The history of Home Automation is littered with the bodies of business that have come in and then left when they realized it's a very difficult place to make money, unless you just carve out the high-end systems used by rich people. If you are building a McMansion type home there are always options available. If you are a middle class home owner looking for a good way to retrofit, no one wants to talk to you. So you end up going down the path of tried-and-true technologies like X10 that have spotty vendor support but a strong hobbyist community.
I'm not saying X10 is perfect, but it does let me control my sprinklers from a crontab file. Any system that can't do that is beneath my contempt.:)
Take a look over here, this is what the industry looks like...
Carl Sagan wrote a lot about the Oort cloud. It would be nice if we could get first-hand evidence of it. Unfortunately the nuclear power supply on Voyager will run out long before anything like that would be remotely possible.
I think the interesting question is, what would constitute evidence of the Oort cloud's actual existence? Every textbook and Wikipedia article I've read still describes it as a theoretical construct.
But yeah, it took us 40 years to get out to 130 AU, and astronomer's talk about comet dust being out as far as 50,000 AU. A humbling thought to be sure.
I'm sorry, when they taught me Earth Science they mentioned that stratification was caused by sedimentary rock, laid down by the action of water over millions of years.
I think the way it was re-written was much better. It's the only episode where McCoy got to kick ass, even if it was because of the Cordrazine. The original script was just a Redshirt dealing drugs, and Ellison even wrote in a cheesy 60's "trip scene" showing a drug hallucination from the crewman's perspective. Completely inappropriate for 60's prime time TV, when the Doors couldn't even sing the word "higher" on Ed Sullivan.
Because he understood the nature of technology fetishism, and he wanted to channel that in the direction of things that would turn a profit for his company.
I'm surprised no one's commented on the irony of the fact that, if someone were to submit an LCARS interface for the iPad, Apple would disallow it because they forbid developers from implementing desktop environments or any sort of alternate UI.
This is a pity, because that's probably the only reason I'd buy one.
A quick look tells me that this is not hobbyist friendly at all. You have to buy a Raven USB stick, but there is no API support, you have to roll your own code to make sense of the 802.15.4 protocol stream before you can even begin to work on the level of devices or events.
Like I said, tell me how to turn my outside lights on at sunset in the Zigbee world. How to I address devices and send commands to them? How do I get status back. X-10 has a flaw in that it's hard to get command confirmation and device state back. So we learn to live with that. But I'm not seeing a compelling case for Zigbee being any better.
Bottom line is the people who write for CE Pro and similar magazines have their own slant on things. And it's a very different slant from Popular Electronics or BYTE or any of the publications that used to show you how to unravel things and make them work your way. And that's what makes HA fun for a lot of people.
The nice thing about X-10 is that the protocol is simple and there are lots of devices that work with it, most of which are relatively inexpensive. It's also friendly to the home hobbyist, and the hacker, since you can buy interfaces that will hook up to your PC via a serial port and write your own scripts, or download free software like Misterhouse.
If I can't turn my outside lights on at sunset via a script, then turn that script into a cron job, don't even talk to me about it. I'll write the interface myself, just give me a clean API I can code to.
We hate it when Microsoft or Apple take the attitude of "No, we won't open up our API and play nice with the open source crowd. At best we will make you join our developer program and sign an NDA. At worst we won't talk to you at all."
When the home automation vendors do it, they're no better. They don't deserve our respect or our help.
The author glosses over the following point: We have no way to prove or disprove the idea that an intelligent non-human species would think in terms that would make technology or communication possible in the first place.
Just as we only have one example of a life-supporting planet, we only have one example of an intelligent species. There is a tacit assumption in science fiction that other species would stumble onto language, mathematics, and advanced technology, even if their brains were organized in a manner totally different from ours. And this assumption in turn seems to taint the scientific discourse on this subject.
Overall I liked the article, but I still think there's too much that we just don't know. I really liked "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem because this is the exact thing he was on about, that as we search for "intelligent life in the universe" what we are really looking for are mirrors of ourselves, and we just need to get past that, and be more willing to stare into the unknown and admit that we don't know what we don't know.
Because a lot of people were waiting in the 90's for one of the Unix vendors (mostly Sun but also SGI and SCO) to stop ignoring the home user / hobbyist market, so when the first usable Linux distros started to come out it was like, "Thanks, it's about f*cking time."
