"Has someone got a new iPhone?" the PFY asks as the lights turn orange.DEF CON (also written as DEFCON, Defcon or DC) is a hacker convention held annually in Las Vegas, Nevada. "We paid good money for your 'latest iPhone,' didn't we?" I ask as we enter Mission Control. "And we paid good money for those lights?" the Boss snaps, a touch annoyed. When they're white, he's in a good mood green, he's OK orange, silently fuming and red – well, you shouldn't be in the room." I linked them to the PFY's electronic mood ring – another piece of pointless technology. I decided to use the lights for something truly pointless. "So just to be clear – you changed out the lights?" Just like a watch is for telling the time and a phone is for communicating with people." Those lights will just keep doing what they do, and all we have to do is accept that. We should've stuck with normal lights that are on when the switch is down and off when the switch is up. "All these things were just a fancy solution looking for a problem. "Completely useless," I say, tucking into another bhaji as we head down to the office. "We configured the light fittings to be on or off to make a room-wide binary clock with the front row being hours and the back row being minutes – which just meant we'd move around desks a lot we had the light color reflect the amount of work time left in the day – red in the mornings, green in the mid-afternoon, white at home time then we linked the lamps to a couple of microphones and used it like a massive audio spectrum analyzer." "And so you changed the lights out then?" We linked the lights to the number of items in our work queue – only we found that when we needed to work on a piece of hardware we'd delete all the jobs in the queue so that we'd have enough light to see what we were doing." "No, because then we went into the next idea.
"It does, doesn't it?" I say, tucking into a bhaji. If the lights were white then everything was normal green, things were normal but the trend analysis criteria indicated routine maintenance was required orange, something important had failed and red, critical system failure." "The idea was that we could use the lamps to indicate the status of our systems. "Yes, but ours were replaced with multicolor addressable LED lamps," I say. "Everyone's were replaced last year," he says. "Take the LED lights in our office which were replaced last year," I say, grabbing a bunch of bhajis before the Boss can snaffle them all. We implement so many ideas that seem to have useful and practical applications but in practice turn out to be nothing more than cheap trinkets." "No, no, we make the same mistakes, just in different ways. "And I suppose you're above all that?" he snaps back with more than a hint of sulkiness.
The excitement half-life of them is measured in weeks, so by this time next year you'll have the new latest iPhone and a different cheap smart watch." "They COULD last for years, yes – but they won't. Their lifetime is so short that even the terms you use to describe them are obsolete in no time." "These things," I say, pointing at his watch and phone, "are the mayflies of the IT world. I resist the urge to shout at him that the only thing you should be queuing for at midnight is a kebab. "It talks to my smart phone," he says, missing most of that. "Sounds like they knew their customer," I say.
"And the great thing about this is that it was so cheap! And it has a Gorilla Glass face."
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