Ah, a young hacker(age 40), full of ideas from the 1950's about home automation, which is why he completely missed the internet and had to put out V2 of The Road Ahead. As goes the OS, so goes the man.

Awesome troll, dude. You'll catch many fish today.

Bill Gates, a visionary??? Please. He missed the single biggest, most obvious trend of the 90s.

By the mid-90s anybody with half a brain who was paying any attention at all to computer and communications technology related industries understood that the Internet was well on its way to becoming THE dominant communications medium. The only question was what form it was going to take. Even so, by 1995 it was pretty clearly going to be led by Web based technologies. Yet Gates missed all of this and had to put out a revised edition of his own book to include it.

Want to read what a true visionary wrote? Take a gander at Alvin Toffler's books from the '70s. Go read Future Shock [wikipedia.org] (published in 1970) and The Third Wave [wikipedia.org] (published in 1980).

Heck, go read William Gibson's Neuromancer [wikipedia.org] (published in 1984). Or, for earlier descriptions of how the Web might work, read James H. Schmitz's [wikipedia.org] Hub stories, some of which date back to the '40s and '50s.

Bill Gates, a hacker? Of a sort, although there were and are FAR more talented people hacking away on a variety of stuff. IMO he was always too self centered [wikipedia.org] to really be a good hacker. (This, from a guy who used computer time on a system that he may not have had authorization to use to create his version of BASIC.)

Good hackers want to share. Great hackers know that it's absolutely mandatory to share.

Tweets from the MS-future:

MSfanboy: "OMG, my house just crashed, I'm trapped inside!"
Macfangrrrl: "Sounds like some old Steve Wright skit"
MSfanboy: "Now the house is flooding, help!"
Lnxfanother: "Just reformat your house, install DebHomeLinux!"
Luddite: ""
Macfangrrl: "Checking app-store for apps for that, hold on MSfanby!"
UnxGeezer: "I once wired my MicroVAX to my door bell..."
4thguru: "I can do all that MShomeOS does in 4k!"
MSfanboy: "I'm downing!!!!!"
Macfangrrl: "Sorry, FixMShomeOS.app was malware, pwned my iPhone!"
UberHacker: "@msfanboy, I reset your system using a bug in Windows that has been unpatched since Windows 3.1, then loaded DebHomeLinux with the MShouseOS WINE based emulator, and loaded all of your programs for you. You should be OK for now, just don't upgrade!" -Send via hackedtwitterposter 140++!
MSfanboy: "I just called the FBI on that evil hacker! And it's not Windows, it's MShomeOS, go read the official MS announcements!"
slsh.Anoncow: "First post!"

Many of the things being automated are just moving it to a centralized location. For example, lights on motion detectors, coffee pots on a timer, etc. Most of the time, the ability to start a pot of coffee brewing from your smartphone is only slightly more convenient than setting a timer in the morning.

That said, when I finally buy a house (in about 3 years), I plan on playing around with some home automation for much the same reason my home router is running on an Athlon II X2 with a quad-port NIC. For fun.

X10 sucks. The "new" (actually about a decade old) Insteon stuff is where its at.

Plain vanilla misterhouse with some perl addons, here.

Its rapidly nearing a decade now (or is it already 10 years?) that I set up my security sensor lights thingies to turn on at sunset and off at a predetermined time, all depending on work/school schedules for that day of week. I figure I've saved pennies, maybe even dollars, of electricity over the past decade, but the thing I've saved the most is time... My motion sensor lights from garage to house are always and only on when I need them and I never, ever, have to turn them on or off.

I've also been fooling with door sensors and occupancy sensors. If the basement workshop door is closed, and the occupancy sensor says there's no one in there, thats two votes to shut off the lights 5 minutes after providing a verbal warning.

The other thing I did with lights is link them to the garage door sensor.. so opening the garage door turns on my walkway and doorway lights for 10 minutes, iff the sun is down.

In the novelty category, my tropical fish tank lights turn on and off with millisecond-level GPS timed accuracy...

Home automation scales like the internet. Two lamp modules and a perl script is about as useful of an automation system as an "internet" containing exactly two computers. Usefulness scales as some polynomial of number of devices...

The problem with X10 is that it was just a horrible piece of equipment. I had a roommate who played with this stuff all day and the control was unpredictable. I'm sure there's a way to configure it properly, but all-in-all, it just wasn't ready for prime-time.

I believe this is eventually where we will be headed, but we're just not there yet. RFIDs are helping bridge the devices gap. I don't think it will be long until we have fridges that can read RFIDs on everything from a bottle of milk (multiple embedded RFIDs could track how much milk is left) to the number of juice boxes left.

But how to get everything integrated is still up in the air. And let's not forget demand: will anyone want this enough to pay for it?