Also, the overall "feel" of Linux reflects the fact that there is no vendor telling you what you can or can't do with it. It lets you be in control. There's nothing in the user experience that reflects corporate arrogance. It lets *me* be arrogant.:)
Did you see Red Planet? You really think they'll use airbags on a landing craft with real people in it? That was the best part of the whole movie, showing how f*cked up the airbags were for a craft of non-trival mass.
It would have been an interesting article if it had gotten into how this "cryogenic" propulsion system will actually work. The biggest problems are (1) fuel for the outbound and return trip (2) how to land the craft that has humans in it and (3) how to get off the planet again. Mars' atmosphere is too thin for parachutes, and the gravity is too heavy to use conventional chemical thrusters to brake the landing all the way down (which isn't possible anyways due to the mass of the fuel you would have to haul all the way from Earth with those "cryogenic" thrusters).
No one has an answer to this question yet. There may not be one. It's not just engineering, there are basic scientific barriers. This is why SF always invents Warp Drive or some other back door - the constraints imposed by Newton's Third Law and the limitations of chemical propulsion make this whole thing a big pain in the ass. Funny how all these articles never bother to review the basics before launching into all the speculation.
Be sure to read the "Final Thoughts" section at the bottom.
Basically he nails the point that TPM should have adhered to origin story conventions.
To sum up:
- Episode 1 should have been an origin story that ended with the start of the Clone War. - Episode 2 should have focused on the Clone War itself, and the transformation of Anakin to Vader should have been well underway at the end. - Episode 3 should have kept the "Rise of the Empire" theme but given us more of Anakin as Vader.
- Does not rely on sending signals thru the electrical system and all the problems that go along with that.
- Each unit has a hard-coded address so you don't have to mess with house and unit codes.
Reasons X10 is better:
- Mature technology, all that gotchas and quirks are well-known.
- Once you understand how house and unit codes work it's very easy to set up room control just by ganging multiple devices onto the same code. Using different house codes to "zone off" your house is convenient and slick.
- The Insteon Powerlinc USB contoller sends signals thru the power lines to the nearest repeater, so your wiring is still a potential point of failure.
- Insteon software support still sucks. For the Insteon Powerlinc serial controller there is no software support at all.
- The internal IDE and API for the Insteon controller is hideously complex and poorly documented since it's a moving target. You have to master this thing called a "Salad IDE" and it just seems like massive overkill if all you want to do is simple home hobbyist stuff, especially if you want to do it from Linux.
- More hardware available for X10. Try finding hardware for Insteon other than lighting control (you want to control your thermostat or your garage door or add a motion sensor to your lighting system). So what you end up with is a hybrid Insteon and X10 environment no matter what you do. So then you have to wrestle with Insteon, X10 and the Insteon-X10 integration issues. So now you have 3 problems where with X10 you only had one.
Overall I think Insteon has a lot of promise, but I'd wait another year or two for it to be more stable and for the variety of switches and the software support to improve. If you think Insteon will "just work" and you won't have to mess with it like you do with X10 you may be disappointed.
You can control your lighting and heating without getting out of bed.
You can turn the outside lights on at sunset and off at sunrise.
You can "gang" all the lights in your room together so that the main switch by the door turns everything on and off.
If you are hacking at your computer and have your head phones on so you can't hear the door bell, you can have your house tell your computer to pop up a message on your screen. If you don't want to wait for someone to ring the door bell (i.e., UPS) you can put in a motion sensor to do the same thing.
Slashdot Mirror
KanbanFlow is nice but it requires you to entrust your data to a "cloud" solution and many people reject that idea on principle.
There is a good Personal KanBan app out there that's 100% free and shows promise:
http://dmitryivanov.net/personal-kanban-app/
It's definitely not a new idea...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FInoU0wzgzY
Does he know about this guy?
http://jvde.us/
The history of Home Automation is littered with the bodies of business that have come in and then left when they realized it's a very difficult place to make money, unless you just carve out the high-end systems used by rich people. If you are building a McMansion type home there are always options available. If you are a middle class home owner looking for a good way to retrofit, no one wants to talk to you. So you end up going down the path of tried-and-true technologies like X10 that have spotty vendor support but a strong hobbyist community.
