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Wired Homes of the Rich
Ant writes: "This article talks about
It talks about the
famous hightech people's home's." Includes multimillion dollar home automation systems for folks like Larry Ellison, among
others. I thought I was high-tech for having a couple of x10'd lights, and the ability to watch and control my TV from my kitchen
or living room.
I have no respect for Larry or anyone else who can't realize what's good for the earth.
The solution to whatever environmental problems come up is not to return to the caves, the solution is produce more power more efficiently and cleanly. Techological progress IS NOT intrinsicially bad for the earth.
In other words, the solution to technology's downsides is more technology.
I wish people would just deal with the fact that we are not going to stop using energy. We are not going to stop being mobile. And these needs will be ever-increasing. "Conservation" is ALWAYS going to be a losing strategy, and it deserves to lose.
Once people deal with this fact of life, then we can get on to identifying whatever problems exist, and simply construct solutions for them. That's how it's always been, and how it will always be.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
Sources close to SV.COM were reporting that Bill Gates home wasn't left out of the article due to a vendetta, or refusal of the billionaire to play nice, but rather because the reporter couldn't make heads or tails of 273 40" monitors all displaying a medium blue background covered with cryptic messages in white text. Since Gates couldn't give a definite time frame for the the so-called "BSOD" to be fixed, the Gates home was not covered.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Wired homes aren't for only the rich. Check out Mister House, an open source project for home automation written entirely in perl and runs on linux and win32. Very cool stuff. Voice activate and everything...
Dave
the writers showed up at the Blue Front Door Of Death, only to discover that not even the Ctrl-Alt-Doorbell was working.
so they left....
sig not found
These guys are in the tech industry. They're hardwired to do this stuff and it's good R&D, too. This is not gold-plated bathtubs; it's solid bleeding edge tech, which will eventually trickle down into better products for all of us.
If you've got a problem with wealth, go beat up on Donald Trump. These guys are just geeks who were in the right place at the right time. If you had a billion dollars in stock would you do any different?
(And yes, most of them give generously to charity, too)
Ok, I fess, I'm a curmudgeon, I like to make my own mess and wallow in my own filth at home and don't need a computer to tell me how deep the pile of junk is around my desk or how much of it is recyclable. The day I can't remember how much food I have in the fridge is the day I subcontract my nutrition management to Archer Daniels Midland Co.
I've reached a point with technology that the more I have of it the more likely that one piece is going to be the weak link and go. I can hardly change a lightbulb without remembering to buy relacements and gradually moving the bag of new bulbs closer to the dim lamp.
It's greatly amusing to see what home entertainment, security, networking, etc. will be assumed normal in a few years. Keep in mind, that CES is about marketing, convincing people they can't live without© said stuff. Get what ya need, dump what you don't. Keep it simple stupid.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Well, you never know when a technology could spawn something truely groundbreaking and useful.
Say, for instance, that the subwoofer company, having never had any requests before for something that would put out that much bass, does some research in the area of amplifier and woofer technology. Perhaps something they learn about the huge magnetic field which would drive such a beast turns out to have an application in medicine? Sure, it sounds stupid, but often this kind of unexpected cross-field discovery is how breakthroughs happen.
Granted, I abhor the materialistic culture we have today - especially its impact on the environment. But there is a positive side of it. With a culture that spends so much, it keeps the economy nice and healthy. What matters is that money is _moving_ around everywhere. Every time money changes hands, extra value is created for both parties (ok, not _every_ time). This net increase in wealth does trickle elsewhere a ceratin amount.
If we didn't have that kind of culture, I think the poor end of the spectrum would be far greater in number, and most would be worse off than they are now.
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
Willing to put up with latency when CD changes because you can't afford a hard disk and an Ogg or MP3 encoder?
Can't afford larger monitors, or to hire programmer to change the code to use a larger font?
Poor guy. Ellison needs our help. Send your check today.
Oh, and what's with this? From the John Seely Brown page:
DSL lines to the rooms? That doesn't make sense; he should use ethernet. I suspect the reporter got confused.
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Larry Ellison is not the second richest guy in the world because he's a brilliant tech. He's a CEO. (He actually did a stint as a programmer of sorts, but not a particularly brilliant one.) CEO's aren't as a rule all that bright - they're charismatic in the way that effective bullies are charismatic.
And the story that the article told of the tech-support visit to his house - where Ellison threw a temper tantrum that broke a remote - indicates what we already knew: that Ellison is, at heart, an infantile bully. (I know Oracle v.p.'s and senior management types socially, so I'm not talking entirely out of my tuchus). Most CEO's have an elements of this personality type - glibly positive when things are going well (and since they get paid millions even when the company is tanking, they always seem to be positive in a professional context), childish and pathetic when they are not.
In many ways, I don't think the greatest tragedy of our times is that we've become too materialistic, or the inequity between the rich and the poor. I think it the characteristic tragedy of our era is that people like this are held up as heroes.
Unless these guys take their gazillions and bury it in what would have to be an awfully big backyard, any money they have is either 1) employing someone else in exchange for goods or services or 2) being invested and providing someone else's capital.
Whether gazillionaires spend money on a box of Tic-Tacs(TM) or a swimming-pool-sized subwoofer, someone is benefiting from that purchase. In this case, those who supply swimming-pool-sized subwoofers will not freeze or starve to death this winter. Or maybe they will...if someone were to force Ellison to direct his wealth towards "better things".
And for Silicon Valley's ultimate party animal, Green engineered a "one-button party mode" that instantly sets the right mood for entertaining -- no matter who shows up. When Ellison calls from his car announcing his impending arrival with a celebrity or business executive, the staff opens a drawer in the catering kitchen that hides a special touch pad.
