Slashdot Mirror
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.'”
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!"
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Black Mirror recently did an episode that had an interesting take on this. It's interwoven into the second part of the episode.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Christmas_(Black_Mirror)
If you haven't seen the rest of their stuff (two seasons, 6 episodes + the xmas special), it's highly recommended.
This is a terrible article. Seriously it is a press release for this company and it says NOTHING. Not only does is say nothing it is full of blatant crap.
Since when does your light bulb and your sensors in ANY WAY contribute to what you OS is?!??!?!?
I'm really at a loss of where to go for what Slashdot used to be. Soilent news isn't there yet. I must be dumb because I can't figure reddit out.
I still come here and every now and again there is something good. But it's getting less and less.
This is total nonsense and irrelevant to home automation.
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
Thanks for the comment about Soilent News, didn't know they existed. No, I can't figure out Reddit either.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I'm thinking people are really talking about what is actually the applications layer.
Why even talk about home automation as if it is new and different, isn't it just a subset of process automation and control?
There has been a lot of this lately.. CEOs of companies with cutesy names like "SmartThings" and "Eyeotee" pitching their bullshit visions to posture as "thought leaders."
We have had internet-enabled devices for some time.
The only revolution here is that big business is trying to monetize your entire life, daily routines and all. They want you to trade all of your security and privacy for a crumb of convenience.
What is missing from the 'automated home' is a amazing use case. The light switch is freeking dead simple. You have to beat the light switch in usability and that is fairly hard to do as you cant make it much simpler. Also every one of these companies that think they have cracked the nut do one thing. They *all* have vendor lockin and a monthly fee on top of it. Not one is open about the standard or wants to actually connect to other items. They only want to connect to their ecosystem. Then on top of that they are all amazingly mediocre to bad at what they do. If they come up with a compelling use case and are willing to let anything connect to them. The OS will come out of that naturally. Probably some linux derivative.
reddit is just a popularity contest of drivel though it is sometimes a smudge better than here. I read it a lot but most of the time never make it past the first couple of pages.
You are right about soylent. Basically they have a serious lack of good stories. With basically 3 people controlling the input queue. Which is what this site suffers from too.
QNX if BlackBerry does the right steps right now. Next question!
Okay, I will explain. Because QNX has the track records, the reliability, the realtime features, the small footprint, the legal backing required to win there. If a house accidentally burn down to ground, with or without fatalities, the OS provider may be liable for such an accident if someone can demonstrate a glitch, bug, malfunction, etc of the OS is at the origin of the fire. It is not a playground for kids and QNX is well in advance to any other racers.
Achille Talon
Hop!
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.
Similar in principle to the confidentiality problems that lead to the orange book, and at least as hard as the byzantine generals problem.
I suspect one needs a trusted system to make sure only the owner issues commands with the right key, and an independent intelligent system to figure out what happens when you add a device and give it a command. Plus lots of hard work figuring out what basic set of rules you need to preserve...
In the short run, expect to "introduce" things to one another, and select what they can do from a restricted and pretty unintelligible menu. Probably using Windows, and probably hacked soon after release.
davecb@spamcop.net
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/
After reading a few Slashdot articles ago about ransomware, and given what can happen via hacking such devices, the last thing I want is more of my home-based devices going online. The last thing I want is for my IoT thermostat (of which many exist already) to get hacked. I can see the thermostat's screen now...
"We turned your thermostat up to 85 degrees and you can't change it. We want $5000 worth of Bitcoins in 72 hours--or we find out if your furnace perpetually on full-blast will burn your house down. Think we're kidding? We also know that you have an [some brand name] WebOS-based TV (it was easy--the IP address was the same as your thermostat) and an [some brand name] Android-based refrigerator that we also pwned. In 24 hours fridge will be set to 50 degrees spoiling your food, and in 48 hours your TV will be permanently stuck showing random videos from Xtube. So, your only options are to pay us or cut off power to your house--but when it comes back on, we still own your pwned devices! Good luck replacing the devices we pwned but didn't mention here... TIMER: 71:59:59...71:59:58...71:59:57......."
