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MS unveils Universal Plug and Play @ CES 105

Posted by Hemos from the but-i-need-updated-drivers-for-my-microwave dept.
Anonymous Coward writes "Microsoft unveiled plans for networking people's homes . It says they'll use "internet protocols." Hopefully these will be actual generic internet protocols, lest our toasters start crashing with the required NT boxen. "
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MS unveils Universal Plug and Play @ CES More

MS unveils Universal Plug and Play @ CES

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  • I read somewhere that Billy has to put blankets over the TV in his bedroom because the 50 NT boxes running his house can't turn it off right...

    --

  • I'm relatively certain he's referring to how one could pay $10 and use <insert ISP here> while still using MSN "premium" sites, etc.
  • The 80's ? I seem to recall getting my first unit in the mid 70's. It still works today....
  • Unlike products directed at supposedly "knowledgeable users", any appliance is going to be reviewed by different criteria than applied to PC's and software. Unreliability will be the kiss of death, hence, if this is the best that MS can produce with its partners it will be excluded and not forgiven for its flaws.

    However, should they produce an acceptable product, which is not beyond the realm of possibility they may gain market share.

    Until then perhaps we should await their offerings and ignore the hype from sources .

    Just incase, I mistyped my password:

    Herschel Cohen at hcohen2@home.com
  • At least we acknowledge our heritage, and build upon it.

    This way we compete on quality, not just on being better-known.
  • Posted by oNZeNeMo:

    I wish people weren't so obsessed with making things smarter. It's not that I have anything against my computer being more complicated. It just has to stop in the kitchen. I don't need a computer to turn on and off my lights. I don't need a computer to cook my breakfast. One used to be able to cook a burito in the microwave with but a single turn of a dial. Now, you have four keystrokes on this slimy keypad just to cook something for a minute. It also has the generic electronic feep that is grating to one's ears where the trusty old "analog" microwave just rang a real live bell. So now I have to put some cat5 drops in my kitchen so Microsoft can put their grubby hands in my food. No Thanks.
  • If I put my bread in the toaster the night before it will be all dried out by the time I get up to eat it. Or what happens if I want Captain Crunch? Then I stick dried out bread in the trash.

    I don't care if Microsft, Sun, SGI, Apple or General Electric make it. I still think it is a stupid idea.
  • Newer VCRs get a time signal broadcasted by some networks, and Brookstone (most likely Sharper Image also) sells desk clocks that set themselves off of the GPS satellite signal. No network required.
  • Their homes will be nice and toasty-warm during the cold winters....as it burns down to the ground around them thanks to mircosoft technology. Want to bet the insurance rates go through the roof on these networked homes?
  • I tried PrintMaster Gold with the latest Wine but, it had Font problems. Would WABI be out of the questions? You could use all those 16bit applications that Windows were bragging about prior to Win95.

    Plus there's the possibility that some 040 System 7 piece of Mac software could do. Although, I haven't had any luck with Executor myself.
  • So,
    For Microsoft the initiative is a key play to grab a large portion of the future consumer appliance market.

    It means I'd have to buy Microsoft Personal Microwave Kit to be able to use my bathroom, and the toilet won't flush with message "Error performing flush: No error" and I'd have to order Microsoft Support Contract by $2000 a year to be able to adjust channels on my TV?

    And how the heck my vacuum cleaner is supposed to "syncronize" with my VCR?

    I only hope it will be so expensive that no large electronics maker will choose to build this abomination in it's appliances.
  • Actually, the first company to instroduce an idea like this one was called Lonewolf Systems. They had a chip that could go in any applicance(primary audio.video gear, but also other appliances). The chip included a fibre port. Nasically, every appliance was controlled by a central compuer on the network. It allowed a VCR or LD player in the living room to play on a TV in the bedroom because the central computer was actually routing the siganls to appropriate sources. It was a mondo cool system, but prohibitvely expensive in the early 90's as it REQUIRED a fiber optic network ...

    I wonder if the MS proposal will do the same kinda thing? I highly doubt it, but who knows ...

  • Isn't this what the goal of Genie, or Jeni, or Jenie, or whatever that is SUN is doing is?

