Actually, almost none of my X10 hardware came from X10 The Company. X10 The Company does make total crap.
The X10 protocol has its place, but it has severe problems at the protocol level. You need much more than just status responses to fix it, and with the low bandwidth, those status responses alone can render the protocol unusable for many things.
I didn't list any because the main contenders have already been listed in the other comments. For my money, I'd go with 1-wire. There are also radio-based solutions that use Zigbee, which I don't think I've seen mentioned.
I think X10 and their peers are offering a turnkey approximation of what I have, but that is very difficult to do.
Oh, indeed! But the key is "and their peers". X10 is the least reliable option amongst its peers. It can, nonetheless, be a good choice in the right circumstances, but for whole-house automation in a place you own, X10 is probably the wrong one.
You can either automate your home the way you want to and use the best tool for the job, or you can bash your head against the wall and try to use open source stuff that pales in comparison.
That's interesting, because I used open source HA software for the simple reason that it met my requirements much better than any commercial software that I could find. I would have said that the commercial stuff "pales in comparison" and then some.
I guess it just goes to show that no piece of software meets everybody's needs.
Cool stuff, and when I buy a house I'm going to run the full gamut with these things.
I wouldn't do that. If you own your house, you can do much, much better than X10.
The great thing about X10 is that it's relatively cheap, and can be retrofitted into existing houses easily.
In almost every other respect, X10 kinda sucks. I don't say this lightly, and it is possible to do cool things with X10, but there are really severe limitations.
I used X10 to fully automate my apartment a couple of years ago. It was quite sweet -- my apartment would send me a text if any emergency situation happened, it would run security cameras, turn lights on and off automatically when people were in rooms, the whole deal. I ran it with a linux box and misterhouse.
I still use X10 now, to automate party lights. My computer turns different effects on and off at preset times during the music. This is using linux, with xmms and a custom plugin to run X10 as the audio player.
So my experience is fairly deep. Here are the problems with X10: slow transmission speed (about.8 secs per command). No error detection/control, so commands can and do get lost and misinterpreted, and if you have multiple sources of commands (motion sensors, etc.) that transmit simultaneously, the collision causes havoc.
There are other solutions that are much better, if you don't mind more installation effort and/or more expense.
We socially lazy people are good at programming because we have lots and lots of free time that the regular folks spend being sociable.
I think this is the largest truth of it. Why are we good at things technological? Because we're so interested in it that we've spent an enormous amount of time and effort on it. Time and effort that had to come at the expense of neglecting other activities.
Also, we tend to be a bit elitist in attitude and relish all things that set us apart. So we probably think we're weirder than we really are.
Also also, people are just weird. I've never known a normal person in my entire life.
I don't wonder why she never reported it to the police: its' because this entire episode, including her and her complaint, is a fake. The news story itself is the actual marketing campaign for Toyota (and Saatchi & Saatchi), not the events it relates. Why else would the marketing company put an actual sales blurb into the article?
It's a reverse psych-out, and we're the ones they're trying to punk
The arrangement of the keyboard/touchpad they showed is where they lost me. Too much desk space taken up, and I'll end up resting my wrists on the touchpad, and I'll have to type with my hands too far forward.
This seems like a tough problem. The best solution I can think of is to use the touchpad as the keyboard as well, with soft keys. But then I won't have a real keyboard -- and I love having a real keyboard.
With all due respect to Sir Berners-Lee, I think he's fibbing. If, indeed, it "seemed like a good idea at the time," then he had some purpose in mind when he came up with them. I don't for a minute believe that he just randomly decided to drop some punctuation in because, hell, why not?
I think his purpose might have been embarrassingly dumb and he's covering it up.
You don't have to publish or register anything for a copyright. You can stick in a drawer somewhere if you wanted and you would still have protection.
Yes, you are correct. My error. Nonetheless, it still isn't a copyright issue in this case.
Every executable binary program on earth is basically one giant number.
True, but not material. Any creative work can be expressed as numbers, but that doesn't make all numbers creative works. In this case, the key is not a creative work -- it's just a number derived from a mathematical algorithm. It is not an expression of any creative work.
And an even weaker position for TI. You can legally publish instructions for very nearly anything, even very illegal activities such as building nuclear bombs, manufacturing controlled substances, murdering people, etc. The first amendment gives us amazingly broad rights.
You can certainly publish instructions for hacking TI's calculators without violating anything.
Not flame, just point out that you're wrong according to established law. Courts have clearly ruled a number of times that you can do whatever you want to equipment you legally own. Courts have even ruled that you can reverse-engineer software.
TI might not like it, but tough cookies. It's not their device once you've purchased it.
It's really hard for me to see how TI has a case under the DMCA at all. They're claiming the anti-circumvention clause, but it doesn't seem to apply here.
