Strongly encouraging change and migration...
on
Is Bluetooth Dead?
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· Score: 1
When Apple released the iMac with no ADB or serial - just USB, I complained (and still feel this way) that, again, steve jobs was shifting things and leaving loyal customers with wads of now useless hardware and no transistion time.
Buy a USB only box and the high end keyboard, trackball and bitpads need to be replaced. That SCSI disk? Now unconnectable. If you're a new customer that's fine, but having accumulated things I liked since 1985 - and not having much selection - he screwed older customers. And he's got a habit of that.
Now on the PLUS side, he created a HUGE market for USB vendors. There were more USB devices introduced in the 6 months after the iMac than their had been in 2 years of Intel boxes having this extra, unnecessary USB port.
Not unrelated: when the Mac came out it was close to unusable at 128K. But it had a huge ROM full of subroutines. What that did, for it's six months, was FORCE software vendors to NOT write their own GUI interfaces, to not use their own menu routines, but to use the stock ones in ROM.
Recall that in the DOS world, to exit Lotus 1-2-3, you hit/q [quit] then "y" [yes, really].
WordPerfect exited with the intuitive
[F7]yy
Every program had some exit routine that was unique and usually required memorization.
The limited Macs meant that every ISV used the menu routines which gave them [APPLE] [FILE] [EDIT]
and [FILE] had a [QUIT] item.
In a year, when we had 512k and later 1MB, all the successfull apps could be used with low learning curve, no cheat sheets that said how to quit.
If you knew Macwrite and MacPaint, you could figure out the basics of CricketDraw and later Word 3.01 without training sessions.
The same strategy with USB and bluetooth holds:
Make it more painful for vendors to do their own proprietary wackiness to interface than to follow the design vision offered by Apple. With the costly and weird cable I have from a sprint phone to a computer, I can easily find windows drivers. Ick. Wireless and an open protocol means that Windows and Mac (and linux and freebsd) can play with a lot less pain. And mom can figure out "turn on mac, open address book, put phone near it, push [SYNC]". - the same reason Palm took off and dominated over sharp wizards and psions and 50 other devices. 1) dock. 2) sync button. Done.
Apple may hold a tiny market share, but they hold a HUGE design share.
Since the imac came out, design shifted from industrial and ugly for many PCs, but also microwaves, and phones, and TVs. Look in ANY dorm room and you will see echos of the iMac design.
Now I want an answering machine that will store its messages on my computer's drive. let me get them form the phone or from the computer. Easy(ish) with bluetooth. And I figure that soon (by jan?) every Mac Laptop will have it, ne?
To add 802.11{a,b,g} to a device, you have several high costs associated with it. Not to mention that 40 devices running 802.11x in your house and the neighbors and... would make it useless.
Short range, low cost
That was the bluetooth goal.
My $400 PDA can take a $30 hit for 802.11a and be more
useful in meetings and around the work campus for it.
My $40 phone cannot take a $30 parts hit (okay, $10 in mass production lots). It *can* take a $1 hit if that lets me sit 1 meter from my computer and sync the Address Book. And sit in my bag while my earpiece works. And 4M from my stereo while I turn on the DVD and run it around.
Friend's Empeg stereo is great. He's got 40GB of music in it, it pulls it from the car and into our ski house where we use it as the house jukebox. Ethernet, RCA outputs and it slides into its dock in the car. High quality decoder and D/As for its age. Pity they went out of business.
Different market and use from an iPod. Given "garage", and its cost, I'd want 802.11g in it so when we use it, it authenticates itself and quickly resyncs to the GirlFs playlists when she takes the car.
"low power"?
That's its problem - it's not really low powered. The earphones die rather quickly. I'm set to get
one of those battery belts that the TV guys wear to power their lights.
Dead?
Like the Internet is dead because Sun isn't trading for 500? Everyone please turn in your connections. Nothing to see here.
I expect that, like any new technology, we'll be seeing more and more bluetooth enabled devices. Keyboards and earphones are one piece (and perhaps useful enough to get it out there en mass).
Other bits include that PDAs need it, phones need it, and it start appearing in other things.
I want my PDA to sit in its dock (for power) and
"hear" my BT keyboard/mouse and send out Good Enough video to my TV/Monitor/Flatscreen.
I can reach and say it would be cool if my door could recognize my bluetooth keyfob with a unique strongly authenticated challenge reponse and unlock before I get there.
I'd love to lose 14,000,000 stupid line of site IR devices at home - a low power RF would work there, but BT is way to costly at this point to replace a $0.05 IR circuit.
Not dead, just perhaps a year or 2 past the flash mob attention span of the media:
month 1: NEW TECHNOLOGY! Revolutionary!
month 2: DEVICE STARTING TO ARRIVE
month 6: NOT ENOUGH DEVICE - technology reeling!
month 12: DEAD!
When, in fact, design -> mass production and distribution takes at least a year and that's usually after they've seen it.
Sorry it's not taken off as fast as 802.11b which did fill a vacuum (and didn't take off until Apple made it cheap (airport was 1/4 the price of it's competition at introduction) and really easy to use.
It's not taken off as fast as USB - which languished until Apple dumped ADB in favor of USB with no transition and that event triggered the introduction of USB keyboards, pointers (mouse and trackball, etc) and modems and speakers and disks and....
I've read stevens. I've read comer. I've perused the triple digit RFCs that created IP, and TCP and UDP and ICMP.
I'm intrigued about what s "special[ly] created packets not destined for any port" looks like?
Certainly there are broadcast and host destined packets that address the stack, but what you're implying is that they send non-TCP packets (feasable when you own the local segment) that "magically" take down a server.
That's not possible with TCP/IP. Or if it is, it represents a brokenness that should be addressed immediately.
Perhaps they send an ARP packet on the local net that tells the host that the router's IP is a different MAC address (that would hold for a 30 second ARP cache timeout).
So U.Fl folks, if you're running an application capable of doing peer to peer file sharing (one might describe most of the TCP application suite as that), run it on some art students' port with a sniffer.
Let them get "taken down" and pass the magic packet to those who write ipf and ipfw and pf.
Me? I'd assume that the admin just logs into their Switch and turns off your port.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
A.C.Clarke
perhaps this is just over the heads of student level knowledge of how networking works. Schools have certainly used that to advantage before.
Once upon a time, Steve Dorner wrote a mail program for the Mac. He called it Eudora. (his web site explains why).
He wasn't a student, but he worked at a school (he also came up with the ph/qi phone book program).