    Not that MicroSoft might not ship it first, but I do think they weren't the first to announce that they came up with the idea for something like this.

  • Here is a comparison from my experience:

    LonWorks is interesting, it consists of these
    single chip network nodes for ~$5.
    The neuron chip is ~$3-4 and there is an
    inductor for ~$2 to provide isolation.
    The media is a single twisted pair.
    Each device is really simple and you need
    a central controller to 'administer' the
    net. But they tend to get a hefty profit
    off that controller portion.

    Lonworks is good for well-defined dedicated
    tasks. Everyone I know who's tried to do
    anything that requires flexibility has
    really gotten in to trouble. LonWorks
    is best in factory control systems that
    do the same thing for 20 to 50 years.
    Industrial Automation is a bad space to
    play in since factories are so conservative.
    Once they are committed to using a vendor,
    they tend to stay with it. Lonworks has
    serious headaches for the developer.

    Using Raw ethernet is not much more expensive
    than lonworks, especially when you consider
    that cabling costs tend to dwarf both lonworks
    and Ethernet components. To make this vision
    work requires new wireless protocols.

    Jini is an interesting concept. There
    are many people at the Media Lab who
    have been pushing similar ideas.
    They have a whole group dedicated to
    Things That Think, and putting intelligence
    and networking hidden into everyday devices,
    so you can get the benefits without even
    knowing that it is there.
    This has long-term credibility, but everybody
    talks about it while few companies actually
    produce. Sun has some incredible concepts
    with Jini, simplifying the whole arena of
    making devices talk to each other.
    This has *long term credibility* since no-one
    else is addressing the issue of how to make
    protocol design easier for our limited
    human brains.
    The MIT Media Lab has a special group focusing
    on Personal Infromation Architectures
    http://www.media.mit.edu/pia
    attempting to address these same issues
    and solve them. The great thing is, real-world
    software can be developed in a research setting.
    Real-world hardware requires a company to sell it.
    In this space the software is what's hard, and
    that makes PIA's work very exciting.

    Ecos is just an operating system for embedded
    devices. Most people still just write their
    own OS from scratch when they need an embedded
    OS. The OS starts out as a superloop and
    functionality gets added as people need more
    features. Finally somebody realizes it needs
    to sit on a network and that gets added too.
    What you end up with is a *minimal* solution
    but at huge development expense. Other
    embedded OSes are hard to cut up because
    one can't share the cut-ups with others.
    Everybody has to re-invent OS partitioning.

    Ecos means anybody can strip the OS down to the
    bone and share that, leading to a community of
    minimal OS implementations tuned for narrow
    applications. This isn't revolutionary either
    though since a free embedded OS has been available
    for some time,known as RTEMS.
    At one point RTEMS was selected as the core
    OS for http://www.jos.org , trying to build a
    free java-based operating system. I'm not sure
    if they are still using RTEMS or have developed
    a new custom kernel.
  • The department of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin has had a networked coke machine for several years. It was run by the student chapter of the ACM; one had to establish an account first by depositing a sum of money. After that, one could telnet to coke, login, and be greeted with a menu, from which one could purchase a coke.

  • All those bulked-up 'enterprise servers' running
    NT in Mongolian Clusters, just to do what a 486
    running Linux or FreeBSD could do in their sleep.

    I'd call the appliances "Expensive Space Heaters"
  • HTCPCP/1.0 [sony.co.jp] Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol.

    So will you embrace and extend this?

  • common MS strategy: see what others are doing and if it has some potential for getting a lot of money and/or a lot of control over customers, announce same thing but with "little improvements" and with support of "powerful coalition"

  • it depends on how you look at that:
    1. other's engeneering point of view: MS stuff is junk (no chance for MS)
    2. otjer's marketing point of view: MS is expensive (no chance for MS)
    3. butcommon user's point of view: "MS is such a good company, it wants us good; windows are that cute, those animated icons, those themes, ..." (prepare for armagedon brought to you by MS :)
    4. but MS' marketing point of view (based on common users' point of view: kill 'em all (prepare for armagedon brought to you by MS)
  • answer: the best of OSes which are not controled by single company, person, government and/or small intrerest group, coalition, ...
  • people, beware!!!

