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The Missing Piece of the Smart Home Revolution: The Operating System
An anonymous reader writes with this story about who will lead the IoT revolution, and whether it will follow in mobile's footsteps. "As these technologies sense and and react to changes in your environment, there are obvious parallels to computer operating systems, which receive input and return output. What does the 'operating system' for the smart home of the future look like? Alex Hawkinson is trying to help answer that very question. The founder and CEO of IoT company SmartThings is not only a leader in the market, he’s a consumer. He suggests there won’t be a singular, cohesive operating system for your home, that this stuff isn’t one-size-fits-all. 'I think it’s up to everyone to determine their own bits,' Hawkinson said. 'Some people love cameras in house, my wife wants none. It’s up to your preferences.'”
It's an obnoxious habit; but I think that they are using 'operating system' in the relatively-weak-analogy sense of 'the bunch of software that sits on top of the nightmare hell-world of your hardware and presents a vaguely sane set of abstractions and standardized interfaces'.
The actual implementation will, as you suggest, be a combination of mostly already common OSes baked into the device firmware, along with a bunch of applications that attempt to present some sort of coherent and usable interface to the whole mess; but using 'operating system' to describe the mechanism that performs hardware abstraction and standardization isn't totally insane, just gratuitously obnoxious.
We're building a new Linux distro called UBOS for this. It's pronounced You-Boss :-) because there are no backdoors, tie-in's to somebody else's cloud strategy etc. For users, it focuses on making it a lot simpler and less labor-intensive to run web apps at home, and for application developers, it becomes a lot easier to deliver web apps to their users who may not have time (or knowledge) how to provision a database or configure a web server or re-installed apps every time they get updated -- because if we can do that, we don't need somebody else's cloud, and we can be independent netizens doing "indiependent IoT" in our homes http://ubos.net/
Lately? You must be a kid.
Idiots have been pitching smart refrigerators, thin clients everywhere etc for decades now. I'm looking at you Ellison.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Networks run by professionals can't keep the hackers out, and I want my home to have an operating system? I'm not intereested in my appliences sending me text messages, and my furnace is already on a fairly sophisticated timer. For me, at least, the answer is "no" - for the time being. I really don't see any show-stopping need beyond "wow, my house is wired!"
I couldn't agree more.
Give me a gadget that can tell me when my washer/dryer is finished. It can be wireless/bluetooth-like, because washers and dryers are usually just far enough, that you can't really hear their buzzer when they're done, but connect that same gadget to the cloud, and you've lost me permanently as a potential customer. Don't give me what I don't need. Do not give me what I don't want. For instance, I already have a smart meter, but this is certainly not because I was given a choice. If I wasn't such a helpless sheep, I would have destroyed that smart meter as soon as I noticed it.
Also, do not build that gadget into the washer/dryer itself and do not embed a tablet or anything too complex like an OS into an appliance. Just like I do not trust Ford to make good and cost-effective built-in gps units with free regular updates, I do not trust a washer/dryer manufacturer to make a good reliable gadget that's easy to fix, or easy/cheap to replace, or can even be easily kept up-to-date, compared to my own dedicated phone, or my own dedicated tablet, which I tend to replace much more frequently.
Also please take into account, that when I move apartments, I usually don't take the washer and dryer with me, nor the fridge. The same goes with some people who actually own homes and move from house to house. Some people do, but not everyone moves in/out with their large appliances. Do not limit the market for your goods to such a small subset of people.
If you want to do something useful, just get out of my way, or make room for my things. It would be nice if my tablet could hang on top of my stove, or on top my fridge. It would be nice if it could be protected from potential splashes, or from heat or smoke, or smudges. It would be nice if my tablet could easily be charged from its stand. And it would be nicer if the form factor of the fridge/stove was flexible enough that it could adapt to a wide range of devices, from my small old recycled re-purposed android phone to the latest and greatest tablet out there, whether it be my device, or the device of a family member/friend visiting me for a day.
Data provided by 'smart homes' will end up with the feds, in due time; but it'll be picked clean by every scumbag marketing weasel in the business first. Best of both worlds!
Don't forget the Internet savvy burglar class that is coming. These smart device companies aren't spending their angel funding on security. Casing houses is quickly going to become a service available on the darknet; for a fraction of a bitcoin, crackers with giant databases of IoT surveillance data will tell the burglar which houses in the target area are unoccupied during the hours they specify. Tapping the camera signals will let the burglars pre-plan which stuff to grab. For a premium price, they'll disable the alarms, unlock the doors, and open the garage.
And my freaking homeowners insurance will go up, while Harry Hairstyle the scumbag CEO's stock will continue to soar into the stratosphere, because he won't be found negligent, and the homeowner who trusted him won't be found stupid.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance