RE: Pluto

["Ian Lowe" <ianlowe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Aha! You found our stalker! :D

It's not just us of course, they have been stalking xAP too..

Have a little fun with google - have a search for xPL or xAP Support and
see
just about everywhere that someone mentions "does this
support..." in a
forum post, a couple of days later Pluto arrives with a "Pluto
supports
this" post.

At one point, they submitted a whole clutch of stories to our postnuke
based
website (I even ended up posting one, then read the website and promptly
deleted it again!).

In fact, I just checked - they did it on automatedhome.co.uk too:

http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/modules.php?name=Forums&file=viewtopic&t=455

It seems to be a template forum post with "insert name of alternative
here",
although I'm not sure if it's posted by a bot or by an actual person.

They have a page called "Why DCE complements UPNP, XAP, XPL and other
standards?" in which the normal English usage of the word
"complements" has
been badly mutilated.

Pluto strikes me as nothing special - pretty much the same as homeseer or
xplhal can do.  They bring pretty much zero new to the table but a swathe
of
marketing money and effort can get people interested more than a good
technical solution ever can.

Someone suggested a home brew effort for something or other recently -
ultimately, I think that those of us who build home brew solutions will, do
so for their own use only. If it helps someone else, that's good and well,
but the absolute apathy which people encounter just puts developers off.

The potential is there to make these great things, but it seems that users
expect great solutions to spring fully formed (complete with marketing
budget and all the bells and whistles) from nothing - not enough people are
interested in the dull bit in the middle where lots and lots of work and
testing is done making these ideas come to fruition.

Meh. It's Sunday, and I'm cranky :P

Ian.