  • ... how they are called?

    btw, such a people are perfect example of impotent criticism

  • X10 is not only still around but is growing in popularity rapidly. The hardware is out in 220V versions nowadays so we're happy in Europe too, and it's quite inexpensive, and it's supported on Unix/Linux/BSD platforms well. The data throughput is very very low so you wouldn't want to layer X11 on it, but for its intended purpose it does the job just fine.

    I currently run a pile of X10 gear controlling various power loads at home, with control coming from my Linux systems, standalone switches, standalone timers, and from the radio remote. And of course it's integrated into the net, since the controlling systems are accessible through IP via a couple of firewalls and gateways.

    A new system is needed though, one that is quite a bit faster and that has a defined data payload capability and forward error correction built in. I sure hope that someone comes up with such a system before the nightmare of a Microsoft solution rears its head. That would be terrible, not only for the reasons expressed by others but also because the "standard" would be a continually moving target.
  • "I'm sorry. Windows NT Kitchen Edition could not authenticate client: toaster. Illegal password specified. Please reboot toaster and try again."

    "General Protection Fault in Module: BreadCrumb001XB03XPF34. Abort, Retry, Fail?"

    Or worse, yet, run Solaris and have to start a Java-based toast client that takes 10 minutes to load...

    ~Dan
  • I can't seem to find any of those comments.....

    I did see a lot refering to monopolizations and incompatabilities, which is why many have bad feelings towards M$.



  • I'd wager most people here dislike Microsoft for a variety of reasons. And much of the hate directed at Microsoft is well deserved. With that said, MY suggestion is if you don't like this then visit www.microsoft.com and be happy as most of the Microsoft bashing that does occur here is the plain and simple truth.

    Cheers

    Ron
  • Insert Microsof Bread(R) and reboot
  • I think you're wrong about number 3. Every "common user" I've encountered has used Windows out of ignorance of alternatives, or because they know that Microsoft is the dominating actor in the market and "a sure bet", but they still love complaining about the instability of Windows.

    Amen. I gave a computer to my folks last summer, and they're both completely computer-illiterate. Six months later, they're already complaining about it crashing. Same thing with my sister - she works in an office and has just gotten a PC at home, and can't stop complaining about how lame Windows is and how Word is a piece of crap compared to Wordperfect. These are far from power-users, and I think their experiences would tend to lead them away from buying MS products.

    P.S. I didn't give my parents Linux, because I couldn't find an equivalent to Broderbund's Print Shop, which they wanted to be able to use. Anyone know of a good, simple, "user friendly" Linux program of this nature? I could easily switch them over if I could find one...
  • Jini is already available for free download from Sun [sun.com]
    It's all done in a few thousand lines of publicly available Java source code.
    It uses TCP/IP.
    The protocol that it uses on top of TCP/IP is clearly specified rather than "de-commoditized".
    We're allowed to modify the source.
    It works.

  • Here's something to note:

    If a software company put not for mission-critical applications on all its products, would you buy something from it to run your furnace? Your water heater? Your cooking appliances? If you would, you better be ready to give a long explanation to the fire inspector.
    No problem, sir! It's automatically set to power down if the smoke detector goes off! And if it fails to do it, I can reinstall!

    And without the heavy appliances, would you really
    need a smart toaster?

    Microsoft's source is assembler-diddled spaghetti. Their smart houses will never make it to market.

  • Yeah, linux copies ideas from other systems, but the copying is acknowledged, unlike M$'s tendency to attempt to decieve the consumer, coming off as if all of their "ideas" are original. Also, M$ intends to make money off of the practice of copying other's ideas; linux does not do this. Finally, alot of things linux gets from other systems, it improves upon, while M$ tends to turn good ideas into technological nightmares.

    Methinks your comparison is not quite equvalent.

    meej
    marijane
    --
  • Actually no - I've been writing technical papers about itegrating the Internet with Home Network technology for over 3 years now ...