Back then, X10 and Microsoft was trying to solve a problem that didn't quite exist. I would say this is still true today. I don't think this type of connectivity will be accepted and/or expected by the general public until the price is so low that it just becomes included with anything we buy (think UPC codes).

The big deal is more along the lines of energy management. The other "house of the future" stuff is there as a hook to get people to sign off on the rest. My applied for, but never completed (Nothing like running out of money at the wrong time...) patent application was in this space.

i found his idea of .net coffee pots funny i mean they if anything will run java.

If you had a full computer (mail, etc), displays around the house, TVs, Radio, and an audio system that moved the sound (and voice input) with you... you might be able to do interesting things. Audio notification and voice input from everywhere; video notification and text input from various places around the house.

But the problem is that it's still more about "cool" than function. "I don't have to look at my phone to get text messages" is crucial in the car, but not at home. "I can always get notified of new mail" is a problem solved by smartphones; it's only a minor inconvenience to carry one around the house. And while you may be able to come up with a plausible use for networked lights if you stretch it, the advantages over dumb wiring aren't all that high.

Arguably, "home automation" might be better suited for office environs than home environs; smart locks, location awareness, power control, lights, etc... it makes more sense for you to invest in infrastructure when you never know who will need what services when, or where. But a house is just a house; it's what, four people on average; unless you live in a mansion, you're not controlling dozens of doors or hundreds of lights. It's "cool", it's playful, but it's not what I would consider practical.

I remember back in the early 90's, I worked for a small computer reseller, and the owner was very interested in home automation. He tried to get certified as an official partner for a "SmartHome" project that was underway at the time. I don't remember all the details anymore, but basically, it was a consortium of manufacturers trying to create standards so the infrastructure could be purchased as an option, at the time a new home was built. They had a whole catalog put together of the products they planned on offering. As I recall, it was all based around the idea of replacing standard home wiring with a ribbon cable of theirs. It would attach to special wall plates you'd buy for it, and depending on the features of a particular plate, different wires in the ribbon would be utilized to carry electrical power, transmit audio signals, ethernet data, etc. Of course, many of these plates and products (digital thermostats and so on) would also allow automation, via commands I assume you'd send down the ethernet portion of the cabling.

I don't think that ever materialized into anything of substance though. The last I heard? They had too many barriers to entry on the home building side of the equation. Home builders weren't technical/computer-centric people as a rule, and they simply weren't interested in doing something as basic as electrical wiring of a home a different way than what they'd always done -- especially if consumers weren't exactly clamoring for it in the first place.

I remember having a fascination with home automation myself using the old X10 stuff, and as quickly as I got interested? I got over it. Like you say, X10 simply sucked. I wired up a portion of my parent's house with it for basic security reasons. (They wanted the front and back porch lights to turn on after dark and off in the early morning, for example -- and other misc. lights to be able to be controlled in a similar fashion for when they left on vacation.) Within a year, all of the push-button type wall switches X10 offered went bad - so you had to repeatedly stab at the buttons to get them to manually turn a light on or off. The automation proved to be unreliable too - with switches missing commands randomly. And even the Radio Shack branded alarm clock with X10 integration as a central home controller was garbage. It allowed programming 2 pairs of on/off times, maximum, for any of eight X10 modules - but any time you forgot to erase an existing program before trying to add a new one, the clock would completely crash/freeze up if you accidentally exceeded that 2 pair per module storage limit!

When I tried to move to something better than X10, I quickly saw the prices soar on all the alternatives. And ultimately, THAT is why home automation hasn't ever really gone mainstream. It's not that it's a "toy" with no practical uses - but it only adds so much value. The really GOOD automation stuff is VERY expensive and only gets purchased by the rich, who can afford to buy it just for the bragging rights and to play with it. Everyone else would only get their money's worth if the prices were at or lower than the X10 stuff's cost, but actually worked reliably.

There was a time when everyone thought this was the future (along with virtual reality and other such things). I bought into it. I figured by now Iâ(TM)d be casually shouting orders at the various appliances in my house.

Which is a great reason for IPv6... until you realize that most of the envisioned applications require them to access the Internet. Including all requisite security issues (they are embedded devices after all) and not finding out that the fridge didn't order new groceries because your ISP decided to change your prefix and the fridge failed to update properly and lost access to the internet. (Meanwhile, it can display local stuff just fine, as link-local works great)

We now have the technology to do all the cool stuff we dreamed about in the early 90s. The big problem however, is once you automate the lights, temperature, and coffee pot what else is there that makes any sense (and even the lights are more of a novelty than much practical benefit). The âoehouse of the futureâ feeling is cool and itâ(TM)s fun to play with... but most of it is impractical and would seem to add very little benefit for a whole lot of complexity.