The anti-circumvention clause makes it a violation to circumvent copy protection -- but what the hobbyists are circumventing in not copy protection, it's a validation key. Without the key, you can still read and copy the existing OS without a hitch. The key is needed to put you own intellectual property on the device, no to copy theirs.
The key itself was never published by TI, and as far as I can tell was never registered with the copyright office, so copyright doesn't apply to that (even if it can apply to a number, which I doubt.)
So where's the copyright violation? this looks like a criminal (bad faith) abuse of the DMCA to me.
It's not like they let people load apps directly from anywhere, propagating who-knows-what.
But that's exactly what they should do.
They have their walled garden, so that normal people can play in their controlled environment. So that's already covered.
Let us more sophisticated users & developers out of that garden completely. Let us skin our knees, pee on the electric fence, and shoot ourselves in the tootsies. That's what we want, we're taking the risk, so why not?
If you're worried about virii, well, don't worry. They'll happen regardless of how open or closed Palm is.
"Free Software" misses the point. Being able to get the software for *free* is of little use if people that receive it are not able to modify it, release the modified versions, use it for any purpose, and freely copy it.
Ummm... You do realize that "free software" does not refer to its price tag (or lack of one), right? It refers to being able to "modify it, release the modified versions, use it for any purpose, and freely copy it."
Free software can (and some does) cost real money.
Isn't it possible that Microsoft will slowly see benefit from releasing source code?
I think a big part of Stallman's point was that CodePlex is going to muddy the open source waters, and this question appears to be an example of it.
Open source is more than just letting people look at the source code. Microsoft can harm OS by geting people to think it's not.
Also, open source != free software, and -- more importantly -- MS will confuse things by trying to make out like they're equivalent. Free software is the important bit. Open source is one part of that.
In the bigger picture, Microsoft has repeatedly shown that it cannot be trusted. In the past, it has looked like it might be getting a bit of enlightenment, only to have it turn out that the goal was to coopt and subvert. WIth that track record, I'm not going to trust them an inch until they've established a reasonably different track record.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually it's a bad idea to buy it from anyone that is not 100% on your side.
True. Also, history teaches us that today's 100% ally can easily become tomorrow's 100% enemy.
There must be a nontrivial market consisting of people like me who don't care about support as much as they care about functionality.
The Maemo looks good. It's the first smartphone that I'm actually excited about!
Actually, almost none of my X10 hardware came from X10 The Company. X10 The Company does make total crap.
The X10 protocol has its place, but it has severe problems at the protocol level. You need much more than just status responses to fix it, and with the low bandwidth, those status responses alone can render the protocol unusable for many things.
I didn't list any because the main contenders have already been listed in the other comments. For my money, I'd go with 1-wire. There are also radio-based solutions that use Zigbee, which I don't think I've seen mentioned.
I think X10 and their peers are offering a turnkey approximation of what I have, but that is very difficult to do.
Oh, indeed! But the key is "and their peers". X10 is the least reliable option amongst its peers. It can, nonetheless, be a good choice in the right circumstances, but for whole-house automation in a place you own, X10 is probably the wrong one.
You can either automate your home the way you want to and use the best tool for the job, or you can bash your head against the wall and try to use open source stuff that pales in comparison.
That's interesting, because I used open source HA software for the simple reason that it met my requirements much better than any commercial software that I could find. I would have said that the commercial stuff "pales in comparison" and then some.
I guess it just goes to show that no piece of software meets everybody's needs.
Cool stuff, and when I buy a house I'm going to run the full gamut with these things.
I wouldn't do that. If you own your house, you can do much, much better than X10.
The great thing about X10 is that it's relatively cheap, and can be retrofitted into existing houses easily.
In almost every other respect, X10 kinda sucks. I don't say this lightly, and it is possible to do cool things with X10, but there are really severe limitations.
I used X10 to fully automate my apartment a couple of years ago. It was quite sweet -- my apartment would send me a text if any emergency situation happened, it would run security cameras, turn lights on and off automatically when people were in rooms, the whole deal. I ran it with a linux box and misterhouse.
I still use X10 now, to automate party lights. My computer turns different effects on and off at preset times during the music. This is using linux, with xmms and a custom plugin to run X10 as the audio player.
So my experience is fairly deep. Here are the problems with X10: slow transmission speed (about .8 secs per command). No error detection/control, so commands can and do get lost and misinterpreted, and if you have multiple sources of commands (motion sensors, etc.) that transmit simultaneously, the collision causes havoc.
There are other solutions that are much better, if you don't mind more installation effort and/or more expense.
That reminds me of something I told my daughter when she was young. She was upset because some schoolkids called her weird. We had this talk:
"What's the opposite of weird?"
"Normal."
"What's normal?"
"How most people are."
"In other words, average, right?"
"Yeah."
"Who wants to be average?"
We socially lazy people are good at programming because we have lots and lots of free time that the regular folks spend being sociable.