    For a short form abstract of a paper presented at ICCE '98 click click here ... [icce.org]

    If people are really interested I'll dig up the original paper and put it on the Web somewhere; otherwise E-Mail me here ... [mailto]

  • As revealed in the Halloween documents, one strategy of MS is to pervert 'standardised' protocols used on the Internet to prevent entry of competitors into the market. This sort of thing has been proposed in the past, and there's gotta be an RFC about connecting low-complexity devices via a simple interface.


    It's fairly easy to envision: MS and its allies in this venture write a proprietary extension of one of the standard protocols (Telnet? HTTP? SNMP?) and keep the specs to themselves. No-one else can make devices which communicate with their control programs, or make programs which communicate with their devices, because the standard's secret. This gouges other competitors out of the market because the blind consumer (who naively thinks that 'standardisation is a good thing') won't buy a product which isn't compatible.


    Interesting Point: As we've seen with the ICQ chat protocol, people have been clever enough to packet-sniff the protocol and produce an open specification. Decoding people's proprietary programs is difficult, esp. when they start getting tricky, but there's little you can do about packet-sniffers, except maybe encryption. And then you'd be exporting munitions under the good ol' US of A's mindless export laws.


    Lesson Number One: Never trust the monopoly.

  • I just press the '1 minute' button. For two minutes I press it twice...etc...

    Oh, and you can still buy those dial microwaves.

    And the 'cool as hell' part of this is when you can get a barcode scanner on the microwave that reads the UPC code and get cooking time off the internet, so you don't press anything....

    ...with an automatic flip up/flip down door so you don't even have to do that part. :)

  • Everyone remember that virus that hit FlashBIOS? Right? Well now imagine one that invades your TV and makes all channels map to a certain channel..... say CSPAN or Lifetime.

    I want to be the first person to have rooted someone's coffeemaker and changed their decaf to mocha.

    I hope this thing doesn't use NT style authentication. (I didn't bother to read the spec.)


    Ex Machina "From the Machine"
    xm@GeekMafia.dynip.com [http://GeekMafia.dynip.com/]

  • This is typical for MicroSloth... Now we can expect development to halt for Jini because MS has decided to rule this market as well.

    How long will it be before Bill gates tries to convince us that this functionality needs to be part of the operating system.

    I can hardly wait until I can't go out and buy a fscking desk lamp without having to pay tribute to Bill Gates. Next thing, they'll claim a patent on photons.

  • i think the reason everyone have seperate appliances is the simple fact that they do one thing (usually) and one thing only. that's why my home doesn't crash every few days. plus, m$'s approach to everything is propreitary, bloated code. jini is much more elegant and if i am gonna have a networked coffe maker that tells me while i'm in the shower that the coffe is done, i'd rather it use jini.
  • It say's there's two comments on this page but
    I only see one. I've got my threshold set low enough that I ought to be seeing all the posts. What's going on?
  • I was just wondering. There is a difference between how far we can push technology to do things and whether we should do it. OK. So we can get our lamp to talk to the microwave but is it going to server a useful purpose ? Are we adopting technology that we really need or are we just becoming a slave to it ?

    - Doodhwala
  • OK, Microsoft is trying to invent a market... crashing home appliances, it's gotta try to keep those shareholders happy by going for enourmous growth rates.

    About the only way I rekcon they could succeed is by bundling a DNA probe in your toaster (for our safety of course) then doing a licensing deal with Monsanto so that the toaster GPFs on anything but Monsanto wheat bread. Or more importantly, the fridge complains of a virus and blue screens if you've got things in there without Monsanto genetic copyright signals.

    Kind of off-topic, but meanwhile, I think I figured out how Microscoft might be planning to lock in NT. Even if they don't de-commoditize the internet, they still have a monopoly on Office. And Office 2000 hype is already coming out.

    Part of Office is COM/DCOM stuff, which means bits of the app don't get installed on your drive until you click particular menus. And I reckon the only way this will work is if you have a DCOM server running on NT.

    So who cares if samba runs rings around NT? Corporates are going to want Office 2000 because MS have lock-in on the deliberate file format mess that is Word. And if Office 2000's fancy new features depend on an NT server, maybe Linux won't get a look in.

