You mean like unknown to the pilot emergencies that might be communicated to him by a traffic controller, such as change your altitude, you are on a collision course with x-other plane?
Google for TCAS Airbus A320 and learn why this is a non-issue for that model of aircraft. The TCAS will likely get tee-d off and start complaining before the controllers can key up their radio...
Also, is your occupancy detection based on motion sensors? What happens if you sit still on the computer or are reading a book for a long time? Or is the timeout sufficiently high....
I use different software than the parent poster; my timers vary on a schedule. On a "work at home day" during "work hours" the office lights, once triggered, won't turn off till somewhat after quitting time. But at 2am they don't stay on for long since I'm probably just passing thru or looking out the window or something. Unless I manually hit the on switch, in which case its on for much longer. It is medically wise to stretch your legs every couple hours, so the rest of the time, the timers reflect that belief, and if I have to wave my hands to turn the lights on, that means I failed and I should have gotten another drink...
But it's only energy saving if you're controlling enough lights to offset the cost of the controller PC running 24/7
Unless that controller PC is running linux, in which case it also happens to be the 24/7 mail server, 24/7 file server, 24/7 torrent box, 24/7 mythtv backend, 24/7 DNS server, 24/7 LAN DHCP server, 24/7 gnump3d server, 24/7 FTP server, and probably some other things that I've forgotten. In which case the "energy cost" is increasing the existing system load by about 0.01% And 7 months out of the year, I have to heat my basement anyway...
Really, the advantages of having these devices know about one another in a practical environment are few-to-none.
Actually, no. One of the greatest energy savings I have with my misterhouse/insteon install, is most "room lights" in my house now have a single on/off switch at each room entrance/exit. Making it infinitely more likely people turn all the lights off when they exit a room, because its so easy. No more walking around to individual floor/table lamps, no more walking across to the other entrance to turn lights on and off. Just one switch, side of each doorway, on/off.
Its possible to do this with lots of 3-way switches and electrical wiring, but its simpler to do it in software. Works for me!
It's not the most exciting feature, but probably the one that saves the most energy.
The problem with auto-dimming lights at home is people don't like them. They are intrusive and turn on garishly bright lights when you don't want them, or turn off lights when you do want them (like while reading a book, for example).
A motion sensor hooked up to a simple timer hooked up to an on/off relay is pretty caveman-like compared to a linux based intelligent perl programmed misterhouse system.
The path lights between my house and garage understand when I'm walking there based on the time of day and when the doors open and close, I'm not left in the dark... It really does work.
An example of a junk system not working, doesn't mean the idea is invalid, it just means, don't use a junk system.
And all of that came with the 30 year old house. Your example is the only compelling example I've ever heard for automation,
You misread him. He wants to change from a classic 1-zone HVAC system to a 3-zone with automated dampers (much like I am planning). There is no point in heating/cooling my office outside of work at home hours (plus a couple hours in advance to preheat/precool). But if I tell it to, or if the motion detectors sense I'm in there anyway, or if the room light switch is on, it'll open the dampers to heat and cool. Same plan with my basement rec room, which is mostly empty. And no point heating/cooling my bedrooms during the day. Should pay for itself rather quickly, I think.
I could flip the dampers open and closed manually a couple times a day (of course, they are not designed to survive that). The whole point of home AUTOMATION is to automate that with a very intelligently programmed computer.
What purpose are you accomplishing with this home automation? I have seen these predictions and calls for home automation for years, but I have never seen a compelling reason for doing so.
Probably the simplest way is to break it down by location.
NTP plus misterhouse's built in functions means my security lights outside turn on shortly after sunset and off at bedtime. They also turn on in the morning, on days that I go to work, if its before sunrise (I live at a pretty high latitude...) Also certain outside lights turn on for awhile when the garage door is opened.
The soundcard is wired into an octopus of speakers in many rooms of my house. Atomic clock accurate grandfather clock chimes. A considerable length of perl code mutes or unmutes based on various bedtimes, etc. It also makes a weird alarm clock.