Then along came a company who wanted to pay him to work on Eudora for commercial porpoises:)
He declared: There will always be a free version. (they said ok)
I won't leave the incredibly flat midwest (they said ok)
He also said other things. Perhaps you could ask him or give him a call.
One might suggest setting salary that is feasable for the experience you have, the skills you bring to the table (including being the most intimate with the code) and keep it realistic.
I gotta say, when I interview someone who's got 1 year of experience and expect to make closer to 6 figures they either have to a whole lot going for them or, if they DO get hired, they're gonna be the first on the layoff catapult.
The boom tainted everybody into thinking they were worth $80k or more when they weren't. Everyone is senior until they get enough experience to realize how much they don't really know.
*which* English Civil War?
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Quicksilver
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· Score: 1
There were a few. Many nations were created from them. Notably, the USA.
And yes, you should read Cryptonomicon. (It will
be interesting to see if this novel has a less abrubt ending that most of his other 90's books though)
Well yeah! The fact that most of the spam coming from chinese IPs is
in ENGLISH has been kind of a giveaway.
On the other hand, you must be THIS tall ------>
to put a machine on the Internet.
If you can't handle the basics, don't be on it.
At the least, these sites should be behind a NAT box, at best,
behind a firewall.
Putting a windows box (or any unsecured box) on the internet directly is irresponsible and wrong.
I'm not letting MS pass on their Hole-Of-The-Week feature; I'm not letting the american spammers pass on their theft of service and hacking that's clearly illegal - I hope they go to jail. Or get caned and
sent to jail.
But I'm not going to let off the people who chose to put machines up and let them get hacked.
I'm sorry, we're going to block you, we're going to hold you responsible. Buy a killer pit-bull on my street and I'm going to
blame YOU when my pet gets injured.
The biggest problem has been the total lack of response (aided by the language barrier) and our inability to even REACH the people from whom the spam comes. So if they want to do business, perhaps they'd act as better partners and not be a menace to the Internet.
I've been hired for several months ONLY to make a company's infrastructure strong enough to handle the 60%+ of mail
that is spam; to buy servers and software to help stop it; to implement it. What should take two light machines to handle requires 3 DMZ machines and a pair of (redundant) spam scanner machines. 100% of my contract (I don't work cheap) is from their budget to ease the spam pain. How many $100,000 of thousands is EVERY fortune 1000 company paying to slow spam? How many MILLIONS are.gov and.mil and public.edu sites paying of MY TAX DOLLARS to stop spam. So hell, I say shoot the spammer. Perhaps just in a typing hand.
Perhaps they'll start to fear stealing resources from the Chinese.
If it's a 17 year old taking some cash, all the better (but get the payer too).
So you PAY for windows yes? Fine. Good. If you feel you need it, you should abide by the rules that the vendor has set - mainly you have to BUY IT FROM THEM.
As far as "Don't use it if you can't buy it", I guess I meant:
Don't use it if you can't afford to pay what it costs.
I'm not particularly "pro-GPL", I prefer the BSD licenses, but each has its place.
By the way, I manage to bank using Mozilla (on Unix and on my Mac OSX box). I play some games on the Mac. If I really want to use Windows for games, I'd have to pay for windows wouldn't I.
And yes, I asked and chose NOT to open a bank account at a bank which required me to use Windows. I even wrote and told them why - I use the Web for banking and that's HTML + HTTP. HTML is well defined. Their site requiring IE is not a web site; it's a microsoft Web site and that's not acceptable. It was a non-trivial amount of money (before buying a house).
I tend to use the DVD player for DVDs and the Mac when I'm on the road. The Mac software is licensed.
If you can't abide by the vendor's license, then don't use the vendors code.
The only thing I don't pay for is a second copy of MS software (windows/office)
Dude, if you can't abide by the conditions that the authors have set: eg. price and license THEN DON'T USE THE FREAKING SOFTWARE
I won't go into quality of the software, but I will touch on that fact that YOU CAN DO ALL OF THIS WITHOUT THEIR SOFTWARE.
I read excel spreadsheets, I write lots of documents. I don't use Microsoft software in my life.
I can afford it. I can't stand its LOW LOW quality (been writing milters to block today's virus/worm that our unix and macs won't get but it clogging up our servers.)
You guys have postgresql, mysql, php, all the BSD and linux you can eat. Laptops that can run what our bigass VAX 780s struggled with. Jesus Freaking Christ. There's better software out there for FREE than was available 5 years ago commercially.
And your whining about how you think XP costs too much.
Don't use it if you can't buy it. You have options. Take them.
NO COMPUTER will effectively last more than 5 years max
/me goes downstairs to turn off the Sparc 20 (1994) that's running mail and LDAP for the house and hosting maps for the CoLo sparc 20 (running mail for 50 people) and the Apple ][+ (1981) that's been doing lots and lots of ADC and IO with video output to the television upstairs.
A sad day...
Otoh, I'm typing this from my yard on a 17" powerbook to a soekris box with 2 ethernets and wireless via IPSec that's the size of the Apple's 80 column card and draws about 20 watts.
Re:DNSSEC and extending protocols
on
DNSSEC: Good Enough?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
SMTP has (and should have) no way to do end to end encryption of a message. It shouldn't. It's transport, not data.
SMIME is a fine and lovely and centralizable way to do mail body encryption.
SMTP/TLS is a fine way to do transport encryption/authenication from one hop to another.
Lacking is a way - perhaps a signature header - for an MTA to "know" where a message is from. I'd love to be able to prioritize mail that's perhaps from "known good" domains. I believe IronPort is doing something proprietary along these lines.
Back to DNS:
DNSSEC tries to offer a way to ensure the content of a zone.
It's a good notion.
It's not been implemented well. I don't trust VeriSign, I certainly don't trust JoeBlow registrar. However, I'm willing to trust my domain and that's really what's needed when dealing with subdomains. And most of the meat of my DNS use is in the subdomains - every desktop, every server lives in a subdomain. www, ftp and MX records are in the top level - that's about it.
With BIND 9, I'm delighted that all my zones use notification and IXFR's (tranferring a 40,000 record zone over a DSL is not good without incremental zone transfers - esp in a DHCP heavy environment that can cause regular zone updates).
We can "extend" DNS with DNSSEC (or -alikes) because it's negotiable (like ESMTP is for SMTP). We cannotchange how ALL DNS transfers and works by default without GREAT pain (we did that pain ONCE in 1980 going from NCP to TCP).
Not that there's a PROBLEM that you're clearly not qualified to talk about IPv6 (since slashdot is full of unqualified people anyhow), but IPv6 requires no "sudden cutover".