Seriously, I'm not for government regulation in a competitive landscape, but such devices, especially given their manufacturers will abandon writing security updates for them--6 months after the new model comes out, are ticking time bombs... I'm not about to replace my oven, furnace, dryer, refrigerator, thermostat, dishwasher, home security system, TV, toaster, and toilets every 3-5 years because someone thinks such devices should be IoT and wants to gather even more "big data" about me...
Windows 3.1x calc: 3.11 - 3.10 = 0.00
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'
The only people who want a "smart home revolution" are advertisers. They would love to be able to show you advertisements on your refrigerator, stove, thermostat, and everywhere else.
I read the whole article (yes, heresy) and the author doesn't even know what an operating system is. He thinks the OS is what made the iPhone and Android take off, even though both those OSes were around for a decade at least.
I was thinking of something exotic like a research-project-distributed-OS, but that's not it at all. It's mainly talking about what features will be in the IoT. It got one point right.....towards the end it points out that consumers don't really see a need for the IoT.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
When I was a kid we had to get up to turn off the lights. We also wiped our butts with paper, using....our hands.
Our grandparents claimed they had to get up to change the TV channel. TV was kind of a primitive net, but they all had to read the same pages at the same time (or something).
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
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'OS' definition typically includes device abstraction (drivers or at least driver interfaces), which might be what they are babbling about.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
$5 WiFi SoCs are not everything.
Modularity, stability, documentation(when all fails, source code is documentation on it's own), ease of configuration. All of those one way or another lead to OSS OS. So *n*x. And, it's probably going to be Linux at the end of the day, could also be Android, as a flavour.
QNX and RTLinux and such are great if you need sub-millisecond response for your home automation systems. You don't. If you do, you're doing it wrong.
If your Internet-O-Things devices have spinning motors driving sharp-edged blades, you should be using hardware or at most electrical methods to do automatic stopping. If your electrical things use high voltage that might be exposed to people, you should be using ground fault interrupters on them. If you've got voice-operated instructions, they may need to process sound quickly, but you should buffer it if there's anything really critical. If your vacuum-cleaner robot scares the cat, responding in 100ms should be good enough (it'll probably have more mechanical inertia than that.) If your hot tub thermostat is sampling temperatures every millisecond, it'll be ok if the controller misses a few seconds worth of samples, as long as you don't do something stupid like treat missed samples as "0".
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If the "things" in question have an operating system, they're both too expensive and too vulnerable to being hijacked. Most of the "things" in an internet of things (the Smart Home from 2 decades ago, go X10!) need to be as simple and dumb and therefore cheap as possible. Most are the functional equivalent of a single sensor or a single switch. They had better not have an operating system. They need to be as dirt simple as possible, so they're cheap to acquire, cheap to install, cheap to replace if they fail or get struck by lightning, and most of all, do my bidding and not someone else's.
So no OS. It can run a micro IP stack like IPic (all 256 bytes of machine code) and the barest of bare bones beyond that, and that'll do just fine.
"Smart Home Revolution" = Hype
How's about I let the industry know when I need some part of my house to be "smart"? I mean, I understand the consumer era is all about creating a "need" out of something that nobody ever realized they wanted, but what do you say we take a little break until we can see some proof that we can stop hackers before we turn our homes into honeypots. Better yet, how about we take a break until we can figure out how to keep consumerist economies from destroying the world?
My coffee maker with a timer control is as smart as I need my house to be, and I went to Edmund Scientific and bought a little mechanical timer to get the job done. The only way to hack it is to come into my house and move the plastic pins around. And even then, I doubt I would miss it if it disappeared tomorrow.
You are welcome on my lawn.