Well, there are other things you can do. For example, centralize your media - you can have things set up so you can pause your Blu-Ray in the living room, and continue watching in the bedroom, or distribute your TV throughout the house. Basically all the screens pull media from all sources (cable, OTA, internet, DVD/Blu-Ray libraries, other stored media) and present it to any screen. Netflix available on every screen, no netflix-compatible box required for everyone, etc.

Heck, maybe gaming as well - you can play games on any screen with just a controller, so when dad kicks you off the nice big TV to watch sports, you can pause and continue somewhere else.

And integrate it all together - the lights dim and windows close when watching movies, etc.

The deal right now is - all this technology is available right now, just in various discrete non-integrated forms (the integration systems are $$$).

The problem with X10 is that the protocol is slow and unreliable. Great for its time, but there is so much better now. The problem is that the market is totally fragmented and none of it inter-operable.

The big problem however, is once you automate the lights, temperature, and coffee pot what else is there that makes any sense

Home security?

even the lights are more of a novelty than much practical benefit

Only if your electricity is free.

Phillip.

I knew it was a bad idea to give you a DVD player with opposable thumbs.

Oh, so you KNEW your home appliances would eventually turn on you! You just wanted Norton's "routine background scan" to trigger every 30 minutes to slow your own personal Skynet down to a crawl. You know, so you'd have time to go get a snack before the next foray.

My mom's house came with Norton pre-installed, it takes 10 minutes to turn on a lamp, and an hour to preheat the oven. You're better off without it, really.

You just wait until the toilet goes on line and mobile.

You get a cup of water? Or maybe they keep some blue food coloring in a small reservoir (or a big one?) so you can tell by the output that it blue "screened".

My wife's previous coffee maker was controlled by misterhouse (the coffee maker has since broken and the new one will not power up on return of AC power without pressing a pushbutton, to my intense annoyance).

If there was an "issue" like a linux kernel panic on the misterhouse, the old coffee maker stayed in its previous state. So its either going to use around 100 watts keeping itself warm continuously all day, or statistically more likely she has a cold coffee maker in the morning. Being linux, this only happened like once per year, if that often. Also had a drive failure, once.

Another tragic occurrence was leaving the fishtank lights on overnight, poor little critters didn't get to sleep that night.

The very first time I wrote perl code to control the outside lights, I somehow screwed up the am/pm but it was pretty obvious and easy to fix. Speaking of writing code, you need to express your needs in perl, which most people can't do, but thats OK because most people can't express their needs in English, or even manage to flip the light switch off when leaving the room, so its never going to be more than a niche project. Most women, heck most people, cannot comprehend how a thermostat works. And thats OK, for the rest of us there is advanced automation.

Those are the only three problems I've had in the past decade of home automation.

JAVA, aka OAK, was supposed to be the toaster esperanto when it was in development. Now it is bloat city.
http://mathbits.com/mathbits/java/Introduction/BriefHistory.htm [mathbits.com]

IN any case why would anyone give an operating system a name that is homophonic with the historically derogatory slang for the gay community: Homos? It's like Squirting your Social. Or the Brown zune. So tone deaf that it is doomed before it starts.

I just bought some microsoft stock a few weeks ago anticipating that Win8 is going to help MS, but now I think I will sell it. These people are institutionally clueless.

That is quite odd you say that since Microsoft's GUID does follow the UUID standard.

It's old hat.

A company by the name of Digital Pockets had come up with the very thing that we're discussing. Linux based. Used OSGi and java plug-ins to provide "applications". They joined forces with another company, Coollogic, to come up with an embedded version of that original base. This was back around 2001-2002 timeframe. How do I know this? I was the CTO of Coollogic at the time. It didn't come together because of lack of funding available and there wasn't any customers willing to shell out $1500 for such a system at the time past a few rich people down in Houston (DP's test market...).

You're still going to see $500-1000 for the price on this system unless you hunker down lower than C# will probably allow them to be in system profile.

It's Microsoft trying to do things so as to seem "relevant" to the market so their share price can stay more elevated than it ought to be.

• Dammit, I forgot to scan milk when putting it back in the fridge!
• Dammit, I didn't align the milk exactly on the milk sensor, and the fridge ordered more!
• Dammit, I put the milk on the cheese sensor, and the fridge didn't order more!

The cheapest solution would probably be to have a small camera inside the fridge, and get someone on Mechanical Turk to fill out an inventory for you. And that's just sad.

It's a major hardware, software integration issue. And this is exactly why Apple will be the first to solve the problem, not Microsoft. All except the 'dystopian surveillance nightmare part' - that will be a feature, not a bug.