That was New Years 1980, when NCP died in favor of TCP.
I'd suggest that MORE work has been put into ensuring that IPv6 and IPv4 coexist than into the protocol work itself.
I run IPv6 on a number of machines on a network. they speak 6 to each other.
If the service or machine don't speak 6, IPv4 is used.
So lets all rant and reinvent X-400 - we saw what a success that was.
SMTP does ok. If we want to deny (or accept more) mail based on signature (S/MIME, PGP, whatever), then so be it.
When I get authenticated mail, it goes into my main box. The rest gets to wait in a lower priority box.
It'll work well when VISA gives everyone a personal CERT and everyone sends mail which has proof it's from them.
- You hope this can be worked out
- If it cannot be worked out, you are considering whether or not you have a future at the company.
No. "Gee, you won't give me a raise (or the raise I want)? I'm disappointed."
There, end of statement. You have nothing more to say. If your boss is too slow to figure that there is an implicit "my resume will be updated", then saying it explicitly won't get you anywhere.
If he can go to his bosses when you give notice for that other job you've been offered that's either [closer to home || pays more || involves scrubbing supermodels] then so be it.
But you may document your goodness and ask for a raise, if you don't get it you simply accept it and move on to your next action, whatever that is.
If you ask and get turned down, get the resume out, quietly and get another job offer.
THEN, you tell your boss that, while you've enjoyed your run here, you've been made a better offer. Bring some boxes so you can clear out.
However! this is when your boss, who really stood to lose nothing before, may push harder for you to get a raise rather than losing you.
This was common practice where I used to work.
You never hung on up recruiters (always be polite) and keep your resume up to date and take a periodic long lunch for an interview.
I friend use to take 2 hrs every Wednesday afternoon and talk to other companies. He had a new boss who dicked around on his expense reports ("you're making me spend 4 hrs of my time trying to get reimbursed for $150 when you bill me out at $200/hr? Are you high?"). When new boss asked where he was going on his Wednesday, he said "job interview." and left. New Boss asked around, learned of the habit and knew that if they weren't a Good Place for this lucrative person to work, he'd leave. When my friend returned (from an interview at a hellish place), his signed and approved expense reports were on his desk.
If you truly get a better offer, by all means take it, but let your company make a counter offer and weigh that.
So Never threaten to leave.
Give notice and threaten not to stay. Unemployment sucks.
Changes everything...
Like the Roland UA-5 box which runs fine on old macs (like a 233MHz laptop) and Windows (ick) boxes and has TOSlink in/out, and XLR/RCA/0.25" jack in/out. For ~$150-$200 on ebay.
Apple's on the cutting edge. I'd be more excited if I hadn't been there with old hardware for a couple years.
I've got an Edirol (aka Roland) UA5. It's a USB
device that I liked for several reasons:
it's EXTERNAL to the electrically noisy box
it was easy to attach to my laptop to record meetings
(the reason I could justify getting it)
It's got optical audio out and in
so the computers are ELECTRICALLY isolated from the stereo
via the TOSlink.
It's got a wide array of connections
RCA, Phone jack, coax and optical digital, and XLR (balanced is useful
for really long runs to avoid buzz - I've done line level balanced for 200 meters without a problem
The two main reasons I got it were to easily record well on a Mac
laptop (better quality than the built in, buzzy jacks) and so I could happily start to digitize around a thousand tapes and albums onto a few DVDs in mp3 format (I'd rather carry 15 or 30 DVDs than 500 pounds of albums and tape boxes).
The pain is that its not supported by Linux or (more important to me) any BSD. So I run it on an older PPC box running MacOS X and playing MP3s. A little Apache, a little perl and it's all good without using the proprietary iTunes stuff.
But USB is just FINE for audio (96khz sampling isn't enough?).
The whines I hear about needing slots remind me too much of John Dvorak reviewing the Mac IIci back when and complaining it only had three slots.
He listed what was in his PC taking many slots.
Someone wrote in and listed that he had similar:
A mouse and a trackball AND a keyboard AND a stylus that all worked concurrently via ADB (shall we call that USB 0.1?)
An external drive, tape drive, scanner via SCSI.
A modem and an AppleTalk link via the serial ports.
He wasn't using his 3 slots yet.
So USB and firewire: yeah, I'd run IP/firewire. I'd run RAID boxes and take drives over Firewire or USB2. I'd run audio over USB.
AGP for my video.
I'll save my PCI slot for something... Right now I've got fiber gigabit cards in two boxes. And an SSL accerator, but mostly that's just storage cause they were free. (3 ethernet and dual SCSI on the MoBo).
I dunno, the girl just got a 17" powerbook. Now she wants
GigE to the machine rack downstairs. But she's been on me to
pull a wire for her audrey to the kitchen for a while.
So show your wife you love her and get her a laptop with GigE:)
Run a cable to the computer. Wow! That's really ugly. Here honey, let me run some outlets in the wall for you. I know I don't have to, but it's because I love you.
Otoh, maybe I started out on easier footing: two of the NeXTs, the Alpha and the 16port switch ARE hers. She's accepted that two machine room racks are the best solution for the computers and she understands that the best way to maintain several machines is through the 16 port terminal server. The 110 punchdown block for the patch panel is her idea. Hell, she's happy to log into the house BSD box and type
"heyu turn den lights on"
when the X10 control is out of sight.
But as an ex-architect (the real kind, not the computer "systems decorator" kind), she despises ugly. The CAT5 across the room at the rental was barely tolerated, but the wireless was welcomed.
"ripping holes in walls" is TEMPORARY, as a general goal. Making walls not have holes is the long term goal. Perhaps if you start small, you can demonstrate that after a lot of dusty drywall, you end up with a pretty wall again. And that your patch panel need not be 3 feet up in the middle of the dining room with wires hanging out.
Computers are noisy, electrically.
Now you want to put 6! amplifiers inside the
computer. And then run it to amplifiers at
line level (you'll want balanced, 3 pin lines) to
amplifiers to the speakers (or are you running
long runs of TOSlink optical cable:).
This is hardly a new thing to tackle. Folks like
smarthome and
others carry multichannel amps with remote controls.
You are prepared to drop a couple grand on amplfiers and a couple more on controls as well as on the speakers, right? (better this than spending money on television and cable and whatnot).
But I'm looking at... computer.
Wireless or Ethernet.
Streaming.
slimp3 can turn files into sound in the room you're in.
No audio noise as you run line level 40-60' to local amps.
No specialized amps, you can attach it to that Kenwood your dad still has in the garage for your garage. You can attach another to the nice amp in the entertainment room.
