* * * * *
                                        
                         What we need is nuclear power
                                        
> I'm not a protocol designer. I'm sure that people have been thinking about
> this for a long time, but I bet all the thought has been behind closed
> doors and not in a public appliance design forum and framework. That said,
> my vision is of a household full of devices that
> 
> * speak to each other over TCP (Transmission Control Protocol)/IP (Internet
>   Protocol)
> * are explicitly tr ansport-layer [1] agnostic, so any TCP/IP transport
>   works, whether it's Powerline Ethernet, Wifi Ethernet, Bluetooth, GSM
>   (Global System for Mobile Communications), Lonworks [2] or tachyon
>   telepathy
> * use a Zeroconf [3] address assignment and service discovery
> 
> In the most basic implementation, for example, a Powerline time broadcast
> system allows every device to be time synchronized, so you don't have to
> reset all the clocks after a power outage. More sophisticated systems can
> advertise themselves as displays, inputs or outputs. To use the tired
> coffee maker example: your coffee maker thus no longer has to include its
> own scheduling device; your alarm clock can schedule all necessary tasks,
> find your coffee maker as an output device with a standard set of services,
> and just tell it when to start percolating at the same time that it tells
> your Wifi rabbit to start caching its the news and traffic MP3s. Your
> pressure-sensitive carpet can just broadcast “turn on 1/10 power” to all
> lights in its vicinity, which turn on as you walk to the bathroom in the
> middle of the night, they light your way. If you have no such lights, they
> don't light.
> 

“Why we need a good appliance communication protocol [4]”

> Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
> 
> “[Arthur C.] Clarke's Third Law”
> 

The link wasn't directly from Blahsploitation [5], but he's also thinking
along similar lines here. And while I would love the lights to turn on as I
walk about the house, or the tea kettle to turn on ten minutes before the
alarm goes off, I worry about making this seem more magical than it appears
[6].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model#Layer_4:_Transport_Layer
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LonWorks
[3] http://www.zeroconf.org/
[4] http://www.orangecone.com/archives/2007/01/we_need_an_appl.html
[5] http://blahsploitation.blogspot.com/2007/02/kind-of-like-i-was-assuming
[6] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2004/08/27.1

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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