I'm not saying X10 is perfect, but it does let me control my sprinklers from a crontab file. Any system that can't do that is beneath my contempt. :)
Take a look over here, this is what the industry looks like...
http://www.cepro.com/
I find the author's lack of Star Wars knowledge disturbing...
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Wars_Droids:_Rebellion_3
Carl Sagan wrote a lot about the Oort cloud. It would be nice if we could get first-hand evidence of it. Unfortunately the nuclear power supply on Voyager will run out long before anything like that would be remotely possible.
I think the interesting question is, what would constitute evidence of the Oort cloud's actual existence? Every textbook and Wikipedia article I've read still describes it as a theoretical construct.
But yeah, it took us 40 years to get out to 130 AU, and astronomer's talk about comet dust being out as far as 50,000 AU. A humbling thought to be sure.
How do you explain this without water?
http://i.space.com/images/i/20995/wS4/mount-sharp-1600.jpg?1346122345
I think the way it was re-written was much better. It's the only episode where McCoy got to kick ass, even if it was because of the Cordrazine. The original script was just a Redshirt dealing drugs, and Ellison even wrote in a cheesy 60's "trip scene" showing a drug hallucination from the crewman's perspective. Completely inappropriate for 60's prime time TV, when the Doors couldn't even sing the word "higher" on Ed Sullivan.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/stockmarket/
Unfortunately you can't stream it anywhere.
But the BBC adapted it with re-recorded narration, and it's right over here.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4auzn4bK1bM
Remember, this was all stuff we knew about in the late 90's.
The only interesting question is, did we fail to learn the lessons from LTCM, or did we learn the wrong ones?
Move along, nothing to see here...
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2010/04/apple-scratch-app/
This is a pity, because that's probably the only reason I'd buy one.
Here, take a look... http://www.lcarsdeveloper.com/
This web site is interesting...
www.freaklabs.org
A quick look tells me that this is not hobbyist friendly at all. You have to buy a Raven USB stick, but there is no API support, you have to roll your own code to make sense of the 802.15.4 protocol stream before you can even begin to work on the level of devices or events.
Like I said, tell me how to turn my outside lights on at sunset in the Zigbee world. How to I address devices and send commands to them? How do I get status back. X-10 has a flaw in that it's hard to get command confirmation and device state back. So we learn to live with that. But I'm not seeing a compelling case for Zigbee being any better.
Bottom line is the people who write for CE Pro and similar magazines have their own slant on things. And it's a very different slant from Popular Electronics or BYTE or any of the publications that used to show you how to unravel things and make them work your way. And that's what makes HA fun for a lot of people.
The nice thing about X-10 is that the protocol is simple and there are lots of devices that work with it, most of which are relatively inexpensive. It's also friendly to the home hobbyist, and the hacker, since you can buy interfaces that will hook up to your PC via a serial port and write your own scripts, or download free software like Misterhouse.
If I can't turn my outside lights on at sunset via a script, then turn that script into a cron job, don't even talk to me about it. I'll write the interface myself, just give me a clean API I can code to.
We hate it when Microsoft or Apple take the attitude of "No, we won't open up our API and play nice with the open source crowd. At best we will make you join our developer program and sign an NDA. At worst we won't talk to you at all."
When the home automation vendors do it, they're no better. They don't deserve our respect or our help.
China‘s Andy Rooney Has Some Funny Opinions...
The author glosses over the following point: We have no way to prove or disprove the idea that an intelligent non-human species would think in terms that would make technology or communication possible in the first place.
Just as we only have one example of a life-supporting planet, we only have one example of an intelligent species. There is a tacit assumption in science fiction that other species would stumble onto language, mathematics, and advanced technology, even if their brains were organized in a manner totally different from ours. And this assumption in turn seems to taint the scientific discourse on this subject.
Overall I liked the article, but I still think there's too much that we just don't know. I really liked "Solaris" by Stanislaw Lem because this is the exact thing he was on about, that as we search for "intelligent life in the universe" what we are really looking for are mirrors of ourselves, and we just need to get past that, and be more willing to stare into the unknown and admit that we don't know what we don't know.
There is a reason IBM stopped being perceived as evil. They have a culture of CEO succession.
I know it's more complicated than that but that's the gist of it.
Once Microsoft moves beyond the personality cult of Bill and Steve, things will change.
But not before then.
The Process Explorer tool helps a lot with this...