Re:The nicest Unix front-end ever?
on
Jaguar is Over
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· Score: 0, Troll
I think step 2 would be "sell them to consumers":P
You'd think so, but then you'd be showing that you hadn't followed Steve's plans when he was at NeXT ("for only $10,000 - we'll sell them to students!").
Just went with the nephew and got a Compaq Laptop for Linux and Windows-Gaming use for $1300. Same specs of machine for Apple was around $2300. You convince a 21 year old blowing his hard earned cash on a laptop that he should spend an extra $1k to run Apple.
See, my 3(!) cylinder bike goes 70 at 5000RPM. In second gear. Of 6. Where 5000 RPM is still less that 50% of the redline.
Full up: 3cylinders, top gear, 160 MPH at redline.
And 50MPG for normal calif highway driving (70ish-80ish, not that I'd go that fast).
You could buy a BMW (Bavarian Made Winnebago) for $17k, or you could get an SV650 from Suzuki for only $6k.
--- --- --- Relevantly, Apple sort of notoriously runs slow bus speeds. They've done it forever. Since the Mac II series, they'd introduce at 68030 at 30MHz 2 months after Motorola was shipping 040's. Quite irksome.
They put out machines with FSB's half the speed of PCs. The PPC chips are quite nice. It was the clones that drove prices down and performance up. So they died.
Apple seems to be forgetting that the public's whims change and that as they are perceived as a poor value, people move away.
I just went and got a gaming laptop with the nephew (note that I'm writing this on a 14" black powerbook next to the GirlF's new 17PB and down stairs is a working Mac Classic II and Mac CI, running OpenBSD and NetBSD respectively. They are on top of the Alpha's, a NeXT and a pair of Apple ][s. I really like NeXTStep. I can't figure out why my 33MHz NeXT isn't much slower than a 400MHz RISC machine. Oh, Aqua.).
So the boy wanted an Intel box for travel and games. We got him a $1300 Compaq - 16", ~3GHz CPU, 512MB RAM. 40GB disk. 802.11g.
Could get 2 of these for the price of a Mac that runs at about 80% the speed.
Me? I figure the black PB's gonna die and all I need is a nice Unix box. $2600 gets me a computer and leaves me with $1300 to blow on other toys.
When *I* have to maintain the rel's boxes, I make them use Macs. But it's a long hard sell for laptops. The company won't touch them because of the price. Status seekers like the CEO can get them, but that's about it.
APPLE:
Cheap (cancelled)
Fast (waiting for IBMotorola on that)
Solid Tech support (we'll get back to you on that).
Does Apple Airport support [IPSEC]?
No, but the machine past your Airport does.
Run WEPless and use IPSec to the house server.
VaporSec is a pretty GUI to setup racoon and IPSec on
your OS X box. (see also netbsd ipsec docs; be neat if
apple's userland utilities would keep up with BSDs post
2000 - FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x userlands are far more advanced).
If WEP is good enough then just turn it off. The WEP emporer is naked. Hell, just print out your squid logs and put them up on your door and your website. Unless you're spinning new keys every couple thousand packets, you're easy to watch. It's not even hard to break - mom can bring up a stumbler program and just leave it on for a couple hours.
Two problems:
802.x is ethernet. So now you want the device (switch, dimmer, etc) to have an IP stack. And speak wireless. From inside a ground metal box (aka Faraday cage).
Wireless could work. Wired would be a nice option too (talk to these over a chain of twisted pair ala RS485). Without the AC in the way, I could talk faster. A redesign (x11?:), might bring it out of the 70's and itno the capabilities of chips we have now. (faster, reliable, two way on an ASIC)
But it needs to cost less than $2 in volume.
Re: linking different phases, basically a capacitor will do what you want. Do it pretty for $5. It works.
Dude, for 10 years, I've reached over, hit "8 ON"
and heard the coffee machine click on. By the time I get my ass out of bed, the coffee is ready. Why is this hard for you? My GirlF took about 3 minutes to embrace the concept (of course she used Irix for 6 years before having to touch windows, so she adopts to this quickly).
I tried having the Sparcstation catch when a motion detector in the bedroom was live after 7AM, but getting up at a proper 10 to old coffee ended that. I know a guy with a pressure mat in front of his bathroom through. Step on it first after sunrise/before noon an the "morning macros" start. That took about 3 minutes of shell script plus cron to touch/rm a file.
What I need is a little Chitty Chitty bang bang type train to get the coffee served, milked and sugared and trolley'd over to me.
I suppose if you use windows, you might need a beefy machine. you need a beefy machine to run notepad.
Mr House is running on my MP3 server/mail server/
internal DNS server/web server.
It handles around 5000 messages/day, streams MP3s and generally just runs.
It's a K5@233 with 48MB of RAM. It cost me $200 a long time ago. It will never die. It's sole purpose was to spit files to the net from a large disk for the other machines. The NeXT didn't cut it (IDE was cheaper:).
Why not the dual CPU 1u under it? Cause the K5 has ISA for the 16 port serial card ($100) and the LCD text console ($80) I have. (and it's quieter than a 1U).
And it's BORED.
I'm likely gonna move it to the soekris (133MHz 486 that's got two wireless and two ethernets) and
get serial via the terminal server. (you DO have a terminal server, right? No? geek-wannabe.)
The code and configs kinda of want a big cleaning, like BigBrother did. Big Sister long wanted "redo" of BB4.
Lots of script components, but it means that when an event happens (motion in garage), I can kick off a script of my own writing without huge API pain.
-=-= -=-=
X10:
not reliable, not ideal. I have a couple lamp modules from 1985 that are fine (replaced a triac in one with one that wasn't crap - that was $3 and 10 minutes of my life).
I don't use x10.com stuff generally (cept for the $4 firecracker).
X10 is a protocol. Developed in the late 70s. It runs over power.
False lights? It's either a neighbor or noise. I had the problem once and put a filter on at the entry of power and never had a bump since.
If you can't make X10 work ok for you, then you're not tall enough. Boot your machine into windows and take the blue pill, hop over to disney.com and note the challenging and cutting edge filmography going on there.
That said, I'd never let it (or any computer) control my heat, or doors without failsafe in place. (heat will alway be between 50 and 75, x10 or computer can control between those. Nobody dies. Basic industrial control rules.
Shoot at X10 as you will, but for the price, I can control 25 lights in my house without ripping into walls, etc. The nearest competition is Lutron's RF stuff ($200 per light switch - but it's reliable RF).
The fantasy? An outlet that spoke IPv6 over SLIP
over RS-485 which could provide control and feedback with strong authentication. For $5/outlet. Let me know when that's available.
