fuck off

and take your internet connected fridges with you.

No-one wants these things.

Engage brain 'on' control required...

PLCs are programmed with OPC [or with] ladder logic and other things that haven’t changed since the 1980s. Every PLC company has their own dialect that isn’t compatible. We’re thinking that basically means 90 per cent of developers in the world can’t program a PLC. That’s a shame,” said Ectors, not unreasonably.

If 90 percent of developers can't program a PLC perhaps it most probably means they have had no reason whatsoever to even consider programming a PLC...

As for OPC/ladder logic, is the man really serious? it isn't difficult, if your typical CNC operator can do it then for someone actually trained in programming techniques not to be able to pick up a manual and learn, speaks volumes about the actual skills and capabilities of the people claiming to be developers...

I also fail to understand what the problem is with "things that haven't changed since the 1980's"; if you are actually doing something new then you simply adapt and repurpose what went before, so I would expect Ectors to be announcing his new (open source) OPC/ladder logic language that includes the constructs necessary to support his gismo and it's use cases.

"Standards? Yeah, they’re for oldies living in the past"

Err no, Standards are needed where you want multiple different implementations and components that will interwork. Whilst there is some truth in what Ectors says in that you can try and set Standards too early, what he is basically saying is that the 'standard' is the code; thus if you want your IoT stuff to interwork, use our source code...

On hairdryers

I have a hairdryer. It has a switch with settings for off, cool, warm and hot. It has dried my hair, when required, for a good decade now (actually, now I come to think of it, rather longer), and is likely to last another decade - it may even outlast me. No IOT frippery required. What was the point of IOT in hairdryers again?