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896653.aspx
Because a lot of people were waiting in the 90's for one of the Unix vendors (mostly Sun but also SGI and SCO) to stop ignoring the home user / hobbyist market, so when the first usable Linux distros started to come out it was like, "Thanks, it's about f*cking time."
:)
Also, the overall "feel" of Linux reflects the fact that there is no vendor telling you what you can or can't do with it. It lets you be in control. There's nothing in the user experience that reflects corporate arrogance. It lets *me* be arrogant.
Did you see Red Planet? You really think they'll use airbags on a landing craft with real people in it? That was the best part of the whole movie, showing how f*cked up the airbags were for a craft of non-trival mass.
It would have been an interesting article if it had gotten into how this "cryogenic" propulsion system will actually work. The biggest problems are (1) fuel for the outbound and return trip (2) how to land the craft that has humans in it and (3) how to get off the planet again. Mars' atmosphere is too thin for parachutes, and the gravity is too heavy to use conventional chemical thrusters to brake the landing all the way down (which isn't possible anyways due to the mass of the fuel you would have to haul all the way from Earth with those "cryogenic" thrusters).
No one has an answer to this question yet. There may not be one. It's not just engineering, there are basic scientific barriers. This is why SF always invents Warp Drive or some other back door - the constraints imposed by Newton's Third Law and the limitations of chemical propulsion make this whole thing a big pain in the ass. Funny how all these articles never bother to review the basics before launching into all the speculation.
The fact that 1/2 of Phantom Menace was either the set-up for the pod race or the pod race itself was a huge miscalculation.
The other biggie was off-loading the Clone War to a cartoon series.
My favorite review was from, of all places, a religious web site called decentfilms.com.
Here's the link: http://decentfilms.com/sections/reviews/starwars1.html
Be sure to read the "Final Thoughts" section at the bottom.
Basically he nails the point that TPM should have adhered to origin story conventions.
To sum up:
- Episode 1 should have been an origin story that ended with the start of the Clone War.
- Episode 2 should have focused on the Clone War itself, and the transformation of Anakin to Vader should have been well underway at the end.
- Episode 3 should have kept the "Rise of the Empire" theme but given us more of Anakin as Vader.
This guy was really the first nerd in space...
:)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harrison_Schmitt
He was a geologist from Cal Tech who got to check out lunar geology
up close up close and personal on the Apollo 17 mission.
That's *very* nerdy, in a *very* cool kind of way.
Reasons Insteon is better:
- Does not rely on sending signals thru the electrical system and all
the problems that go along with that.
- Each unit has a hard-coded address so you don't have to mess with
house and unit codes.
Reasons X10 is better:
- Mature technology, all that gotchas and quirks are well-known.
- Once you understand how house and unit codes work it's very easy to
set up room control just by ganging multiple devices onto the same
code. Using different house codes to "zone off" your house is
convenient and slick.
- The Insteon Powerlinc USB contoller sends signals thru the power
lines to the nearest repeater, so your wiring is still a potential
point of failure.
- Insteon software support still sucks. For the Insteon Powerlinc
serial controller there is no software support at all.
- The internal IDE and API for the Insteon controller is hideously
complex and poorly documented since it's a moving target. You have to
master this thing called a "Salad IDE" and it just seems like massive
overkill if all you want to do is simple home hobbyist stuff,
especially if you want to do it from Linux.
- More hardware available for X10. Try finding hardware for Insteon other
than lighting control (you want to control your thermostat or your garage
door or add a motion sensor to your lighting system). So what you end
up with is a hybrid Insteon and X10 environment no matter what you do.
So then you have to wrestle with Insteon, X10 and the Insteon-X10
integration issues. So now you have 3 problems where with X10 you
only had one.
Overall I think Insteon has a lot of promise, but I'd wait another
year or two for it to be more stable and for the variety of switches
and the software support to improve. If you think Insteon will "just
work" and you won't have to mess with it like you do with X10 you may
be disappointed.
You can control your lighting and heating without getting out of bed.
You can turn the outside lights on at sunset and off at sunrise.
You can "gang" all the lights in your room together so that the main
switch by the door turns everything on and off.
If you are hacking at your computer and have your head phones on so you
can't hear the door bell, you can have your house tell your computer to
pop up a message on your screen. If you don't want to wait for someone
to ring the door bell (i.e., UPS) you can put in a motion sensor to do
the same thing.