-=-= -=-=
So MisterHouse controls/watches the X10.
It talks to my weeder technology
boxes, it talks to my 1-wire stuff, it spews out stuff for my 3com audrey.
It doesn't talk at me nor I to it.
At night, I hit a button, based on that it's got an
idea where I am. It looks at the alarm and might note that a door is open and beep at me. it can't
control the alarm, that's stupid. It can WATCH the sensors though. I hit the button, it gives me 10 minutes and shuts off all the lights that aren't in the bedroom.
Plans? catch the weather (nobody on the www uses a standard form, bastards, it's all pretty and unparseable). If it's gonna be warm, don't bother
turning the heat up at 8AM unless it's really chilly inside. (thermometer that has a "vacation" mode that can be twiddled by a computer).
Main uses? I hit a "watching a movie" button and the lights set, the TV/DVD/VCR go on. Motion outside will turn up the lights (someone coming in
late).
It logs motion on the front porch and the doorbell.
When did UPS come? Oh, someone rang at 3:30. It was raining then, yell at them for leaving a box out in the rain without a signature.
The audrey shows the weather and headlines in the AM in the kitchen.
The temp in a couple rooms is logged (and outside).
The fact that the furnace is on or not it logged.
I can log in (via my phone or a web browser), AUTHENTICATE and view th
Slashdot Mirror
Buy a USB only box and the high end keyboard, trackball and bitpads need to be replaced. That SCSI disk? Now unconnectable. If you're a new customer that's fine, but having accumulated things I liked since 1985 - and not having much selection - he screwed older customers. And he's got a habit of that.
Now on the PLUS side, he created a HUGE market for USB vendors. There were more USB devices introduced in the 6 months after the iMac than their had been in 2 years of Intel boxes having this extra, unnecessary USB port.
Not unrelated: when the Mac came out it was close to unusable at 128K. But it had a huge ROM full of subroutines. What that did, for it's six months, was FORCE software vendors to NOT write their own GUI interfaces, to not use their own menu routines, but to use the stock ones in ROM.
Recall that in the DOS world, to exit Lotus 1-2-3, you hit /q [quit] then "y" [yes, really].
WordPerfect exited with the intuitive
[F7]yy
Every program had some exit routine that was unique and usually required memorization.
The limited Macs meant that every ISV used the menu routines which gave them [APPLE] [FILE] [EDIT] and [FILE] had a [QUIT] item.
In a year, when we had 512k and later 1MB, all the successfull apps could be used with low learning curve, no cheat sheets that said how to quit.
If you knew Macwrite and MacPaint, you could figure out the basics of CricketDraw and later Word 3.01 without training sessions.
The same strategy with USB and bluetooth holds:
Make it more painful for vendors to do their own proprietary wackiness to interface than to follow the design vision offered by Apple. With the costly and weird cable I have from a sprint phone to a computer, I can easily find windows drivers. Ick. Wireless and an open protocol means that Windows and Mac (and linux and freebsd) can play with a lot less pain. And mom can figure out "turn on mac, open address book, put phone near it, push [SYNC]". - the same reason Palm took off and dominated over sharp wizards and psions and 50 other devices. 1) dock. 2) sync button. Done.
Apple may hold a tiny market share, but they hold a HUGE design share.
Since the imac came out, design shifted from industrial and ugly for many PCs, but also microwaves, and phones, and TVs. Look in ANY dorm room and you will see echos of the iMac design.
Now I want an answering machine that will store its messages on my computer's drive. let me get them form the phone or from the computer. Easy(ish) with bluetooth. And I figure that soon (by jan?) every Mac Laptop will have it, ne?
Short range, low cost
That was the bluetooth goal.
My $400 PDA can take a $30 hit for 802.11a and be more useful in meetings and around the work campus for it.
My $40 phone cannot take a $30 parts hit (okay, $10 in mass production lots). It *can* take a $1 hit if that lets me sit 1 meter from my computer and sync the Address Book. And sit in my bag while my earpiece works. And 4M from my stereo while I turn on the DVD and run it around.
Friend's Empeg stereo is great. He's got 40GB of music in it, it pulls it from the car and into our ski house where we use it as the house jukebox. Ethernet, RCA outputs and it slides into its dock in the car. High quality decoder and D/As for its age. Pity they went out of business.
Different market and use from an iPod. Given "garage", and its cost, I'd want 802.11g in it so when we use it, it authenticates itself and quickly resyncs to the GirlFs playlists when she takes the car.
That's its problem - it's not really low powered. The earphones die rather quickly. I'm set to get one of those battery belts that the TV guys wear to power their lights.
Dead?
Like the Internet is dead because Sun isn't trading for 500? Everyone please turn in your connections. Nothing to see here.
I expect that, like any new technology, we'll be seeing more and more bluetooth enabled devices. Keyboards and earphones are one piece (and perhaps useful enough to get it out there en mass).
Other bits include that PDAs need it, phones need it, and it start appearing in other things.
I want my PDA to sit in its dock (for power) and "hear" my BT keyboard/mouse and send out Good Enough video to my TV/Monitor/Flatscreen.
I can reach and say it would be cool if my door could recognize my bluetooth keyfob with a unique strongly authenticated challenge reponse and unlock before I get there.
I'd love to lose 14,000,000 stupid line of site IR devices at home - a low power RF would work there, but BT is way to costly at this point to replace a $0.05 IR circuit.
Not dead, just perhaps a year or 2 past the flash mob attention span of the media:
month 1: NEW TECHNOLOGY! Revolutionary!
month 2: DEVICE STARTING TO ARRIVE
month 6: NOT ENOUGH DEVICE - technology reeling!
month 12: DEAD!
When, in fact, design -> mass production and distribution takes at least a year and that's usually after they've seen it.
Sorry it's not taken off as fast as 802.11b which did fill a vacuum (and didn't take off until Apple made it cheap (airport was 1/4 the price of it's competition at introduction) and really easy to use.
It's not taken off as fast as USB - which languished until Apple dumped ADB in favor of USB with no transition and that event triggered the introduction of USB keyboards, pointers (mouse and trackball, etc) and modems and speakers and disks and ....
"the author of this page"
The author of Unix...
I just hope Caldera-sco goes after him for misuse of their trademark.
I'll bet if they search his computer they find that he's stolen (STOLEN! I say) unix source code from them. C'mon darryl, take him on...
I'm intrigued about what s "special[ly] created packets not destined for any port" looks like?