Text to speech makes various announcements thru above speakers. Long story there.
misterhouse is set up as an AIM bot, I can command it and see what its up to remotely.
misterhouse also has a nice, or at least usable web interface to control it.
I have several remote controlled switches that are essentially using misterhouse as an extremely complicated timer.
Long term plans:
reconfigure my hvac system with motion detectors and a permanent schedule to basically shut off unused parts of the house to save energy and turn them back on predictably in advance of when they'd be needed.
sync my google calendar with misterhouse and utilize the text to speech
Get my weather station connected, and use misterhouse text to speech to announce the temperature each hour, etc.
Work extensively on modes. Put lights, speakers, even HVAC, into "movie watching mode" vs "work mode" vs "sleep mode" etc.
In house motion sensors trigger my lights, timers, and HVAC intelligently.
Its the kind of thing that you add one little thing at a time. The goal, is to notice things I manually do "all the time" and automate them away...
What are the cheapest options out there right now?
You need to clarify cheap as in upfront $, cheap as in reliable so you don't have to replace all the time and it actually works, or cheap as in labor hours. You will not get the same answer.
Based on years of experience, currently using Insteon (used to use unreliable X10) and misterhouse, you're going to drop about $60 per "thing" automated, and it'll last a long time/forever if its not a dimmer and it'll actually work reliably if its insteon, and it'll be a good sweaty half hour of wiring and moving stuff of labor combined with perhaps an hour or two of fooling around with misterhouse.
In terms of upfront time, effort and entertainment, its about like a poor videogame.
Also, very much like the network effect, the value of automation increases as something like the square of the number of "things" interconnected. So, the worlds most elaborate lamppost timer is "X" units of cool, but ten "things" in my home office fully wired up and automated is worth about "X**10" units of cool.
The Insteon stuff can be hacked a bit but the company is not at all OSS friendly. They're much more interested in business partners then they are in end users. They'd much rather sell big expensive packages and commercial systems.
I have plenty of Insteon stuff and a nice misterhouse installation. It just works. Really.
X10 is not reliable so you have to play games like send each command 3 times and hope its OK. Insteon is all 2-way and each command is ack'd.
With infinite wisdom and omnipotence and infinite resources, the Designer (or Designers) should have been able to create much more cooperative human beings. No wars. all peace.
Well, by Norse mythology, Odin, Vili, and Ve created the humans to fight in the final battle of Ragnarok, which wouldn't be much of a battle if humans just sit around all day and post to slashdot. The world is supposed to end in flames, perhaps Ragnarok will be started by a vi vs emacs flamewar on slashdot. Certainly the Norse mythology fits the human condition much more closely than the Christian mythology. Which would imply...
I wonder how they (the IDists) are able to square their ability ti "infer design" with the obvious "deficiencies of design".
If you really want to mess with the heads of IDers, ask them what they'd do if further research showed neither the Christians nor the scientists are correct, and it turns out they're worshiping the wrong gods.
Have every copy include a few dozen or hundred random addresses out of the larger pool. Add and "retire" addresses to the pool daily, so it won't be possible to see "retired" addresses by repeatedly downloading the program.
Wouldn't it be better to generate the exe file (or zip or rar or whatever) that is downloaded by means of a CGI script that compiles each and every copy with a random selected starter set and randomly selected file name?
After she was discharged , I was criticizing the family for having a 100lb carnivore that was bred for aggression living in the house with their 4 year old child. One of my co-workers got really angry at me, saying "we don't know that that child did to provoke the dog! Did you even ask that?" She blamed the kid and sided with the dog. I was dumbfounded. It fascinates me that people can work alongside one another and have profoundly divergent value systems.
With incredibly few exceptions, that literally make the news because they're so shockingly unusual, dogs don't just randomly mutilate their family/pack members. With incredibly few exceptions, untrained kids will randomly provoke dogs until taught how to behave.
You are looking in the rear view mirror, not planning for the future.