Man, that's old-tech. I can call my linux-based cd-quality answering machine from my GSM mobile, it Call-IDs me, then I can just use the touch-tone functions to identify my settings to the computer, which deploys my settings over 100Mbps Ethernet to each device's inbuilt Transmeta Crusoe processors, then calls the GSM telephone built into my car's onboard computer, which interrogates the car's GPS system and online traffic reports to project my time of arrival, and schedules my house systems to power-on just before I arrive.
Also, I don't have one of these old-fashioned 'door-knobs'. I have a webcam on my drive, and another on my porch. It detects image changes, and uses OCR to identify car registration plates and face-recognition technology to identify people, and then searches my address book to identify whether to greet them with the door opening automatically, the lights coming on and a videophone connection to the room I'm in, or a Comprehensive Armed Response incorperating camoflaged minigun turrets and model helicopters armed with air-to-ground missiles and guided dropped ordinance.
(This message has been psted in jest)
Michael
...another comment from Michael Tandy.
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
The idea behind conservation is not to impede technological progress but to eliminate waste.
Well, there are two things to say about that. First, I think a lot of the "conservationists" have very expansive ideas of what constitutes "waste". Look at the original poster: She thinks that having a roomful of computers in a house is wasteful. Others are attacking the whole idea of Christmas lights! The point is that the drumbeat of conservation never ends. Even if we did everything they wanted, they would start all over again. To them, ANY energy use beyond the bare minimum of survival is unacceptable.
The second point is this: What's wrong with waste? Why is it intrinsically bad to leave all the lights of my house on whenever I want to. Notice that this question is different from the question of pollution or landfills. That is a clean versus dirty environment problem; the question of "waste" is a different question. And that's where a lot of environmentalists go wrong. Instead of focusing on the real problem, which is cleaning up messes, they choose to focus on limiting technology, progress and convenience.
Environmentalists should focus on clean production of energy, not reducing the production of energy.
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Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
It's nice to know that Larry Ellison has a pool sized subwoofer while a bunch of poor people will either freeze or starve to death this winter.
BigCat79
"The dead have risen and are voting Republican!" --Bart Simpson
here's a FAQ right here...
Who's the black private dick, who's a sex machine for all the chicks?
that's an aside though...here's what i thought last night about the prospects of a DIY "HeadEnd" (what a wonderful term).
Well certainly hooking up a home network of PCs (in the personal computer sense, i.e. whatever OS, architechture is not a job that requires said millions and large groups of routers. However, setting up a home network to interface with your home still seems to me a formiadable job.
First, the simple stuff, like lights. I don't know much about the ethernet protocol, but i'm assuming it would be easiest to hack something together that controlled the lights with a fluctuation in simple voltage, i.e. a relay. Still, you have a wire per light to run, presumably. Of course you could just use x10 light controls, and i remember my father used to program some of the lights in our house on an old IBM 286, but if you want every light in every room to be controlled, perhaps a hack like this would be better...i have no experience with x10.
but that of course immediately leads to the question: "but what about dimmers." For that, perhaps another Ethernet/usual electrical circuits kludge would do, i.e. have the light brighten quicker the pulse to the switch. As a goal you of course want as much computer as possible to be done on the "server," not at the aparati, but still, e.g. hacking the networking to pulse an IR LED to interface your stereo through the remote receiver instead of having a proper node of the network with some computation done at the stereo.
But the heating system! I'm guessing servos of some sort but this would definitely require a bit more EE than the stuff already discussed, not to mention all the different things that would need to be controlled in order to effect the desired change...a plug into the thermostat would be the simplest, and least needing of motors etc., but if you want full room by room control you either get an expensive heating system or build expensive (i'm guestimating) interfaces thereto.
And of course controlling the system itself...i'm assuming a PDA with a self-written program communicating via IR. The program's the easy part, you still need IR receivers in every room running back to your computer.
So even with a small house you're talking about a lot of wires, though perhaps, with ingenuity, you will barely need any true nodes to the network at the execution end (i.e. a jerryrigged ethernet card to run your toaster).
arthhhhhhhhur
sell your certainty and buy bewilderment
Great, an ultra-rich geek can pay someone to come in and techno-pimp their home for $750K-3 million...
But wouldn't it be somewhat more cool to find out that these folks built out their network, wired the place for sound, and tuned the home theater on their own? Sure, people will say these are CEO's and they've got better things to do, but I'm a purist.
After spending a month ducting AC and building a rackmount into a closet I have an appreciation for my pimped out geek house. All this article said to me was "Nyah nyah! I got more dough than you do!"
Midwatch Industries
I was working in a small business a while ago, and they had a Meridian phone system(don't know the exact name - fancy phones, though).
:)
:) (okay, well I lie, I kept testing them with my tongue, but I was more careful)
Anyways, being the boy wonder in the building, I was told to re-wire everything. Great fun
Anyways, to check to see if a line was live, I'd stick my tongue to it. No biggie, nice fuzzy buzzing feeling. These were the fancy-phone lines, so I figured they'd carre more juice than a regular phone line.
WRONG. I was up on some scaffolding playing around in the big box where all the wires came/went from/to, testing lines. Put two of them to my tongue and nearly flew off the scaffolding.
Yeah, that was the fax line - just a regular phone line(singled out because the fax machine needed a regular line).
Regular phone lines have enough juice to case muscle contractions. To someone with any number of medical conditions, that could be fatal.
Needless to say, I stopped testing the lines with my tongue.
Dave
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)
Barclay family motto:
Aut agere aut mori.
(Either action or death.)