Certainly there are broadcast and host destined packets that address the stack, but what you're implying is that they send non-TCP packets (feasable when you own the local segment) that "magically" take down a server.
That's not possible with TCP/IP. Or if it is, it represents a brokenness that should be addressed immediately.
Perhaps they send an ARP packet on the local net that tells the host that the router's IP is a different MAC address (that would hold for a 30 second ARP cache timeout).
So U.Fl folks, if you're running an application capable of doing peer to peer file sharing (one might describe most of the TCP application suite as that), run it on some art students' port with a sniffer.
Let them get "taken down" and pass the magic packet to those who write ipf and ipfw and pf.
Me? I'd assume that the admin just logs into their Switch and turns off your port.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
A.C.Clarke
perhaps this is just over the heads of student level knowledge of how networking works. Schools have certainly used that to advantage before.
He wasn't a student, but he worked at a school (he also came up with the ph/qi phone book program).
Then along came a company who wanted to pay him to work on Eudora for commercial porpoises :)
He declared: There will always be a free version. (they said ok)
I won't leave the incredibly flat midwest (they said ok)
He also said other things. Perhaps you could ask him or give him a call.
One might suggest setting salary that is feasable for the experience you have, the skills you bring to the table (including being the most intimate with the code) and keep it realistic.
I gotta say, when I interview someone who's got 1 year of experience and expect to make closer to 6 figures they either have to a whole lot going for them or, if they DO get hired, they're gonna be the first on the layoff catapult.
The boom tainted everybody into thinking they were worth $80k or more when they weren't. Everyone is senior until they get enough experience to realize how much they don't really know.
And yes, you should read Cryptonomicon. (It will be interesting to see if this novel has a less abrubt ending that most of his other 90's books though)
On the other hand, you must be THIS tall ------>
to put a machine on the Internet.
If you can't handle the basics, don't be on it.
At the least, these sites should be behind a NAT box, at best, behind a firewall.
Putting a windows box (or any unsecured box) on the internet directly is irresponsible and wrong.
I'm not letting MS pass on their Hole-Of-The-Week feature; I'm not letting the american spammers pass on their theft of service and hacking that's clearly illegal - I hope they go to jail. Or get caned and sent to jail.
But I'm not going to let off the people who chose to put machines up and let them get hacked.
I'm sorry, we're going to block you, we're going to hold you responsible.
Buy a killer pit-bull on my street and I'm going to blame YOU when my pet gets injured.
The biggest problem has been the total lack of response (aided by the language barrier) and our inability to even REACH the people from whom the spam comes. So if they want to do business, perhaps they'd act as better partners and not be a menace to the Internet.
I've been hired for several months ONLY to make a company's infrastructure strong enough to handle the 60%+ of mail that is spam; to buy servers and software to help stop it; to implement it. What should take two light machines to handle requires 3 DMZ machines and a pair of (redundant) spam scanner machines. 100% of my contract (I don't work cheap) is from their budget to ease the spam pain. How many $100,000 of thousands is EVERY fortune 1000 company paying to slow spam? How many MILLIONS are .gov and .mil and public .edu sites paying of MY TAX DOLLARS to stop spam. So hell, I say shoot the spammer. Perhaps just in a typing hand.
Perhaps they'll start to fear stealing resources from the Chinese.
If it's a 17 year old taking some cash, all the better (but get the payer too).
As far as "Don't use it if you can't buy it", I guess I meant:
Don't use it if you can't afford to pay what it costs.
I'm not particularly "pro-GPL", I prefer the BSD licenses, but each has its place.
By the way, I manage to bank using Mozilla (on Unix and on my Mac OSX box). I play some games on the Mac. If I really want to use Windows for games, I'd have to pay for windows wouldn't I.
And yes, I asked and chose NOT to open a bank account at a bank which required me to use Windows. I even wrote and told them why - I use the Web for banking and that's HTML + HTTP. HTML is well defined. Their site requiring IE is not a web site; it's a microsoft Web site and that's not acceptable. It was a non-trivial amount of money (before buying a house).
I tend to use the DVD player for DVDs and the Mac when I'm on the road. The Mac software is licensed.
If you can't abide by the vendor's license, then don't use the vendors code.
Dude, if you can't abide by the conditions that the authors have set: eg. price and license
THEN DON'T USE THE FREAKING SOFTWARE
I won't go into quality of the software, but I will touch on that fact that YOU CAN DO ALL OF THIS WITHOUT THEIR SOFTWARE.
I read excel spreadsheets, I write lots of documents. I don't use Microsoft software in my life.
I can afford it. I can't stand its LOW LOW quality (been writing milters to block today's virus/worm that our unix and macs won't get but it clogging up our servers.)
You guys have postgresql, mysql, php, all the BSD and linux you can eat. Laptops that can run what our bigass VAX 780s struggled with. Jesus Freaking Christ. There's better software out there for FREE than was available 5 years ago commercially.
And your whining about how you think XP costs too much.
Don't use it if you can't buy it. You have options. Take them.
A sad day...
Otoh, I'm typing this from my yard on a 17" powerbook to a soekris box with 2 ethernets and wireless via IPSec that's the size of the Apple's 80 column card and draws about 20 watts.
SMIME is a fine and lovely and centralizable way to do mail body encryption.
SMTP/TLS is a fine way to do transport encryption/authenication from one hop to another.
Lacking is a way - perhaps a signature header - for an MTA to "know" where a message is from. I'd love to be able to prioritize mail that's perhaps from "known good" domains. I believe IronPort is doing something proprietary along these lines.
Back to DNS:
DNSSEC tries to offer a way to ensure the content of a zone.
It's a good notion.
It's not been implemented well. I don't trust VeriSign, I certainly don't trust JoeBlow registrar. However, I'm willing to trust my domain and that's really what's needed when dealing with subdomains. And most of the meat of my DNS use is in the subdomains - every desktop, every server lives in a subdomain. www, ftp and MX records are in the top level - that's about it.
With BIND 9, I'm delighted that all my zones use notification and IXFR's (tranferring a 40,000 record zone over a DSL is not good without incremental zone transfers - esp in a DHCP heavy environment that can cause regular zone updates).
We can "extend" DNS with DNSSEC (or -alikes) because it's negotiable (like ESMTP is for SMTP). We cannot change how ALL DNS transfers and works by default without GREAT pain (we did that pain ONCE in 1980 going from NCP to TCP).
That was New Years 1980, when NCP died in favor of TCP.
I'd suggest that MORE work has been put into ensuring that IPv6 and IPv4 coexist than into the protocol work itself.
I run IPv6 on a number of machines on a network. they speak 6 to each other.