By your plan, removing the family dog but not training the child, in the future the child will die when it inevitably harasses an even larger stronger dog, and that dog won't have any mercy because it is not part of the family "pack". By your co workers plan, in the future, the child will live because it will understand how to properly handle a dog, or at least how not to get hurt by a dog. I'm sure your co worker thinks you're just as crazy as you think they are.
Interestingly, in your post, neither of you blame the family for not teaching the kid to properly handle a dog, which in a world full of pet dogs, is pretty much a mandatory learned skill, unless you enjoy stitches/death.
Google for "online seeds", you get 57 million results, some fraction of which are online seed sellers. Oddly enough on my first page several results are for Cannabis seed sellers, I don't know if that is normal for everyone, or Google customizing my internet experience for me...
For example... a clear glass bottle and a cotton filter can clean water from many sources because UV light can sanitize the water.
Yes, for example, given wikipedia access, they could learn that regular window glass blocks pretty much all UV below 300 nm. You'd be better off simply placing an uncovered tray in the sunlight... Probably in a decade or two, solar powered hard-UV "flashlights" will revolutionize water purification, but just not quite yet.
This discussion is a good example of how the average user spends most of their time online discussing urban legends and porn surfing, frankly, primarily the latter.
There is no way to automatically detect and cancel out all the possible ways to redundantly hide an 8 byte purchase ID from a 1GB file.
Sure there is. Transcode it from the highest resolution they offer, which you probably cannot display unless you're filthy rich, to a slightly different format, such as the highest resolution you can display.
Most media sponges don't care about picture quality anyway. Maybe they care about showing off their "wealth" buying an expensive TV, but they don't care how it looks.
Good lord marketing is diluting that name... When I bought my netbook that was the second generation netbook, no other products.... The way they're going, there's going to be "eee hamburgers" and "eee brand twinkies" soon.
A great deal has changed in six years. Small computing has become more ubiquitous with the arrival of the netbook, high capacity flash devices are a lot more common, low power cpu's more common, wireless hot spots vastly more common...
And e-ink displays, which I personally find icky due to the insanely slow screen updates, and light-gray on dark-gray ultra low contrast, but some people actually like that...
Your statement is blatantly false. As the most minor of checks would show you. Children don't due from flu in the hundreds each year. So show us your stats source, or did you just make it up because you are an uninformed idiot?
I'm sure he just misread "flu deaths" as "car flew thru the air" deaths. Which coincidentally kills about 40000 people per year, or roughly one hundred to one thousand times as many people as the flu will kill.
Signing a petition does not mean that you agree with the views of the petitioner, it just means that you agree that the issue should be brought to a wider vote to decide the matter.
Even worse, having your name on a petition, doesn't mean you signed the petition, but it does mean you might be harassed.
If there is a valid notary stamp next to my name, I can sue the notary for utter failure to verify my identity, instead of the petition organizers for publicly defaming my character. Either way, someone is going to have a very bad day if they can't prove it was me who signed it.
Kudos to the intimidators for not just shooting them all.
Yeah, especially since X percent of the signatures on the list are fraudulent. And I personally think X is a pretty large percentage. Would be a shame if someone shot me merely because someone else found my name in the phonebook, or the parish directory, or the elementary school family book, or the employee contact list, or the ham radio club mailing list, or... If no pity for me, at least admit it would be a waste of a bullet to mistarget me.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean like unknown to the pilot emergencies that might be communicated to him by a traffic controller, such as change your altitude, you are on a collision course with x-other plane?
Google for TCAS Airbus A320 and learn why this is a non-issue for that model of aircraft. The TCAS will likely get tee-d off and start complaining before the controllers can key up their radio...
Also, is your occupancy detection based on motion sensors? What happens if you sit still on the computer or are reading a book for a long time? Or is the timeout sufficiently high....