    Just something to watch out for I reckon.
  • Wouldn't it be great to come downstairs in the morning and found out that hackers have burnt your toast AGAIN? Never shoulda got that TCP/IP enabled toaster...

    Home networking is cool, but I'd prefer an open-source open-standard solution. If I can't get the thermostat to work exactly how I want it to, there shouldn't be any problem with me popping open Emacs (or vi for some of you) and editing a few things here and there.

    I'll be first in line for this stuff, but I'll be damned if I pay $98 bucks to upgrade my blender, my stove and my Home Fusion Recycling Unit(tm) from M$ Home Kitchen 2001 to M$ Home Kitchen 2003.

    :)
  • Actually I think using NAT or ipmasq or whatever else you want to call it is the exact way to go. We really don't need to polute the planet with an endless ammount of ip addresses. Also, NAT provides additional security. I don't want the outside world being able to access my appliances. What if someone who really hates me decides to hack my water heater and set the hot water temperature to 500degrees C. Next time I step into the shower it would most likely result in my death. Or do you want people being able to teardrop your fridge so all of your food spoils? I do think some kind of outside access is desireable, ie turning off an appliance you left on, however that could be done automatically. (One of my friend's house is already setup basically like this. Accept he designed the system around a comodore 64, and later upgraded to a 386. All of the space heaters in the house are set to turn off every hour on the hour so you can never forget to turn it off.) I really don't think direct access to everything in your house should be granted to the world, however.
  • And there is a good reason for this. Microsoft has a history of unfair business practices and abuse of its monopoly. Microsoft also is well known for making proprietary standards to keep other companies out, and bastardizing existing standards to keep other companies out. With Linux this situation cannot occur. If someone writes a home automation protocol for Linux but refuses to document it the solution is simple. Read the source and document it yourself. If you feel the need to extend said protocol, do it, the source is there for you to modify/break in anyway you want. If you (and others) feel that your changes are good, they become part of the standard. It's a very nice system. With Microsoft you have to wait for them to improve the protocol, for them to document the protocol, for them to charge you $100 for the privlage of using their protocol, for them to charge you for protocol 2000 to fix the bugs in protocol 98. Microsoft deserves our hate. The day Microsoft starts caring about the customer, instead of soley about $$$ is the day that we should reconsider our position of hate towards Microsoft. Until then, Microsoft will be nothing more than a ruthless company that will stop at nothing to shove its broken products and protocols down the throats of consumers. Viva Linux.
  • Man.. Just think about how much this going to cost a person down the road.

    Toaster2000 Single User - $250
    Toaster2000 User Upgrade - $99
    Toaster2000 4 User License - $999

    Whoo. Better be single!

    Cross
  • I don't need to have a bug in computer that lets people see what appliances are turned on over the Internet... just what I need...some robber can just check to see if I'm home by watching what appliances are turned on.
  • My TV can crash. When it receives certain signals it will crash. Even the power button won't work. I have to UNPLUG it, let it wait 15 min for the batteries to drain, and then plug it in again.

    Actually, about three months ago, it got worse. Now it boots up and works fine except when I shut it off, it won't come back on. :-( I have to unplug it, wait 15 min, etc. every time! That's when I stopped watching TV and started reading /.

    - Amit
  • Having a central computer control appliances, especially when running an Microsoft OS, is prone to frequent crashing and annoyances.

    Putting small cheap embedded controllers in all appliances and linking them with easy serial links to a hub is the way to go. You could go modular and have control pannels, or hook up a computer. However, since the computer or control panel doesn't actually control the devices (just sends commands), NOTHING CAN CRASH!

    And best of all, this costs a heck of a lot less than the MS solution to implement, since most appliances already have about 75% of the electronics backbone to do this.
  • Well, sending info via the power line need NOT be low bandwidth and prone to error, so that's not really a good reason.
  • Microsoft ScanToast has discovered lost crumbs on your toast!


    This could be a result of your Microsoft Toaster being improperally shutdown.


    [D]elete Crumbs [S]ave Crumbs [I]gnore Crumbs

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