If the service or machine don't speak 6, IPv4 is used.
So lets all rant and reinvent X-400 - we saw what a success that was.
SMTP does ok. If we want to deny (or accept more) mail based on signature (S/MIME, PGP, whatever), then so be it.
When I get authenticated mail, it goes into my main box. The rest gets to wait in a lower priority box.
It'll work well when VISA gives everyone a personal CERT and everyone sends mail which has proof it's from them.
- If it cannot be worked out, you are considering whether or not you have a future at the company.
No. "Gee, you won't give me a raise (or the raise I want)? I'm disappointed."
There, end of statement. You have nothing more to say. If your boss is too slow to figure that there is an implicit "my resume will be updated", then saying it explicitly won't get you anywhere.
If he can go to his bosses when you give notice for that other job you've been offered that's either [closer to home || pays more || involves scrubbing supermodels] then so be it.
But you may document your goodness and ask for a raise, if you don't get it you simply accept it and move on to your next action, whatever that is.
THEN, you tell your boss that, while you've enjoyed your run here, you've been made a better offer. Bring some boxes so you can clear out.
However! this is when your boss, who really stood to lose nothing before, may push harder for you to get a raise rather than losing you.
This was common practice where I used to work.
You never hung on up recruiters (always be polite) and keep your resume up to date and take a periodic long lunch for an interview.
I friend use to take 2 hrs every Wednesday afternoon and talk to other companies. He had a new boss who dicked around on his expense reports ("you're making me spend 4 hrs of my time trying to get reimbursed for $150 when you bill me out at $200/hr? Are you high?").
When new boss asked where he was going on his Wednesday, he said "job interview." and left. New Boss asked around, learned of the habit and knew that if they weren't a Good Place for this lucrative person to work, he'd leave. When my friend returned (from an interview at a hellish place), his signed and approved expense reports were on his desk.
If you truly get a better offer, by all means take it, but let your company make a counter offer and weigh that.
So Never threaten to leave.
Give notice and threaten not to stay. Unemployment sucks.
Like the Roland UA-5 box which runs fine on old macs (like a 233MHz laptop) and Windows (ick) boxes and has TOSlink in/out, and XLR/RCA/0.25" jack in/out. For ~$150-$200 on ebay.
Apple's on the cutting edge. I'd be more excited if I hadn't been there with old hardware for a couple years.
- it's EXTERNAL to the electrically noisy box
- it was easy to attach to my laptop to record meetings
- It's got optical audio out and in
- It's got a wide array of connections
The two main reasons I got it were to easily record well on a Mac laptop (better quality than the built in, buzzy jacks) and so I could happily start to digitize around a thousand tapes and albums onto a few DVDs in mp3 format (I'd rather carry 15 or 30 DVDs than 500 pounds of albums and tape boxes).(the reason I could justify getting it)
so the computers are ELECTRICALLY isolated from the stereo via the TOSlink.
RCA, Phone jack, coax and optical digital, and XLR (balanced is useful for really long runs to avoid buzz - I've done line level balanced for 200 meters without a problem
The pain is that its not supported by Linux or (more important to me) any BSD. So I run it on an older PPC box running MacOS X and playing MP3s. A little Apache, a little perl and it's all good without using the proprietary iTunes stuff.
But USB is just FINE for audio (96khz sampling isn't enough?).
The whines I hear about needing slots remind me too much of John Dvorak reviewing the Mac IIci back when and complaining it only had three slots. He listed what was in his PC taking many slots.
Someone wrote in and listed that he had similar:
A mouse and a trackball AND a keyboard AND a stylus that all worked concurrently via ADB (shall we call that USB 0.1?)
An external drive, tape drive, scanner via SCSI.
A modem and an AppleTalk link via the serial ports.
He wasn't using his 3 slots yet.
So USB and firewire: yeah, I'd run IP/firewire. I'd run RAID boxes and take drives over Firewire or USB2. I'd run audio over USB. AGP for my video.
I'll save my PCI slot for something... Right now I've got fiber gigabit cards in two boxes. And an SSL accerator, but mostly that's just storage cause they were free. (3 ethernet and dual SCSI on the MoBo).
So show your wife you love her and get her a laptop with GigE :)
Run a cable to the computer.
Wow! That's really ugly. Here honey, let me run some outlets in the wall for you. I know I don't have to, but it's because I love you.
Otoh, maybe I started out on easier footing: two of the NeXTs, the Alpha and the 16port switch ARE hers. She's accepted that two machine room racks are the best solution for the computers and she understands that the best way to maintain several machines is through the 16 port terminal server. The 110 punchdown block for the patch panel is her idea. Hell, she's happy to log into the house BSD box and type
"heyu turn den lights on"
when the X10 control is out of sight.
But as an ex-architect (the real kind, not the computer "systems decorator" kind), she despises ugly. The CAT5 across the room at the rental was barely tolerated, but the wireless was welcomed.
"ripping holes in walls" is TEMPORARY, as a general goal. Making walls not have holes is the long term goal. Perhaps if you start small, you can demonstrate that after a lot of dusty drywall, you end up with a pretty wall again. And that your patch panel need not be 3 feet up in the middle of the dining room with wires hanging out.
Now you want to put 6! amplifiers inside the computer. And then run it to amplifiers at line level (you'll want balanced, 3 pin lines) to amplifiers to the speakers (or are you running long runs of TOSlink optical cable
This is hardly a new thing to tackle. Folks like smarthome and others carry multichannel amps with remote controls.
You are prepared to drop a couple grand on amplfiers and a couple more on controls as well as on the speakers, right? (better this than spending money on television and cable and whatnot).
But I'm looking at... computer.
Wireless or Ethernet.
Streaming.
slimp3 can turn files into sound in the room you're in.
No audio noise as you run line level 40-60' to local amps.
No specialized amps, you can attach it to that Kenwood your dad still has in the garage for your garage. You can attach another to the nice amp in the entertainment room.
You'd think so, but then you'd be showing that you hadn't followed Steve's plans when he was at NeXT ("for only $10,000 - we'll sell them to students!").
Just went with the nephew and got a Compaq Laptop for Linux and Windows-Gaming use for $1300. Same specs of machine for Apple was around $2300. You convince a 21 year old blowing his hard earned cash on a laptop that he should spend an extra $1k to run Apple.
Engine doesn't matter; it's the gearing.
See, my 3(!) cylinder bike goes 70 at 5000RPM.
In second gear.
Of 6.
Where 5000 RPM is still less that 50% of the redline.
Full up: 3cylinders, top gear, 160 MPH at redline.