I think this is the largest truth of it. Why are we good at things technological? Because we're so interested in it that we've spent an enormous amount of time and effort on it. Time and effort that had to come at the expense of neglecting other activities.
Also, we tend to be a bit elitist in attitude and relish all things that set us apart. So we probably think we're weirder than we really are.
Also also, people are just weird. I've never known a normal person in my entire life.
I don't wonder why she never reported it to the police: its' because this entire episode, including her and her complaint, is a fake. The news story itself is the actual marketing campaign for Toyota (and Saatchi & Saatchi), not the events it relates. Why else would the marketing company put an actual sales blurb into the article?
It's a reverse psych-out, and we're the ones they're trying to punk
I only use one monitor. But then, you don't know me, so that doesn't count.
That's a fantastic solution. Maybe a panel along the top of the keyboard, too, for more involved window manipulation.
The arrangement of the keyboard/touchpad they showed is where they lost me. Too much desk space taken up, and I'll end up resting my wrists on the touchpad, and I'll have to type with my hands too far forward.
This seems like a tough problem. The best solution I can think of is to use the touchpad as the keyboard as well, with soft keys. But then I won't have a real keyboard -- and I love having a real keyboard.
With all due respect to Sir Berners-Lee, I think he's fibbing. If, indeed, it "seemed like a good idea at the time," then he had some purpose in mind when he came up with them. I don't for a minute believe that he just randomly decided to drop some punctuation in because, hell, why not?
I think his purpose might have been embarrassingly dumb and he's covering it up.
You don't have to publish or register anything for a copyright. You can stick in a drawer somewhere if you wanted and you would still have protection.
Yes, you are correct. My error. Nonetheless, it still isn't a copyright issue in this case.
Every executable binary program on earth is basically one giant number.
True, but not material. Any creative work can be expressed as numbers, but that doesn't make all numbers creative works. In this case, the key is not a creative work -- it's just a number derived from a mathematical algorithm. It is not an expression of any creative work.
And an even weaker position for TI. You can legally publish instructions for very nearly anything, even very illegal activities such as building nuclear bombs, manufacturing controlled substances, murdering people, etc. The first amendment gives us amazingly broad rights.
You can certainly publish instructions for hacking TI's calculators without violating anything.
Which one of those companies is suing people who hack the hardware?
Not flame, just point out that you're wrong according to established law. Courts have clearly ruled a number of times that you can do whatever you want to equipment you legally own. Courts have even ruled that you can reverse-engineer software.
TI might not like it, but tough cookies. It's not their device once you've purchased it.
It's really hard for me to see how TI has a case under the DMCA at all. They're claiming the anti-circumvention clause, but it doesn't seem to apply here.
The anti-circumvention clause makes it a violation to circumvent copy protection -- but what the hobbyists are circumventing in not copy protection, it's a validation key. Without the key, you can still read and copy the existing OS without a hitch. The key is needed to put you own intellectual property on the device, no to copy theirs.
The key itself was never published by TI, and as far as I can tell was never registered with the copyright office, so copyright doesn't apply to that (even if it can apply to a number, which I doubt.)
So where's the copyright violation? this looks like a criminal (bad faith) abuse of the DMCA to me.
That's close, but not quite enough -- it's too much like jailbreaking.
Yeah, the N900 is looking like the only game in town to me.
*sigh*
In my view, they're still far too closed.
It's not like they let people load apps directly from anywhere, propagating who-knows-what.
But that's exactly what they should do.
They have their walled garden, so that normal people can play in their controlled environment. So that's already covered.
Let us more sophisticated users & developers out of that garden completely. Let us skin our knees, pee on the electric fence, and shoot ourselves in the tootsies. That's what we want, we're taking the risk, so why not?
If you're worried about virii, well, don't worry. They'll happen regardless of how open or closed Palm is.
That's what I get for failing to lint my comments.
"Free Software" misses the point. Being able to get the software for *free* is of little use if people that receive it are not able to modify it, release the modified versions, use it for any purpose, and freely copy it.
Ummm... You do realize that "free software" does not refer to its price tag (or lack of one), right? It refers to being able to "modify it, release the modified versions, use it for any purpose, and freely copy it."
Free software can (and some does) cost real money.
Isn't it possible that Microsoft will slowly see benefit from releasing source code?
I think a big part of Stallman's point was that CodePlex is going to muddy the open source waters, and this question appears to be an example of it.
Open source is more than just letting people look at the source code. Microsoft can harm OS by geting people to think it's not.
Also, open source != free software, and -- more importantly -- MS will confuse things by trying to make out like they're equivalent. Free software is the important bit. Open source is one part of that.
In the bigger picture, Microsoft has repeatedly shown that it cannot be trusted. In the past, it has looked like it might be getting a bit of enlightenment, only to have it turn out that the goal was to coopt and subvert. WIth that track record, I'm not going to trust them an inch until they've established a reasonably different track record.