No, it's not the OS that's needed, but the protocols. For example the Internet is not an OS - it is a set of protocols built on protocols with more protocols running on top. What is needed for home automation is the protocols allowing a "dumb" device like a sensor or button to be able to connect to something that unifies everything together and lets them communicate. What OS, if any, is running on the devices doesn't matter.
Better known as 318230.
I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that until you insert two bitcoins.
idiots have been pitching alternating current for years now. I'm looking at you Edison.
This is some funny shit.
http://edition.cnn.com/videos/...
Don't forget the British Charm Unit, asswipe.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
What is missing from the 'automated home' is a amazing use case.
my brother and his wife just had their first baby, and when it came time for the wife to go back to work they got three dropcams and put them throughout the house - living room, nursery, and a third place I forget. Now they can check in at any time of day to see what the baby is up to and what the nanny is doing. I agree, it's weird. But it gives them peace of mind and the nanny knows about the camera, so the system works for them.
For many people, "Allows me to check on my infant daughter" is an amazing use case. Consider the all-in was $600 for three cameras, plus $20/month for hosting. Connects to the existing wifi system, no wires to run. Monitored through an ipad or iphone app, which they already have. For me it woudl be super creepy, but it works for them and they love it.
So you may not see a business case here, but for many people (perhaps millions) the combination of utiity plus low cost plus easy setup plus easy use will be very compelling, even considering the tradeoffs.
NEST had to recall their fire alarms...
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Don't recommend skipping the ad. If you do it automatically cycles compressor back on it shut off 3 seconds ago so you could better enjoy the ad (for new HVAC equipment).
I haven't kept up, but TRON used to be the dominant embedded OS. Has it fallen by the wayside, and if so, what's replacing it?
IMHO the smart home OS will look like QNX.
It might not BE QNX, but it will at least look like it.
QNX is doing just what is needed, and has been for decades. It's about the most rock-solid OS out there. It's tiny and fast.
(What little I've seen of it reminds me of what "super" - my clone of Wiser's clone of the core of Dkikstra & Riddle's T.H.E. - might have evolved into if it were oriented to being invulnerable to failed or hostile tasks rather than being completely dependet on the tasks it supports being well behaved and perfect.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
On the off chance you aren't deliberately tossing out a red herring...
You will find very few people arguing against improved devices or superior efficiency. The problem arises when your "smart" devices start collecting and distributing information about you over the worlds largest information interchange network. Do you see how that could be objectionable to some people?
I also don't "get" Reddit. The pages give me a headache, it's a mess. The moderation system also sucks (just up and down) and looking at what gets modded up there... Slashdot is still way, way better.
Love sees no species.
Yeah, pretty much different types of "media" and "news outlets" exist to create markets where there are none. This is done in order to keep the gears of industry turning, selling you crap that you don't need.
Buying things will not make you happy.
It seems like he's still in the "I'm not satisfied" phase of solving a problem, unfortunately it's unsure if he'll ever reach the "I've understood why I'm not satisfied" phase.
Simply put, in order to derive any meaning full use out of those systems you need to be able to program them. And to be able to program them, they need to have as simple as possible interfaces. If I'll have to read into some complex programming language like Java I'm not going to bother.
It needs to be something simple like sending "show status" over a socket to the device and it'll return with it's current status in a simple non-XML or JSON format. And devices should be able to emulate multiple protocols. So people can choose the simplest one with the functionality they need or the one they are most familiar with.
Bigots are far better but good luck trying to find one.
Are you sure you know what the USA is like?
(Unrelated, I totally agree with you about the faucet controls).
Idiots have been pitching geometry for years now. I'm looking at you, Euclid.
--fyngyrz (anon due to mod points)
*Why don't we have two faucet controls, one for temperature and one for stream force? Instead we get two dials each mixing both attributes or one control mixing everything.*
because not too many people want electrified active mixing faucets.
you can buy them if you want to. that shits expensive though.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
You have to beat the light switch in usability and that is fairly hard to do as you cant make it much simpler.