I use different software than the parent poster; my timers vary on a schedule. On a "work at home day" during "work hours" the office lights, once triggered, won't turn off till somewhat after quitting time. But at 2am they don't stay on for long since I'm probably just passing thru or looking out the window or something. Unless I manually hit the on switch, in which case its on for much longer. It is medically wise to stretch your legs every couple hours, so the rest of the time, the timers reflect that belief, and if I have to wave my hands to turn the lights on, that means I failed and I should have gotten another drink...
But it's only energy saving if you're controlling enough lights to offset the cost of the controller PC running 24/7
Unless that controller PC is running linux, in which case it also happens to be the 24/7 mail server, 24/7 file server, 24/7 torrent box, 24/7 mythtv backend, 24/7 DNS server, 24/7 LAN DHCP server, 24/7 gnump3d server, 24/7 FTP server, and probably some other things that I've forgotten. In which case the "energy cost" is increasing the existing system load by about 0.01% And 7 months out of the year, I have to heat my basement anyway...
Really, the advantages of having these devices know about one another in a practical environment are few-to-none.
Actually, no. One of the greatest energy savings I have with my misterhouse/insteon install, is most "room lights" in my house now have a single on/off switch at each room entrance/exit. Making it infinitely more likely people turn all the lights off when they exit a room, because its so easy. No more walking around to individual floor/table lamps, no more walking across to the other entrance to turn lights on and off. Just one switch, side of each doorway, on/off.
Its possible to do this with lots of 3-way switches and electrical wiring, but its simpler to do it in software. Works for me!
It's not the most exciting feature, but probably the one that saves the most energy.
The problem with auto-dimming lights at home is people don't like them. They are intrusive and turn on garishly bright lights when you don't want them, or turn off lights when you do want them (like while reading a book, for example).
A motion sensor hooked up to a simple timer hooked up to an on/off relay is pretty caveman-like compared to a linux based intelligent perl programmed misterhouse system.
The path lights between my house and garage understand when I'm walking there based on the time of day and when the doors open and close, I'm not left in the dark... It really does work.
An example of a junk system not working, doesn't mean the idea is invalid, it just means, don't use a junk system.
And all of that came with the 30 year old house. Your example is the only compelling example I've ever heard for automation,
You misread him. He wants to change from a classic 1-zone HVAC system to a 3-zone with automated dampers (much like I am planning). There is no point in heating/cooling my office outside of work at home hours (plus a couple hours in advance to preheat/precool). But if I tell it to, or if the motion detectors sense I'm in there anyway, or if the room light switch is on, it'll open the dampers to heat and cool. Same plan with my basement rec room, which is mostly empty. And no point heating/cooling my bedrooms during the day. Should pay for itself rather quickly, I think.
I could flip the dampers open and closed manually a couple times a day (of course, they are not designed to survive that). The whole point of home AUTOMATION is to automate that with a very intelligently programmed computer.
What purpose are you accomplishing with this home automation? I have seen these predictions and calls for home automation for years, but I have never seen a compelling reason for doing so.
Probably the simplest way is to break it down by location.
NTP plus misterhouse's built in functions means my security lights outside turn on shortly after sunset and off at bedtime. They also turn on in the morning, on days that I go to work, if its before sunrise (I live at a pretty high latitude...) Also certain outside lights turn on for awhile when the garage door is opened.
The soundcard is wired into an octopus of speakers in many rooms of my house. Atomic clock accurate grandfather clock chimes. A considerable length of perl code mutes or unmutes based on various bedtimes, etc. It also makes a weird alarm clock.
Text to speech makes various announcements thru above speakers. Long story there.
misterhouse is set up as an AIM bot, I can command it and see what its up to remotely.
misterhouse also has a nice, or at least usable web interface to control it.
I have several remote controlled switches that are essentially using misterhouse as an extremely complicated timer.
Long term plans:
reconfigure my hvac system with motion detectors and a permanent schedule to basically shut off unused parts of the house to save energy and turn them back on predictably in advance of when they'd be needed.
sync my google calendar with misterhouse and utilize the text to speech
Get my weather station connected, and use misterhouse text to speech to announce the temperature each hour, etc.