And 50MPG for normal calif highway driving (70ish-80ish,
not that I'd go that fast).
You could buy a BMW (Bavarian Made Winnebago) for $17k,
or you could get an SV650 from Suzuki for only $6k.
--- --- ---
Relevantly, Apple sort of notoriously runs slow bus speeds.
They've done it forever. Since the Mac II series, they'd introduce
at 68030 at 30MHz 2 months after Motorola was shipping 040's.
Quite irksome.
They put out machines with FSB's half the speed of PCs. The
PPC chips are quite nice. It was the clones that drove prices
down and performance up. So they died.
Apple seems to be forgetting that the public's whims change
and that as they are perceived as a poor value, people move away.
I just went and got a gaming laptop with the nephew (note that
I'm writing this on a 14" black powerbook next to the GirlF's
new 17PB and down stairs is a working Mac Classic II and Mac
CI, running OpenBSD and NetBSD respectively. They are
on top of the Alpha's, a NeXT and a pair of Apple ][s. I really like
NeXTStep. I can't figure out why my 33MHz NeXT isn't much
slower than a 400MHz RISC machine. Oh, Aqua.).
So the boy wanted an Intel box for travel and games.
We got him a $1300 Compaq - 16", ~3GHz CPU, 512MB RAM.
40GB disk. 802.11g.
Could get 2 of these for the price of a Mac that runs at about
80% the speed.
Me? I figure the black PB's gonna die and all I need is
a nice Unix box. $2600 gets me a computer and leaves
me with $1300 to blow on other toys.
When *I* have to maintain the rel's boxes, I make them
use Macs. But it's a long hard sell for laptops. The company
won't touch them because of the price. Status seekers like
the CEO can get them, but that's about it.
APPLE:
Cheap (cancelled)
Fast (waiting for IBMotorola on that)
Solid Tech support (we'll get back to you on that).
No, but the machine past your Airport does.
Run WEPless and use IPSec to the house server.
VaporSec is a pretty GUI to setup racoon and IPSec on your OS X box. (see also netbsd ipsec docs; be neat if apple's userland utilities would keep up with BSDs post 2000 - FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x userlands are far more advanced).
If WEP is good enough then just turn it off. The WEP emporer is naked. Hell, just print out your squid logs and put them up on your door and your website. Unless you're spinning new keys every couple thousand packets, you're easy to watch. It's not even hard to break - mom can bring up a stumbler program and just leave it on for a couple hours.
802.x is ethernet. So now you want the device (switch, dimmer, etc) to have an IP stack. And speak wireless. From inside a ground metal box (aka Faraday cage).
Wireless could work. Wired would be a nice option too (talk to these over a chain of twisted pair ala RS485). Without the AC in the way, I could talk faster. A redesign (x11? :), might bring it out of the 70's and itno the capabilities of chips we have now. (faster, reliable, two way on an ASIC)
But it needs to cost less than $2 in volume.
Re: linking different phases, basically a capacitor will do what you want. Do it pretty for $5. It works.
I tried having the Sparcstation catch when a motion detector in the bedroom was live after 7AM, but getting up at a proper 10 to old coffee ended that. I know a guy with a pressure mat in front of his bathroom through. Step on it first after sunrise/before noon an the "morning macros" start. That took about 3 minutes of shell script plus cron to touch/rm a file.
What I need is a little Chitty Chitty bang bang type train to get the coffee served, milked and sugared and trolley'd over to me.
When is Mr Roger's train hitting EBay?
Mr House is running on my MP3 server/mail server/ internal DNS server/web server.
It handles around 5000 messages/day, streams MP3s and generally just runs.
It's a K5@233 with 48MB of RAM. It cost me $200 a long time ago. It will never die. It's sole purpose was to spit files to the net from a large disk for the other machines. The NeXT didn't cut it (IDE was cheaper :).
Why not the dual CPU 1u under it? Cause the K5 has ISA for the 16 port serial card ($100) and the LCD text console ($80) I have. (and it's quieter than a 1U).
And it's BORED.
I'm likely gonna move it to the soekris (133MHz 486 that's got two wireless and two ethernets) and get serial via the terminal server. (you DO have a terminal server, right? No? geek-wannabe.)
The code and configs kinda of want a big cleaning, like BigBrother did. Big Sister long wanted "redo" of BB4. Lots of script components, but it means that when an event happens (motion in garage), I can kick off a script of my own writing without huge API pain.
-=-= -=-=
X10:
not reliable, not ideal. I have a couple lamp modules from 1985 that are fine (replaced a triac in one with one that wasn't crap - that was $3 and 10 minutes of my life).
I don't use x10.com stuff generally (cept for the $4 firecracker).
X10 is a protocol. Developed in the late 70s. It runs over power.
False lights? It's either a neighbor or noise. I had the problem once and put a filter on at the entry of power and never had a bump since.
If you can't make X10 work ok for you, then you're not tall enough. Boot your machine into windows and take the blue pill, hop over to disney.com and note the challenging and cutting edge filmography going on there.
That said, I'd never let it (or any computer) control my heat, or doors without failsafe in place. (heat will alway be between 50 and 75, x10 or computer can control between those. Nobody dies. Basic industrial control rules.
Shoot at X10 as you will, but for the price, I can control 25 lights in my house without ripping into walls, etc. The nearest competition is Lutron's RF stuff ($200 per light switch - but it's reliable RF).
The fantasy? An outlet that spoke IPv6 over SLIP over RS-485 which could provide control and feedback with strong authentication. For $5/outlet. Let me know when that's available.
-=-= -=-=
So MisterHouse controls/watches the X10.
It talks to my weeder technology boxes, it talks to my 1-wire stuff, it spews out stuff for my 3com audrey.
It doesn't talk at me nor I to it.
At night, I hit a button, based on that it's got an idea where I am. It looks at the alarm and might note that a door is open and beep at me. it can't control the alarm, that's stupid. It can WATCH the sensors though. I hit the button, it gives me 10 minutes and shuts off all the lights that aren't in the bedroom.
Plans? catch the weather (nobody on the www uses a standard form, bastards, it's all pretty and unparseable). If it's gonna be warm, don't bother turning the heat up at 8AM unless it's really chilly inside. (thermometer that has a "vacation" mode that can be twiddled by a computer).
Main uses? I hit a "watching a movie" button and the lights set, the TV/DVD/VCR go on. Motion outside will turn up the lights (someone coming in late).
When did UPS come? Oh, someone rang at 3:30. It was raining then, yell at them for leaving a box out in the rain without a signature.