Usability and simplicity are not the same thing, and upgrading the common light switch is not a new idea *CLAP CLAP*.
The fact is there are many use cases for equipment that can be remotely monitored and controlled, even if that equipment is usually run by something as dead simple as a switch. Here's some things I use mine for:
- When sitting down at the movies I don't need to crawl through a dark living room to get back to my seat, I can switch the lights on and off remotely. I even tried integrating it with the play button on my media centre but it was flaky.
- We have one room in the house with multiple entry points, the choice was pay an electrician to install a 3-way switched light, crawl through the room in the dark to one of the other switches, or just put in a smart switch at one of the points and link it to a door sensor. A cost winner right there when you see what electrical work is worth.
- I'm going to China in 4 days. When I do I'll set my house in a way where after a certain time some lights will randomly come on and off in various rooms, while a few main rooms stay lit. No it won't stop a crafty thief but it will deter a lot of potential would be thieves from approaching when they think the house is occupied.
The heat set to 100, the A/C at minus 30, yeah. That's what I want.
Not sure what the operating system of the smart home *looks* like, but it sounds like Pierce Brosnon.
http://seekcartoon.com/watch/2...
Fine! I dont need cameras. I dont need a networked Fridge. I dont need a networked lighting setting. I dont need to look up the curve of my heating over the year in the internet.
IMHO the machines should be as dumb as possible. Heating/AC should have a timer. (Oh, wait, it has that already for the last 20 years). The energy savings you can achieve by not starting your heating/AC at the same time but "just before you come home" are not so high.
So yeah. MCUs with 128bytes of ram, no network connection, and a power consumption in the muW-mW range without any OS work for me. If you really are interested in comsumption data, make a fucking SD slot - if i write 1kB every minute for 1 year, a 1GB card is only filled to 50%.
Glad that it works for your brother's family, but I'm not sure how a few webcams is an "automated home".
he's talking about user interface and machine to machine interfaces in the article, I reckon. that's what he thinks the operating system is... a system for operating the internet of things.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
"What do you use now? Shells? Toilets and faucets haven't advanced in the USA. Why don't we have two faucet controls, one for temperature and one for stream force?"
A pet peeve of mine actually. When I was a kid in the 1940s and 1950s, showers and baths had two controls -- one for hot water and one for cold. Possible, if not especially easy, to get the temperature and flow you desired. Since then, that system has been replaced by four dozen variants of single knob controls. All of which suck and none of which work as well as the ancient two control system. Your idea would probably be even better and seemingly would not be hard to implement.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
Yeah, abstraction-layer, that hides the "ugly bits" of each manufacturer's implementation is very much required - I opted to "roll my own", writing a Qt5-based library that detects various (networked) products through manufacturer-specific protocols, and then presents a standard interface for each type of device (e.g. "Smart Light" interface to "LIFX Light", "Hue Light", "Holi Light" etc...)
2 "small" issues is finding time to write support for each protocol, and getting support (products, specs) from each manufacturer
The mass media as well as tech companies have redefined the term "operating system". It's been fuzzy this way for awhile. The company I'm at added "OS" as a suffix to a suite of services, including one part that actually uses an third party operating system but also the back office servers and the like. It's a marketing term. Similar to some smart phones, the "OS" is no longer the kernel there but instead refers more to the API or suite of applications. I suspect the average person on the street thinks that Notepad is a part of the Windows operating system too.
All an operating system does is file (and secure - more or less) data and schedule/manage tasks: some at given times and optionally concurrently.
An IoT or "smart house" has little need for anything more than a state machine with local in-RAM data and possibly the means to interact with other IoT's within the same house. There are many solutions to this that have been around for years. Whether that involves 432MHz Tx/Rx modules, I.R. or the overkill and high power needs of a WiFi on a chip such as the ESP8266.