Work extensively on modes. Put lights, speakers, even HVAC, into "movie watching mode" vs "work mode" vs "sleep mode" etc.
In house motion sensors trigger my lights, timers, and HVAC intelligently.
Its the kind of thing that you add one little thing at a time. The goal, is to notice things I manually do "all the time" and automate them away...
What are the cheapest options out there right now?
You need to clarify cheap as in upfront $, cheap as in reliable so you don't have to replace all the time and it actually works, or cheap as in labor hours. You will not get the same answer.
Based on years of experience, currently using Insteon (used to use unreliable X10) and misterhouse, you're going to drop about $60 per "thing" automated, and it'll last a long time/forever if its not a dimmer and it'll actually work reliably if its insteon, and it'll be a good sweaty half hour of wiring and moving stuff of labor combined with perhaps an hour or two of fooling around with misterhouse.
In terms of upfront time, effort and entertainment, its about like a poor videogame.
Also, very much like the network effect, the value of automation increases as something like the square of the number of "things" interconnected. So, the worlds most elaborate lamppost timer is "X" units of cool, but ten "things" in my home office fully wired up and automated is worth about "X**10" units of cool.
Yes, same as linux on the desktop... Had it at my house since the mid 90s, and granny will almost certainly never have it.
The Insteon stuff can be hacked a bit but the company is not at all OSS friendly. They're much more interested in business partners then they are in end users. They'd much rather sell big expensive packages and commercial systems.
I have plenty of Insteon stuff and a nice misterhouse installation. It just works. Really.
X10 is not reliable so you have to play games like send each command 3 times and hope its OK. Insteon is all 2-way and each command is ack'd.
... the Maya supposed ... but there is no evidence that the Maya had any such beliefs.
I would be nervous if the Maya had any beliefs at all, that have been proven correct. Are there? As far as I know, no.
Would I be correct in saying, if the world ends in 2012, that would be the first time the Mayans got something right?
I'm just trying to figure out the fascination.
With infinite wisdom and omnipotence and infinite resources, the Designer (or Designers) should have been able to create much more cooperative human beings. No wars. all peace.
Well, by Norse mythology, Odin, Vili, and Ve created the humans to fight in the final battle of Ragnarok, which wouldn't be much of a battle if humans just sit around all day and post to slashdot. The world is supposed to end in flames, perhaps Ragnarok will be started by a vi vs emacs flamewar on slashdot. Certainly the Norse mythology fits the human condition much more closely than the Christian mythology. Which would imply...
I wonder how they (the IDists) are able to square their ability ti "infer design" with the obvious "deficiencies of design".
If you really want to mess with the heads of IDers, ask them what they'd do if further research showed neither the Christians nor the scientists are correct, and it turns out they're worshiping the wrong gods.
Have every copy include a few dozen or hundred random addresses out of the larger pool. Add and "retire" addresses to the pool daily, so it won't be possible to see "retired" addresses by repeatedly downloading the program.
Wouldn't it be better to generate the exe file (or zip or rar or whatever) that is downloaded by means of a CGI script that compiles each and every copy with a random selected starter set and randomly selected file name?
After she was discharged , I was criticizing the family for having a 100lb carnivore that was bred for aggression living in the house with their 4 year old child. One of my co-workers got really angry at me, saying "we don't know that that child did to provoke the dog! Did you even ask that?" She blamed the kid and sided with the dog. I was dumbfounded. It fascinates me that people can work alongside one another and have profoundly divergent value systems.
With incredibly few exceptions, that literally make the news because they're so shockingly unusual, dogs don't just randomly mutilate their family/pack members. With incredibly few exceptions, untrained kids will randomly provoke dogs until taught how to behave.
You are looking in the rear view mirror, not planning for the future.
By your plan, removing the family dog but not training the child, in the future the child will die when it inevitably harasses an even larger stronger dog, and that dog won't have any mercy because it is not part of the family "pack". By your co workers plan, in the future, the child will live because it will understand how to properly handle a dog, or at least how not to get hurt by a dog. I'm sure your co worker thinks you're just as crazy as you think they are.
