Home automation exists and is cheap. There's a huge niche industry built around it. The problem is that people don't actually want it as much as they say they do. That doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I think they are still a bit too expensive for people. You can either get a whole system for several dozen kUSD, or single elements (e.g. smart outlets) for ~$100 each. The former is a significant expense people might not want to pay at once when buying homes, and the latter is a bit too expensive to buy one by one, because you require to have at least few of those devices before the system starts to get useful.
It's not nearly that expensive, though. A light socket is in the neighborhood of $15. A wall socket is less than $25. A transceiver is $30. For just over $100 you can get the controlling software, two wall switches, two light sockets, and a transceiver.
That's not the point, and there are units which address those concerns. The point is, home automation is not "right around the corner", it's here today and it doesn't take a millionaire to have a smart home. The sticking point is not technology nor is it money, it's that people have realized they don't really want that.
The technology you refer to has not changed since 1975.
It is a stretch to call this smarthome technology considering the ban on incandescent bulbs, which completely eliminate X10s ability to dim or fade bulbs (because you are using CFL, and if you use a x10 dimmer on a CFL, you can burn down a house), and writing any sort of logic based on whether the device is on or off is not possible.
Now Insteon supports bi-directional communication and you can determine state, but you are looking at $45 per outlet or switch versus the $8 X10 stuff.
So, yeah, still out of most people's price range, unless you want to settle for over 30 year old technology.
That's sort of tangential to my point. There are reasons we might not want phased array radar systems picking up every move we make in the privacy of our own homes, independent of home automation applications, which is I presume what the post I was responding to was getting at. My point is that those desires of ours are irrelevant when it comes to whether or not the applications we don't want come to pass, because at some point there's going to be a financial incentive for someone to do it anyway.
It's your own phased array radar system--oooh such a scary word! It's an input device. If you're worried about it telling Google that you spent 30 minutes on the toilet this morning, then either monitor the traffic for odd connections or just block it from making any connections outside your LAN.
I should have said "Home automation for the masses."
I know, I worked at a startup in the space. The people who are capable of spending the money will spend the extra necessary to get someone to install it for them. The people who would install it themselves can't afford even the basic systems, as you need quite a few devices before the things get useful.
The most profitable use we ever found for it was to provide light switches and thermostats in hotels, in places where the wiring in the walls wouldn't allow. That's about it.
One definition of cheap would be something like $0.10 for self contained electronics in a light bulb. Then the installation is practically an accident.
(I think home automation sounds like a neat idea, but I always end up trying to figure out $10 of value that it would provide...)
> $0.10 for self contained electronics in a light bulb
I guess we'll get there at some point, but I'd rather prefer a $.10 for a wall-socket adapter with electronics. Much more versatile. I'd buy truckload of these and connect all stuff through it. As for lights, why not $.10 light bulb slot adapter?
> I think home automation sounds like a neat idea, but I always end up trying to figure out $10 of value that it would provide...
Since you're OK with poking fun at other people's software, I'll point out that your left margin vanishes at 990px viewport, and readers need the left-right scrollbar to read below 750px viewports. Not a great reading experience (in Safari 6 on Lion). Cheers!
"But Android is such an open platform! /QQ" Meanwhile, my iPad 2 just asked me if I wanted to upgrade to iOS6. It did it over wifi, and the whole thing took maybe half an hour.
Seiously guy, go away. I'm so tired of hearing this. Android is open, Google apps are not. You can download the source for Android right now, modify it freely, and put it on a device. It may not be as open as some Linux distros, in that not everyone can submit code that will make it in to the official distro, but it is still open.
I don't see any problem with saying that Android is not an open system. They use open source, but the way it is distributed takes away many of the freedoms of OSS. Also, most of the system is really in the Apps, many of which are closed source. In other words, Android is as much open source as the iOS is, because it is based on an open source kernel but the user space is full of non-open components. And good luck trying to contribute something back to the owners of the system...
Eh, releases are arbitrary points in the development cycle. There is new, stable, stuff in the dev trunk today, we just don't get to see it.
I don't see any difference between Google code-dumping (because that's all they do) "releases" of Android and iD Software open-sourcing old versions of idTech. iD is just more honest about it.
If you remove the community-based aspect from open source, there is not much of an advantage in it. This idea of regular code-drops seem just like a way of maintaining the minimum requirements to conform to the open source tag.
If you'll look at a few recent commits in the Android code-review system, you'll see quite a few non-Google email addresses: https://android-review.googlesource.com/
Right now, you can install applications distributed by non-authorized third parties onto many Android systems, and you cannot do so on any iOS system without jailbreaking. There are many other important meanings of "open" which Android may or may not satisfy, but those aren't what's being discussed here.
I think you're right, and that sideloading (which is really just normal loading, as people have done since the dawn of computing) is the most important test of openness for a platform. If you can write a program, and hand it to me somehow, and I can install it - and the platform developer doesn't have a veto over it - that means the platform is open.
Platform openness is really important, too. It means that people can write and share applications that the platform developer may not approve of - benchmarks, secure network code, games with controversial content - the list goes on.
That isn't to claim that an open source platform isn't a good thing. But open closed-source platforms have been a huge boon to the world since the dawn of computing, while closed closed-source platforms are problematic.
I'm not going to debate absolutes, but it is patently obvious that Android is relatively more open than iOS or Windoze by such an immense margin that your statement seems, well... asinine. Could it be better? Yes, absolutely. But, given the BS business model that Microsoft has always had (which is really the same for Apple, though they are better at marketing), Android is a hippie commune by comparison.
