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.
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.
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.
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.
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'
"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.
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.