My own preference would be for as small a footprint as possible, with very little additional cruft -- even encryption would be too difficult for the average homeowner to manage (as evidenced by the parlous state of home PC security - even with the "can it get any simpler" functions of WPS) and therefore physical security would be the preferred path: not letting any signals out of the house. Have whatever sensors and controls on a I2C bus and get the unit price down to $5, so the units are both disposable and interchangeable without any need for reconfiguration.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The article is poorly written but there are some valid (and amusing / scary) points of view made. The author doesn't know what an OS is, clearly. But Hawkinson (the SmartThings guy) is right that there isn't going to be a one-size-fits all solution to home automation, there will have to be something to integrate disjoint subsystems. According to him, your system needs to be open to be fully useful, and I agree. However I am not sure that SmartThings is going in the right direction.
There's a few things to keep in mind in home automation:
- No vendor is ever going to manufacture and sell all the kinds of "connected" devices you will want. You're going to be mixing brands.
- The standard you pick will not be available on all your devices. When you choose an A/C unit, you don't want your choice to be limited by the HA standard it happens to support. Be prepared to deal with multiple HA protocols.
- No home automation vendor is going to write a driver or plugin for every conceivable device. And no equipment manufacturer is going to supply drivers for their products on every conceivable HA hub. Choose open systems with an active community
Open systems allow you to deal with these issues. One such is Vera (based on the proprietary Z-wave protocol), and its success is partly due to the fact that anyone can write and publish plugins for non Z-wave devices. Nest, Philips Hue lights, homebrew Arduino-based sensors, even your Ethernet capable Japanese massaging toilet are supported by Vera as native devices once a plugin for them is written. It's also a popular system because it isn't cloud based (there's a remote access capability through their servers, but it's optional). In TFA, that tool Dahlberg (of Arrayent) sees the cloud as the great solution to the integration and interoperability problem. Sure, I can see something like IFTTT acting as an integrator for different technologies, but I seriously don't want that stuff in the cloud, and I don't see a compelling reason for it to be there. Most serious HA enthusiasts are very wary of such developments.
I like the idea behind OpenHAB; they don't want to build yet another home automation hub, but be a "hub of hubs". In a reality where you are likely to have multiple HA systems and standards in your home, OpenHAB centralizes the intelligence and provides a unified interface, and uses the existing hubs as dumb communication channels. This is kind of what TFA was on about with their "OS for the home".
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
How will they feel when discover that government and anyone with low hacking skills can watch the baby too?
I thought 'OS' meant "Oh, Shit!".
Makes a lot more sense than "operating system".
I'm in for the cat videos. It's fascinating, disturbing and occasionally hilarious to watch what your master^H^H^Hcat gets up while you are away.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Well, at the current rate, the OS will be little more than a data delivery system as google, et alia, harvest all manner of data about the occupants of the smart home, and sell that information to other companies.
Slashdot is way way smaller....and serves a much smaller slice of internet users.
Good-bye
The difference being that its not jsut geeks and the rich that are now buying this stuff now. Thats why we are talking about it from this angle. Keep in mind we have LEGIONS of people with devices in thier hand that they have absolutely no clue how it actually works. That is what is new and different.
Good-bye
Hang on, where are you getting a WiFi SoC that runs Linux for $5?
(I'm not being facetious, I'd really rather like to know)
I'm a minority race. Save your vitriol for white people.
For a tech website, Slashdot has a lot of luddites, but we already knew that. My smart meter saves me money, and the privacy consequences aren't really that dire. Definitely far less than what your credit card bills reveal.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
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.
I wouldn't say that "receiving input and returning output" is one of the defining qualities of an operating system.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
"We turned your thermostat up to 85 degrees and you can't change it. We want $5000 worth of Bitcoins in 72 hours--or we find out if your furnace perpetually on full-blast will burn your house down.