Interestingly, in your post, neither of you blame the family for not teaching the kid to properly handle a dog, which in a world full of pet dogs, is pretty much a mandatory learned skill, unless you enjoy stitches/death.
would I not be more concerned with things like food for my family
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=farming#
(of course, if they search for "gold farming" instead of just farming that is an entirely different third world industry)
Google for "online seeds", you get 57 million results, some fraction of which are online seed sellers. Oddly enough on my first page several results are for Cannabis seed sellers, I don't know if that is normal for everyone, or Google customizing my internet experience for me...
For example... a clear glass bottle and a cotton filter can clean water from many sources because UV light can sanitize the water.
Yes, for example, given wikipedia access, they could learn that regular window glass blocks pretty much all UV below 300 nm. You'd be better off simply placing an uncovered tray in the sunlight... Probably in a decade or two, solar powered hard-UV "flashlights" will revolutionize water purification, but just not quite yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultraviolet#Natural_sources_of_UV
This discussion is a good example of how the average user spends most of their time online discussing urban legends and porn surfing, frankly, primarily the latter.
There is no way to automatically detect and cancel out all the possible ways to redundantly hide an 8 byte purchase ID from a 1GB file.
Sure there is. Transcode it from the highest resolution they offer, which you probably cannot display unless you're filthy rich, to a slightly different format, such as the highest resolution you can display.
Most media sponges don't care about picture quality anyway. Maybe they care about showing off their "wealth" buying an expensive TV, but they don't care how it looks.
Sun will be basically dead, and barely have any role as the competitor, anyways.
So, if the situation is unchanged, whats the rush?
first-time Internet users
That must be a strange population, very distinct from normal society. I'm not sure their brain data is relevant to ours.
Good thing that's not what he's talking about
Good lord marketing is diluting that name... When I bought my netbook that was the second generation netbook, no other products.... The way they're going, there's going to be "eee hamburgers" and "eee brand twinkies" soon.
Asus Eee Box
My eee gets "hot" in an hour and approaches boiling water temperature in two or so... Luckily the battery only lasts a couple hours.
On the other hand, my wife's mac mini runs DVD transcode jobs overnight with no obvious temperature problems.
Have you actually tried running an eee more than a couple hours?
Note that we probably have different eee models, yours might run cold or have a fan that actually does something.
A great deal has changed in six years. Small computing has become more ubiquitous with the arrival of the netbook, high capacity flash devices are a lot more common, low power cpu's more common, wireless hot spots vastly more common...
And e-ink displays, which I personally find icky due to the insanely slow screen updates, and light-gray on dark-gray ultra low contrast, but some people actually like that...
Your statement is blatantly false. As the most minor of checks would show you.
Children don't due from flu in the hundreds each year.
So show us your stats source, or did you just make it up because you are an uninformed idiot?
I'm sure he just misread "flu deaths" as "car flew thru the air" deaths. Which coincidentally kills about 40000 people per year, or roughly one hundred to one thousand times as many people as the flu will kill.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year
Flu deaths are pretty much a rounding error compared to car accident deaths.
Signing a petition does not mean that you agree with the views of the petitioner, it just means that you agree that the issue should be brought to a wider vote to decide the matter.
Even worse, having your name on a petition, doesn't mean you signed the petition, but it does mean you might be harassed.
If there is a valid notary stamp next to my name, I can sue the notary for utter failure to verify my identity, instead of the petition organizers for publicly defaming my character. Either way, someone is going to have a very bad day if they can't prove it was me who signed it.
Kudos to the intimidators for not just shooting them all.
Yeah, especially since X percent of the signatures on the list are fraudulent. And I personally think X is a pretty large percentage. Would be a shame if someone shot me merely because someone else found my name in the phonebook, or the parish directory, or the elementary school family book, or the employee contact list, or the ham radio club mailing list, or ... If no pity for me, at least admit it would be a waste of a bullet to mistarget me.