RE: Pluto

["UKHA" <ukha@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 29/01/2006 at 15:21 Ian Lowe wrote:

>Aha! You found our stalker! :D

pussy ;)

>
>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.

Except they are correct, normal people don;t care about protocols, they
just want
stuff to work together. IIRC the original xap (and it's bastard child) xpl
started out
as a mechanism to integrate devices with little or no effort. IMHO that
goal was never
achieved by either and neither address security at all and xap became Mr
Bloaty Bloat.
Anything that makes the protocol differences invisible can't be all that
bad. I've come to
dislike Xap completely, not for what it is - simply because what happend
with it (which I
wont discuss here).



>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.


I have to disagree. Having read a lot of their documentation and installed
Pluto
I believe that they are going down the right track. They have integrated a
number
of different elements of HA in one package - and that's what it's about.
Users
(hell even me now I have less free time) don;t want to have to grab 30
different apps
from 20 different locations to get a system up and running - and that's the
problem it
addresses. With the exception of homeseer (@ around 2k!) none others come
as a
prepackaged deal.


>
>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.

I agree totally... remember ehome hvc?


>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

.. and then you biatched about it when someone dropped a user solution
in you lap...

>interested in the dull bit in the middle where lots and lots of work
and
>testing is done making these ideas come to fruition.

only the developers/designers *need* to be - end users couldn't give a
f**k.


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

I guess so ;)


Andy