You do realize that virtually all consumer thermostats use a fairly standard interface, and they can be swapped with one another, right? This includes the Nest/Ecobee, etc. If someone threatened me like that, I'd laugh at them, disconnect the thermostat from the wall, and attach a cheap replacement.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
Let me paint you a picture. Your house graphs the indoor and outdoor temperature with mrtg along with when your furnace or AC was on. It graphs the per outlet electricity usage on a minute by minute basis. Both graphs can go back for years. Your hallway and bathroom lights turn on and off automatically based on motion sensors, only they are smart enough to know that if you get up after you go to sleep you want hte lights to only come on at 50%, not 100%. Your doorbell rings and you get emailed on your smart phone with a picture of the front door of your house. Your house plays a warning tone on your bedroom speaker you to let you know your teenager's window was opened after 10pm on a weekend night. The camera system notices someone pulling into your driveway and pops up a picture in picture of the driveway on your tv while you are watching a movie. You decide to come home from work early so you login from your phone and turn the thermostat setback off, to warm the house before your arrival. These are some of the things you can do with a 'smart' house. pick and choose what you want to install.
Surprised that no one pointed out (or no one I can see) that the article says "Nest has since released an intelligent CO2 detector, called Nest Protect". This would be a Carbon Dioxide detector, when we know Nest has a Carbon Monoxide detector i.e. CO not CO2.
What, you don't? My shower has a knob you rotate to adjust temp, and push/pull to adjust flow. The motions are completely disjoint....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
* Profile a specific target's electricity use (discussed above)
* Cut off power at a specific time (discussed above)
* Get the meter to report slightly higher usage than actual, to defraud the customer
* Get the meter to report slightly lower usage than actual, to defraud the electricity company (or for the lulz)
* Get the meter (or many meters) to report obviously false readings to lower consumer confidence in the devices, cost the electricity companies lots of money, to raise awareness that such devices can be hacked, or just for the lulz
* Other reasons???
Note to anyone even thinking about hacking a meter without permission of all affected parties: Don't. Not only is it almost certainly a crime, it's just bad form. It's also probably not so hard that anyone over the age of 14 will think "d00d, that guy has skillz" when your "hack" becomes public. More likely, people will think "dude, that was lame." If you really want to hack an electric meter, buy one, hook it up to your testbed environment (you DO have a testbed environment, right? right???) and hack away.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
is pretty large, but you seem to think all you have to do is call each and every failure a one off
Direct solar = almost immediate use of the sun's energy.
Direct wind = storing the sun's energy for minutes, hours, or days, occasionally longer
Solar or wind + electric-company's battery/supercapacitor/hot-water/other-short-term storage = storing the sun or wind for a day or so.
Corn/grass ethonol = storing the sun for a few weeks or months.
Tree ethonol = storing the sun for a few years/decades.
Peat fuel = storing the sun for a few decades to millenia.
Most fossil fuels = storing the sun for 10,000-1,000,000,000 years give or take
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
How about a device that listens for the dryer buzz and when it hears it, buzzes with a slightly different sound.
Put a few of these around your house and you'll be able to "hear" the dryer buzz without using any radio spectrum or signal-transmission wires.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Who cares about the Operating System, as long as it's cheap, reliable, and trivial for the consumer. It's more about the network and the high-level protocols that will define how devices cooperate or if we have to wait for a vendor to monopolise the market.
because you don't have to see the damage and can pretend that it doesn't exist when your next one off inexplicably occurs.
Bitter much?
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Robocop is not even close to a corporations-rule-the-world dystopia. Try cyberpunk. WTF happened to /. that people bring up a stupid 80s movie instead of Gibson and Sterling.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
that happen to earlier reactors. Especially if you are ignorant enough to stick it on a platform in the middle of the ocean. Don't worry, I'm sure you'll have plans for a generation five reactor as soon as the oops happens.
Agreed but the Politicans are just as guilty as rebranding the same old shit under a new and improved name and then pretending it's new....
Murphy was an optimist